One of the major factors of the energy problem is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). In many states, it is extremely difficult to build a new power plant or new distribution lines. Besides the costs of land and construction, there are many people who will do anything to prevent the construction of a facility in their neighborhood. They can delay construction for years or decades by going to court and lobbying the state and local governments. Environmental protection laws are often used to delay and block projects. It doesn't help that there are pseudo-scientific loons who blame overhead power lines for everything from hair loss to leukemia. They want the power but they don't want the infrastructure needed to generate and distribute the power.
If you can jam the enemy's communications, they are in deep shit. They can't coordinate movement of units, call for fire support, report contact with the enemy, request resupply, etc.
I've written programs that use RPC to control and monitor certain types of equipment. In my case, one of the main benefits of the software was that the user could operate the equipment from anywhere in the World. Why should I be prevented from using RPC across the Internet?
That won't help with the transmission lines and generating capacity that never get built because of NIMBY. The average citizen is capable of being just as pig-headed, greedy and duplicitous as the worst utility executive or politician. We don't want a transmission line in our backyard. We don't want a new power plant in our county. We don't want a new landfill in our county. We want it cheap, we want it now, and put the nasty bits in somebody else's backyard.
I suspect it would have to do with the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) and other safety critical systems. What if something goes wrong, say the steam generator blows up, and the plant stops producing power. How do you cool the reactor and do a safe shutdown if the grid is also down? The safe approach would be to start shutting the reactor down before you end up in an unsafe situation.
Large power grids can have stability problems that take down the whole grid. Quickly adding or removing load can mess up the grid. An electrical generator is designed to go off line if it is out of sync with the grid. This prevents physical damage to the generator. There are also current limits on the high voltage transmission lines that connect regions. These can trip if too many power plants in a region go off line, increasing the power imported from outside the region.
I've read that the stability of large power grids is still a poorly understood problem. Normally they are reliable, but what happens when they are already running close to the limit of safe operation and a major generating facility goes off line?
I've used this technique in a random number generator. Smoke detectors are a cheap and available source of radioactive material. Aware Electronics sells relatively inexpensive Geiger counters that have PC interfaces. Add a small program to measure times in between radioactive decays. It t0 is greater than t1, generate a 1. if t0 is less than t1, generate a 0. Repeat forever.
While CPU performance has improved by several orders of magnitude in recent years, we still have brain-dead operating system schedulers that can't properly allocate system resources to multiple applications. Why does the user interface turn to shit when I run a CPU or I/O intensive program in the background? Performance should degrade gracefully, not fall over a cliff. A program should be able to request, and get, X CPU cycles every N milliseconds. It should also be able to get guaranteed amounts of network and I/O bandwidth.
128 bits may not be needed for addressing physical memory, but there are interesting applications for very large virtual address spaces. They can be used to address huge databases, networked filesystems and the memory of large collections of computers.
It would probably help, but the fundamental problem is the design of the operating system. Running everything in kernel space, without memory protection, is begging for problems. This is aggravated by the complexity of many types of drivers.
You are assuming that the bank examines the signature. When I had trouble with an improperly handled check, the banker explained that, for most banks, the check processing system is totally automated. Humans only get involved when an error is reported. It is cheaper for the bank to let the system run on autopilot. Security and fraud problems that affect the bank's customers are given a low priority. It is only when the bank's money is being stolen that they get serious about security.
A common thread in many of the reports is the unwillingness, or inability, of many organizations to spend an adequate amount of money on systems administration and security. How many organizations take a "If it's not broken, don't fix it" approach to dealing with computer systems? Some organizations appear to think that an anti-virus package is the silver bullet for the problem, and don't understand why their computers were affected. Others rely on outside contractors or consultants to fix problems after they have occurred. I've worked in many places where there were no full-time systems administrators. Management depended on local PC "gurus", whose primary job was something else, to keep things running.
Everybody who has a friend or acquaintance named Robert should call 202-223-2400 (Robert L. Hunter IV at the Entertainment Software Association) and ask for Bob. Tell them that you grepped the phone book for your friend's name and their phone number was a hit.
Your friend's parents are mistaken. Just because the computer has a 400 Watt power supply doesn't mean that it is actually supplying that much power. It is probably considerably less. Think of it like the engine in a car. It may be capable of 150 horsepower but the average power output is much less.
Electronic, as opposed to electrical, cash registers did not appear until cheap microprocessors became available. The older registers were mechanical or electro-mechanical. It was the age of the precision machine. Calculators, cash registers, typewriters and teletypes were mechanical devices with large numbers of parts. National Cash Register was the dominant company in the cash register business.
I can remember going to the department store with my mother back in that era. The department store used special models of cash registers that were huge and had many more buttons than a normal cash register. They also had a pneumatic tube system to send paperwork from one department to another.
I used to take advantage of that in my software. I think it was three 16-bits words. If you could make your loop fit inside the buffer, the CPU would execute the instructions out of the buffer rather than fetching them from main memory.
It's worse than that. It isn't just ratings, demographics are very important. A show can get cancelled even if it has good ratings. As far as advertisers and network executives are concerned, many viewers are irrelevant because they are too young, too old, too poor, or other factors that make the viewer undesirable.
Internally the 80386SX was a 32-bit processor, just like the 80386DX. The external bus interface was 16-bits. This is similar to the difference between the 8086 and 8088. Supposedly you could take an existing 80286 motherboard design and modify it for the 80386SX with minimal changes to the motherboard layout.
