http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/1...id=106&tid=185
quote:
'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 08:41:16 -0500, Amused wrote:

What's amusing is that the article has about two sentances referring to
Windows. 99.9% of it is in regard to Closed Source Unix apps versus open
source Linux apps. BTW, they prefer closed source Unix apps for hte most
part (Oracle, PeopleSoft, Domino/Notes, etc..)

begin <1p9k98udsuwoz.dlg@funkenbusch.com>,
Erik 'MS Apologist' Funkenbusch <erik@despam-funkenbusch.com> writes:
What's really amusing is that you cannot counter their claim that
Windows is not cheaper. Now I know for a fact that Windows has a far
higher TCO than Linux in the areas I implement Linux.

Does it hurt when people publish the truth about your beloved MS Erik?

Roy Culley wrote:

Of course not. The best he can do is Links to MS sponsored studies. Of
course, those studies are meaningless in the face of realworld experiences.

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 20:13:09 +0100, Roy Culley wrote:

How can I counter it when they provide no measurement for how they came to
that conclusion.

I'm waiting for some.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 18:21:59 GMT,
Erik Funkenbusch <erik@despam-funkenbusch.com> wrote:
MS-Windows is mentioned 11 times in the body of the article, in 6
seperate paragraphs.

Must have been another one of your "rough guesses"

Mind you, some of the MS-Windows mentions were keepers...

<quote>

The PeopleSoft back end is moving to the AIX system and we would move
the Windows front end to Linux if the application gave us the option,"
Peters said. "We have no interest in staying on Windows for those types
of applications as there are just down sides. In our organisation
Windows is not a threat as we get to see both sides and Windows is not
cheaper at all."

</quote>


<quote>

"I'm happy to pay for Linux support by moving to Red Hat Advanced Server
which is about $1500," he said. "Choosing Linux is not about acquisition
costs and I'd be prepared to pay $10,000 per server for it. I wouldn't
have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust
Windows for that."

</quote>



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAKUfmd90bcYOAWPYRAtu/AKDWVgNEnoUeRpyeL076EFPVYXgXHwCfSMAZ
c6J9oU07liiA6lsXamrkt+M=
=s6Xs
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
Jim Richardson http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock
Dorothy Parker's reply to her editor who was bugging her for her belated
work while she was on her honeymoon: "Too fucking busy, and vice versa."

"Erik Funkenbusch" <erik@despam-funkenbusch.com> wrote in message
news:q4col0kkn3vm$.dlg@funkenbusch.com...
How about

'MS artificially lowers TCO to large installations by offering them the
Licenses at significant discount (even free) when other parties are
presenting alternative operating systems (Linux BSD et al) to the customer'

They've been caught at it multiple times, and hard to study TCO when your
stuck on the upgrade treadmill and MS tells you upgrade now or pay more
later.

Amused wrote:

For a power company, it's no longer a question of what's cheaper; it's a
question of what's safer. With this new Windows exploit, they'd be nuts to
run mission-critical systems (generators and transmission) on any MS
product.

By the way, has anyone heard any more about that "computer failure" that was
instrumental in last summer's blackout in the Northeast? Was it due to MS
software or operator error?

John wrote:

From: mlw <mlw@nospam.no>
Subject: Did Windows cause the blackout?
Message-ID: <qW56b.366793$o%2.165558@sccrnsc02>
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 19:59:18 GMT
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11393

"TRANSCRIPTS of telephone conversations .. include explicit mention of
some unknown 'computer problems' at FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility
thought to have triggered the regional power failures, in those
preceding hours" - Egan Orion

[..]

"The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's
Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety
monitoring system for nearly five hours" - Kevin Poulsen

[..]

"We do know that our alarm-screen function failed," says FirstEnergy
spokesman Mark Durbin. "But we can't believe that a problem with our
transmission lines could have been the cause of such a widespread problem."

[..]

"Government and industry experts speaking unofficially with
Computerworld have linked Blaster to the severity of the blackout, since
on the day of the blackout Blaster affected the communications networks
used to manage the power grid" - Dan Verton

"The W32.Blaster worm may have contributed to the cascading effect of
the Aug. 14 blackout, government and industry experts revealed this week" -
Dan Verton

[Now from the official report. Notice how they blame, the weather, the
operators and Dayton Power & Light’s 345-kV line. No mention is made of
Microsoft Windows, Blaster or any previous problems with a virus
disabling the monitoring equipment in a power statation run by the same
company with the same equipment in a Nuclear power station.

