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New Member Introductory Offer

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New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Pops » Mon 05 Aug 2013, 15:55:10

Hello All, welcome!

Looking at the new member list I see we have quite an influx of new folks, half a dozen some days, that's pretty exciting.

I know it's sometimes hard to get your feet wet and start posting, so here is my Limited Time Offer to you:

One Free Pass!

That's right folks, step right up and give us a piece of your mind in this thread on the topic of peak oil: all rants, ideas and ruminations accepted; however brief, long, educated, opinionated or idiotic are eligible.

And I personally guarantees you'll catch no flack from the resident peanut gallery - a free pass.*

* Free Pass limited to first post only, lol.


Note to Peanut Gallery: I'm serious, back off, give 'em some room. :-D
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby SeaGypsy » Mon 05 Aug 2013, 18:13:43

This must have taken weeks of heavy deliberation! (as informal member of said peanut gallery) I hope this major incentive policy & procedure will be adhered to by all legumes :lol:
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Keith_McClary » Tue 06 Aug 2013, 01:59:14

Pops wrote:And I personally guarantees you'll catch no flack from the resident peanut gallery - a free pass.*

* Free Pass limited to first post only, lol.


Note to Peanut Gallery: I'm serious, back off, give 'em some room. :-D

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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby dbruning » Tue 06 Aug 2013, 15:53:41

In other news, I believe new posters are also eligible for delicious, tasty moist cookies of deliciousness. Step right up to get yours today! Say hello, we don't bite.

(*only cookies provided are site cookies, but still tasty. And hey, no calories!)
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Ibon » Tue 06 Aug 2013, 20:49:18

I fully embrace this message......I will even grant two free passes....I owe this for my bad behaviour with Runey who filled my quota of teasing for 2013.... :)
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby dinopello » Tue 06 Aug 2013, 21:19:01

I pledge to say something nice about your first post, new people.

In fact, I pre-compliment you all on your astute observations and/or your insightful questions.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Beery1 » Tue 06 Aug 2013, 21:35:44

Ibon wrote:I fully embrace this message......I will even grant two free passes....I owe this for my bad behaviour with Runey who filled my quota of teasing for 2013.... :)


That goes for me too. My flamethrower needs recharging anyway after having had to use it for a few days to burn off a few fields of Rune-blight.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Carnot » Thu 08 Aug 2013, 15:34:52

Hello to all,

I am new to PO though I have visited on and off for some time. Now that TOD has decided to shut its doors I need a new forum to maintain my view mod the peak oil world.

I am using my TOD username and some might connect this with some articles that were published on TOD, along with commentary.

I am a petroleum chemist and I work for a large petrochemical company researching feedstocks and primary processing processes. This means refining, steam cracking, catalytic cracking, Fischer Tropsch, and certain other processes such as methanol to gasoline, olefins and other fuels.

Quite a list. I have a good inside knowledge of some of these processes but may not be able to disclose all information for commercial reasons.

I have been in the refining/ petrochemical business for 35 years and started my career drilling oil wells.

I believe in PO but to date there is not one technology that I have seen that is going to preserve our way of life. Not one. That includes all the biofuel processes that I have seen and the hydrogen/CO2 processes.

That should start a debate.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Pops » Thu 08 Aug 2013, 16:50:29

Thanks for posting up carnot, thought I was going to draw a big zilch on this one. lol

Consider po.com exactly like TOD except the comments stay open forever and popularity keeps a thread at the top of the list as long as there is interest. Feel free to post up any type of tech piece that suits your fancy, many folks here are endlessly curious about the biz and science of energy.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Mon 12 Aug 2013, 08:03:03

I am also new here, although I lurked with guest status for a couple of months before I decided to become a member and post.

I'm a 61 year old Electrical Engineer working on computer hardware for the largest tech company on Earth. I joined a startup Silicon Valley firm just entering it's 3rd year in 1978, which posted $23M in earnings that year, and I rode it to a $4B revenue year. Then somebody bought that company, and a few years later, somebody bought the company that bought ours, and now I am one of over 300,000 employees.

Prior to joining my original company, I studied EE at a MidWestern University and did an enlistment in the USCG where I worked on LORAN transmitters, a system that was finally shut down in 2010 after being replaced by GPS satellites. I am a "Vietnam Era" veteran, I volunteered for combat, but I actually served near the Arctic Circle in Alaska, and then on Nantucket Island. Then I returned to school to get that degree, and pretty much milked the GI Bill for every dime, studying Economics, History, and Astronomy for as long as they let me, until they kicked me out with my degree and an embarassingly large credit total.

My area of expertise is fault tolerant computers. My original company made a commercial fault tolerant computer, which is exactly what is needed for any financial transaction. You will find our computers running every stock exchange, every credit card company, every cellphone billing application, most ATMs, etc. etc. These are the costly large computers that still exist in chilled rooms in unlikely places that we like to keep secret. Nowadays as I approach retirement after a 35 year career, I do sustaining engineering for hardware that I and many other engineers designed.

