What is the value of putting the batteries and the hydrogen production facilities all on the same platform with the turbines? It is not like water is hard to come by on land. 1-5 mile transmission lines can move the power ashore very efficiently. Storing large quantities of hydrogen just makes the entire thing 10x less safe. Even with fuel cells, the conversion to hydrogen and back to electricity ruins the system efficiency. The situation with batteries isn't any better.
Certainly, there needs to be batteries in place to power and navigate this thing when the wind is low or so high that they can't run the turbines, but large scale battery/hydrogen storage systems are best left on the beach. Perhaps this is a bit to untether the platform and let it wander the open sea charging and electrolyzing and then return to port to drop its energy cargo. Though that seems in direct conflict with the "continuous energy supply" bit.
I have to concur with you, at least to a point. My undergrad degree is from Penn State which has very good engineering department, especially for a state school. I did my first two years at a branch campus which provided an atmosphere very similar to a community college--small classes, professors with an active interest in your education, the same excellent teachers from semester to semester providing excellent continuity. The classes were not easy by any means. Many students who couldn't cut it washed out, but it was not from lack of effort on the instructors' part.
The classes for the last two years were only available at University Park, so I transferred to finish up. The quality of professors there was staggeringly worse! And these were teaching the "honors" engineering courses (Engineering Science). Many of the points made in the article struck a chord with me. The mindlessly excessive homework (which spawned mindlessly excessive cheating among 80% of the students) just sucked the life out of me, since I was unwilling to cheat. I had one chemistry class that had 300 people in it. It was pointless. There was no opportunity to interact with the professor at all and the fresh-off-the-boat TAs barely spoke English. With a long lot of effort, I finished up my required courses in three semesters and returned to the branch campus to take my humanities/art requirements and graduate. I graduated with a respectable GPA and, in spite of the quality of instruction, did manage to learn something. But I am eternally grateful that I started out my college carreer at the branch campus. If I had to take four semesters of calculus and physics in that environment, I may well have washed out too.
I remember walking through 6502 assembly looking for those things on my C64. Programmers tried everything in the world to make things difficult. The undocumented instruction(s), self-modifying code, almost random JMPs to odd offsets. Anything to make it hard to disassemble. I was never really that successful at it, but it sure was fun trying. I was 13 and bored.
Honestly, I think there is an untapped power *source* here. There is a significant temperature differential between the surface water and the water several hundred feet below. A submerged pumping station could easily move the cold water to the surface and use the temperature difference to run a power generation equipment. A low-pressure power cycle would work fine with such a system. Thus, you can reduce the surface water temperature and produce extra electricity.
If you want to read more, google for "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion."
What about the Farnsworth EIC devices? It seems that everyone just stopped thinking about those many years ago? They are pretty easy to build and rely on simple principles. In fact, they fuse D-D. Have those options been thoroughly investigated? And by thoroughly, I mean, a real proof of implausibility, a Monte Carlo EM/plasma similation of the electrode geometry parameter space, etc? This seems like a promising idea that was just collectively ignored in favor of massive scale laser IC and magnetic confinement research in the 60s.
A succinct and apt analogy. Maybe now graduates from the Vince McMahon School of Political Science will finally start getting the recognition they justly deserve.
Placing a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit is going to be hugely expensive. It is only going to provide a niche solution due to the second-scale ping times. I think most people want a solution that is responsive! SSH sessions will be almost unusable over this system.
Placing so-called "stratellites" in the upper atmosphere makes so much more sense. Just a handful would be required to cover all of the Japan. And the great thing is that you can replace/repair/upgrade them if you need to. The geo-sync satellite is a one-shot deal. With deployment 10 years away, this looks terribly shortsighted!
Can someone explain to me how investing in and maintaining hundreds of active LCD shutter specs is better than using two projectors with polarizing filters and super-cheap passive polarized glasses? Heck, Disney World had that Michael Jackson movie that used this approach 15 years ago. Maybe everyone is just so busy with the "high-tech" feel of the LCD shutter specs that they've take leave of their senses.
This seems like a no-brainer, especially with the gradual move to digital projection. Building a projector that composites the left and right eyes images is not that complicated and should be only incrementally more expensive as they would share much of the same optic path. The 3D form of the compressed movie shouldn't be that much bigger either as the same interframe compression algorithms can be use on the left/right eye frames and avoid the need to store two full copies.