Instead they waffle on about 'evaluation tools .. unable to access
systems .. and that chap who went to lunch. Who is this ? He should be
as famous as KiLroy by now. Think of the T shirt rights. "I'm the man
who single handedly shut down North America".

Take note of that para with 'non-real-time' in it. What the f*** does it
mean exactly - in English/American ?]

"One of MISO’s primary system condition evaluation tools, its state
estimator, was unable to assess system conditions for most of the period
between 12:37 EDT and 15:34 EDT, due to a combination of human error and
the effect of the loss of DPL’s"

"The initiation of the August 14, 2003, blackout was caused by
deficiencies in specific practices, equipment, and human decisions that
coincided that afternoon."

"MISO’s reliability coordinators were using non-real-time data to
support real-time “flowgate” monitoring. This prevented MISO from
detecting an N-1 security violation in FE’s system"

"On August 14 at about 12:15 EDT, MISO’s state estimator produced a
solution with a high mismatch (outside the bounds of acceptable error).
This was traced to an outage of Cinergy’s Bloomington-Denois Creek
230-kV line—although it was out of service, its status was not updated
in MISO’s state estimator."

"Line status information within MISO’s reliability coordination area is
transmitted to MISO by the ECAR data network or direct links and
intended to be automatically linked to the SE. This requires coordinated
data naming as well as instructions that link the data to the tools."

"For this line, the automatic linkage of line status to the state
estimator had not yet been established (this is an ongoing project at
MISO). The line status was corrected and MISO’s analyst obtained a good
SE solution at 13:00 EDT and an RTCA solution at 13:07 EDT, but to
troubleshoot this problem he had turned off the automatic trigger that
runs the state estimator every five minutes."

"After fixing the problem he forgot to re-enable it, so although he had
successfully run the SE and RTCAmanually to reach a set of correct
system analyses, the tools were not returned to normal automatic
operation. Thinking the system had been successfully restored, the
analyst went to lunch."

[So there you have it. Some operator went to lunch - in the middle of
the biggest blackout on continental north America. This is whats known
in the business as giving them the MushRoom treatment. Cover them in
BullShit and keep them in the dark - iterally]

https://reports.energy.gov/BlackoutReport-2.pdf

Daeron wrote:

With FirstEnergy, that doesn't surprise me, especially seeing how they've
ignored problems at Davis-Besse nuclear. The fact that we have to pay their
outrageous prices really irks me, though.

--
A Fighting Cock Is Still A Chicken -- WSJ headline, Feb. 10, 2004.

John wrote:

I read this elsewhere, and this seems like a good place to post it too.
---<quote>---
4 100 watt panels, without batteries or anything fancy,
would offset your energy costs by a bit.

In Calif, we can get 2 way meters. *While some folks want to
do the whole 8KW roof full of panels thing, perhaps with 2
days of battery backup, I see a lot more in a modest, small
setup. *If every other house in the US has 2 or 4 panels,
the local generation of power would reduce power consumption,
reduce demand on the grid (producing more during demand hours)
and, frankly, not be a burden on the home owner.

1 inverter
1 disconnect switch
4 panels
some wire
a little bit of other stuff (array combiner, etc)
and it will generally pay for itself in 5-6 years.
And keep working for another 20 years.
---</quote>---

Amused wrote:

Heard they have 2 way meters in Germany too.

But, do panels really last that long? How much does their efficiency drop
over time? How long 'til they are down to 50%?

Having solar panels connected to the grid gives another bonus, say you
wanted to generate all your power from solar, you'd need huge battery bank
for night and rainy days, but with a 2-way meter you could just use the
grid for those days, and save alot on the costs :-)

Jan Knutar wrote:

Solar panels are at about 13% or 17% to begin with. If they were 100%, then
you would be able to stand in front of them not see your reflection and not
see your shadow, plus they would feel cool to the touch despite them being
black-hole black in colour (like in the book 2001).
50% is still a long way to go, but the technology is improving a little.

