Digi-Key, the electronic parts house, works incredibly well. Order by 8 PM Central Time, and it's shipped by FedEx to arrive by 10:30 AM the next morning.
And they do this routinely. Order from them online, and you'll get an e-mail in about a minute acknowledging the order. Maybe fifteen minutes later, you'll get another e-mail, indicating that the order has been shipped. And this is for orders with multiple small parts. They apparently have a very good automated warehouse operation. Each part shows up in a plastic bag with the order information printed and bar-coded.
This is a company that has hundreds of thousands of different parts in inventory. The online catalog pages show the current inventory, updated continually. This is Internet commerce done right. The site isn't decorative, but it has real data, like online data sheets, "related parts" lookup, pictures of parts for most of the inventory, and history data for everything you've ordered in the past.
We ordered from them perhaps fifty times during 2003-2005, and every shipment showed up on time, with no errors. No defective parts, either.
Digi-Key can be overwhelming if you're not into electronics. Here's the page for a DB-9 plug. This is one of over 3000 D-Subminiature connector parts. Click on "Technical/Catalog information", and you'll get the enginering drawings for that connector.
They even have phone tech support with a clue. I've called to ask about obscure errors in catalog specs, and was quickly connected to someone who had the data in front of them and was able to contact the part manufacturer to fix the problem.
It sounds more like "gaming for gamers who have a life". Many of the MMORPGs require so much online time per week to advance that you can't have a life outside the game.
The last few decades have been disappointing for secret aircraft projects. The really good ones all started under Eisenhower - the U2, the SR-71, the balloon trains (the source of the Roswell rumors), the Corona spy satellites, and the DEW line. Many of them really paid off in the Kennedy and Johnson years. Nixon's secret legacies seem to mostly have been disasters. Gerald Ford authorized the stealth aircraft program, which paid off under Carter, who expanded it. Reagan spent vast amounts of money on defense, but his big breakthrough projects (Star Wars and the hypersonic transport) were flops. The USAF has had a huge "black" budget since Reagan, but it doesn't seem to have resulted in any major war-winning technologies.
Post-Reagan, we're too close to current technology to expect much to be known.
Most of the big successes came from the Lockheed "Skunk Works". The Skunk Works is gone. The hangars in Burbank were abandoned, and have now been demolished. Another great R&D center lost.
There's an argument against "files" as the basis of an operating system. The most successful movement in that direction was Tandem's operating system, Guardian. The bottom-level storage system in the classic Tandem world was a relational database, not "files". All database operations were atomic and recoverable, and the database was duplicated across multiple disks and computers. Tandem machines were all clusters, decades before other companies figured out how to do clustered systems.
Business systems built on Tandem's hardware and software could be, and were, able to run for years, sometimes decades, without failure. Machines in the cluster could be fail and be replaced without a shutdown. This worked for real transactions where updates mattered, not just for stateless operations like web page serving.
Many banks and stock markets still run Tandem systems for that reliability.
If you needed a "text file" in the Tandem world, it was treated as a big object (a BLOB) in the database, and handled as a unit. THis seems wierd, but it allowed program development on Tandem machines. Storing a file was, of course, an atomic operation; you never had a truncated file.
Apple's "resource fork" was a step in the right direction, but the implementation of updates in the classic MacOS was so unreliable that it was hopeless as a data-storage mechanism. Apple backed off from the resource fork when they went to a UNIX-type file system after the NeXT acquisition. Now it's making a comeback in a minor way.
Early visions of Microsoft's Longhorn seemed to be moving in that direction, but Microsoft couldn't bring it off.
UNIX/Linux has terrible file reliability semantics. Locking is an afterthought. File transactions aren't atomic. (Even lock file creation isn't atomic if the the file system is on NFS.) Nobody understands two-phase commit, the technique that keeps your bank account from being debited twice if the ATM loses power during a transaction. There have been attempts to fix these problems (see UCLA Locus), but they never caught on.
The most likely company to fix this problem is Google. Google's own machines are full of databases of text, not "files". In a sense, we're all using a system that's not file-based - we just don't see it.
Jaron Lanier does have something of a cult image, but he once did real technical work.
He did build the first immersive virtual reality system with a head-mounted display and input gloves. I tried it, back in the mid-80s, and met Jaron. The system took two SGI machines to drive it, and the lag was terrible. No collision detection. You couldn't do much more than look around. But it did work.