There is no anonymity now. On a bittorrent network, you have the real IPv4 addresses of seeders and other downloaders on the torrent. A narc can connect to the tracker and get everone's IP addresses. If you are NATed, they will get the IP of your NAT box and your ISP will be able to turn that IP into a name and address.
Don't tell anyone, but the multicast ability in IPv6 could make P2P file sharing *even more efficient*! That initial seeder could send every packet to every downloader at the same time. Multiplexing that with a bittorrent-type download net means that you could move a lot of data much faster.
When each packet can reach multiple destinations, there are lots of very interesting possibilities. And if P2P has taught us anything, it is that those new technical possibilities will be employed first and foremost to trade moviez, mp3z, warez, and pr0n!
I thought that AMD had just "scooped" Intel with the on-board memory controller and that they would scramble to follow suit by integrating all or most of the north bridge into the CPU. This just seems like the right thing to do. But, the Opteron has been out long enough now that the idea should have worked its way through the Intel development cycle. Now it seems like Intel is purposefully avoiding this route, not unlike SOI. Maybe for similar IP reasons. Either that, or it is a manifestation of the same Not-Invented-Here arrogance that kept them pushing Itanium and dragging their feet on x86-64.
Intel is going to start losing across the board very soon. Maybe in the next 12 months. At some point, Dell will have to jump ship to AMD in the server market at least. Xeon systems just cannot compete on performance, and Itaniums cannout compete on price.
I am a bit of an Intel fan. The deep pipelines in the P4 actually suit a lot of the code we run. Unlike common experience, our performance jump from P3 -> P4 was significantly BIGGER than proportianal to MHz. That 3-year old performance boost is still there in the Xeon, but the Opteron is closing very fast. I really hope that Intel roles out a Xeon rev with a on-board memory controller or at least builds a northbridge with two memory controllers and two memory banks...it doesn't take a PhD in Computer Engineering to see they are trying to push the Mississippi through a garden hose.
Dual Xeon systems (even with DDR2 RAM) cannot supply enough memory bandwidth to keep both CPUs running. We are lucky to get 80% of the single CPU performance when running two instances of a scientific app on two CPUs. Adding more cores just makes the situation far worse as now four CPUs will be competing for that same memory path.
Opterons are way ahead here with their built-in memory controller and dedicated memory banks for each CPU. Intel's SMP folks really need to pull a rabbit out of their hat and right quick. The last cluster (256 CPUs) I built used dual Xeons because they were still slightly faster on our applications over similarly priced Opterons in spite of the degraded SMP performance. Next time around, I doubt that will be the case.
Back in the "old days," I remember the pgcc/gcc split. The old version of gcc was in dire need of an update, but was relied upon by many projects and users. The pgcc effort came online and made remarkable improvements. The old gcc and pgcc coexisted for years. People wanting the fastest compiled code used pgcc. Them finally pgcc was deemed stable enough and became gcc.
Revolutionary work can be done in a fork and I surely wouldn't discourage it. It will make distributions a little more complicated and may cause compatibility issues, but there is a clear benefit here. If the whizbang new stuff is worthwhile, people will use it, patch the bugs, solve the compatibility problems, and use it.
I don't see how it can be more cost effective to equip theaters with active LCD shutter glasses rather than cheap cross-polarized glasses and a polarizing projector. Does anyone know more about this technology? I have seen visualization displays that use both approaches. The passive polarization seems the most simple. I guess, the key thing is that the movies need to be masters with two perspectives per frame...how it is put on the screen and filtered into our eyes is irrevelant. I just can't see the active glasses thing being cost effective.
The 3D in that film is generated by using polarized light. Right eye gets (say) horizontally polarized light, Left eye gets vertically polarized light. The intention is to display slightly different views on the screen for each eye. The glasses have polarized lens that block out the opposite image. With your glasses off, you could see both images...that is why you could see twice the number of lines. Both eyes were getting both sides.
I have a few DirecTivo units and honestly, I was on the verge of cancelling DirecTV until I got them. Now, I don't want to give them up. Has DirecTV licensed the Tivo software permanently or is it licensed per system? I know DirecTV is actively promoting DirecTivo sales. The ability to record two shows at the same time is a big win! And the Tivo interface is far superior to the other options (say from Dish).
