Nothing at all. This is one of the little rewards in wiring a friend's company 10 years ago, where TCP-IP-savvy geeks weren't a dime a dozen... Over the years, the link went from 64K ISDN to T-1.
if Windows fails (and we all know that Windows is far less reliable than the hardware it runs on), you get two parallel blue screens. (Don't mod this up as 'Funny' -- I'm dead serious here.)
Theres little wonder in that. Look at all the IO channels and processors that the mainframe has. Instead of moving every byte between peripherials with the CPU, the mainframe tells one of its IO processors: "Move that data for me, and tell me when its done."
You don't want your bank using the same unreliable hardware. Do you want to wait a week while the maintenance guy comes along to replace the failed node that held the records of your last deposit?
I can sure live with that when it comes to my last withdrawal!!!
I've been researching railroad issues for almost 25 years, so I am quite confident that when I say that maglev is rubbish, I DO know what I am talking about:
The techno-babble surrounding maglev always have the proverbial geek techno-myopia. They are unable to focus on the problem as a whole, but rather on the most glamorous details.
Sure, maglev, by itself, is a neat concept. It's the implementation that leaves to be desired. This is where the theory gets whacked by reality.
To be viable, any rail network needs flexibility; you have to be able to send trains here and there on different tracks. You need to switch the trains around.
This is the biggest problem with maglev: switching them around. You just can't switch them like conventionnal (TGV) trains; the track switches are so cumbersome, awkward and complex that any maglev line will be limited in the numbers of switches it can be fitted with.
Maglev (and monorail) switches work by removing a whole section of track, and replacing it by another one that goes the proper directin (or by turning one around). The sheer size of the mobile section of track prevents the switch from being long enough to be traversed at high-speed. And whenever you move such a big piece of track around, you need to have big motors and big safety interlocks that all add to the cost of switches.
By contrast, a normal ("birail") switch has 2 (or 3 for TGV high-speed switches) small moving points that a very tiny percentage of the total weight of the whole switch, thus simplyfing them very much and keeping the cost down.
Furthermore, a normal "birail" switch can be switched directions in 3-4 seconds, compared to upwards of a minute for maglev. This means that any train that comes towards the switch has be forewarned of the safety of proceeding towards the switch long enough to be able to stop if the switch somehow cannot be lined-up properly. This means that the time interval between trains has to be lengthened to allow for the time to turn switches around, thus losing capacity compared to normal birail tracks...
And in terms of safety, when you run through a maglev/monorail switch that isn't lined properly, you are running head-on into a disaster, whilst an unproperly lined birail switch can be passed without too much destruction besides the switch point actuating rods; in fact, run-through and spring switches are DESIGNED to be run into if they are not properly lined!
On a short single suburban line, this doesn't cause any problem really; ultimately, you need one switch at each-end of the line, if it is double-tracked (if it is single-tracked and there is only one train, you don't need any switches at all, nor do you need signalling).
But if you want to envision a whole network of intercity maglev trains, you start to have junctions, terminals and maintenance yards, all facilities who need a fair amount of track switches.
The cost of those quickly add-up, and they eventually make a fair portion of the cost of a rail network as it is eventually expanded.
Intercity lines will need crossovers at each major station, simply to allow to run around a crippled train, unless you want to shut down the whole line when there is a problem. Don't forget that the longer a relief gang takes to go to a crippled train, the longer the line is shut-down. In a suburban environment, this is not a big deal; you get a ladder and bring down the people on buses. But in the countryside, this is a wholly different matter.
The high-cost of maglev switches will definitely be a hindrance to the realization of an efficient network topology (here's terminology the slashgeek can grasp!), so in the end, maglev train networks will never be as efficient, flexible and reliable as conventionnal birail networks.
The railroad as we know it evolved rather quickly between the early 1800s and the 1880's, and then it pretty well stabilized in it's current form. By the beginning of the last century, pretty well all the theoretical problems that surfaced were properly addressed and dealt with scientifically; since that time, the only progress made have been incremental. Even the TGV has nothing really exotic about it; it's a perfectly ordinary train that runs on a pike designed specifically for very high speeds.
It is not for nothing that railroads have kept the same form for a century: it's the most optimal way to do the work! Maglevs are far from being optimal!!! They have a lot of drawbacks and disadvantages that far outweigh their few benefits.