Eventually the lag and cost problems were solved. But that wasn't the real problem. Friends of mine at Autodesk tried to do a 3D CAD system in virtual reality. Real work in a gloves-and-goggles environment turned out to be painful, and much slower than keyboard-and-mouse. Remember those Hollywood movies about VR, where people are making gestures and reaching for things? It can be, and has been, implemented, but it's hell to use. VR is good for moving and shooting. That's about it.
Eventually Jaron's company, VPL, tanked, because there weren't any useful applications for gloves-and-goggles VR.
The first thing the company behind this, Tiga Technologies, needs is a new name. There's already a commercial product called e-Dispute. This is a system for resolving billing disputes between companies. It's useful where there are many invoices with multiple line items to be matched up with purchase orders, shipping and receiving information, rejects and returns. It lets both sides see all the documents involved. As issues are resolved, everybody sees the same markup and the numbers are recomputed.
It's not AI, it's just good accounting.
Tiga's new thing may be vaporware. Their website is suspicious. The graphics all look like generic clip art. The e-Dispute application system diagram appears to be a generic drawing of a Citrix Metaframe system with a bit of markup. An old Metaframe system, too. Note the terminals marked "OS/2 PCs" and "Legacy DOS PCs", and the data links marked "ISDN" and "Dial-Up". In fact, here's the image it was apparently copied from. Note that Tiga seems to have removed the Citrix name and the "tm" after Metaframe, along with other editing.
I'm no structural engineer, but I know that concrete is extremely rigid--this is why steel-reinforced concrete is used in construction.
The steel is more flexible, and helps hold together the concrete even when it cracks under stress.
Er, no. Steel is used to reinforce concrete because concrete has high strength in compression but low strength in tension. The steel is used to provide tensile strength. In load-bearing concrete members for tension loads, like beams, the concrete is "prestressed", so that the concrete is in compression while the steel is in tension. Even under load, the concrete in a prestressed beam remains in compression.
Philanthropy worked for John D. Rockefeller and John A. MacArthur.
Who mentions the Ludlow Massacre today?
Almost nobody knows that John D. MacArthur, who funded the "genius" awards (posthumously), made his money with a life insurance company scam. His unauthorized 1969 biography, "The Stockholder", by William Hoffman, gives the details. MacArthur introduced mail-order life insurance sold through newspaper ads, and his company, Banker's Life, was notorious for refusing to pay claims.
If it worked for them, it should work for Gates. Gates isn't even alleged to have killed anyone.
Ford built a turbine truck prototype for the 1964 World's Fair, but it was never produced in quantity. A prototype turbine powered offroad truck train intended for military arctic operations was built in the 1950s. A small fleet of experimental turbine-powered trucks ran in the late 1970s, powered by Garret turbines. But these were all experiments.
The M1 Abrams tank is turbine-powered, of course, and may be the only turbine-powered ground vehicle ever mass produced.
The trouble with turbine-powered ground vehicles is the frustrating fact that small turbines aren't much cheaper than big turbines. This is why small aircraft are still piston-powered, despite many attempts to built cheaper engines.
The "engine" referenced is described like this: "The DCGT is powered by an innovative new electromagnetic isothermal combustion process that produces complete combustion of fuel-oxidized mixtures in cyclic detonations." That's not a turbine engine. It sounds more like a pulse engine, like the V1 buzz bomb, with a turbine on the exhaust.
Video card reviews are hysterical. Some new board is 3% faster on some of the benchmarks, but costs twice as much, and it's hyped as a major breakthrough.
Then, of course, each hardware review consists of ten paragraph-length "pages" through which you must click, with the copy in a narrow column in the middle surrounded by ads.
I'm tempted to provide some links, but that would be too mean.
The trouble with a trunnion on a swivel base for this application is that it has a singularity around the straight position. Small changes of direction when pointed nearly straight require big changes in the swivel base position. For a thruster, you need to make small corrections quickly, with minimal actuator motion. (Think WWII antiaircraft guns, forced to slew around frantically when the attackers were overhead, usually missing the target at its point of closest approach.)
Different animation, and a different version of roughly the same klunky mechanism. Better bearing mounts, though. That one you could actually build.
The motors seem to be right out of the Maxon catalog, with the planetary gearhead option on one end and the encoder on the other. Those are good motors (we used one to steer our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle), but they are not rated for spacecraft operation.