I think the problem is that installing the gyroscopes into Hubble is too complicated to do robotically. Personally, I am in agreement with you. Why not just make a "box of gyros" that will attached to some hard point on the unit and adjust the tracking/pointing system to use the new system. If they get them installed *before* the last of the internal gyros go, they should be able to calibrate easily.
I guess powering them might be a problem...the addon unit would need it's own solar panels, be positioned were it could see the sun, etc. NASA has smart people. I am not willing to say this is a wrong move, but I would like to see Hubble continue to fly and do good scient.
I've worked in the Aerospace biz many years and have never seen big number crunching programs done in C/C++ or Java.
Several major commercial computational fluid dynamics codes are written in C or C++. It wouldn't surprise me that your "in-house" codes are still coded in some FORTRAN variant, but commercial vendors moved onto C about a decade ago.
I think this argument is somewhat off, even if the goal is to "destroy" Microsoft. Having Windows installed on every system rolling off of 99.9% of PC manufacture assembly line is a fact of life. But, Microsoft makes its *real* money on the application side, mostly from Office. Getting good OSS applications onto people's computers makes them realize that MS is not necessarily the only game in town. Once OSS starts seriously chewing into the application space, as has started with Firefox, then Microsoft really starts to feel it.
I think the door is open for a suite of OSS applications...be they KDE or Gnome or whatever...that integrates exactly what home users or business users need into one bundle along with tutorials, etc. Firefox, AbiWord, OOo, etc. are very close to being all any user would need. Make that bundle available for Windows, Linux, *BSD, *nix. That is the pressure point, because it makes the platform irrelevant and that breaks the MS monopoloy.
There are very stable software-only hacks to get a hacked BIOS installed. The best one is called UDE. I uses a buffer overflow in the font handling calls of the Xbox dashboard (actually a replacement dashboard). Then it installs its own BIOS and runs its own software.
Here is the skinny. I use this to launch XBMC and turn the xbox (w/ remote) into a very nice media center for every tv in my house. Plus, it plays games.
I gave up on trying to build media PCs and went with softmodded xboxes and XBMC. Full compatibility, high definition output, $20 remote control that works great, and minimal hacking to make it all go. I have a 1.2 TB Linux server that serves up SMB. You will not find a better, more cost effective way to do it.
I still need to get the noscramble.o hack done to my Tivo. With a streaming server, you can watch stuff on your Tivo with XBMC.
Negative energy is also necessary to stabilize the opening of wormholes. I believe both are discussed, though I didn't spend a lot of time reading the.pdf. I do remember a modification of the Alcubiere approach that required a much smaller amount of negative energy, so in principle, this may be a limitation that can be engineered away. Of course, Casimir cavities are the only way that we currently have to reduce the vacuum energy. Not sure how that can be translated into a propulsion system.
The bit of the report that I read is rather unimpressive. I only read the wormhole stuff...not the psychic stuff. But that certainly doesn't mean that this type of research is without merit. I think the issue increasing the speed of light in a Casimir cavities and the results issues that arise with regard to causality.
Read what I wrote! We can *make* methane from water and any carbon feedstock given sufficient cheap electricity.
Hydrogen is *not* the perfect energy storage mechanism and the technologies are *not* "well known." The whole hydrogen economy is a pipe dream. Investigate all of the problems that exist in transportation and bulk storage of hydrogen. Look at my posting history. I have addressed this many times.
Transition from gasoline to compressed natural gas is fairly straightfoward. I used to drive CGN truck while in graduate school eight years ago. Conversion kits are readily available and car manufacturers could switch over completely in a few model years. I have worked on projects that were investigating the use of CNG in large diesel motors as well. This can be made to work without a huge technology change or big expense.
And we can systhesized "natural gas" which is mostly methane from about any fuel stock on the planet, including coal and biofuels. If we have sufficiently cheap electrical power, we can make it from water and a carbon source...even carbon dioxide.
Nuclear energy plus CNG is a reasonable step forward over the next ten to twenty years both economically and environmentally speaking. Policitally though, it is anyone's guess. Nuclear has no friends now...big oil is in the White House and progressives still can't shake the scare the got from "The China Syndrome."
