"so much of history came from this brightly-lit city."
so much of history came from the country whose capital is this brightly-lit city. - fixed that
2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
NYSE Trading Platform
"Unparalleled Price-Performance
The Universal Trading Platform for International Markets runs on commodity
Linux hardware and standards-based communication protocols."
http://nysetechnologies.nyx.com/sites/technologies.nyx.com/files/L5756_NYSE%20Tech%20UTP_IM_OST_100105b.pdf
"New York Stock Exchange uses SQL........"
First hit on Google !
How Linux Mastered Wall Street
www.pcworld.com/article/.../how_linux_mastered_wall_street.html
"NYSE Does Linux
The largest exchange, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Euronext, is run on a Linux system that can generate 1,500,000 quotes and process 250,000 orders every second, offering acknowledgments of each transaction within two milliseconds. "
"no office or other Win application that requires more performance than I have."
I think you mean - that YOU use. There are plenty of applications that can use huge amounts of memory/cpu -the most general obvious being video, esp. rendering or transcoding 1080p/50
"
> I'm not sure I'd want to deal with a company whose director, or even a senior staff, have a
> history of bankruptcies, millions of pounds of debts, failed companies, etc"
Like many things it depends on the details, was it a well-thought out scheme that failed due to unexpected circumstances, suprise innovation from a competitor, market downturn etc. Or were the directors out-of -their-depth in some areas, dishonest, over-optimistic, poor managers etc.
"Inert gas extinguishers, or anything else, will not help much in a lithium ion battery fire."
Whilst I agree with this and have on several occasions in my lab career extinguished burning metal & metal hydride fires using special ternary powder extinguishers and whilst noting that these batteries are worst in having their own oxidant the use of inert gas would at least help to control any collateral fires in the vicinity.
"that you don't have software maintenance if you don't buy the Windows flavour."
Certainly I build all my own desktops/servers and install Linux on them - for years I've had NO maintenance cost other than one flaky HD
Laptops are a more difficult matter - so far I've got by with 1 netbook (Linux from new) and 1 second-hand laptop (donated after a Windows Update disaster). I'm going to have to replace it soon-ish as various non-core bits are failing and the memory is becoming rather tight)
I'm going to have to look around rather carefully
"But that's one big if."
Absolutely. Si surfaces rapidly coat with SiO2 so I imagine the nanospheres would need to be made out of contact with air. On exposure to water I rather think they would change their shape rapidly and indeed if they didn't much unexposed silicon might be wasted or the reaction rate at least limited.
Overall this is just one scheme amongst others that could be used as a portable source of hydrogen.
There are plenty of uses for a 'refillable battery' although a generator is really a better name. Already large units are available for motorhomes and yachts that allow silent power production on a considerable scale for many weeks from cassettes of methanol ( not ideal I admit ). You could use solar or wind but the energy stored in even methanol is significant and allows for heavy usage in darkness.
An example here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vWvPwiQazI
A bit twee but it gives some of the current possibilities. As far as I can tell the running costs are ~~£2/day for a 600W unit
"bear on making the spheres cheaply"
The silicon is just an energy carrier - you need to put energy in to get silicon from silicon dioxide. Generate the hydrogen and consume it as efficiently as possible and you might get back a modest proportion of the input energy. There's no way round that it's just chemistry and thermodynamics. If you can get really cheap energy it might be useful for certain niche application - basically it allows you to store the equivalent ~45L of hydrogen in 28g of silicon (+water)
Energy costs dominate this with the proviso that making the nano-silicon particles may in fact dominate the process. Material costs are irrelevant as the silicic acid can be converted back to silica if necessary
The minimum energy cost is ~1MJ/mol (=28g) and may be a lot more
"Can you re-cycle the wast product?"
Yes, but you'd need to provide some more energy to dehydrate it - it's basically similar to silica gel that's used as a desiccant often in little bags with "do not eat" on them.
I've covered some aspects of the energy cost in a post further up the thread
(The whole business is a little like the old carbide process where calcium carbide + water produced acetylene on demand for portable lights.)
"Those cleanup instructions from the EPA tacitly assume a hard surface floor. Wall-to-wall carpeting is very common; just try to scrape up spilled mercury from it!"
You obviously didn't read the information the EPA provided.
It concludes :
"What if I can't follow all the recommended steps? or I cleaned up a CFL but didn't do it properly?
Don't be alarmed; these steps are only precautions that reflect best practices for cleaning up a broken CFL. Keep in mind that CFLs contain a very small amount of mercury -- less than 1/100th of the amount in a mercury thermometer. "
Whilst the total amount of mercury in all CFL may be significant the risk from one broken one is miniscule.
"but with any poison dose matters "
Indeed it seems to and Bruce Ames who was partly responsible for much of the scare about zero tolerance to some carcinogens changed his mind in later life and published well-reasoned papers about why a threshold amount/concentration was probably more likely.
" factory still using the mercury process"
Really, I'd imagined most long gone. I'm certainly no expert being an organic chemist by training and a drug designer/protein modeller by profession, but I imagine that mercury could be stored as it's sulfide which forms easily (we always used to us sulfur powder to 'mop-up' stray drops from broken bits of kit) and is a natural ore anyway.
"Mercury in the environment but I can't remember if its the top cause."
It used to be used in very large scale electrolytic production of chlorine and sodium hydroxide from brine . The mercury acted as the cathode and dissolved the sodium formed. The mercury flowed in a loop and once away from the electrolytic cell the mercury/sodium amalgam allowed to react with water to generate sodium hydroxide. I think it was waste water from this process that caused the Minimata incident.
These days the electrolytic cell has a membrane barrier that can pass current so no mercury is involved. The membrane is neat and rather expensive called 'nafion'
In fact I've used it myself in an experimental electrochemical removal of a protecting group off a synthetic antibiotic years ago
" mercury-filled fluorescents"
Not really a very objective way to describe a tube that (these days) contains generally a few milligrams of mercury. A trace would be more appropriate in common parlance.
That said I agree that phasing mercury out should be considered a good thing but AFAIK the likelihood that such efficient lighting can be produced without mercury seems very low (see http://www.osram.com/osram_com/sustainability/sustainable-products/sustainability-criteria/key-performance-indicators/mercury/why-mercury/index.jsp)
But there is always LEDs
""oh no, can't repair this. Has to be couriered to Dell. I'll build you a new one. I'll even dispose of the old one for you in an environmentally friendly way.""
You don't really understand life in a remote community, do you. Get caught at this sort of thing and you'd end up inside a wicker man with someone with a lit torch about to reprimand you.
Me, I jumped from SC/MP assembler to 6809 assembler/Forth to C on 68K and the x86 C under Linux. I have used a MS 6502 ROM basic but it had a huge bug in its garbage collector.
Today all 6 current machines run Linux.
I suppose you don't believe any of this either, but I must admit I don't really care.