My interest in Peak Oil was stimulated by viewing Ruppert's movie Collapse(2009). After a period of acute anxiety I realized that hydraulic fracking tech has bought us some years or decades of reprieve - although I have no firm idea how long the reprieve lasts.

I also need to admit I am a skeptic about Climate Change. I do not believe that humans burning fossil fuels alters global climate to any significant degree. It definitely affects human health which is reason enough to avoid the practice - and oil and coal are really valuable as raw materials, they should not be burned.

My hobbies are fishing, camping, and driving Jeeps in unlikely places in the backcountry. I presently own three Jeeps. I own several firearms, but they are tools that bear no special fascination for me. I have had 2.8kW of solar photo-voltaic panels on my roof for just over 3 years, which has been instructive. I expect to pay off my mortgage in a view years, and I want to retire somewhere other than California, but I'm not sure where yet.
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Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Pops » Mon 12 Aug 2013, 10:45:15

Hi KJ, thanks for posting.

My interest in energy was sparked by another electrical engineer, Richard Duncan, who back sometime before the turn of the century came up with wht he called the Olduvai theory
Original at DieOff.org
(Disjointed Mega-Merg thread @ PeakOil.com)

Welcome
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Mon 12 Aug 2013, 11:56:48

KJ – “…although I have no firm idea how long the reprieve lasts”. Hmm...I’m not sure how well you’ll fit in here then. Lots of folks in these here parts are sure they can accurately predict the future.

But welcome anyway.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby TemplarMyst » Fri 16 Aug 2013, 22:24:40

Well, hope the intro offer still stands. I'm a TOD migrant as well. Need a new place to follow on with the environment, energy, and economics memes that periodically impinge on my well defined attempts to ignore reality.

Background is in systems analysis, documentation, and administration. Live north of Chicago, work downtown, and routinely commute from the burbs to the city via Metra. Got interested in it all in Sept 08 when the financial world caught fire. Some Austro-Libertarian leanings, but not hard core.

Initially anti-nuke but have changed that tune, in some part due to Radioactive Wolves, but in another part due to not being able to (yet) see how a renewables-only approach will work. Follow the Fraunhofer Institutes' periodic updates on energy generation in Germany to keep up with how Germany is doing there.

Have a ton of reading to do here to even begin to get up to speed. Gotta start somewhere tho 8)
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Pops » Sat 17 Aug 2013, 08:44:48

Hi Mysty, thanks for posting up! Yes the offer is still valid, but remember, only one free post per customer!
:-D

Welcome.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Sun 18 Aug 2013, 20:23:20

KaiserJeep wrote:I'm a 61 year old Electrical Engineer working on computer hardware for the largest tech company on Earth.
...
Then somebody bought that company, and a few years later, somebody bought the company that bought ours, and now I am one of over 300,000 employees.

Hi KaiserJeep. From context, I assumed you were talking about IBM.

Looking at the 10 biggest tech companies on Wiki (as of 3/2012), IBM is third in employees, roughly tied for second in market cap, and Fifth in annual revenue. For consistency in being "big", I'd give either IBM or Samsung the nod. (DIsclosure: I spent my 26+ year I/T career at IBM). I'm NOT being pedantic here -- it is no longer obvious at all to me which is the largest tech company.

...

Re your interest in fault tolerant computers, and the large chilled room (presumably mainframes) you cite, it prompts a question.

My expertise after my application programming days was system software programming, specifically DB2 on the IBM mainframe. (Fault tolerance was clearly a BIG deal to me before RAID made single point of failure mainframe hard drive head crashes a thing of the past). With the advent of networking and distributed computing, and robust applications like DB2 (parallel sysplex) that can operate on many mainframes simultaneously which (within distance limits) are on different sites -- I wonder about the relative NEED for serious fault tolerant computing (i.e. one single super-duper fault tolerant computer) any more.

Essentially, cheap redundancy and reliable communication seems to have largely filled the gap. The thing all the beasts need, which is the obvious linchpin over time, is plenty of reliable electric power.

Just wondered if I'm missing something obvious. (I'm a pure software guy -- I know a little physics and math and principles of electricity, but nothing close to formal degrees in EE, etc).

....

For the home user, having a few cheap PC's and a group of memory sticks stored in several relatively secure locations (like safe deposit boxes -- which also serve as a Faraday cage) in a ubiquitous format like PDF seems to have the data redunancy issue covered without complexity or undue expense. (Just diligence in backing up and storing the data).

