R. Scott Belford wrote:
I don't think that you are making sense. This is the title that Jim
has chosen for his presentation. Are you saying that this is *not*
his title, [let's not get too personal]?
--scott
I don't think Jim would mind a little tease. But thanks for your concern.
Jim's talk about "oil", however, brought me nostalgia. I spent most of
my career with Exxon (now ExxonMobil). One of the projects I was
assigned to was developing reservoir simulation software (as part of a
huge team) for Ghawar (the largest oil field in the universe, with a
daily oil production rate of over 5 million barrels a day, translating
into over 300 million US dollars a day at today's price), which was a
joint project between Exxon and Saudi Aramco, more than 25 years ago.
To service this project, we bought one of the first Cray-1 "super
computers". This very expensive hardware became an antique and was
eventually donated to the Smithsonian.
Essentially all the major oil companies have since switched to Linux to
do geological reservoir modeling and production simulation. Exxon was
the last holdout, but when Exxon went, so went the entire oil industry.
Daily oil production from Ghawar has decreased to just over 4 million
barrels, with (alarmingly) increased water cut (percent of reservoir
water produced along with oil). But it is true that oil companies all
over the world are increasingly relying on Linux to find new oil fields,
and to try to squeeze every possible drop of oil from a known field.
Indeed, AFAIK, no industry is as dominated by Linux as the oil industry.
Just a little personal bit for Jim to juicy up his long-anticipated talk.