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What is the value of putting the batteries and the hydrogen production facilities all on the same platform with the turbines? It is not like water is hard to come by on land. 1-5 mile transmission lines can move the power ashore very efficiently. Storing large quantities of hydrogen just makes the entire thing 10x less safe. Even with fuel cells, the conversion to hydrogen and back to electricity ruins the system efficiency. The situation with batteries isn't any better.
Certainly, there needs to be batteries in place to power and navigate this thing when the wind is low or so high that they can't run the turbines, but large scale battery/hydrogen storage systems are best left on the beach. Perhaps this is a bit to untether the platform and let it wander the open sea charging and electrolyzing and then return to port to drop its energy cargo. Though that seems in direct conflict with the "continuous energy supply" bit.
I have to concur with you, at least to a point. My undergrad degree is from Penn State which has very good engineering department, especially for a state school. I did my first two years at a branch campus which provided an atmosphere very similar to a community college--small classes, professors with an active interest in your education, the same excellent teachers from semester to semester providing excellent continuity. The classes were not easy by any means. Many students who couldn't cut it washed out, but it was not from lack of effort on the instructors' part.
The classes for the last two years were only available at University Park, so I transferred to finish up. The quality of professors there was staggeringly worse! And these were teaching the "honors" engineering courses (Engineering Science). Many of the points made in the article struck a chord with me. The mindlessly excessive homework (which spawned mindlessly excessive cheating among 80% of the students) just sucked the life out of me, since I was unwilling to cheat. I had one chemistry class that had 300 people in it. It was pointless. There was no opportunity to interact with the professor at all and the fresh-off-the-boat TAs barely spoke English. With a long lot of effort, I finished up my required courses in three semesters and returned to the branch campus to take my humanities/art requirements and graduate. I graduated with a respectable GPA and, in spite of the quality of instruction, did manage to learn something. But I am eternally grateful that I started out my college carreer at the branch campus. If I had to take four semesters of calculus and physics in that environment, I may well have washed out too.
I remember walking through 6502 assembly looking for those things on my C64. Programmers tried everything in the world to make things difficult. The undocumented instruction(s), self-modifying code, almost random JMPs to odd offsets. Anything to make it hard to disassemble. I was never really that successful at it, but it sure was fun trying. I was 13 and bored.
Honestly, I think there is an untapped power *source* here. There is a significant temperature differential between the surface water and the water several hundred feet below. A submerged pumping station could easily move the cold water to the surface and use the temperature difference to run a power generation equipment. A low-pressure power cycle would work fine with such a system. Thus, you can reduce the surface water temperature and produce extra electricity.
If you want to read more, google for "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion."
What about the Farnsworth EIC devices? It seems that everyone just stopped thinking about those many years ago? They are pretty easy to build and rely on simple principles. In fact, they fuse D-D. Have those options been thoroughly investigated? And by thoroughly, I mean, a real proof of implausibility, a Monte Carlo EM/plasma similation of the electrode geometry parameter space, etc? This seems like a promising idea that was just collectively ignored in favor of massive scale laser IC and magnetic confinement research in the 60s.
A succinct and apt analogy. Maybe now graduates from the Vince McMahon School of Political Science will finally start getting the recognition they justly deserve.
Maybe you should just boot XBMC as your dashboard instead of EVOX. It works pretty well.
Placing a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit is going to be hugely expensive. It is only going to provide a niche solution due to the second-scale ping times. I think most people want a solution that is responsive! SSH sessions will be almost unusable over this system.
Placing so-called "stratellites" in the upper atmosphere makes so much more sense. Just a handful would be required to cover all of the Japan. And the great thing is that you can replace/repair/upgrade them if you need to. The geo-sync satellite is a one-shot deal. With deployment 10 years away, this looks terribly shortsighted!
Can someone explain to me how investing in and maintaining hundreds of active LCD shutter specs is better than using two projectors with polarizing filters and super-cheap passive polarized glasses? Heck, Disney World had that Michael Jackson movie that used this approach 15 years ago. Maybe everyone is just so busy with the "high-tech" feel of the LCD shutter specs that they've take leave of their senses.
This seems like a no-brainer, especially with the gradual move to digital projection. Building a projector that composites the left and right eyes images is not that complicated and should be only incrementally more expensive as they would share much of the same optic path. The 3D form of the compressed movie shouldn't be that much bigger either as the same interframe compression algorithms can be use on the left/right eye frames and avoid the need to store two full copies.
