You don't violate a patent by publishing how it works. And you don't violate a patent by publishing the specs of a patent encumbered device. That's one thing patents are made for: You can publish how it works, and still the original inventor (or the current patent holder) doesn't have to fear his revenue stream dies.
Actually, it does not take you away from your engineering subjects. History of engineering itself is a wonderful topic, and it helps you to understand many of today's building codes and regulations. And the history of engineering can only be understood if you know about the intellectual climate at different points in time, the barocque idea of Nature being an immense and intricate clockwork, for instance.
Take the theory of evolution. It sounds good, but outside of a few simple examples (real life encounters replicated) it has not been proven.
Beside the fact that scientific theories can't be proven, we have a pretty good record of being right due to the theory of Evolution. It makes some specific, testable claims. For instance, it claims that you will have homologue organs (organs developping from the same part of the developing embryo) in species that are related, and analogue organs (organs fullfilling similar tasks, but develop from different parts of the embryo) in species that are not. Take for instance the fluke of whales and the tail fin of fishes. They are analogue organs, but develop from different parts of the embryo. The fluke develops from the part of the embryo that normally creates legs, and the tail fin comes from the end of the spine. Thus, fishes and whales are not directly related, and at least one has ancestors that didn't have anything compareable with a tail fin (the cow-like predecessors of whales). Tail fin and fluke are thus analogues, but not homologues.
Thanks to the theory of Evolution we have a pretty good idea what kinds of fossils we can expect to find, and where. It's for instance quite unlikely to ever find the remainings of sixlegged vertebrae, or insects with a lung.
You know that in the long run, we are all dead? And this means that there will be for each of us a reason to die? The different death causes are sitting around and throw dices, and the one who gets the lowest number, wins. If "run over by a car" throws a 24, but "measles induced heart problems" are scoring 17, you will die at age 17 with heart problems and not with 24 in a car accident.
There are some players we managed to get out of the game. Many infections are no longer allowed to play. Thus higher numbers win more often now, and our average life expectancy increases. But the sum of all death cause margins will still be 100 percent, and if we manage to get each single cause to a margin of less than 1%, it just means, that we have to have literally hundred of different ways to die.
I don't know if you really know about the problems with a grid. Most grids are designed with some big powerplants at one point and power consumers at the other ends. So you have high capacity cables only in a very limited part of the grid, and most other parts are of small capacity. But if you have several small power plants distributed in the grid, the local grid might not be able to handle the differences between the local small powerplant activated and deactivated.
One of our customers is a power plant operator, and they showed us the problems they have. Because of many small powerplants in regions where in former times only were consumers of eletrical power, they now have a huge balance problem. In the region, which uses at maximum about 100 MWatts of power, there are power plant installations of 400 MW. If there is a larger failure somewhere outside this region, and those 400 MWatts kick in as replacement power, the grid, which is fine for normal operation, will be completely overloaded, if all 400 MWatts suddenly push energy into the grid.
Another problem is the direction of power distributions. With a big plant design, the grid is built in a way that power runs only in one direction: away from the power plant to the consumers. Thus all regulation mechanisms are adapted to only one direction. If you have several power plants which run at different times, and consumers of power which sometimes take power from one plant, sometimes from others, you need a grid that is able to handle bi-directional or multi-directional power distribution. Most grids are not adapted to such a scenario.
You also scale up if you use hundreds of small units. Are we able to maintain hundreds of units? Do we have enough trained personell? Do we have the technology to keep them running? Do we have the grid to redistribute powers if they fail randomly? Do we have the grid to redistribute powers if all failed ones are at the same end of the same few wires? What happens if a crucial part fails prematurely at several units at the same time?
Problems of scale arise whatever parameter you push up the scale. In your example, you scale up the number of units running.
You put the nail on the head and are summing up the article just nicely:
But when you try to tell someone that, all they can think of is Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both were outdated and should have been scrapped but due to irrational fear, were allowed to keep running past thier expiration date.
That's exactly what TFA is talking about: when calculating the gain-cost-ratio of any new technologies, you have to always calculate in a) the cost of getting the technology to mature and b) the cost of keeping the technology up-to-date and c) the cost of finally scrapping the technology. Yes, we have several technologies. No, those technologies are not mature (e.g. we have no clue how they will scale, how much fine tuning it will take until they are at their designed power output and for how long they will maintain this output). And we don't know which incidents will happen in the future that force us to retrofit the technologies, and more so, at which point in time it will be cheaper just to scrap the new technologies instead of continous retrofitting.
