Re: FW: L-Soft service unavailable on Saturday, November 8, 2003

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Judith
> Rosen
> Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 10:35 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: FW: L-Soft service unavailable on Saturday, November 8,
> 2003
>
>
> Why can't they invest in a couple generators? Better yet, why not go
> solar??? That's what I'm doing... I've got a handicapped child who has
> medical equipment that needs electricity. But even if I didn't; energy
> dependence and vulnerability to grid disturbance is the single biggest
> immediate threat to the welfare of this country, the way I look
> at it. There
> are plenty of reasons, from all areas, ranging from health to
> environment to
> finances to national security to global stability, but in this case, it's
> about commerce. Purely from a business point of view, how much money isn't
> "made" when lack of electricity forces shutdowns like this one? Lost
> economic development because of something so preventable is a damn shame.


Well, I think exactly because it is about commerce that they are probably
not investing in generator backup. :)

Statistically, an outage of more than several hours is extremely low, and
the capital cost and ongoing costs for generators would have a very poor ROI
(return on investment). I'd imagine they have their systems on battery
backups, which typically will hold systems up for 2-8 hours depending on
what they've chosen. So, to have invest in generators would serve to
probably only change their uptime from 99.99% to 99.999% or something like
that. They probably have more downtime due to hardware/software failures
than power issues. Also, since mailing lists are not "mission-critical"
services (like a hospital or 911 system, or in business, like a
stock-trading biz), the rare outage of a day or less are not enough to make
customers go elsewhere.

As for solar, at this time it is simply not very feasible. The conversion
efficiency is very low, so to run real-time off of panels requires alot of
square footage. Plus, because solar supply is so intermittent, based on
time-of-day and weather, real-time usage of solar is impractical and instead
it requires a huge investment in some kind of power storage (batteries) if
you intend to have it "on-demand" or for mission-critical applications for
any length of time beyond what a normal battery-backup system would handle.
A warehouse full of storage batteries and power inverters would be a big
cost, and in a business environment would probably be classified as
hazardous materials by OSHA & EPA.

Maybe thin-film photovoltaics and fuel cells will help some this situation
some. Speaking of fuel cells, I am skeptical about hydrogen as a ubiquitous
power storage medium - it strikes me as much too volatile and difficult to
safely store in a density that wouldn't require a huge vessel. Maybe I'm
just a cynic, but I think that the "hydrogen economy" is way oversold as
being viable anytime soon.

These methodologies have one thing in common: they are all entirely
mechanistic.In the long run, I wonder if it would probably be better to have
biological partners to generate our power needs or act as power storage
resources: growing mats of electricity-producing moss on our house roofs,
etc. Maybe we can make use of the way in which different observers "see"
items differently, by storing energy in forms that are, to us, non-volatile,
but to a colony of some certain microbe are an energetic feast. Certainly
these are things that are not near-term, but I find the idea of living in
such a world fascinating.


>
> Judith
> PS: On an unrelated issue: RoadRunner has lost me as a customer as of
> Monday. They have a nasty policy of blocking whole internet
> service domains
> based on suspected spamming by anyone in the domain. If anyone
> has tried to
> send me email and had it bounce with a security notice attached, that's
> RoadRunner. They do not even notify me that this is happening.
> I'm moving to
> Earthlink as my ISP. The new email address is
> *** and
> it's up and running already. Tim, you can unsubscribe this RoadRunner
> address and substitute the Earthlink one, by Sunday. Thanks, folks, and
> sorry for the inconvenience!


I'll change the email. Not that its any consolation, but Roadrunner isn't
the only culprit. AOL is notorious for blocking domains erratically
supposedly because of spam.  Comcast, too. List admins on Lsoft are very
frustrated with this, since companies like AOL or Comcast willl not listen
to them, and sometimes not even to Lsoft.

Earthlink has been good for me over the past several years, and I still keep
an account going with them.



>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tim Gwinn" <***>
> To: <***>
> Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 7:18 PM
> Subject: [ROSEN] FW: L-Soft service unavailable on Saturday, November 8,
> 2003
>
>
> > To all listmembers:
> > This notice arrived on the list administrators support forum.
> > Tim
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: L-Soft EASE Home Support Forum
> > [mailto:*** Behalf Of Nelson Chen
> > Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 3:50 PM
> > To: ***
> > Subject: L-Soft service unavailable on Saturday, November 8, 2003
> >
> >
> > On Saturday, November 8, 2003, the electricity will be shut off
> from 7:00
> > a.m. - 5:00 p.m
> > by our building management in conjunction with Baltimore Gas & Electric
> > (BGE) for
> > emergency maintenance.
> >
> > In light of this development, email traffic through our servers will be
> > temporarily
> > unavailable.  We will be monitoring this situation closely and
> will do our
> > best to
> > minimize any disruption to normal mail traffic.
> >
> > We apologize for the short notification and for any inconvenience.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >
> > --
> > Nelson Chen
> > L-Soft international, Inc
> > http://www.lsoft.com/
> >
> > Support is available 9:00-18:00 ET, Monday-Friday
> > except on the following holidays:
> > http://www.lsoft.com/products/default.asp?item=holidays