Here's an Aeroflex gimbal that actually is used in space to steer a thruster. Note how the rotational axes go through the line of thrust, and how big and solid the bearing blocks are, compared to the proposed design.
If you don't want to plow through all the blogodreck and registration, here's the animation of the Canfield joint (quicktime).
As a rocket engine gimbal, this doesn't look promising. It's a rather bulky mechanism; the linkage is much larger than the engine bell. It requires fifteen bearings, not including the three motors.
The standard solution, a gimbal ring arrangement, only requires four. The bearings also have to handle off-center loads, never a good thing. Bearings in space are headaches; lubrication is tough and temperature changes can jam them.
The motors are in a weak position from a leverage standpoint; the engine thrust is applied directly to the motor shafts, so they (and their gear trains) must be strong enough to overpower the thruster. In a gimbal ring arrangement, the bearings are usually placed so that the center of thrust is at the center of the gimbal, so that the bearings, not the actuators, take almost all the thrust. Very large engines, like the Space Shuttle and Saturn V main engines, have been successfully gimballed that way.
The three motors don't seem to add redundancy; it looks like they all have to be working.
The only thing that's keeping interest rates low is that China is buying far more low-paying US treasury paper than makes economic sense. This is part of the deal
with the Bush Administration - the US doesn't erect trade barriers against China's products, and China doesn't pull their money out of the US. This deal makes possible high deficits and tax cuts without financial collapse.
If China stops pulls their money out of the US, interest rates go up.
By historical standards, they're still too low. If mortgage rates go up, the speculators who have interest-only loans with adjustable rates have their payments go up. Many will default, resulting in foreclosure. The housing bubble finally pops. Baby boomers who expect to sell their houses at a profit lose their equity.
Also, the US stock market is overpriced by a factor of 2 or so, based on historic P/E ratios. There's too much money in stocks because debt yields are so low. If interest rates go up, money moves from stocks to bonds. The stock market collapses.
All this is well known. China is using it, too. The position of the Chinese government appears the People's Daily: The US must "break away from the "cultural superiority" theory, which stresses a certain set of values, because we have entered a new era featuring long-term coexistence and blending of various civilizations." That's clear enough, even though written in the rather oblique style of diplomacy.
Here's the manual for one. (large PDF) I and some others developed this in 1981-1983. Back then, it took 45 minutes to grind through the verification process for a 500-line program.
I used to demo this by showing people a verified program and letting them put in a a bug, then watch the verifier find it.
Years later, a somewhat similar verifier for Modula III was developed at DEC Western Research Labs, but it died with DEC.
Microsoft Research is now developing something called Spec#, an extension to C# for formal verification. Much of the effort there focuses on object consistency, and, for the first time, somebody is finally handling the consistency issues associated with object call-out and callback. (This is badly needed in the Microsoft world, where the GUIs call round and round and back in, without proper theory to support that.)
Early speculation was that the shortage of Xbox units was "managed" by Microsoft. But the shortage continued through the Xmas season. Microsoft missed the Xmas shopping season. That's a disaster for a toy. No vendor does that on purpose.
Somewhere, there was a schedule slip. A bad one.
Check what's happening on Ebay. Early on, Xbox units were selling at high premiums. That's over. Core systems sold for $330 today. At $355, core systems don't sell. That's an unopened price; used systems are down to $200 or so.
Many speculators who bought systems for resale are still trying to unload them, and they're not making money when they do.
Because this is an old case, before Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley. Today, if you do that, you go to jail.
Over in Enron land, by the way, we had another guilty plea last week. The Enron cases have been slowly working their way up the corporate ladder. At the end of January, the guys at the top, Lay and Skilling, go on trial. They're terrified. Because most of the people below them have already pled guilty or been convicted at trial.
Many are in jail. Like Enron's treasurer, Benjamin Glisan (prisoner #20293-179, Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution), former Enron finance executive Daniel Boyle (prisoner #20294-179, Beaumont), Merril Lynch executivs Daniel Bayly (prisoner #29125-179, Petersburg FCI), James A Brown (#29126-179, Fort Dix FCI), and William Fuchs (#29179-179, Oklahoma City FTC).
And then there are the ones convicted, but awaiting sentencing while they cooperate with the prosecution in the remaining trials: Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO. Michael Kopper, Enron's "global finance managing director".
PlatinumBucks, the micropayment system for porno sites, is now supporting Firefox.
"After much webmaster demand, we are pleased to announce that
Platinum Bucks is now FireFox compatible!
