Non-binary components survive (indeed, have massively expanded recently), notably MLC Flash memory where the higher density is very much in demand. Unfortunately, trying to cram in more possible states makes accurately setting or reading the state of a cell more difficult, so MLC is generally lousier than SLC except on price.
My impression is that this difficulty is what tends to keep greater-than-two-state components away, even from areas where they could be incorporated transparently, from the point of view of the overall binary system: if your technology allows you to accurately distinguish between more than two states at a given voltage and speed, it likely allows you to distinguish between only two faster, or at lower voltage, or both.
Dart is available under the BSD 3-Clause license, so if they are poisoning the well for other adopters, it's by subtler means, and 'dart2js' is designed to do exactly what it sounds like, for compatibility with any remotely recent JS implementation.
I'm not seeing the lock-in here, though they haven't stirred enough buzz to get it more widely adopted.
Again, I hardly suspect them of altruism; but they don't seem to think that they have the power to push a 'Google only' JS replacement, and so would rather try to improve webapps generally, even on competitors' browsers, as a strategic move against platform-native applications.
Obviously, given Google's product areas, an improved replacemen for javascript is not exactly altruism. However, do you have any evidence to the effect that 'Dart' advances Google's control except by making 'web apps' better and/or easier?
Any sign of them attempting to make Dart Chromium-only or somehow favored by Chromium's architecture in a way that will freeze out IE and FF? Any dependence on the mothership implied by either a dart-language program or support for dart in a browser or elsewhere?
Efficiency may be an issue as well, depending on the delta between on and off peak pricing: Taking grid power, converting it to DC at the voltage suitable for your charge controller, charging a battery bank, and then discharging the battery bank into an inverter is substantially lossier than just passing it through with a line interactive UPS taking a small cut to keep its batteries charged and itself powered.
Really classy establishments that are doing dual conversion all the time anyway, for maximum isolation from lousy grid power and essentially zero cut-over times wouldn't incur additional penalties, since they pay them already; but if you are currently improving your efficiency numbers by doing as little as possible until the power goes out, increasing the amount of load that goes through full dual conversion will increase your energy use, possibly quite substantially, though at least the increase will be moved to off-peak times.
What do you think powers the pump laser in such arrangements? EDFAs do have the lovely advantage(vs. a receiver/emitter pair used as a repeater) that their operations are purely optical, so absolutely no knowledge of the protocol being used is required; but you need to pump them and transmitting high power laser beams over long fiber runs is problematic.
Very long distance fiber cable sometimes has a conductive layer in order to power the optical amplifiers needed to handle distances well in excess of what the transmitter alone would be capable of.
On land, I assume that it's much cheaper to run fiber without a conductor and try to place the amps in locations that have power. Undersea cables, though, don't really have much of a choice.
The people advocating such schemes tend not to be 'willing to accept' so much as 'overtly gleeful about' a bit of the old collateral damage, so long as it isn't real people or anything.
Hydrogen is actually a fairly nasty customer. Chemically it isn't all that scary; but it's small enough to just diffuse right into the structure of things that really ought to be solid; but aren't quite, especially pronounced at high pressure.
I don't doubt that materials science types have some clever plans to mitigate, or at least slow, this; but it isn't a fun gas to store under pressure.
My skepticism is heightened by the fact that good old Lead-Acid is crazy cheap compared to the classy stuff light enough for cars, (plus expertise in the care and feeding of large battery banks isn't exactly hard to come by in telco, datacenter, and solar-power sectors), and I've never heard of anybody using those for peak/off-peak optimization, even if they have them anyway for backup during power cuts.
I might blame mere stodgy conservatism, except that on-peak/off-peak and capacity optimization in heating and cooling systems (eg. small chiller runs all night, gradually freezing a big brine tank in the basement, chilled brine is tapped for cooling all day instead of having a big chiller capable of keeping up with solar heating and occupant/hardware generated heat running full bore during work hours, various schemes for absorbing, storing, and slowly re-radiating solar heat in colder locations) is something that has been explored, and not just in fancy uneconomic tech-demos, in newish buildings. Retrofitting the old, pre-oil-shock building stock isn't always worth it; but the numbers often add up for new builds. If the same thing could be done for power, I would have assumed that somebody would have tried it.
