The Volvo S60 and V60 come with Volvo's City Safety system as standard, which is the same system fitted to its sister the XC60. This system stops the car in the event of impending collision in 'City Traffic' below 19 mph (31 km/h). A new safety feature named "Pedestrian Detection", available on both the V60 and S60, detects people in front of the car and automatically applies the brakes if the driver does not react in time.
I had no idea there was a single voting day in the US. In Sweden we have weeks to vote, even though the votes are counted on a single day. Make it several days at least so the people can take their time to vote.
Add all of Scandivia to the list of places that doesn't need, get or want dubs. I'm sure there are many more as well. The few dubs I have had the displeasure of watching have been of children's movies, and it cannot be expressed how horrible the dubbing was.
Besides, if the film has to be translated to the native language, why worry about piracy of a non-translated version?
Agreed. I used to be a PC only gamer (engineer, computer geek etc bla bla..) but since I got a PS3 I'm totally sold on consoles. Easy to use, comfortable to play from my couch, in general a better experience as a whole for me. It also fits nicely with my home theater system.
Sure, the PC can do all those things, but not as easily and would require more maintenance and configuration. Especially getting wireless controllers set up to work well with each game.
Sweden has a progressive tax system which pays for the move
While I don't know the details, I do know that a good chunk if not all of the cost is paid by the mining companies. Either way if tax money is being used that money is easily recouped in the form of taxes from the mining operation.
in Russia if you aren't connected to the government you're almost irrelevant, other than to be a moron to be manipulated to give Putin a shine of legitimacy.
I do see your point and I'm not surprised, I guess in Russia neither the mining company nor the government would pay for an operation like this, screwing over the local residents.
There are a few places in Sweden where entire towns are in the process of being gradually moved due to the expansion of neighboring mines. The thing is, these towns were built _because_ of those mines in the first place, generations ago. The citizens don't mind, they actually support it, since they know their towns would become ghost towns without the mines.
That being said, from the sound of things this town should have undergone similar procedures a long time ago. But there is more than one side to this type of situation.
Well said. And since there is already a sensor on the brake pedal for turning off the cruise control, it should just be a matter of programming to make it happen.
Then there's the problem of shadowing/shading you pointed out. In a pure ray tracer, everything has that unnatural shiny/bright look. This is because you trace rays from the screen back to the light source. Works fine for direct illumination but the real world has lots of indirect illumination that gives the richness of shadows we see. For that you need something else like radiosity or photon mapping, and that has different costs.
Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why ray tracing can't handle indirect illumination. Wouldn't the traced ray modify the intensity and color of the (eventually found) light source with each bounce? Or is the problem that when you cast one ray per pixel you only get the contribution from a single light source in the end?
Well, considering that the critical mass of pure plutonium-239 is about 10kg, I would say the risk of 8g of thorium going critical is fairly small. That's not to say I believe this will ever work though.
I'm not able to make any sense out of it either. The article says:
Stevens agrees, emphasizing his system is “subcritical.” This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state...
...in which case it's not clear where the energy is coming from. It's apparently not coming from fissioning or from breeding some fissile element. It can't be coming from decay heat which would be extremely trivial in this case.
Is he claiming that heating an element will cause it to decay more quickly?
I can't make any sense out of it right now.
The quoted statement doesn't make sense either. Subcritical only means that there is no self-sustaining nuclear reaction, not that there are no reactions taking place. I haven't RTFA but it sounds like whoever wrote it didn't understand what was going on.
The contact circles has me intrigued, especially if it will allow me to target messages to specific groups.
This feature alone makes it way better than facebook for me. It's so easy to send messages only to close friends, or colleagues, etc. And I can easily choose to only view messages from specific groups as well. With facebook it always feels like everything you write or do is visible to everyone. And everything someone else does is visible to me, which is not optimal either.
Yep, same here. I pay a high price for premium channels and yet I can't see much of what I want to see. And when / if they finally do air it here, it's not in HD. While I can get an HD version of it the same day it airs in the US. A case of the pirated alternative being a better product. I still keep paying for the channels though, even if I rarely use them. Maybe I shouldn't though (the whole "vote with your wallet" thing).
Do you need consent in a public location? Honest question, I'm not from the US. In Sweden you can film, record audio and take as many pictures as you like in any public place including inside buildings.
will be what happens when mining becomes prohibitively expensive or the 21 million coin limit is reached.