Our team at Platinum Bucks always keep up with growing trends in technology to meet webmaster needs, especially the increased move from Internet Explorer to FireFox and have worked hard to make our program and stats page fully compatible with FireFox."
Visit Platinum Bucks at booth 1115 at Internext, the trade show for porno sites. Tomorrow through Sunday at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
It's been conventional wisdom in the porno site business that supporting IE was good enough. The customer base for porno sites is not tech-savvy. Apparently Firefox has now achieved enough market share to change that.
They're similar. But for QNX, it's the basic startup mechanism. For Linux, it was an afterthought. So Linux has redundant machinery in the kernel to do what "initrd" and "linuxrc" can also do.
Both appeared around 1996-1997, although the "initrd" approach didn't really become standard until 2000 or so.
QNX has a rather different approach, because it runs on non-PC hardware and can't assume there's a BIOS to get things started. QNX uses a program called "mkifs" to build an "OS file system", which is a bootable image. This contains not only the operating system kernel, but any other programs and files you want available during the boot process. Even user programs and shared objects. You can build your own bootable image, with whatever programs you want in it.
With this approach, there's no need to put drivers needed at boot time in the kernel. (Drivers are user programs under QNX.) The kernel doesn't need to know about disks. If you want a GUI during boot, you can have it. For embedded systems, the entire "OS file system" can be put in ROM, eliminating any need for a disk. For desktop x86 systems, there's a standard bootable "OS file system" which has all the usual disk and display drivers, the bus enumerators and plug-and-play handler, and the rest of the stuff needed to start an x86 PC. But all that startup stuff isn't in the kernel.
This is especially useful when your target is something that doesn't have a keyboard and screen. That's why QNX does this. Doing it this way cleans much startup-only junk out of the kernel.
The Minix 3 people, unfortunately, didn't get this, so their "microkernel" has more stuff in it than it really needs.
Once we get past the blogdreck, the vendor site and the product site are more informative. The original article should have been titled "3DVisor head-mounted display now comes in low end model for Apple iPod." This is really a virtual reality display, originally with gyros for head movement sensing, that's been dumbed down for TV viewing.
The West Wind Project isn't quite that big. 70 turbines are proposed, but they won't all be the new Vesta V90 3MW model. Some of them will be the older but proven V72 model, at 1.5MW.
Since wind turbines are expected to run for several decades, it's good to get a few years of operating experience on a new design before deploying it in quantity. It took decades to get wind turbines to where they are now. The first megawatt-sized wind turbine, in 1941, ran less than 1200 hours before experiencing a loss of blade accident. About half of the units from the 1980s failed within a few years. There are subtle issues, such as the fact that wind speeds may be different on different blades, which stresses the mounting. That doesn't happen with aircraft propellors. So aircraft hub designs don't transfer directly to wind turbine hubs.
This applies to most new energy schemes. Scaleup always brings out new problems.
Wind power is now working quite well. General Electric has over 2800 of their 1.5 megawatt turbines installed, so big wind machines are finally working commercially.
The wind turbines of the 1980s were typically in the 50KW to 100KW range.
By comparison, a big commercial power plant (coal or nuclear) is typically in the 500 to 2000 megawatt range.
These things are big - the towers are 200 to 300 feet high. It takes 500 of them to equal one coal plant. And bigger wind turbines are coming. The latest General Electric 3MW turbines are so big they're only being considered for offshore installations. The Cape Cod Wind Farm project has produced much grumbling: "A 24 square mile industrial park the size of the island of Manhattan, 40 story turbines permanently scarring our ocean horizon, 580 lights destroying our nightscape, 130 air and sea navigation hazards in the middle of some of the foggiest air and waters in the world..."
This is a generic problem with wind and solar energy. Once it starts really working, the installations are huge, because the energy densities are so low.
The downside of wind power, of course, is that it's intermittent. Typically, average power is only 30% of rated power. Of course, you don't get to pick when you get power. So you either need energy storage (like a pumped storage plant) or excess capacity in non-wind generation. Which means building more plant.
Still, wind power is real. Unlike much of the other stuff mentioned, like the "magnet engines" (an entry-level bozo idea), the "neutron generator" (a misunderstanding of a well-understood device), and "blacklight power" (generally considered to be a scam).