The experience with those mature technologies like the ones used in the U.S. (which didn't, with the exception of Three Mile Island, have had any large and costly failures) proves so far, that the time frame in which those technologies ran at least at 90% of their capacities were much shorter than expected, and 70% capacity would be a much more realistic assumption.
Currently, consoles have a big problem, that's not easy to overcome. While from the 1970ies to the 1990ies, consoles could use specialised components developed for consoles, and thus implement features a PC lacked completely, and the home computers only had in reduced form, it's no longer so. With the advent of highend soundcards for PCs in the 1980ies and highend graphic cards in the 1990ies, and with the 3D boom in the 2000s, the technical advantages of consoles were gone. Today, you won't find any console with better specs than a decent PC, specialized chip development for game consoles is dead, and the only advantages consoles can have is a set of very well integrated standard components and a comparatively low price, and maybe the additional advantage of having some hardware constancy over several years, which allows game developers to better adapt to the hardware and invent tricks and routines to make better use of the console capabilities.
When consoles became a "big thing", it was the non-hardcore gamers who went there, and the hardcore types that stayed on the PC.
Consoles became a big thing in 1977, when Atari debuted the 2600. And this was incidentally the same year, when the first computer, which called itself "PC", was available.
Re:Typical Oracle - Enterprise sheds tear
on
Java 6 EOL'd By Oracle
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· Score: 3, Informative
I still have sometimes to use tools that were developed for Java 1.3.1 and barely run with Java 1.4.2.
Well, one of the best arguments for upgrading from a system that old is computation power per watt. It costs a lot to run a very old power-hungry system to do something that a tiny micro-controller can do today for fractions of a penny on the dollar in power consumption. You're paying an exorbitant rate per CPU cycle with something like a PDP-11.
I've seen worse. I know of a site where an old phone switch is still in service to handle a single door, e.g. the doorbell and the door lock are connected to the phone switch, pushing the button will ring a specified phone in the building, and then the phone user can unlock the door by dialing a code. The phone switch was once designed to handle up to 750 parallel calls and is powered by 1500 Watts. Due to the replacement of the phone switch with an new one, almost all stations were replaced by new ones, except that single door-opener-phone and the doorbell. As far as I know, the operator of the building seems to be unable to replace the door lock with a new one that can be operated by the new phone switch, thus the old one is still in service, using 1500 Watts x 24/7.
In a way, it is already. If you trade 100 times for $10,000 each, you have to pay $300 tax. If you trade only once for $10,000, you have to pay $3. Thus trading once and then keeping it and intentionally missing the next 100 trade opportunities is rewarded.
Actually, the Quebequois is much closer to the French spoken in the late 18th and early 19th century than the French in France today. Probably due to the lower number of speakers, Quebequois has developed slower than french French.
Then you don't power the gas engine with wood, but with wood gas. And yes, you can turn wood into biofuel. But that doesn't make wood itself a biofuel.
The person is a programmer. Programming Linpack, you know, the program, that as a result of a run puts out a figure giving the number of floating points per seconds according to the number of floating point operations processed during its run and the time consumed. And he maintains this list: Top 500, which is the result of running Linpack on very large systems. And this list giving the computing power in TFlop/s. And not in TFLOPS.
And even if you stand on your head, this guy surely has seen a TFlop/s much earlier than you. And he probably gave the TFlop/s and the Petaflop/s its name - as his program is the tool to actually figure if a computer is able to put out a TFlop/s or a PFlop/s.
Not exactly, biofuel refers mostly to gas or gasoil replacements. Except some very large diesel engines, which you can fuel with sawdust, it's not very easy to power a gas or gasoil engine with wood.
There is a PetaFLOP. It's one trillon floating point operations. If you calculate the computative cost of an algorithm given some input data, you often arrive at some number like 20 MegaFLOP or 40 PetaFLOP. And if you want to know how much processing time this will take, you need to know how many floating point operations a given system can process per time, and you get FLOP per second or FLOP/s. There is nothing wrong with that, even if you like to abbreviate it as FLOPS.
If the author who compiles the list of the fastest computers in the world, and who co-developed Linpack, likes to write "petaflop/s" (see his blog entry in the second link), and if the author who writes the article in Nature World News, writes that as "petaflop per second", then who are you to argue?