There is no anonymity now. On a bittorrent network, you have the real IPv4 addresses of seeders and other downloaders on the torrent. A narc can connect to the tracker and get everone's IP addresses. If you are NATed, they will get the IP of your NAT box and your ISP will be able to turn that IP into a name and address.
Don't tell anyone, but the multicast ability in IPv6 could make P2P file sharing *even more efficient*! That initial seeder could send every packet to every downloader at the same time. Multiplexing that with a bittorrent-type download net means that you could move a lot of data much faster.
When each packet can reach multiple destinations, there are lots of very interesting possibilities. And if P2P has taught us anything, it is that those new technical possibilities will be employed first and foremost to trade moviez, mp3z, warez, and pr0n!
I thought that AMD had just "scooped" Intel with the on-board memory controller and that they would scramble to follow suit by integrating all or most of the north bridge into the CPU. This just seems like the right thing to do. But, the Opteron has been out long enough now that the idea should have worked its way through the Intel development cycle. Now it seems like Intel is purposefully avoiding this route, not unlike SOI. Maybe for similar IP reasons. Either that, or it is a manifestation of the same Not-Invented-Here arrogance that kept them pushing Itanium and dragging their feet on x86-64.
Intel is going to start losing across the board very soon. Maybe in the next 12 months. At some point, Dell will have to jump ship to AMD in the server market at least. Xeon systems just cannot compete on performance, and Itaniums cannout compete on price.
I am a bit of an Intel fan. The deep pipelines in the P4 actually suit a lot of the code we run. Unlike common experience, our performance jump from P3 -> P4 was significantly BIGGER than proportianal to MHz. That 3-year old performance boost is still there in the Xeon, but the Opteron is closing very fast. I really hope that Intel roles out a Xeon rev with a on-board memory controller or at least builds a northbridge with two memory controllers and two memory banks...it doesn't take a PhD in Computer Engineering to see they are trying to push the Mississippi through a garden hose.
Dual Xeon systems (even with DDR2 RAM) cannot supply enough memory bandwidth to keep both CPUs running. We are lucky to get 80% of the single CPU performance when running two instances of a scientific app on two CPUs. Adding more cores just makes the situation far worse as now four CPUs will be competing for that same memory path.
Opterons are way ahead here with their built-in memory controller and dedicated memory banks for each CPU. Intel's SMP folks really need to pull a rabbit out of their hat and right quick. The last cluster (256 CPUs) I built used dual Xeons because they were still slightly faster on our applications over similarly priced Opterons in spite of the degraded SMP performance. Next time around, I doubt that will be the case.
Back in the "old days," I remember the pgcc/gcc split. The old version of gcc was in dire need of an update, but was relied upon by many projects and users. The pgcc effort came online and made remarkable improvements. The old gcc and pgcc coexisted for years. People wanting the fastest compiled code used pgcc. Them finally pgcc was deemed stable enough and became gcc.
Revolutionary work can be done in a fork and I surely wouldn't discourage it. It will make distributions a little more complicated and may cause compatibility issues, but there is a clear benefit here. If the whizbang new stuff is worthwhile, people will use it, patch the bugs, solve the compatibility problems, and use it.
I don't see how it can be more cost effective to equip theaters with active LCD shutter glasses rather than cheap cross-polarized glasses and a polarizing projector. Does anyone know more about this technology? I have seen visualization displays that use both approaches. The passive polarization seems the most simple. I guess, the key thing is that the movies need to be masters with two perspectives per frame...how it is put on the screen and filtered into our eyes is irrevelant. I just can't see the active glasses thing being cost effective.
The 3D in that film is generated by using polarized light. Right eye gets (say) horizontally polarized light, Left eye gets vertically polarized light. The intention is to display slightly different views on the screen for each eye. The glasses have polarized lens that block out the opposite image. With your glasses off, you could see both images...that is why you could see twice the number of lines. Both eyes were getting both sides.
I have a few DirecTivo units and honestly, I was on the verge of cancelling DirecTV until I got them. Now, I don't want to give them up. Has DirecTV licensed the Tivo software permanently or is it licensed per system? I know DirecTV is actively promoting DirecTivo sales. The ability to record two shows at the same time is a big win! And the Tivo interface is far superior to the other options (say from Dish).