The 68000 was a 16-bit hardware implementation of a 32-bit architecture. The processor's microcode hid this from the programmer. For a more extreme example, the IBM 360/30 implemented a 32-bit architecture using 8-bit hardware. This allowed IBM to offer a cheap, but slow, version of the IBM 360 to their customers.
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One of the major factors of the energy problem is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). In many states, it is extremely difficult to build a new power plant or new distribution lines. Besides the costs of land and construction, there are many people who will do anything to prevent the construction of a facility in their neighborhood. They can delay construction for years or decades by going to court and lobbying the state and local governments. Environmental protection laws are often used to delay and block projects. It doesn't help that there are pseudo-scientific loons who blame overhead power lines for everything from hair loss to leukemia. They want the power but they don't want the infrastructure needed to generate and distribute the power.
A defense that is incapable of maneuver is next to useless.
The U.S. Navy used wolfpacks in submarine operations against Japan in the Pacific during World War II.
If you can jam the enemy's communications, they are in deep shit. They can't coordinate movement of units, call for fire support, report contact with the enemy, request resupply, etc.
I've written programs that use RPC to control and monitor certain types of equipment. In my case, one of the main benefits of the software was that the user could operate the equipment from anywhere in the World. Why should I be prevented from using RPC across the Internet?
That won't help with the transmission lines and generating capacity that never get built because of NIMBY. The average citizen is capable of being just as pig-headed, greedy and duplicitous as the worst utility executive or politician. We don't want a transmission line in our backyard. We don't want a new power plant in our county. We don't want a new landfill in our county. We want it cheap, we want it now, and put the nasty bits in somebody else's backyard.
I suspect it would have to do with the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) and other safety critical systems. What if something goes wrong, say the steam generator blows up, and the plant stops producing power. How do you cool the reactor and do a safe shutdown if the grid is also down? The safe approach would be to start shutting the reactor down before you end up in an unsafe situation.
I've read that the stability of large power grids is still a poorly understood problem. Normally they are reliable, but what happens when they are already running close to the limit of safe operation and a major generating facility goes off line?
According to this Wiki article, "One kilogram of pure Hf-178-2m contains approximately 900 gigajoules of energy, or about a quarter of a kiloton."
I've used this technique in a random number generator. Smoke detectors are a cheap and available source of radioactive material. Aware Electronics sells relatively inexpensive Geiger counters that have PC interfaces. Add a small program to measure times in between radioactive decays. It t0 is greater than t1, generate a 1. if t0 is less than t1, generate a 0. Repeat forever.
Microsoft supplied the AppleSoft BASIC interpreter to Apple.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
While CPU performance has improved by several orders of magnitude in recent years, we still have brain-dead operating system schedulers that can't properly allocate system resources to multiple applications. Why does the user interface turn to shit when I run a CPU or I/O intensive program in the background? Performance should degrade gracefully, not fall over a cliff. A program should be able to request, and get, X CPU cycles every N milliseconds. It should also be able to get guaranteed amounts of network and I/O bandwidth.
128 bits may not be needed for addressing physical memory, but there are interesting applications for very large virtual address spaces. They can be used to address huge databases, networked filesystems and the memory of large collections of computers.
It would probably help, but the fundamental problem is the design of the operating system. Running everything in kernel space, without memory protection, is begging for problems. This is aggravated by the complexity of many types of drivers.
You are assuming that the bank examines the signature. When I had trouble with an improperly handled check, the banker explained that, for most banks, the check processing system is totally automated. Humans only get involved when an error is reported. It is cheaper for the bank to let the system run on autopilot. Security and fraud problems that affect the bank's customers are given a low priority. It is only when the bank's money is being stolen that they get serious about security.
A common thread in many of the reports is the unwillingness, or inability, of many organizations to spend an adequate amount of money on systems administration and security. How many organizations take a "If it's not broken, don't fix it" approach to dealing with computer systems? Some organizations appear to think that an anti-virus package is the silver bullet for the problem, and don't understand why their computers were affected. Others rely on outside contractors or consultants to fix problems after they have occurred. I've worked in many places where there were no full-time systems administrators. Management depended on local PC "gurus", whose primary job was something else, to keep things running.
Everybody who has a friend or acquaintance named Robert should call 202-223-2400 (Robert L. Hunter IV at the Entertainment Software Association) and ask for Bob. Tell them that you grepped the phone book for your friend's name and their phone number was a hit.
Your friend's parents are mistaken. Just because the computer has a 400 Watt power supply doesn't mean that it is actually supplying that much power. It is probably considerably less. Think of it like the engine in a car. It may be capable of 150 horsepower but the average power output is much less.
I read somewhere that the Spanish discovery and exploitation of the New World resulted in massive inflation in the Spanish economy.
I can remember going to the department store with my mother back in that era. The department store used special models of cash registers that were huge and had many more buttons than a normal cash register. They also had a pneumatic tube system to send paperwork from one department to another.
The Macintosh did not exist when VisiCalc was introduced. Lots of people bought Apple II computers just to run VisiCalc.
I used to take advantage of that in my software. I think it was three 16-bits words. If you could make your loop fit inside the buffer, the CPU would execute the instructions out of the buffer rather than fetching them from main memory.
It's worse than that. It isn't just ratings, demographics are very important. A show can get cancelled even if it has good ratings. As far as advertisers and network executives are concerned, many viewers are irrelevant because they are too young, too old, too poor, or other factors that make the viewer undesirable.
The 68000 was a 16-bit hardware implementation of a 32-bit architecture. The processor's microcode hid this from the programmer. For a more extreme example, the IBM 360/30 implemented a 32-bit architecture using 8-bit hardware. This allowed IBM to offer a cheap, but slow, version of the IBM 360 to their customers.