You are not required to have a driver's permit, thus this example is not valid.
You are not required to build something, thus this example is not valid.
You are not required to create garbage, thus this example is not valid.
Sorry, but if you do something that influences other people (and all three, driving, building and creating garbage do so massively), you are required to follow rules negotiated by the people (maY it be by elections, petitions and writing your member of congress, or via written or unwritten contracts) you are influencing.
If you want to drive around, build something or litter as you want without any restrictions, go, find some place where you are disturbing no one else, and do it there.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that's why most countries have asylum laws.
Someone violated the Omertà, and you demand that he comes back to the Family, and have the Godfather decide who has the right to kill him?
You don't violate a patent by publishing how it works. And you don't violate a patent by publishing the specs of a patent encumbered device. That's one thing patents are made for: You can publish how it works, and still the original inventor (or the current patent holder) doesn't have to fear his revenue stream dies.
Actually, it does not take you away from your engineering subjects. History of engineering itself is a wonderful topic, and it helps you to understand many of today's building codes and regulations. And the history of engineering can only be understood if you know about the intellectual climate at different points in time, the barocque idea of Nature being an immense and intricate clockwork, for instance.
Take the theory of evolution. It sounds good, but outside of a few simple examples (real life encounters replicated) it has not been proven.
Beside the fact that scientific theories can't be proven, we have a pretty good record of being right due to the theory of Evolution. It makes some specific, testable claims. For instance, it claims that you will have homologue organs (organs developping from the same part of the developing embryo) in species that are related, and analogue organs (organs fullfilling similar tasks, but develop from different parts of the embryo) in species that are not. Take for instance the fluke of whales and the tail fin of fishes. They are analogue organs, but develop from different parts of the embryo. The fluke develops from the part of the embryo that normally creates legs, and the tail fin comes from the end of the spine. Thus, fishes and whales are not directly related, and at least one has ancestors that didn't have anything compareable with a tail fin (the cow-like predecessors of whales). Tail fin and fluke are thus analogues, but not homologues.
Thanks to the theory of Evolution we have a pretty good idea what kinds of fossils we can expect to find, and where. It's for instance quite unlikely to ever find the remainings of sixlegged vertebrae, or insects with a lung.
There are some players we managed to get out of the game. Many infections are no longer allowed to play. Thus higher numbers win more often now, and our average life expectancy increases. But the sum of all death cause margins will still be 100 percent, and if we manage to get each single cause to a margin of less than 1%, it just means, that we have to have literally hundred of different ways to die.
One of our customers is a power plant operator, and they showed us the problems they have. Because of many small powerplants in regions where in former times only were consumers of eletrical power, they now have a huge balance problem. In the region, which uses at maximum about 100 MWatts of power, there are power plant installations of 400 MW. If there is a larger failure somewhere outside this region, and those 400 MWatts kick in as replacement power, the grid, which is fine for normal operation, will be completely overloaded, if all 400 MWatts suddenly push energy into the grid.
Another problem is the direction of power distributions. With a big plant design, the grid is built in a way that power runs only in one direction: away from the power plant to the consumers. Thus all regulation mechanisms are adapted to only one direction. If you have several power plants which run at different times, and consumers of power which sometimes take power from one plant, sometimes from others, you need a grid that is able to handle bi-directional or multi-directional power distribution. Most grids are not adapted to such a scenario.
Problems of scale arise whatever parameter you push up the scale. In your example, you scale up the number of units running.
But when you try to tell someone that, all they can think of is Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both were outdated and should have been scrapped but due to irrational fear, were allowed to keep running past thier expiration date.
That's exactly what TFA is talking about: when calculating the gain-cost-ratio of any new technologies, you have to always calculate in a) the cost of getting the technology to mature and b) the cost of keeping the technology up-to-date and c) the cost of finally scrapping the technology. Yes, we have several technologies. No, those technologies are not mature (e.g. we have no clue how they will scale, how much fine tuning it will take until they are at their designed power output and for how long they will maintain this output). And we don't know which incidents will happen in the future that force us to retrofit the technologies, and more so, at which point in time it will be cheaper just to scrap the new technologies instead of continous retrofitting.