If your goal is just to reduce friction, why not simply float the train on an air cushion, like a hovercraft? It seems like it would eliminate a lot of the complexity.
The point is: the TGV has once reached a maximum speed of more than 500km/h with a specially designed trainset on special rails, while 400km/h is the usual travelling speed for the transrapid. I see quite a difference there. The TGV does not come close to 400km/h, let alone 500km/h in everyday travel...
Nitpick: the world-record was made by a souped-up perfectly normal beas^h^h^h^h TGV fitted with a bigger transformer, bigger wheels, a smaller gearing ratio, 7 less cars than normal, various aerodynamic optimizations and a stiffer-than-normal catenary.
And TGVs everyday come 80 km/h close to 400 km/h on the newest high speed line, the LGV Médditérranée where the top commercial speed is 320 km/h (that's exactly 200 miles per hour). And they are routinely tested at 400 km/h, and most journalists invited for the ride don't bother showing-up.
Maglev is just plain stupid. Given that conventional rail can do well over 500 km/h (new French fast trains are ROUTINELY tested at over 400 km/h - most of the journalists invited for the ride don't bother to show up anymore), there is no compelling reason to build a maglev.
What would you trust more, a well developped and well researched almost 200 year old technology (the first steam train ran in 1804), or a new, extremely complex technology that has yet to carry it's first passenger???
What they don't mention is that when Apple did release the Mac, they named one of the system sounds Sosume/So-sue-me/, basically laughing at Apple recording.
They also had a prototype of a machine named Sagan, in honour of the astonomer. But it fell on deaf ears, and Carl Sagan promptly sued them. They renamed the prototype BHA, for "Butt-Headed Asstronomer". Sagan sued again, but this time, the courts told him to chill out.
In a very different way, I would guess. What did you build with your Lego? Nothing creative? Nothing of all the things I mentioned?
House. Building. Things you could do with 4 kinds of different bricks and doors and windows. 30 years ago, there weren't any of those spaceship crap. Instead of building pre-packaged stuff, you had to think of yours.
'Microsoft doesn't think computer users should have to use one program to read and write a word-processing file, another to use a spreadsheet, and a third to correspond via e-mail. Rather, the company thinks, a single program should handle it all.
Lego is a wonderful toy to develop spatial orientation and projection. It is perfect to develop the kind of intelligence needed to navigate in three dimensions by projecting the spatial relationships on a two dimensional plane.
It also is a good learning tool to develop volumetric relationship (in an architectural sense).
What I just don't understand is people trying to make it do something it's not made for: duplicating the volumetry and appearance of arbitrarly-shaped objects.
Why don't you use clay or plaster? They are shapable to a great degree of likeness, far more than what you'll be able to achieve with legos.
he network at my company is quickly becoming so complex that neither I nor the admins can troubleshoot it. ...
Developers suspect that there's a simpler way to do it all, but since we're not networking experts, it's just a suspicion.
If you're not a networking expert, then you definitely are a part of the problem. That's why you can't find solutions...
There is no 'no turning back' point for a transaction. Either they agree to accept what you are offering, or they don't. You can't trick them into accepting one thing and then replace it with another of supposed equal value. Likewise, they can't accept payment form you, and then tack on an additional charge and force you to pay it. Transactions have either happened or they haven't, there's no middle ground.
Stop pussyfooting. Just state that "transactions are atomic".
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing at all. This is one of the little rewards in wiring a friend's company 10 years ago, where TCP-IP-savvy geeks weren't a dime a dozen... Over the years, the link went from 64K ISDN to T-1.
If earth wasn't artistic, Slartibartfast wouldn't have earned all those awards for his norvegian fjords and coastline!!!
And given that mac users are often doing high-data volume stuff such as video editing, IDE has to be better than SCSI...
Speed and acceleration aren't everything.
The techno-babble surrounding maglev always have the proverbial geek techno-myopia. They are unable to focus on the problem as a whole, but rather on the most glamorous details.
Sure, maglev, by itself, is a neat concept. It's the implementation that leaves to be desired. This is where the theory gets whacked by reality.