I think the problem is that installing the gyroscopes into Hubble is too complicated to do robotically. Personally, I am in agreement with you. Why not just make a "box of gyros" that will attached to some hard point on the unit and adjust the tracking/pointing system to use the new system. If they get them installed *before* the last of the internal gyros go, they should be able to calibrate easily.
I guess powering them might be a problem...the addon unit would need it's own solar panels, be positioned were it could see the sun, etc. NASA has smart people. I am not willing to say this is a wrong move, but I would like to see Hubble continue to fly and do good scient.
I've worked in the Aerospace biz many years and have never seen big number crunching programs done in C/C++ or Java.
Several major commercial computational fluid dynamics codes are written in C or C++. It wouldn't surprise me that your "in-house" codes are still coded in some FORTRAN variant, but commercial vendors moved onto C about a decade ago.
I think this argument is somewhat off, even if the goal is to "destroy" Microsoft. Having Windows installed on every system rolling off of 99.9% of PC manufacture assembly line is a fact of life. But, Microsoft makes its *real* money on the application side, mostly from Office. Getting good OSS applications onto people's computers makes them realize that MS is not necessarily the only game in town. Once OSS starts seriously chewing into the application space, as has started with Firefox, then Microsoft really starts to feel it.
I think the door is open for a suite of OSS applications...be they KDE or Gnome or whatever...that integrates exactly what home users or business users need into one bundle along with tutorials, etc. Firefox, AbiWord, OOo, etc. are very close to being all any user would need. Make that bundle available for Windows, Linux, *BSD, *nix. That is the pressure point, because it makes the platform irrelevant and that breaks the MS monopoloy.
There are very stable software-only hacks to get a hacked BIOS installed. The best one is called UDE. I uses a buffer overflow in the font handling calls of the Xbox dashboard (actually a replacement dashboard). Then it installs its own BIOS and runs its own software.
Here is the skinny. I use this to launch XBMC and turn the xbox (w/ remote) into a very nice media center for every tv in my house. Plus, it plays games.
I gave up on trying to build media PCs and went with softmodded xboxes and XBMC. Full compatibility, high definition output, $20 remote control that works great, and minimal hacking to make it all go. I have a 1.2 TB Linux server that serves up SMB. You will not find a better, more cost effective way to do it.
I still need to get the noscramble.o hack done to my Tivo. With a streaming server, you can watch stuff on your Tivo with XBMC.
Negative energy is also necessary to stabilize the opening of wormholes. I believe both are discussed, though I didn't spend a lot of time reading the .pdf. I do remember a modification of the Alcubiere approach that required a much smaller amount of negative energy, so in principle, this may be a limitation that can be engineered away. Of course, Casimir cavities are the only way that we currently have to reduce the vacuum energy. Not sure how that can be translated into a propulsion system.
The bit of the report that I read is rather unimpressive. I only read the wormhole stuff...not the psychic stuff. But that certainly doesn't mean that this type of research is without merit. I think the issue increasing the speed of light in a Casimir cavities and the results issues that arise with regard to causality.
Read what I wrote! We can *make* methane from water and any carbon feedstock given sufficient cheap electricity.
Hydrogen is *not* the perfect energy storage mechanism and the technologies are *not* "well known." The whole hydrogen economy is a pipe dream. Investigate all of the problems that exist in transportation and bulk storage of hydrogen. Look at my posting history. I have addressed this many times.
Transition from gasoline to compressed natural gas is fairly straightfoward. I used to drive CGN truck while in graduate school eight years ago. Conversion kits are readily available and car manufacturers could switch over completely in a few model years. I have worked on projects that were investigating the use of CNG in large diesel motors as well. This can be made to work without a huge technology change or big expense.
And we can systhesized "natural gas" which is mostly methane from about any fuel stock on the planet, including coal and biofuels. If we have sufficiently cheap electrical power, we can make it from water and a carbon source...even carbon dioxide.
Nuclear energy plus CNG is a reasonable step forward over the next ten to twenty years both economically and environmentally speaking. Policitally though, it is anyone's guess. Nuclear has no friends now...big oil is in the White House and progressives still can't shake the scare the got from "The China Syndrome."