I’m thinking about changing my blog host setup. Currently, I host the front end of the blog on my Linux workstation, and host the back end on my MythTV DVR system. Since I’ve gotten the MacBook Pro, I’m finding I never use the Linux workstation anymore, so all it’s doing is consuming power hosting a blog front end. I could get a single server to act both as my DVR and blog host, and anything else I might want it to do. If I’m going to consolidate both machines, I’ll probably get a new case, and a few larger hard disks so I can make a RAID5 array, to guard against data loss in the event of drive failure. I might as well make it a dual core box as well. I’ve not noticed either machine having a hard time with blog traffic. The only time I noticed it was in the middle of an Instalaunch.
The real question is whether I want to shell out 500 or so bucks when it’ll take a while to recover that in energy savings.
I’ve been spending my time at work migrating over to a new file server. The old Windows 2000 file server was getting rather long in the tooth. Microsoft wanted to charge more than two grand for a Windows 2003 Server and CALs for the whole company, so I said “Piss on that!” and decided to convert it to a Linux server using Samba. I plan to move all the company’s print functions over to Samba in the next few days. My ultimate goal is to have Windows only used as Active Directory domain controllers and for Exchange. I would ideally like to get rid of Exchange too, but I’m not selling management on the idea, and they seem to have no issue forking over 8 grand to Microsoft when I could for over 1.5 grand and get Zimbra to do the same job under Linux.
Of course, this new file server is just a stop gap. The big plan for the following year involves consolidating our Andrew File System under samba, and to move most of the simulation data (which is into the terabytes) to a new distributed cluster file system written by one of my coworkers.
Clayton Cramer points out this site on problems with temperature sensors that are being used to measures global warming. It would seem to be lending some credence to the urban heat island theory of global warming. I found it to be pretty amusing though. I should qualify this with two things.
It’s just anecdotal evidence
I’m far from an expert on weather instrumentation and how to properly place it, so I don’t know if the things pointed out are really problems.
But it sure is pretty funny, and does show that this is definitely a government operation. Go give it a read.
Kim and Tam are amused by the Cult of Apple. It’s all rather amusing to me since I was a part of the cult before it was cool. Started in 1992 with a Mac IIsi and System 7. I had used the Classic Mac with System 5 and System 6, but never owned one. System 7 was considerably better than Windows 3.1. I was more functional and sure crashed a lot less. Windows 95 wouldn’t come out for another few years, and even when it did, it sucked too.
Apple lagged behind for a while with System 8 and 9, at least in terms of essential features like protected memory and preemptive multi-tasking. Apple caught up when it bought NeXT and reengineered NeXTStep to be MacOS X, which is a truly wonderfully engineered operating system.
I was a Linux user from the dark days of System 8 and 9 up until recently, when I purchased the MacBook Pro. Trendy or not, they are still putting out the best desktop operating system on the market today. It’s really just NeXTStep with better eye candy and a more Macintosh-like look and feel, but NeXTStep was way ahead of it’s time years ago, and I think has come of age rather nicely as MacOS X.
So don’t buy a Mac because it’s trendy. Buy it because it’s a legitimately excellent product. I spent 10 minutes using a laptop with Vista on it before I wanted to throw it out a window. Even Linux is less obnoxious as a desktop operating system than Windows is becoming.
I will admit, when it comes to private sector action, I’m not a big privacy advocate. I don’t really care if my supermarket chain knows what brand of toothpaste I prefer, or how often I buy paper towels. I also don’t get how Google’s new street zoom features is violating anyone’s privacy. When you’re in a public place, you’re in a public place. And as for this:
Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.
“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”
I have a novel and innovative new technology for dealing with this issue. I call them blinds.
Instapundit seems to be a lot more skeptical than some reporters are. Follow the story to a guy who seems to have stumbled across a way to make hydrogen using a radio frequency generator. I’m not an expert in this area, but I do think this is possible. There’s already a patent on it, actually. The problem is that it’s not revolutionary. The radio frequency generator will consume more energy than is released by burning hydrogen. This article suggests that the efficiency is around 76% of ideal, which is less, I’m fairly certain, than conventional electrolysis methods, which are more like 80%.