To be viable, any rail network needs flexibility; you have to be able to send trains here and there on different tracks. You need to switch the trains around.
This is the biggest problem with maglev: switching them around. You just can't switch them like conventionnal (TGV) trains; the track switches are so cumbersome, awkward and complex that any maglev line will be limited in the numbers of switches it can be fitted with.
Maglev (and monorail) switches work by removing a whole section of track, and replacing it by another one that goes the proper directin (or by turning one around). The sheer size of the mobile section of track prevents the switch from being long enough to be traversed at high-speed. And whenever you move such a big piece of track around, you need to have big motors and big safety interlocks that all add to the cost of switches.
By contrast, a normal ("birail") switch has 2 (or 3 for TGV high-speed switches) small moving points that a very tiny percentage of the total weight of the whole switch, thus simplyfing them very much and keeping the cost down.
Furthermore, a normal "birail" switch can be switched directions in 3-4 seconds, compared to upwards of a minute for maglev. This means that any train that comes towards the switch has be forewarned of the safety of proceeding towards the switch long enough to be able to stop if the switch somehow cannot be lined-up properly. This means that the time interval between trains has to be lengthened to allow for the time to turn switches around, thus losing capacity compared to normal birail tracks...
And in terms of safety, when you run through a maglev/monorail switch that isn't lined properly, you are running head-on into a disaster, whilst an unproperly lined birail switch can be passed without too much destruction besides the switch point actuating rods; in fact, run-through and spring switches are DESIGNED to be run into if they are not properly lined!
On a short single suburban line, this doesn't cause any problem really; ultimately, you need one switch at each-end of the line, if it is double-tracked (if it is single-tracked and there is only one train, you don't need any switches at all, nor do you need signalling).
But if you want to envision a whole network of intercity maglev trains, you start to have junctions, terminals and maintenance yards, all facilities who need a fair amount of track switches.
The cost of those quickly add-up, and they eventually make a fair portion of the cost of a rail network as it is eventually expanded.
Intercity lines will need crossovers at each major station, simply to allow to run around a crippled train, unless you want to shut down the whole line when there is a problem. Don't forget that the longer a relief gang takes to go to a crippled train, the longer the line is shut-down. In a suburban environment, this is not a big deal; you get a ladder and bring down the people on buses. But in the countryside, this is a wholly different matter.
The high-cost of maglev switches will definitely be a hindrance to the realization of an efficient network topology (here's terminology the slashgeek can grasp!), so in the end, maglev train networks will never be as efficient, flexible and reliable as conventionnal birail networks.
The railroad as we know it evolved rather quickly between the early 1800s and the 1880's, and then it pretty well stabilized in it's current form. By the beginning of the last century, pretty well all the theoretical problems that surfaced were properly addressed and dealt with scientifically; since that time, the only progress made have been incremental. Even the TGV has nothing really exotic about it; it's a perfectly ordinary train that runs on a pike designed specifically for very high speeds.
It is not for nothing that railroads have kept the same form for a century: it's the most optimal way to do the work! Maglevs are far from being optimal!!! They have a lot of drawbacks and disadvantages that far outweigh their few benefits.
And TGVs everyday come 80 km/h close to 400 km/h on the newest high speed line, the LGV Médditérranée where the top commercial speed is 320 km/h (that's exactly 200 miles per hour). And they are routinely tested at 400 km/h, and most journalists invited for the ride don't bother showing-up.
So a pityful maglev is laughable.
What would you trust more, a well developped and well researched almost 200 year old technology (the first steam train ran in 1804), or a new, extremely complex technology that has yet to carry it's first passenger???
It also is a good learning tool to develop volumetric relationship (in an architectural sense).
What I just don't understand is people trying to make it do something it's not made for: duplicating the volumetry and appearance of arbitrarly-shaped objects.
Why don't you use clay or plaster? They are shapable to a great degree of likeness, far more than what you'll be able to achieve with legos.
Does this means we'll be able to download all those UFO episodes????
This brings a totally new meaning to Shaddap your face!!!
Well, for a banker (and any ignorant bean-counting type), a pound of cure is better than an ounce of prevention...
Lawyers are already human-rat hybrids!!!
* Canadian postal codes are alphanumeric; this is the actual postal code of a sulpician monastery...