The Athabasca Oil Sands projects are already producing 1 million barrels of oil per day, and that should double by 2010. The scale of the operation is huge. It takes two tons of sand to yield one barrel of oil. That's one Panama Canal every ten months. Want a job as a heavy equipment operator? Move to Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. Rents have passed Silicon Valley levels, and the apartment vacancy rate is zero.
The future looks like coal. Too much coal. China is building about 50,000MW of coal-fired electric plants per year. US coal consumption has been roughly constant for a while, but will probably go up as oil prices increase.
Nuclear may make a comeback, probably when coal gets too ugly.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a company that has hundreds of thousands of different parts in inventory. The online catalog pages show the current inventory, updated continually. This is Internet commerce done right. The site isn't decorative, but it has real data, like online data sheets, "related parts" lookup, pictures of parts for most of the inventory, and history data for everything you've ordered in the past.
We ordered from them perhaps fifty times during 2003-2005, and every shipment showed up on time, with no errors. No defective parts, either.
Digi-Key can be overwhelming if you're not into electronics. Here's the page for a DB-9 plug. This is one of over 3000 D-Subminiature connector parts. Click on "Technical/Catalog information", and you'll get the enginering drawings for that connector.
They even have phone tech support with a clue. I've called to ask about obscure errors in catalog specs, and was quickly connected to someone who had the data in front of them and was able to contact the part manufacturer to fix the problem.
It sounds more like "gaming for gamers who have a life". Many of the MMORPGs require so much online time per week to advance that you can't have a life outside the game.
They're looking for a web designer.
Most of the big successes came from the Lockheed "Skunk Works". The Skunk Works is gone. The hangars in Burbank were abandoned, and have now been demolished. Another great R&D center lost.
If you needed a "text file" in the Tandem world, it was treated as a big object (a BLOB) in the database, and handled as a unit. THis seems wierd, but it allowed program development on Tandem machines. Storing a file was, of course, an atomic operation; you never had a truncated file.
Apple's "resource fork" was a step in the right direction, but the implementation of updates in the classic MacOS was so unreliable that it was hopeless as a data-storage mechanism. Apple backed off from the resource fork when they went to a UNIX-type file system after the NeXT acquisition. Now it's making a comeback in a minor way.
Early visions of Microsoft's Longhorn seemed to be moving in that direction, but Microsoft couldn't bring it off.
UNIX/Linux has terrible file reliability semantics. Locking is an afterthought. File transactions aren't atomic. (Even lock file creation isn't atomic if the the file system is on NFS.) Nobody understands two-phase commit, the technique that keeps your bank account from being debited twice if the ATM loses power during a transaction. There have been attempts to fix these problems (see UCLA Locus), but they never caught on.
The most likely company to fix this problem is Google. Google's own machines are full of databases of text, not "files". In a sense, we're all using a system that's not file-based - we just don't see it.
Eventually the lag and cost problems were solved. But that wasn't the real problem. Friends of mine at Autodesk tried to do a 3D CAD system in virtual reality. Real work in a gloves-and-goggles environment turned out to be painful, and much slower than keyboard-and-mouse. Remember those Hollywood movies about VR, where people are making gestures and reaching for things? It can be, and has been, implemented, but it's hell to use. VR is good for moving and shooting. That's about it.
Eventually Jaron's company, VPL, tanked, because there weren't any useful applications for gloves-and-goggles VR.
Tiga's new thing may be vaporware. Their website is suspicious. The graphics all look like generic clip art. The e-Dispute application system diagram appears to be a generic drawing of a Citrix Metaframe system with a bit of markup. An old Metaframe system, too. Note the terminals marked "OS/2 PCs" and "Legacy DOS PCs", and the data links marked "ISDN" and "Dial-Up". In fact, here's the image it was apparently copied from. Note that Tiga seems to have removed the Citrix name and the "tm" after Metaframe, along with other editing.
Er, no. Steel is used to reinforce concrete because concrete has high strength in compression but low strength in tension. The steel is used to provide tensile strength. In load-bearing concrete members for tension loads, like beams, the concrete is "prestressed", so that the concrete is in compression while the steel is in tension. Even under load, the concrete in a prestressed beam remains in compression.
Almost nobody knows that John D. MacArthur, who funded the "genius" awards (posthumously), made his money with a life insurance company scam. His unauthorized 1969 biography, "The Stockholder", by William Hoffman, gives the details. MacArthur introduced mail-order life insurance sold through newspaper ads, and his company, Banker's Life, was notorious for refusing to pay claims.
If it worked for them, it should work for Gates. Gates isn't even alleged to have killed anyone.