Thermodynamics is a real bummer. It will always demand that you use more energy breaking the hydrogen/oxygen bond than you’ll get out of burning it. I’m sure someday someone will make a fool of us all by figuring out to convert matter directly into energy, but when one sees inventions like this, the conventional laws of physics will apply. There’s no such thing as free energy.
Instapundit is talking about compressed air cars. The big problem with this technology is you’re essentially driving with a bomb under your car. Gasoline contains a lot of energy, but it won’t explode under normal conditions. You’ll get a hell of a blaze, but not an explosion. Any compressed gas technology is going to have the fundamental problem of an explosion hazard, not because of the gas within being explosive, but because of the tremendous amount of energy being stored up in the tank. See this summary of a dive shop explosion that occurred when the tank failed.
Also, the net greenhouse gas savings here would be negligible, since it will take copious amounts of electricity to operate the fill up stations and compressors. This energy, if it comes from burning coal, will just shift the greenhouses gases to the power companies. But still, this technology is more promising than the ones that involve reacting light metals with water to produce hydrogen.
This one looks pretty identical to the magnesium based process that was talked about last month, and it suffers from the same problem. Aluminum is expensive, and it takes a LOT of energy to produce aluminum from bauxite ore, particularly electrical energy, which in this country, is produced mainly by burning coal.
The main problem with hydrogen is that it’s not an energy source. It’s a way of storing energy. To make hydrogen, you still need a source of energy that’s coming from some other source. In addition, it would be difficult to pack enough hydrogen into a small enough space to be a practical motor fuel, and it would be completely impractical to power larger vehicles like airplanes.
I can see this company is also big on the hype as well:
For Woodall, the biggest speed bump lies elsewhere. “The egos of program managers at DOE are holding up the revolution,” he told msnbc.com.
No, I’m pretty sure the laws of physics and principles of economics are what’s holding up the hydrogen revolution.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.
“To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated,” Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.
What is an attempt to commit copyright infringement exactly? And why are Republicans pushing for these draconian copyright protections? Most of the people who benefit from these are core Democrat constituencies.
I’ll put my biases here up front, I believe in much weaker copyright laws than we currently have, but I also don’t think this is good politics for the Republicans. Also, we have this:
Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who “recklessly causes or attempts to cause death” can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.
In addition, it’s also calling for expanded civil asset forfeiture for DMCA violations. It also requires the RIAA to be notified by homeland security “when CDs with ‘unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance’ are attempted to be imported.” I guess because terrorists aren’t as big a threat to the American way of life as copyright infringers. Seriously, when college kids who copied a song start getting thrown in federal prison for years, and have their lives ruined, something has gone horribly off the rails. I can’t blame Gonzalez for enforcing the laws Congress has already passed, even though I don’t agree with them, but asking for more is simply unconscionable.
I guess I’m more affluent then, because I’d hate to think I fit into the “older” demographic now. This Slashdot post talks about the increasing trend among young people to give up the land line:
More than a quarter of the under-30 crowd has decided you only need one telephone — and it sure as heck does not plug into a wall. The trend towards an all-mobile lifestyle is accelerating, according to a new survey. Besides younger people, lower-income people are also more likely to have cut the cord. And while businesses may be a bit slower on the cell-only uptake, there appears to be little doubt at this point that the traditional landline will be joining rotary dials and party lines as a relic of the telecommunications industry.
I still have a land line, but I have thought about giving it up. I use my land line similarly to how I use GMail. When I want to give someone a phone number, but I really don’t want them bothering me, I’ll give them the land line. Anyone who I know well enough gets the cell phone number. I don’t answer calls on my land line unless I recognize the caller, which is rare, since everyone who knows me knows to call the cell phone.