When the limit is reached, there will still be coin to be made from mining (though it wouldn't really be mining) from transaction fees. When mining become prohibitively expensive people will stop mining, which will decrease the difficulty and make it (slightly) profitable again. Either that or people don't stop mining and operate at a loss. Neither scenario has any impact on the usability of bitcoin.
Hm, my bank never took a cut from my debit card. The credit cards I have don't either, unless I don't pay the bills the same month I made the purchases. Where do banks do this?
Here in Sweden, there have actually been plans (don't know the status) to add a fee to cash withdrawals. This is to reduce cash circulation, in an attempt to minimize robberies (no cash in stores, not much to rob).
Whether or not BItcoins are a good idea, the market ecosystem behind them is far too flaky.
Yes, this is correct. However, Bitcoin is still in its infancy. Nobody could reasonably expect it to have a well established "market ecosystem" this early on. This is an argument why Bitcoin is not fit for major use at this time, not that it will never be.
As the number of hands played goes to infinity, the player who makes the best decisions with regards to his odds of winning, the size of the pot etc is going to win. When talking about cashgames it is said that one needs to play on the order of 100k hands (which isn't that much when talking about online poker) to be sure whether his strategy and skill is good enough to win.
Sure, if you play a few tournaments during a lifetime then luck will be a significant factor. If you play every tournament of the WSOP, WPT, EPT every year skill is likely to determine your results.
I'm curious, since this is never specified: are these average outputs per year?
For some reference, here in Sweden we have 1252MW of wind power installed, average over the past 30 days is ~320MW actual output. I haven't been able to find the yearly average.
As I already said, no we will not be running X on all the nodes. One of them will run it, with a few cores reserved for the purpose (this is the way we do it today and we have no significant issues with the arrangement). But like I say, we may very well decide to use one of the boxes from the old cluster for this task, seems like a good idea. But I still think we'd like the same distro to make the administration bit easier.
One of our most used softwares is practically closed source (to get access to the source you have to pass a series of security screenings as well as motivate why you really REALLY need the source, it's almost impossible for non-US citizens). This software does not implement GPGPU functionality at this point, and whether or when it will be supported is unknown to us. Therefore, getting GPUs at this point would probably not be the best idea. It has been discussed, and we might look at getting boxes that can be upgraded with GPUs in the future.
As for being an administrator, I volunteered for it so I'm not "unsuspecting":) I have my reasons for wanting to do it, won't go into them here. But it will not count towards the time I have for research, that is already reserved specifically for research. We will be at least 3 people sharing the load on this too, I don't really see a problem with it.
Yes, we have looked at the other clusters around here. The problem with them is that we have to pay for them per unit of processing time per specific project. These will be used for larger jobs that our local cluster cannot handle, the local one will mainly be used for developing software to run on the larger ones as well as running smaller simulations and verifying algorithms. This is very useful to us, since it would be a pain to plan small things like that ahead of time. And we do need more processing power than we have today, even smaller jobs of the type we do require some power.
Our current setup works fine for this and it has been of great use, but it is getting old and is beginning to be a limitation. So now that we're considering upgrading we wanted to do some research first, hence the question.
Thanks very much for your advice, I will keep your comments in mind. Maybe we can find someone else who wants to run a cluster for a similar purpose. Though we really do like having one reserved just for us as well. This is a general opinion in the department, and it would probably be hard to convince everyone to do it any other way. Any additional comments are of course welcome!
Thank you all for the informative replies, this will help us in deciding what to use.
It seems that Redhat or a variant thereof is what most of you agree is good, so we will probably go with one of those. Especially since that is what we have used in the past.
The reason for having X is that we work in X, some of the software we use need that for various reasons such as plotting. This will only be used on one node. Since this will be a small cluster (probably 4 boxes with 32 cores each) we do not intend on building a separate box for running X. We might use one of the old boxes for X, but I think we still would want the same dist on all of them for simplicity. (Oh, and to those who asked: these will be in racks and not used for desktops)
Answer to another question that came up: This is for use at a university, we will be using it mainly for (nuclear physics) simulations/calculations based on Monte Carlo methods.
It is unclear to me from the article and the summary whether this is peak or average power? Does anyone have a quote on this?