Solar panels must be well mounted if you expect them to last. Mounting them
on a 4x8 foot plywood sheet is not going to give you 20+ years worth of
electricity. www.homepower.com (I believe) seems to have a lot of pointers.

If you're looking for 50% efficiency, you'd probably try something like hot
water heating (after all, you're going to lose power on electric cables,
conversion, etc., so if you're using electricity to heat, just go direct by
transfering heat directly via hot water heating - watch out for cold
weather).

There is also something worth "some" independence too. For example the cold
weather experienced in places like Quebec a couple of years ago, huge drain
on the power grid at the wrong time, therefore you're just as likely going
to be in the dark at the worst of times, just like everyone else. Atleast
with a little buffer power, you could run a couple of lights at night,
perhaps central heating too.

Amused wrote:

I should have said it more clearly, I meant, how long before they are down
to 50% efficiency of their efficiency as new? i.e., how long it takes the
new 10% efficienct solar panel to drop to 5%.

Heating is easily solved with a few fireplaces :-)

Jan Knutar wrote:

A quick google search for { "solar panel" years efficien } gives top hit of:
http://www.heizmann.com/englisch/eng...katalog-04.pdf
This may give you a ballpark figure... read bottom of page1
....."The panel performance of 175W,+/-5% is guaranteed 2 years on the
product and 25 years on 80 percent of the nominal performance..."

Nominal performance depends on if you are in California or in Northern
Canada (you need to lookup hours of sunshine for your location and factor
that in) and whether you mount it in the general direction of the sun or
under a tree ;-)

Feeding 1 fireplace takes plenty of wood, feeding a few fireplaces, you
better have a wood shed handy.
New homes (here) are not allowed to have wood fireplaces.
Gas fireplaces require electricity too.

Amused wrote:


Never heard of a gas fireplace, seems like a huge inconvenience to have to
drag around gas bottles, but I guess it's less of a bother than wood, come
to think of it.
What sort of idiocy is not allowing wood fireplaces? I'm curious, what's the
reason/motivation behind that?

Datagram from Amused incoming on netlink socket
<102qko6js8u4h56@corp.supernews.com>. Dumping datagram.

Small black holes are white-hot. Larger ones are black, but not perfectly
black. See 'Hawking radiation'.

-Ilari
--
Yep, half a frog in blender is better than no frog. -- Daniel Phillips
Linux LK_Perkele_IV9 2.4.23-selinux1 #2 Mon Jan 5 20:12:55 EET 2004 i686 unknown
3:08pm up 39 days, 18:44, 5 users, load average: 0.03, 0.22, 0.38

Datagram from John incoming on netlink socket
<pgiWb.22040$GO6.2373@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink .net>. Dumping datagram.
Some newest data points to that it was software bug in control application.

It was said that both primary controller and its backup failed, without the
operators knowing about failures...

-Ilari
--
Of course MS is to be blame. -- Erik Funkenbusch
Linux LK_Perkele_IV9 2.4.23-selinux1 #2 Mon Jan 5 20:12:55 EET 2004 i686 unknown
6:42pm up 37 days, 22:19, 7 users, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.04

Fearing a spontaneous XP reboot, Jimbo mumbled this incantation:

Yeah, I'm against those tree-hugging wackos. The way I figure it, once we
completely pollute all parts of the earth and use up the easiest 90% of the
resources, the environment problem will practically take care of itself.

No cars, no cares, and no computers. A fine life for the remaining 1.2 billion
of humanity.

--
No, I won't fix your Windows computer!

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sun, 15 Feb 2004 08:20:07 +0200,
Jan Knutar <shadowjksp@yahoo.se> wrote:
Typically, they use piped in gas, or a large storage tank out back.

Smog, fire risk from embers. Here in the Seattle area, we often have
burn bans if there's a long term inversion layer, fortunately, those
don't usually occur when it's cold enough to need heat, although they
sometimes do.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAMDCyd90bcYOAWPYRAsRKAJ97QMy6f4bStWzNXwkxQZ +i5gVtPQCgpfeu
CE8bW23SYrDm7acfzZu0NPA=
=Q405
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--
Jim Richardson http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock
Ok, the guy who made the netfilter Makefile was probably on some really
interesting and probably highly illegal drugs when he wrote it.
-- Linus Torvalds