Posts by Mark Lockett

Musk: Come ride my Big F**king Rocket to Mars

even if the price is possible - how much fuel would this lot need for mass transport

Musk talked about using this system for mass transport, and getting the price down around current flight tickets.

Would that not mean a PHENOMENAL amount of fuel? we may or may not have global warming now, but to burn methane to get lots of these rockets into orbit every day would surely be Huge (to use a technical term). I can't see how we would get enough methane to fuel this lot. (actually, with the 100 tonne behomoth returning to earth after only half an hour in orbit, would it need a lot of fuel for braking on top of the fuel to get up to orbit velocity), and then is there going to be a parachute to help the landing, or fire up the rocket motor again to land. It all sounds quite tricky

Stand by for more big, windfarm-driven 'leccy price rises

In New Zealand we do some demand management .....

nice article, but I haven't checked all the figures.

Just one point about demand management:

Here in New Zealand we have had a system for decades where the power company (or, before privatisation, the Power Board) can switch off the hot water cylinder at will, using a ripple control. This effectively means that the company can switch on the hot water during mid afternoon, and (mostly) between midnight and dawn. Most people have a big enough hot water cylinder to provide a full day's supply of hot water, so there is absolutely no effect on consumers, but it does allow some smoothing in demand, at practically no cost (hot water is close to half domestic demand).

(here in NZ, most electricity is hydro, and the rivers have to keep running at night, when the spot price of electricity drops to almost nothing).

Mark Lockett

Will Google regret the mega data center?

Margins must be tight in cloud computing

Wow, margins must be tight in cloud computing if a tax rate of less than 10% is enough to close down a facility.

In computing, (what with Moore's law and rapidly changing technology), all the successful companies (Microsoft, Oracle, Sun) used to boast to their customers that if we implemented their latest release, whatever it was, it would have a payback of several months or less.

Don't Microsoft believe their own publicity any more? A few percent tax should not be enough to kill a good idea, if it is that good an idea .

Exploding core counts: Heading for the buffers

can our current Windows even handle the existing hardware?

When I run Cognos Data Manager and various SQL Server processes the CPU ulitilisation is typically 12%. That is an eighth of all the CPU. it would appear that the bottleneck is CPU but the software cannot take advantage of the multi-processor, multi-core, multi-thread arrangements we currnetly have. If we are only getting 12%, will moving to a more modern server just give us 12% (or maybe 6% !) of a slightly more poiwerful CPU?