Whether it is average or not, I have always been interested in what this type of technology can actually achieve. It is definitely an interesting project and I will be watching for the final verdict on it.
This is true. I know companies that still rely on old DOS-boxes and ISA cards for certain critical tasks. Sometimes they just consider it too expensive to develop the stuff all over again (and source code may have disappeared, making it hard to figure out exactly what the old program does). And of course, those applications don't need a lot of CPU cycles.
I will try to give a somewhat educated answer to your question.
First on the note of "no way to stop it":
The wikipedia article does not mention which control rod mechanisms could have failed; there are two. The SCRAM (emergency shutdown) system uses stored pressurized gas to effectively "blow" the control rods in fully within the space of seconds. The system used during normal operation is of a different kind (whether electrical or hydraulic, I'm not intimate whith those details) which takes on the order of 5 minutes for a complete insertion.
Secondly, this was a light water reactor, meaning that as soon as the water level sunk below the fuel rods (or even water density decreased due to depressurization) the reactor would have halted. This is due to the moderation effect of the water necessary to control the neutrons energies to sustain the reaction in an LWR. In other words a passive shutdown.
What could have happened:
The reactor had a system for reinjecting lost coolant into the core. If this system operated correctly a meltdown could probably have been avoided (again, I am not intimate with the details or effectiveness of such systems). The wikipedia article that issues were found with this system following the incident. So assuming the system failed:
A meltdown would have occurred, the scale would have depended on the functionality of other emergency cooling systems. What the consequences of this would have been is hard to say. The wikipedia article mentions issues were found the emergency diesel generators. As we all know by now, failure in this system is a big reason why Fukushima turned out like it did.
So yes, this could have been a Fukushima type event. It would have required several safety systems to fail, but given the flaws found the risk cannot be discounted. But given the limited information in the article I cannot say more, or even if my assessment is correct.
I am not an expert in reactor safety, I work mainly on the theoretical side of things. I hope this sheds some light on your question.
Well, that wouldn't be enough. They probably couldn't filter out someone with just a couple of plants anyway. But if you have say 3kW of growing lamps going on and off at the same second every day then maybe, if added to other suspicious activity it could warrant some form of action.
I've been told that this is one way police look for marijuana farms here in sweden.. whether there's any truth to that I do not know.
Slashdot Mirror
10) auto brake on object detect Don't exist except in a few ~$100k cars.
Is available in some mid-range Volvos:
The Volvo S60 and V60 come with Volvo's City Safety system as standard, which is the same system fitted to its sister the XC60. This system stops the car in the event of impending collision in 'City Traffic' below 19 mph (31 km/h). A new safety feature named "Pedestrian Detection", available on both the V60 and S60, detects people in front of the car and automatically applies the brakes if the driver does not react in time.
I had no idea there was a single voting day in the US. In Sweden we have weeks to vote, even though the votes are counted on a single day. Make it several days at least so the people can take their time to vote.
Add all of Scandivia to the list of places that doesn't need, get or want dubs. I'm sure there are many more as well. The few dubs I have had the displeasure of watching have been of children's movies, and it cannot be expressed how horrible the dubbing was.
Besides, if the film has to be translated to the native language, why worry about piracy of a non-translated version?
Agreed. I used to be a PC only gamer (engineer, computer geek etc bla bla..) but since I got a PS3 I'm totally sold on consoles. Easy to use, comfortable to play from my couch, in general a better experience as a whole for me. It also fits nicely with my home theater system.
Sure, the PC can do all those things, but not as easily and would require more maintenance and configuration. Especially getting wireless controllers set up to work well with each game.
Sweden has a progressive tax system which pays for the move
While I don't know the details, I do know that a good chunk if not all of the cost is paid by the mining companies. Either way if tax money is being used that money is easily recouped in the form of taxes from the mining operation.
in Russia if you aren't connected to the government you're almost irrelevant, other than to be a moron to be manipulated to give Putin a shine of legitimacy.
I do see your point and I'm not surprised, I guess in Russia neither the mining company nor the government would pay for an operation like this, screwing over the local residents.
There are a few places in Sweden where entire towns are in the process of being gradually moved due to the expansion of neighboring mines. The thing is, these towns were built _because_ of those mines in the first place, generations ago. The citizens don't mind, they actually support it, since they know their towns would become ghost towns without the mines.
That being said, from the sound of things this town should have undergone similar procedures a long time ago. But there is more than one side to this type of situation.