Are batteries (of the sort light and energy-dense enough to put in cars) sufficiently resistant to wear that this sort of cycling doesn't get rather expensive? The Li-ions die even faster than usual if repeatedly charge-cycled. Is NiMH better on that score?
(Also, given charge/discharge inefficiencies, is the delta between on and off peak really high enough to justify that sort of thing?
Perhaps more importantly, given the areas of strength and weakness in the Soviet economy, what resources did it get them to waste?
Team USSR could probably afforded to have the million conscripts who scored lowest on physical fitness staring at playing cards and trying to develop psychic powers through sheer force of will for years without much trouble. Something that consumed a resource that needed to be imported in exchange for hard currency, though, or a project that represented a nontrivial slice of domestic productivity? That was a race that they weren't able to win even with regard to real weapons, so any nonsense they could be conned into would just make things even harder for them.
I have nothing against Lockheed's engineering prowess. My point is that the major claim to novelty of the 'OMG Private Space Exploration!!!' proponents has been that exciting, new, innovative, start-up technology would be crazy cheap compared to the 'We are the smiley civilian face of the ICBMs and deep, deep, pockets side of the DoD' style of space travel.
Lockheed is a lot of things; but crazy cheap is not one of them.
Seeing a private-space-startup start buying from Lockheed is sort of like seeing a web or 'cloud' startup start buying mainframes from IBM. It's not that IBM is a bad company, or that their mainframes don't have superb records for uptime, reliability, and capability for certain workloads, it's that that's a good indicator that they aren't having the luck they hoped for in using innovative new techniques to render obsolete the old, reliable, and stratospherically expensive gear that they were attempting to disrupt...
Somebody should really just tamper with the instruments on the ground. We all know that Mission Control is going to rerout the power to the secondary flux controller at the last moment; but they are waiting for the big bank of intimidating gauges and colored lights to show that only moments remain. We could save a lot of time by installing a 'false indication of crisis' feature to spur them to action ahead of time.
It's the scary kind of 'routine', since cooling failure (on a spacecraft that gets a pretty good dose of solar radiation and has no atmosphere for cooling purposes) will definitely render the station incompatible with human life in fairly short order, possibly even get it toasty enough to destroy some of the less robust hardware; but, unfortunately, pumped coolant loops running in space are kind of touchy. Pity that Peltiers are so miserably inefficient and power hungry...
As it happens, the US and Russians used pencils at first; but concluded that unpredictable addition of conductive graphite dust to the closed interiors of expensive, accident-prone aerospace hardware was a bad plan.
The Russians used grease pencils as a substitute for a while, since the binder keeps the pigment from floating around, and NASA took Fisher up on their offer to test some of their fancy new pressurized pens, which they eventually adopted (as did the Russians).
No actual space travel, just the heartwarming story of how the guy with the life-threatening cardiac defect subverted screening procedures in order to endanger the entire mission, and all his crewmates, on a months-long journey to some other planet in the solar system.
Oh, I wouldn't even try to sell the public on that one. On the plus side, Technetium is a pain in the ass to distribute precisely because it decays so fast, so you could choose far worse payloads.
I can see this having very niche applications for very, very, fast-expiring medical goods (like live organs or components of the Technetium99 supply chain), where vehicles with a vulnerability to traffic might not be fast enough; but aren't the vast majority of drugs either taken predictably (multi-month supplies of this or that, trivial to just mail) or pulled from on-site inventory at hospitals and pharmacies?
Are you saying that you wouldn't try to organize a brutal reality TV event where the colonists fight like animals, using only the airlock/bulkhead control systems and whatever tools can be fashioned into makeshift weapons, to monopolize the rapidly dwindling oxygen supply?