Thinking about it, it probably makes sense to give up the land phone. But I doubt I’ll actually do it. It must be the old fogy in me that has a hard time letting go of the wire.
Whoever decided that “FakeRAID”, which is a highly technical term used to describe the types of Serial ATA RAID apearing on some cheaper motherboards, was a good idea needs a severe beating. It appears that FakeRAID is just basically a BIOS hint, requiring the CPU on the machine to do the majority of the work with regards to creating and maintaining the array. I was trying to make Ubuntu do the FakeRAID thing on a server at work, but I think I’m just going to use the Linux software RAID, which seems to be the conventional wisdom these days anyway.
Now back to your regularly scheduled gun blogging.
The gun blogosphere is pretty quiet today, so I thought I’d take some time to take a look at a new technology. While I’m a gun blogger normally, by training and profession I’m an engineer, so this will be a rare occasion when I get to use that skill in the blogosphere.
Instapundit points to a technology that claims to be able to make hydrogen from magnesium and water. This is interesting, but I consider this another example of a company cashing in on the alternate fuel craze. The big reason not to get excited about this is the second law of thermodynamics will always demand that you lose. You will need to put more energy into cleaving the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen that you will ever get back from putting it back together either by burning it in a conventional internal combustion (IC) engine or fuel cell. In short, this system is essentially turning magnesium into an energy source, with hydrogen as an intermediary, to be turned into a usable form of energy in a fuel cell or IC engine. Interesting idea, but is magnesium cheap enough and sufficiently energy dense to be a practical motor fuel?
Magnesium seems to cost about $2.75 per kilogram. A kilogram of magnesium contains about 24.7 megajoules of energy. To compare to gasoline, we really need to measure energy by volume, which is 43 megajoules for a liter of of magnesium, compared to 34.6 megajoules for a liter of gasoline. Magnesium wins on energy density!
A liter of magnesium has a mass of 1.74 kilograms, and a cost of $4.79 based on recent pricing. It would take 1.24 liters of gasoline to have the same amount of energy that’s in a liter of magnesium. Gasoline in my area is about $2.60 a gallon, which comes out to about 69 cents per liter. Therefore the energy equivalent for gasoline comes out to cost 86 cents, compared to magnesium’s $4.79. So magnesium costs about five and a half times what gasoline does if you use equivalent energy.! If you do the unit conversions, to get the same amount of energy that’s in a gallon of gas, it would cost you $14.48. A little pricey for driving the kids to soccer practice, wouldn’t you say?
Also consider this is based on the current price of magnesium. No doubt common use of magnesium as a motor fuel would drive the price through the roof. Magnesium mining also requires energy, and is not exactly environmentally friendly.
So unless Ecotality has found a way to get around the second law of thermodynamics, this technology is a dead end. I’m sure the government would gleefully throw lots of grants (tax dollars) in their direction, but I certainly wouldn’t invest.
UPDATE: Glenn updated the article with a bit from a chemist who reveals where the energy is going in the process; making the elemental magnesium in the first place, and then recycling the oxides back into free metal. If you submerge magnesium in water, it will react with the water as a matter of course, releasing hydrogen. Didn’t know that. My background isn’t in chemistry. But the physics still says you lose.
The IBM hard drives have glass plates instead of aluminum, so it was like breaking several mirrors. I figure I have at least a century of bad luck coming to me now. Most hard drives these days are using glass platters, I think, because glass has a lower coefficient of expansion than most metals, so the magnetic tracks on the platter surface don’t move as greatly with the expanding platter.
I notice Jeff is saying so-long to sitemeter. I’m not sure about it myself. I’ve been using GoStats longer, and I only find sitemeter useful for a few things.
But if any of you want to eliminate this problem, just block cookies from Specificclick. Cookies aren’t really so much a security problem as a privacy problem, in that sites can use it to track your browsing habits. Personally, I don’t really care if they know what I browse, so I don’t generally block cookies, but for those of you who are concerned, turning off cookies, and only explicitly allowing them for sites where they do useful things, will solve the problem for you.