Well said. And since there is already a sensor on the brake pedal for turning off the cruise control, it should just be a matter of programming to make it happen.
Forgive my ignorance, but I don't quite understand why ray tracing can't handle indirect illumination. Wouldn't the traced ray modify the intensity and color of the (eventually found) light source with each bounce? Or is the problem that when you cast one ray per pixel you only get the contribution from a single light source in the end?
Well, considering that the critical mass of pure plutonium-239 is about 10kg, I would say the risk of 8g of thorium going critical is fairly small. That's not to say I believe this will ever work though.
I'm not able to make any sense out of it either. The article says:
Is he claiming that heating an element will cause it to decay more quickly?
I can't make any sense out of it right now.
The quoted statement doesn't make sense either. Subcritical only means that there is no self-sustaining nuclear reaction, not that there are no reactions taking place. I haven't RTFA but it sounds like whoever wrote it didn't understand what was going on.
The contact circles has me intrigued, especially if it will allow me to target messages to specific groups.
This feature alone makes it way better than facebook for me. It's so easy to send messages only to close friends, or colleagues, etc. And I can easily choose to only view messages from specific groups as well. With facebook it always feels like everything you write or do is visible to everyone. And everything someone else does is visible to me, which is not optimal either.
Yep, same here. I pay a high price for premium channels and yet I can't see much of what I want to see. And when / if they finally do air it here, it's not in HD. While I can get an HD version of it the same day it airs in the US. A case of the pirated alternative being a better product. I still keep paying for the channels though, even if I rarely use them. Maybe I shouldn't though (the whole "vote with your wallet" thing).
Do you need consent in a public location? Honest question, I'm not from the US. In Sweden you can film, record audio and take as many pictures as you like in any public place including inside buildings.
will be what happens when mining becomes prohibitively expensive or the 21 million coin limit is reached.
When the limit is reached, there will still be coin to be made from mining (though it wouldn't really be mining) from transaction fees. When mining become prohibitively expensive people will stop mining, which will decrease the difficulty and make it (slightly) profitable again. Either that or people don't stop mining and operate at a loss. Neither scenario has any impact on the usability of bitcoin.
I mean, seriously. Until I can purchase groceries, or pay my mortgage or utility bill, with this stuff, it's about as useful to me as WoW gold.
Yup, agreed. Doesn't mean it doesn't have a future though. Might not be likely, but not impossible either.
Hm, my bank never took a cut from my debit card. The credit cards I have don't either, unless I don't pay the bills the same month I made the purchases. Where do banks do this?
Here in Sweden, there have actually been plans (don't know the status) to add a fee to cash withdrawals. This is to reduce cash circulation, in an attempt to minimize robberies (no cash in stores, not much to rob).
Whether or not BItcoins are a good idea, the market ecosystem behind them is far too flaky.
Yes, this is correct. However, Bitcoin is still in its infancy. Nobody could reasonably expect it to have a well established "market ecosystem" this early on. This is an argument why Bitcoin is not fit for major use at this time, not that it will never be.
As the number of hands played goes to infinity, the player who makes the best decisions with regards to his odds of winning, the size of the pot etc is going to win. When talking about cashgames it is said that one needs to play on the order of 100k hands (which isn't that much when talking about online poker) to be sure whether his strategy and skill is good enough to win.
Sure, if you play a few tournaments during a lifetime then luck will be a significant factor. If you play every tournament of the WSOP, WPT, EPT every year skill is likely to determine your results.
I'm curious, since this is never specified: are these average outputs per year?
For some reference, here in Sweden we have 1252MW of wind power installed, average over the past 30 days is ~320MW actual output. I haven't been able to find the yearly average.
Hi,
:) I have my reasons for wanting to do it, won't go into them here. But it will not count towards the time I have for research, that is already reserved specifically for research. We will be at least 3 people sharing the load on this too, I don't really see a problem with it.
As I already said, no we will not be running X on all the nodes. One of them will run it, with a few cores reserved for the purpose (this is the way we do it today and we have no significant issues with the arrangement). But like I say, we may very well decide to use one of the boxes from the old cluster for this task, seems like a good idea. But I still think we'd like the same distro to make the administration bit easier.