That the mega-rich have mega-toys seems as good an explanation as any.
I assume that gapagos' question, to the degree that it is fully serious, is a reference to the fact that, in stark contrast to all the hip, cool, oh-so-startup space ventures, Lockheed Martin is one of the aerospace contractors that you go to if you want to deliver a project on a nation-state-sized budget, with overruns to be expected...
While Lockeed is technically private, and only acts like a parasitic appendage of the US government, they aren't exactly a poster child for the 'zOMG! Free Enterprise Innovation will get us into space for cheap!' school.
>The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds â" just like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not anonymous. There is a very clear, public trail linking your wallet to your purchases.
Yes; but (unlike, say, credit cards) anybody can magic a wallet into existence with a dash of math, at any time, so connections between people and wallets are established only by inferences made possible by various forms of sloppiness in handling. Odds are that many wallets are robustly identified with users; but only on the basis of techniques unrelated to bitcoin proper.
Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
I suspect that JP Morgan's patent attorneys aren't idiots, so they've probably done some clever rules-lawyering; but 'bitcoin' is one of those things with such substantial public recognition that it won't be trivial to hide unless the examiner is really sleeping on the job.
With a lot of painfully-obvious tech patents, the prior art (while it definitely exists) is mostly working knowledge among techies, and (because it's considered obvious) often doesn't get a writeup anywhere, although source implementations and the like may be publicly available. That's the sort of thing that makes it easier to sneak by the examiner with a bit of creative rewording so that the old 'just google the important-sounding strings' doesn't work.
Bitcoin, though, didn't Newsweek, or some rag of similar caliber, to a (deeply uninformative, possibly actively misleading) puff piece on it a little while ago? It isn't exactly commonly well-understood; but you'd have to be living under a rock to have not heard at least some journalist's 3rd-hand interpretation of what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-binary components survive (indeed, have massively expanded recently), notably MLC Flash memory where the higher density is very much in demand. Unfortunately, trying to cram in more possible states makes accurately setting or reading the state of a cell more difficult, so MLC is generally lousier than SLC except on price.
My impression is that this difficulty is what tends to keep greater-than-two-state components away, even from areas where they could be incorporated transparently, from the point of view of the overall binary system: if your technology allows you to accurately distinguish between more than two states at a given voltage and speed, it likely allows you to distinguish between only two faster, or at lower voltage, or both.
Dart is available under the BSD 3-Clause license, so if they are poisoning the well for other adopters, it's by subtler means, and 'dart2js' is designed to do exactly what it sounds like, for compatibility with any remotely recent JS implementation.
I'm not seeing the lock-in here, though they haven't stirred enough buzz to get it more widely adopted.
Again, I hardly suspect them of altruism; but they don't seem to think that they have the power to push a 'Google only' JS replacement, and so would rather try to improve webapps generally, even on competitors' browsers, as a strategic move against platform-native applications.
Obviously, given Google's product areas, an improved replacemen for javascript is not exactly altruism. However, do you have any evidence to the effect that 'Dart' advances Google's control except by making 'web apps' better and/or easier?
Any sign of them attempting to make Dart Chromium-only or somehow favored by Chromium's architecture in a way that will freeze out IE and FF? Any dependence on the mothership implied by either a dart-language program or support for dart in a browser or elsewhere?
Efficiency may be an issue as well, depending on the delta between on and off peak pricing: Taking grid power, converting it to DC at the voltage suitable for your charge controller, charging a battery bank, and then discharging the battery bank into an inverter is substantially lossier than just passing it through with a line interactive UPS taking a small cut to keep its batteries charged and itself powered.
Really classy establishments that are doing dual conversion all the time anyway, for maximum isolation from lousy grid power and essentially zero cut-over times wouldn't incur additional penalties, since they pay them already; but if you are currently improving your efficiency numbers by doing as little as possible until the power goes out, increasing the amount of load that goes through full dual conversion will increase your energy use, possibly quite substantially, though at least the increase will be moved to off-peak times.