The M1 Abrams tank is turbine-powered, of course, and may be the only turbine-powered ground vehicle ever mass produced.
The trouble with turbine-powered ground vehicles is the frustrating fact that small turbines aren't much cheaper than big turbines. This is why small aircraft are still piston-powered, despite many attempts to built cheaper engines.
The "engine" referenced is described like this: "The DCGT is powered by an innovative new electromagnetic isothermal combustion process that produces complete combustion of fuel-oxidized mixtures in cyclic detonations." That's not a turbine engine. It sounds more like a pulse engine, like the V1 buzz bomb, with a turbine on the exhaust.
Then, of course, each hardware review consists of ten paragraph-length "pages" through which you must click, with the copy in a narrow column in the middle surrounded by ads.
I'm tempted to provide some links, but that would be too mean.
The trouble with a trunnion on a swivel base for this application is that it has a singularity around the straight position. Small changes of direction when pointed nearly straight require big changes in the swivel base position. For a thruster, you need to make small corrections quickly, with minimal actuator motion. (Think WWII antiaircraft guns, forced to slew around frantically when the attackers were overhead, usually missing the target at its point of closest approach.)
The motors seem to be right out of the Maxon catalog, with the planetary gearhead option on one end and the encoder on the other. Those are good motors (we used one to steer our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle), but they are not rated for spacecraft operation.
Here's an Aeroflex gimbal that actually is used in space to steer a thruster. Note how the rotational axes go through the line of thrust, and how big and solid the bearing blocks are, compared to the proposed design.
As a rocket engine gimbal, this doesn't look promising. It's a rather bulky mechanism; the linkage is much larger than the engine bell. It requires fifteen bearings, not including the three motors. The standard solution, a gimbal ring arrangement, only requires four. The bearings also have to handle off-center loads, never a good thing. Bearings in space are headaches; lubrication is tough and temperature changes can jam them.
The motors are in a weak position from a leverage standpoint; the engine thrust is applied directly to the motor shafts, so they (and their gear trains) must be strong enough to overpower the thruster. In a gimbal ring arrangement, the bearings are usually placed so that the center of thrust is at the center of the gimbal, so that the bearings, not the actuators, take almost all the thrust. Very large engines, like the Space Shuttle and Saturn V main engines, have been successfully gimballed that way.
The three motors don't seem to add redundancy; it looks like they all have to be working.
For comparison, here's a simple gimbal from Amadillo Aerospace, Carmack's rocket program.
In reality, having many fixed reaction thrusters is probably more reliable than have a few steerable ones. Fewer moving parts.
How did you get Season 6? Did you get the UK version, in PAL Region 2?
If China stops pulls their money out of the US, interest rates go up. By historical standards, they're still too low. If mortgage rates go up, the speculators who have interest-only loans with adjustable rates have their payments go up. Many will default, resulting in foreclosure. The housing bubble finally pops. Baby boomers who expect to sell their houses at a profit lose their equity.
Also, the US stock market is overpriced by a factor of 2 or so, based on historic P/E ratios. There's too much money in stocks because debt yields are so low. If interest rates go up, money moves from stocks to bonds. The stock market collapses.
All this is well known. China is using it, too. The position of the Chinese government appears the People's Daily: The US must "break away from the "cultural superiority" theory, which stresses a certain set of values, because we have entered a new era featuring long-term coexistence and blending of various civilizations." That's clear enough, even though written in the rather oblique style of diplomacy.
That's why the US has to suck up to China.
Years later, a somewhat similar verifier for Modula III was developed at DEC Western Research Labs, but it died with DEC.
Microsoft Research is now developing something called Spec#, an extension to C# for formal verification. Much of the effort there focuses on object consistency, and, for the first time, somebody is finally handling the consistency issues associated with object call-out and callback. (This is badly needed in the Microsoft world, where the GUIs call round and round and back in, without proper theory to support that.)
Somewhere, there was a schedule slip. A bad one.
Check what's happening on Ebay. Early on, Xbox units were selling at high premiums. That's over. Core systems sold for $330 today. At $355, core systems don't sell. That's an unopened price; used systems are down to $200 or so. Many speculators who bought systems for resale are still trying to unload them, and they're not making money when they do.
This is not a "must have" product any longer.
Over in Enron land, by the way, we had another guilty plea last week. The Enron cases have been slowly working their way up the corporate ladder. At the end of January, the guys at the top, Lay and Skilling, go on trial. They're terrified. Because most of the people below them have already pled guilty or been convicted at trial.