I didn’t get anything prepared last night for today, and we’re doing daylight savings patches today at work on everyone’s workstations. It’s the Y2K thing all over again, courtesy of our friends in Congress who probably thought they were actually accomplishing something, and didn’t think about the technological terror they were constructing with this asinine change.
Microsoft wants $4000 bucks for the daylight savings time patch for Windows 2000. Now, it’s one thing to say something is off support, and they won’t be patching anymore. But they are still providing security updates and such for Windows 2000 for free. You have the patch, it’s critical for your customers, you provide that as a courtesy. This is a way for Microsoft to subtly encourage users to upgrade, if by subtly it’s meant that they are hitting you over the head with a 2×4 and shouting “Upgrade, bitch!” at you.
I’d love to switch to something else, but Microsoft has a good little monopoly going, and there’s not much we can do about it. I use Linux and MacOS personally, and at work, so I have no use for Windows. But try convincing people to go without Visio, and things like that. You won’t have much luck. OpenOffice is a good substitute for Microsoft Office, but it’s almost formats things properly when converting back and fourth to word format. I deviate from my libertarian instincts when it comes to Microsoft, or monopolies in general.
It’s hard to tell if it’s because the 20th has come and gone (confirming my theory that it was my accidentally post-dated posts and comment that scrozzled the Bloglines), or if Bloglines did something. If bloglines did something, thanks. But I’m thinking it was probably the post dating and subsequent corrections that confused Bloglines into not updating its feed for my blog.
In other news, I’m liking my MacBook Pro enough that I’m considering getting myself a desktop Mac Pro and running the blog off that, and decommissioning the old Linux server. It’s not that I don’t like Linux anymore, it’s just the differences between MacOS and Linux are pronounced enough that it makes going back and forth painful.
They are both Unix underneath anyway, though it’s taking some getting used to going back to the BSD universe, where I have to do ps -aux instead of ps -ef to get a process list, and no longer have things like /proc. Plus, true to its NeXTStep roots, I see MacOS still retains NetInfo, which always seemed to me to be NIS written by aliens.
MacOS X is pretty cool, but it’s basically NeXTStep running on top of BSD with a nicer user interface on top of it :)
This is a 15 Kilojoule shot at target. You can see the plasma arc coming out of the gun. On their site, they say a lot of the energy got wasted because of the metal vaporization. Sad.
8.3KJ shot with aluminium/teflon projectile. Apparently sending the projectile supersonic.
Take a trip over to powerlabs to get the details. You could build one of these yourself if you wanted to.
Without a doubt, eventually, someday, we’ll figure out a way to pack enough energy into a small enough space to basically render ordinary firearms obsolete. Indeed, materials technology is nearing the point, probably by the middle of this century, where body armor will be effective enough that standard small arms will not penetrate it, and light enough to be worn without too much burden.
But which technology would supplant the firearm? Well, lasers are one possibility. For various reasons, I think the least likely, but it’s interesting to take a look at the current legal regulations concerning lasers. From Sam’s Laser FAQ, we have:
Please don’t give the legislators ideas. Sales of lasers are unregulated except for medical and laser show systems, and a few systems under export controls. For all other systems, you just have to register as a manufacturer if you’re making them for public sales and submit your product for compliance, and maintain records of who it was initially sold to in case there is a need for a recall.
Of course, this is just the federal level. Apparently a few states regulate lasers.
NOW, where the crap hits the fan is at the state level. New York records the serial number of all lasers and requires licensed operators, transferring a laser in NY above class II to another citizen of NY without reregistering the unit is an offense. Transporting a laser through NY or selling it out of state from NY is not however a offense. Texas and Arizona have user fees to pay for their states radiologic safety programs, etc. I’m told by a friend that AZs fees are quite steep, on the order of $1,500 a year for large industrial lasers and that AZ inspects laser shows rather thoroughly. Other states may vary, but generally unless they have made misuse of pointers a issue, there are no worries except in NY and AZ. Possession is not illegal and they don’t deny permits to register in those states. However, they may disqualify a person who fails to pass the test.