The experience with those mature technologies like the ones used in the U.S. (which didn't, with the exception of Three Mile Island, have had any large and costly failures) proves so far, that the time frame in which those technologies ran at least at 90% of their capacities were much shorter than expected, and 70% capacity would be a much more realistic assumption.
The first Mozilla browser did it already. Instead of linking to an image (which would then open in an external viewer), it displayed the image inline.
Currently, consoles have a big problem, that's not easy to overcome. While from the 1970ies to the 1990ies, consoles could use specialised components developed for consoles, and thus implement features a PC lacked completely, and the home computers only had in reduced form, it's no longer so. With the advent of highend soundcards for PCs in the 1980ies and highend graphic cards in the 1990ies, and with the 3D boom in the 2000s, the technical advantages of consoles were gone. Today, you won't find any console with better specs than a decent PC, specialized chip development for game consoles is dead, and the only advantages consoles can have is a set of very well integrated standard components and a comparatively low price, and maybe the additional advantage of having some hardware constancy over several years, which allows game developers to better adapt to the hardware and invent tricks and routines to make better use of the console capabilities.
When consoles became a "big thing", it was the non-hardcore gamers who went there, and the hardcore types that stayed on the PC.
Consoles became a big thing in 1977, when Atari debuted the 2600. And this was incidentally the same year, when the first computer, which called itself "PC", was available.
I still have sometimes to use tools that were developed for Java 1.3.1 and barely run with Java 1.4.2.
Well, one of the best arguments for upgrading from a system that old is computation power per watt. It costs a lot to run a very old power-hungry system to do something that a tiny micro-controller can do today for fractions of a penny on the dollar in power consumption. You're paying an exorbitant rate per CPU cycle with something like a PDP-11.
I've seen worse. I know of a site where an old phone switch is still in service to handle a single door, e.g. the doorbell and the door lock are connected to the phone switch, pushing the button will ring a specified phone in the building, and then the phone user can unlock the door by dialing a code. The phone switch was once designed to handle up to 750 parallel calls and is powered by 1500 Watts. Due to the replacement of the phone switch with an new one, almost all stations were replaced by new ones, except that single door-opener-phone and the doorbell. As far as I know, the operator of the building seems to be unable to replace the door lock with a new one that can be operated by the new phone switch, thus the old one is still in service, using 1500 Watts x 24/7.
That might get flashy.
In a way, it is already. If you trade 100 times for $10,000 each, you have to pay $300 tax. If you trade only once for $10,000, you have to pay $3. Thus trading once and then keeping it and intentionally missing the next 100 trade opportunities is rewarded.
Actually, the Quebequois is much closer to the French spoken in the late 18th and early 19th century than the French in France today. Probably due to the lower number of speakers, Quebequois has developed slower than french French.
Then you don't power the gas engine with wood, but with wood gas. And yes, you can turn wood into biofuel. But that doesn't make wood itself a biofuel.
And even if you stand on your head, this guy surely has seen a TFlop/s much earlier than you. And he probably gave the TFlop/s and the Petaflop/s its name - as his program is the tool to actually figure if a computer is able to put out a TFlop/s or a PFlop/s.
Not exactly, biofuel refers mostly to gas or gasoil replacements. Except some very large diesel engines, which you can fuel with sawdust, it's not very easy to power a gas or gasoil engine with wood.
There is a PetaFLOP. It's one trillon floating point operations. If you calculate the computative cost of an algorithm given some input data, you often arrive at some number like 20 MegaFLOP or 40 PetaFLOP. And if you want to know how much processing time this will take, you need to know how many floating point operations a given system can process per time, and you get FLOP per second or FLOP/s. There is nothing wrong with that, even if you like to abbreviate it as FLOPS.
If the author who compiles the list of the fastest computers in the world, and who co-developed Linpack, likes to write "petaflop/s" (see his blog entry in the second link), and if the author who writes the article in Nature World News, writes that as "petaflop per second", then who are you to argue?
You are not required to build something, thus this example is not valid.
You are not required to create garbage, thus this example is not valid.
Sorry, but if you do something that influences other people (and all three, driving, building and creating garbage do so massively), you are required to follow rules negotiated by the people (maY it be by elections, petitions and writing your member of congress, or via written or unwritten contracts) you are influencing.
If you want to drive around, build something or litter as you want without any restrictions, go, find some place where you are disturbing no one else, and do it there.
Oh the irony!
You even have short and long silences, thus we are talking base 4.