Many are in jail. Like Enron's treasurer, Benjamin Glisan (prisoner #20293-179, Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution), former Enron finance executive Daniel Boyle (prisoner #20294-179, Beaumont), Merril Lynch executivs Daniel Bayly (prisoner #29125-179, Petersburg FCI), James A Brown (#29126-179, Fort Dix FCI), and William Fuchs (#29179-179, Oklahoma City FTC).
And then there are the ones convicted, but awaiting sentencing while they cooperate with the prosecution in the remaining trials: Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO. Michael Kopper, Enron's "global finance managing director".
Plus the ones with trials still pending.
Visit Platinum Bucks at booth 1115 at Internext, the trade show for porno sites. Tomorrow through Sunday at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
It's been conventional wisdom in the porno site business that supporting IE was good enough. The customer base for porno sites is not tech-savvy. Apparently Firefox has now achieved enough market share to change that.
Both appeared around 1996-1997, although the "initrd" approach didn't really become standard until 2000 or so.
With this approach, there's no need to put drivers needed at boot time in the kernel. (Drivers are user programs under QNX.) The kernel doesn't need to know about disks. If you want a GUI during boot, you can have it. For embedded systems, the entire "OS file system" can be put in ROM, eliminating any need for a disk. For desktop x86 systems, there's a standard bootable "OS file system" which has all the usual disk and display drivers, the bus enumerators and plug-and-play handler, and the rest of the stuff needed to start an x86 PC. But all that startup stuff isn't in the kernel.
This is especially useful when your target is something that doesn't have a keyboard and screen. That's why QNX does this. Doing it this way cleans much startup-only junk out of the kernel.
The Minix 3 people, unfortunately, didn't get this, so their "microkernel" has more stuff in it than it really needs.
Once we get past the blogdreck, the vendor site and the product site are more informative. The original article should have been titled "3DVisor head-mounted display now comes in low end model for Apple iPod." This is really a virtual reality display, originally with gyros for head movement sensing, that's been dumbed down for TV viewing.
Since wind turbines are expected to run for several decades, it's good to get a few years of operating experience on a new design before deploying it in quantity. It took decades to get wind turbines to where they are now. The first megawatt-sized wind turbine, in 1941, ran less than 1200 hours before experiencing a loss of blade accident. About half of the units from the 1980s failed within a few years. There are subtle issues, such as the fact that wind speeds may be different on different blades, which stresses the mounting. That doesn't happen with aircraft propellors. So aircraft hub designs don't transfer directly to wind turbine hubs.
This applies to most new energy schemes. Scaleup always brings out new problems.
These things are big - the towers are 200 to 300 feet high. It takes 500 of them to equal one coal plant. And bigger wind turbines are coming. The latest General Electric 3MW turbines are so big they're only being considered for offshore installations. The Cape Cod Wind Farm project has produced much grumbling: "A 24 square mile industrial park the size of the island of Manhattan, 40 story turbines permanently scarring our ocean horizon, 580 lights destroying our nightscape, 130 air and sea navigation hazards in the middle of some of the foggiest air and waters in the world..." This is a generic problem with wind and solar energy. Once it starts really working, the installations are huge, because the energy densities are so low.
The downside of wind power, of course, is that it's intermittent. Typically, average power is only 30% of rated power. Of course, you don't get to pick when you get power. So you either need energy storage (like a pumped storage plant) or excess capacity in non-wind generation. Which means building more plant.
Still, wind power is real. Unlike much of the other stuff mentioned, like the "magnet engines" (an entry-level bozo idea), the "neutron generator" (a misunderstanding of a well-understood device), and "blacklight power" (generally considered to be a scam).
Tidal power seems attractive, but there are only about 20 good sites worldwide.
The Athabasca Oil Sands projects are already producing 1 million barrels of oil per day, and that should double by 2010. The scale of the operation is huge. It takes two tons of sand to yield one barrel of oil. That's one Panama Canal every ten months. Want a job as a heavy equipment operator? Move to Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. Rents have passed Silicon Valley levels, and the apartment vacancy rate is zero.
The future looks like coal. Too much coal. China is building about 50,000MW of coal-fired electric plants per year. US coal consumption has been roughly constant for a while, but will probably go up as oil prices increase.
Nuclear may make a comeback, probably when coal gets too ugly.