Arizona is surprising. New York not so much, because New York likes to regulate everything. I don’t think you can take a dump in New York without a permit.
As I said, I think lasers are not likely to supplant firearms, because they take a lot of energy to be powerful enough to damage someone or something. Burning a hole through someone, other than through a vital organ, isn’t really all that serious, plus you could armor something just by putting a mirror on it.
What I think will likely supplant firearms are electromagnetic weapons. These are more commonly known as rail guns or gauss guns. While I don’t think these will supplant small arms for quite some time, they will probably start to appear on ships and heavy artillery platforms by the middle of the century. But if we ever figured out how to pack a lot of energy into a small space, in theory you could make a man portable electromagnetic weapon that could punch through tank armor. The ironic thing is, if you did this today, your device, as best I can tell, would be completely unregulated in most states (New Jersey, you’d still need an FID, sorry). But imagine an arm you could adjust a power setting on: low for taking out soft targets, and high for busting through hardned targets.
But I’m sure if you had one of those, it wouldn’t be long before the VPC and Brady’s would start preaching the evils of electromagnetism, and the need to ban assault magnets. It’ll come someday. You heard it here first.Ooops, maybe you didn’t hear it here first.
Aside from interest in things that go boom, I also have a bit of fascination with lasers. Not the common semi-conductor variety that you see in laser pointers and DVD players, but noble gas lasers. Last night I picked up an old Spectra-Physics helium-neon laser from a friend of mine. It’s nothing really powerful. A bit more powerful than your standard laser pointer, but it’s not a Class IV laser that can punch holes throughi solid steel.
Unfortunately, the thing didn’t work, probably because the gas inside has become too impure. The composition of a laser tube isn’t all that different from a neon sign. You have a cathode and anode, and a high voltage power source pumping the electrons of the He and Ne atoms into an excited state. But it takes more than this to get the gas medium to lase.
To accomplish that, you have to pump a large number of atoms into an excited state, and establsih population inversion. When these exited atoms’ electrons return from their excited state to the ground state, they emit a photon. In a laser configuration, you have two reflective mirrors on either side of the tube. One mirror will be highly reflective, and the other semi-reflective. This forms an optical catvity, or resonator along the axis of discharge. What’ll end up happening is you’ll have photons moving back and forth in the cavity hundreds of times, where they’ll interact with other excited atoms, casuing them to emit photons themselves. This process is called “stimulated smission”. Every photon produced through stimulated emissions will be of the same wavelength and move in the same direction as the stimulating photon. Once you build up enough light radiation within the reasonator cavity, some photons will begin to escape from the slightly less reflective mirror, producing a coherent beam of light that most people are familiar with. Helium neon lasers produce a nice, bright pink/reddish light. You can get other colors using other gases as your lasing medium. Laser pointers use a solid state laser, which operates a bit differently than this, but the principle is basically the same.
But the laser I got didn’t work. Just like a neon sign, after a while you start introducing impurities into the tube, both from the glass, the sealants on the tube, and from the operation of the cathode and anode. Most gas lasers have something in them called a “getter”, which is a device, usually heat activated at the time of manufacture, which sucks impurities out of the tube. There are different ways to heat up the getter to reactivate it, in an attempt to restore the laser function, but the easiest way is just to remove the tube from its power source and microwave the thing for a few seconds until you notice the tube start to come back to life. The microwaves induce a current in the metal part, heating it enough to activate. Sadly, this didn’t work for me. The light show inside the tube was impressive, but still no lasing when I reconnected the tube to the high voltage power supply. Sad.
You can actually build your own Class IV lasers, which can actually cut and burn things. There are kits and plans out there if you look. Generally, it’s CO2 lasers that make the best implements of destruction. The cool thing is, unlike guns, lasers are pretty much unregulated. I will post about that a little later in the day.
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