One of our most used softwares is practically closed source (to get access to the source you have to pass a series of security screenings as well as motivate why you really REALLY need the source, it's almost impossible for non-US citizens). This software does not implement GPGPU functionality at this point, and whether or when it will be supported is unknown to us. Therefore, getting GPUs at this point would probably not be the best idea. It has been discussed, and we might look at getting boxes that can be upgraded with GPUs in the future.
As for being an administrator, I volunteered for it so I'm not "unsuspecting"
Yes, we have looked at the other clusters around here. The problem with them is that we have to pay for them per unit of processing time per specific project. These will be used for larger jobs that our local cluster cannot handle, the local one will mainly be used for developing software to run on the larger ones as well as running smaller simulations and verifying algorithms. This is very useful to us, since it would be a pain to plan small things like that ahead of time. And we do need more processing power than we have today, even smaller jobs of the type we do require some power.
Our current setup works fine for this and it has been of great use, but it is getting old and is beginning to be a limitation. So now that we're considering upgrading we wanted to do some research first, hence the question.
Thanks very much for your advice, I will keep your comments in mind. Maybe we can find someone else who wants to run a cluster for a similar purpose. Though we really do like having one reserved just for us as well. This is a general opinion in the department, and it would probably be hard to convince everyone to do it any other way. Any additional comments are of course welcome!
Hello,
Thank you all for the informative replies, this will help us in deciding what to use.
It seems that Redhat or a variant thereof is what most of you agree is good, so we will probably go with one of those. Especially since that is what we have used in the past.
The reason for having X is that we work in X, some of the software we use need that for various reasons such as plotting. This will only be used on one node. Since this will be a small cluster (probably 4 boxes with 32 cores each) we do not intend on building a separate box for running X. We might use one of the old boxes for X, but I think we still would want the same dist on all of them for simplicity. (Oh, and to those who asked: these will be in racks and not used for desktops)
Answer to another question that came up: This is for use at a university, we will be using it mainly for (nuclear physics) simulations/calculations based on Monte Carlo methods.
Again, many thanks!
It is unclear to me from the article and the summary whether this is peak or average power? Does anyone have a quote on this?
Whether it is average or not, I have always been interested in what this type of technology can actually achieve. It is definitely an interesting project and I will be watching for the final verdict on it.
This is true. I know companies that still rely on old DOS-boxes and ISA cards for certain critical tasks. Sometimes they just consider it too expensive to develop the stuff all over again (and source code may have disappeared, making it hard to figure out exactly what the old program does). And of course, those applications don't need a lot of CPU cycles.
I will try to give a somewhat educated answer to your question.
First on the note of "no way to stop it":
The wikipedia article does not mention which control rod mechanisms could have failed; there are two. The SCRAM (emergency shutdown) system uses stored pressurized gas to effectively "blow" the control rods in fully within the space of seconds. The system used during normal operation is of a different kind (whether electrical or hydraulic, I'm not intimate whith those details) which takes on the order of 5 minutes for a complete insertion.
Secondly, this was a light water reactor, meaning that as soon as the water level sunk below the fuel rods (or even water density decreased due to depressurization) the reactor would have halted. This is due to the moderation effect of the water necessary to control the neutrons energies to sustain the reaction in an LWR. In other words a passive shutdown.
What could have happened:
The reactor had a system for reinjecting lost coolant into the core. If this system operated correctly a meltdown could probably have been avoided (again, I am not intimate with the details or effectiveness of such systems). The wikipedia article that issues were found with this system following the incident. So assuming the system failed:
A meltdown would have occurred, the scale would have depended on the functionality of other emergency cooling systems. What the consequences of this would have been is hard to say. The wikipedia article mentions issues were found the emergency diesel generators. As we all know by now, failure in this system is a big reason why Fukushima turned out like it did.
So yes, this could have been a Fukushima type event. It would have required several safety systems to fail, but given the flaws found the risk cannot be discounted. But given the limited information in the article I cannot say more, or even if my assessment is correct.
I am not an expert in reactor safety, I work mainly on the theoretical side of things. I hope this sheds some light on your question.
Well, that wouldn't be enough. They probably couldn't filter out someone with just a couple of plants anyway. But if you have say 3kW of growing lamps going on and off at the same second every day then maybe, if added to other suspicious activity it could warrant some form of action. I've been told that this is one way police look for marijuana farms here in sweden.. whether there's any truth to that I do not know.