What do you think powers the pump laser in such arrangements? EDFAs do have the lovely advantage(vs. a receiver/emitter pair used as a repeater) that their operations are purely optical, so absolutely no knowledge of the protocol being used is required; but you need to pump them and transmitting high power laser beams over long fiber runs is problematic.
Very long distance fiber cable sometimes has a conductive layer in order to power the optical amplifiers needed to handle distances well in excess of what the transmitter alone would be capable of.
On land, I assume that it's much cheaper to run fiber without a conductor and try to place the amps in locations that have power. Undersea cables, though, don't really have much of a choice.
The people advocating such schemes tend not to be 'willing to accept' so much as 'overtly gleeful about' a bit of the old collateral damage, so long as it isn't real people or anything.
Do they really have enough electricity in North Korea to operate their telescreens?
Hydrogen is actually a fairly nasty customer. Chemically it isn't all that scary; but it's small enough to just diffuse right into the structure of things that really ought to be solid; but aren't quite, especially pronounced at high pressure.
I don't doubt that materials science types have some clever plans to mitigate, or at least slow, this; but it isn't a fun gas to store under pressure.
My skepticism is heightened by the fact that good old Lead-Acid is crazy cheap compared to the classy stuff light enough for cars, (plus expertise in the care and feeding of large battery banks isn't exactly hard to come by in telco, datacenter, and solar-power sectors), and I've never heard of anybody using those for peak/off-peak optimization, even if they have them anyway for backup during power cuts.
I might blame mere stodgy conservatism, except that on-peak/off-peak and capacity optimization in heating and cooling systems (eg. small chiller runs all night, gradually freezing a big brine tank in the basement, chilled brine is tapped for cooling all day instead of having a big chiller capable of keeping up with solar heating and occupant/hardware generated heat running full bore during work hours, various schemes for absorbing, storing, and slowly re-radiating solar heat in colder locations) is something that has been explored, and not just in fancy uneconomic tech-demos, in newish buildings. Retrofitting the old, pre-oil-shock building stock isn't always worth it; but the numbers often add up for new builds. If the same thing could be done for power, I would have assumed that somebody would have tried it.
Are batteries (of the sort light and energy-dense enough to put in cars) sufficiently resistant to wear that this sort of cycling doesn't get rather expensive? The Li-ions die even faster than usual if repeatedly charge-cycled. Is NiMH better on that score?
(Also, given charge/discharge inefficiencies, is the delta between on and off peak really high enough to justify that sort of thing?
Those 'users' should be thankful that the company deigns to employ their lazy asses, and don't you forget it!
Now get off slashdot and back to work.
Perhaps more importantly, given the areas of strength and weakness in the Soviet economy, what resources did it get them to waste?
Team USSR could probably afforded to have the million conscripts who scored lowest on physical fitness staring at playing cards and trying to develop psychic powers through sheer force of will for years without much trouble. Something that consumed a resource that needed to be imported in exchange for hard currency, though, or a project that represented a nontrivial slice of domestic productivity? That was a race that they weren't able to win even with regard to real weapons, so any nonsense they could be conned into would just make things even harder for them.
We cannot permit an imaginary weapons gap!
I have nothing against Lockheed's engineering prowess. My point is that the major claim to novelty of the 'OMG Private Space Exploration!!!' proponents has been that exciting, new, innovative, start-up technology would be crazy cheap compared to the 'We are the smiley civilian face of the ICBMs and deep, deep, pockets side of the DoD' style of space travel.
Lockheed is a lot of things; but crazy cheap is not one of them.
Seeing a private-space-startup start buying from Lockheed is sort of like seeing a web or 'cloud' startup start buying mainframes from IBM. It's not that IBM is a bad company, or that their mainframes don't have superb records for uptime, reliability, and capability for certain workloads, it's that that's a good indicator that they aren't having the luck they hoped for in using innovative new techniques to render obsolete the old, reliable, and stratospherically expensive gear that they were attempting to disrupt...