Cheers, and welcome to the discussion boards.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby davep » Mon 19 Aug 2013, 06:37:31

The simplest and cheapest method of having a low power data redundant NAS (for example) at home is to buy a Raspberry Pi with a couple of 1TB 2.5 USB-powered disks. I've got one in my cupboard using SAMBA, and I copy all my data there every day using ROBOCOPY (only adding and taking away the delta). It's not blindingly quick, but the power consumption is minimal (so you can keep it on all day) and you can have a spare ready to replace it with an image of SD card.

I also have a home email server on another Pi. It's a good method for encrypted communications with friends, if they all use my email server over SSL. SSL isn't the best encryption, but it's good enough if you're not a terrorist.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby ralfy » Mon 19 Aug 2013, 11:08:32

Thanks for mentioning the RPis. I've always wanted to get one in place of a regular NAS with the operating system installed in the HD. I prefer the system using RPis as the OS can be placed in a mem card and separate from data stored in the HDs. This makes backing up the OS and swapping HDs easier.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby jaxon » Wed 21 Aug 2013, 23:12:12

Hi, I am new to this forum and like to know news about oil production, energy, oil prices. I assumed that PO will give more insight regarding that topics.
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Thu 05 Sep 2013, 17:57:30

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
KaiserJeep wrote:I'm a 61 year old Electrical Engineer working on computer hardware for the largest tech company on Earth.
...
Then somebody bought that company, and a few years later, somebody bought the company that bought ours, and now I am one of over 300,000 employees.

Hi KaiserJeep. From context, I assumed you were talking about IBM.

Looking at the 10 biggest tech companies on Wiki (as of 3/2012), IBM is third in employees, roughly tied for second in market cap, and Fifth in annual revenue. For consistency in being "big", I'd give either IBM or Samsung the nod. (DIsclosure: I spent my 26+ year I/T career at IBM). I'm NOT being pedantic here -- it is no longer obvious at all to me which is the largest tech company.

...

Re your interest in fault tolerant computers, and the large chilled room (presumably mainframes) you cite, it prompts a question.

My expertise after my application programming days was system software programming, specifically DB2 on the IBM mainframe. (Fault tolerance was clearly a BIG deal to me before RAID made single point of failure mainframe hard drive head crashes a thing of the past). With the advent of networking and distributed computing, and robust applications like DB2 (parallel sysplex) that can operate on many mainframes simultaneously which (within distance limits) are on different sites -- I wonder about the relative NEED for serious fault tolerant computing (i.e. one single super-duper fault tolerant computer) any more.

Essentially, cheap redundancy and reliable communication seems to have largely filled the gap. The thing all the beasts need, which is the obvious linchpin over time, is plenty of reliable electric power.

Just wondered if I'm missing something obvious. (I'm a pure software guy -- I know a little physics and math and principles of electricity, but nothing close to formal degrees in EE, etc).

....

For the home user, having a few cheap PC's and a group of memory sticks stored in several relatively secure locations (like safe deposit boxes -- which also serve as a Faraday cage) in a ubiquitous format like PDF seems to have the data redunancy issue covered without complexity or undue expense. (Just diligence in backing up and storing the data).

Cheers, and welcome to the discussion boards.


Thank you. My original company was Tandem Computers Inc. , the remnants of which live on as the NonStop Enterprise Division of HP.

The Tandem product was unique, and the entirely proprietary operating system was based upon processor pairs that communicate over entirely redundant high speed interprocessor busses, using data packets and duplicating each piece of system hardware for redundancy. The "online transaction processing system" also utilized the dual interprocessor busses to scale the server from the minimum two CPU configuration up to 16 CPUs/server. Add the networking layer and the system scaled to up to 254 nodes of 16 CPUs. The system was 100% redundant hardware, and designed for online repair that allowed you to restore redundancy before a second failure occurred.

Tandem grew rapidly until every stock exchange, most banks, most credit card companies, and miscellaneous applications like cellphone billing were saturated by Tandem products. It is still the case that NonStop computers are still the most expensive to acquire but offer the most security possible (0.999994 availability) and the lowest cost per transaction - even when measured against PCs and mobile devices. Our equipment fulfills the "database of record" function in a remote chilled room often hundreds of miles from the users.

Just the upgrade business is $6B to $8B per year, and NonStop still enjoys the highest profit margin of any part of HP. But we have literally saturated our OLTP market, and growth has slowed. The NonStop OS has been ported onto HP Blade Servers and we no longer manufacture unique hardware. However I still sustain our older products, some of which have been in service for over two decades.

I never really left Tandem Computers, it left me, through the two acquisitions I described. Now at HP it seems like full circle, the original Tandem NonStop I computer from the days of ferrite core memory in the late 1970's, was very similar to the HP 3000, plus dual redundant hardware busses to allow the message based operating system to function.
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Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
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Re: New Member Introductory Offer

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Thu 05 Sep 2013, 18:05:29

Duplicate Post.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
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