Somebody should really just tamper with the instruments on the ground. We all know that Mission Control is going to rerout the power to the secondary flux controller at the last moment; but they are waiting for the big bank of intimidating gauges and colored lights to show that only moments remain. We could save a lot of time by installing a 'false indication of crisis' feature to spur them to action ahead of time.
It's the scary kind of 'routine', since cooling failure (on a spacecraft that gets a pretty good dose of solar radiation and has no atmosphere for cooling purposes) will definitely render the station incompatible with human life in fairly short order, possibly even get it toasty enough to destroy some of the less robust hardware; but, unfortunately, pumped coolant loops running in space are kind of touchy. Pity that Peltiers are so miserably inefficient and power hungry...
As it happens, the US and Russians used pencils at first; but concluded that unpredictable addition of conductive graphite dust to the closed interiors of expensive, accident-prone aerospace hardware was a bad plan.
The Russians used grease pencils as a substitute for a while, since the binder keeps the pigment from floating around, and NASA took Fisher up on their offer to test some of their fancy new pressurized pens, which they eventually adopted (as did the Russians).
No actual space travel, just the heartwarming story of how the guy with the life-threatening cardiac defect subverted screening procedures in order to endanger the entire mission, and all his crewmates, on a months-long journey to some other planet in the solar system.
It's a triumph of the human spirit, or something.
Radioactive drones --- brilliant sales pitch
Oh, I wouldn't even try to sell the public on that one. On the plus side, Technetium is a pain in the ass to distribute precisely because it decays so fast, so you could choose far worse payloads.
I can see this having very niche applications for very, very, fast-expiring medical goods (like live organs or components of the Technetium99 supply chain), where vehicles with a vulnerability to traffic might not be fast enough; but aren't the vast majority of drugs either taken predictably (multi-month supplies of this or that, trivial to just mail) or pulled from on-site inventory at hospitals and pharmacies?
Are you saying that you wouldn't try to organize a brutal reality TV event where the colonists fight like animals, using only the airlock/bulkhead control systems and whatever tools can be fashioned into makeshift weapons, to monopolize the rapidly dwindling oxygen supply?
That the mega-rich have mega-toys seems as good an explanation as any.
I assume that gapagos' question, to the degree that it is fully serious, is a reference to the fact that, in stark contrast to all the hip, cool, oh-so-startup space ventures, Lockheed Martin is one of the aerospace contractors that you go to if you want to deliver a project on a nation-state-sized budget, with overruns to be expected...
While Lockeed is technically private, and only acts like a parasitic appendage of the US government, they aren't exactly a poster child for the 'zOMG! Free Enterprise Innovation will get us into space for cheap!' school.
>The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds â" just like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not anonymous. There is a very clear, public trail linking your wallet to your purchases.
Yes; but (unlike, say, credit cards) anybody can magic a wallet into existence with a dash of math, at any time, so connections between people and wallets are established only by inferences made possible by various forms of sloppiness in handling. Odds are that many wallets are robustly identified with users; but only on the basis of techniques unrelated to bitcoin proper.
Maybe the patent office will notice a bit of prior art? One can hope, right?
I suspect that JP Morgan's patent attorneys aren't idiots, so they've probably done some clever rules-lawyering; but 'bitcoin' is one of those things with such substantial public recognition that it won't be trivial to hide unless the examiner is really sleeping on the job.
With a lot of painfully-obvious tech patents, the prior art (while it definitely exists) is mostly working knowledge among techies, and (because it's considered obvious) often doesn't get a writeup anywhere, although source implementations and the like may be publicly available. That's the sort of thing that makes it easier to sneak by the examiner with a bit of creative rewording so that the old 'just google the important-sounding strings' doesn't work.
Bitcoin, though, didn't Newsweek, or some rag of similar caliber, to a (deeply uninformative, possibly actively misleading) puff piece on it a little while ago? It isn't exactly commonly well-understood; but you'd have to be living under a rock to have not heard at least some journalist's 3rd-hand interpretation of what it is.