Turning on verbose logging doesn't help you after the process has gone tits up. It's ok if you are debugging, but really if you are debugging you want to use a debugger, not a log.
As far as hardware being cheap etc. as other posters have posited, I'd sure like to know where you work that a Sun E10000 and an EMC Symmetrix are considered cheap.
The fact is that if you are running apps on big iron hardware is not cheap, and the economic effectiveness of an application can well depend on how many transactions it can process in a given period of time.
Yes, it can be tough to figure out what went wrong with a sparse log. But that's the way it is, sorry.
On the other hand I do agree with people who state disk space is usually not a factor. There are ways to manage that issue.
Log the starting conditions so you can reconstruct data. Otherwise don't do much logging because it will hurt application performance, sometimes drastically.
Netflix has the biggest volunteer distributed backup system on the planet. If they were smart they could have planned for this outage and had their customers supply backup disks to other customers who were not getting shipments on time.
Eh. The company I was working for until last week crashed into a brick wall and exploded. Basically they ran out of money to pay their employees and did an 80% layoff.
Still haven't been paid for the last few weeks of work. I'm trying to decide if the 20% left are better or worse off. At least I am collecting unemployment. They are working without pay.
Plenty of people drive after death (usually into a fixed object), and I haven't had a vision test in 40 years. I have a friend who is legally blind and drives. He has a big old Chevy Suburban because it stands up to the frequent minor collisions he has quite well.
The eternal optimist in me feels some will see this as a step too far.
Eventually something so repugnant will happen that all of this will be swept away. The shame of it is that it will take that repugnant event. In the US we went through a lot of this during Vietnam and the civil protests - eventually the FBI and CIA were raked over the coals for excessive surveillance of US citizens.
Now I think we are going through the same cycle again - and the result will be the same.
I am not from New Zeland, whatever that is. I'm from Massachusetts. Not Marlboro though. Some members of my family certainly would have been surprised at how politics in that state have evolved.
I worked as an R&D chemist for 20+ years, and can understand why the town would be alarmed. A large scale lab (which it sounds like was in place here) should not be run on a hobby basis. The EPA and OSHA have significant regulatory impact on lab operations including safety and disposal requirements (no you can't just pour it down the drain) which sound like were being completely ignored here. Not to mention the fire department would be very concerned if they were called to a place where they did not know what they were going to be exposed to (exactly what happened here).
As part of my job I was involved in training local fire and rescue teams on hazmat response. Fire departments in particular take this sort of thing VERY seriously, and it was no surprise they acted the way they did when they found this home R&D lab.
Aside from the zoning issues I'd bet this operation was in violation of a large number of EPA and OSHA rules. Some of which could invoke criminal penalties and jail time. If the owner is not getting hit with any of this he should consider himself damn lucky.
I can't imagine how they would have reacted if they found the basement lab I had when I was a teenager. I did some of the synthesizing explosives and making my own fireworks, along with some other experiments I am sure the local police would now find very alarming.
Crikey, it is now definitely a "everything not compulsory is forbidden" country.
I think that the idea that this requires no moving parts is something of a red herring. Yes it requires no moving parts to accomplish the phase transition, however there is still the issue of heat removal from the polymer. Some sort of heat exchanger will be needed, presumably convectively cooled by something, and of course there is the issue of how do you prevent the polymer from heating whatever you are trying to cool while the electric field is applied.
I think that there are some practical applications to this, particularly where you would want direct contact between the coolant and whatever is being cooled. The solid coolant may provide advantages in terms of not requiring a downstream separation process.
But this isn't going to replace conventional compressor-evaporator-condenser systems.
TFA is written very poorly and describes a phenomena involving polymers that is already widely known. There are many examples. Here is one you can try using something far less exotic than the polymers mentioned in the article.
For this example, take a rubber band. Stretch it out. Touch the stretched rubber band to your lips. It will feel warm. Hold it in the stretched position for a few seconds to let it cool down to room temperature. Now let the rubber band relax, and once again touch it to your lips. You should now notice that it will feel cool.
The above process uses exactly the same principles described in TFA. Stretching the rubber band causes reduction of disorder by aligning the polymer chains. It also warms the rubber band because of the work applied. As you hold the rubber band in the stretched state it will cool to room temperature releasing some of the energy needed to heat it. This is equivalent to the step where the electrical field is applied.
Now release the rubber band. The polymer chains now revert back to a disordered state, cooling the rubber. Since the rubber band started in a stretched room temperature state the relaxed rubber band will now be below room temperature. this is equivalent to turning off the electric field as mentioned in the article.
Voila. This is a wonderful new refrigeration system that will replace all existing known cooling systems. NOT.
There are so many issues with practical application of this it is not funny. If these issues didn't exist we would have been using rubber band refrigerators for many decades already.
Also, please note that from a thermodynamics point of view this is essentially how a conventional refrigeration system works (albeit fat far more efficiently).
It sound like they have essentially developed a solid refrigerant. That has got to be far less useful than a liquid refrigerant that can me moved around to where it is needed. Not to mention since there is no phase change involved you need a buttload more of this fancy polymer to get the same heat capacity.
These ideas won't work for many reasons. Here are a few.
1. Patents are often granted on improvements to processes that are owned by other companies. The commercial resolution may involve complex cross licensing including other technologies and patents. Your ideas do not account for these agreements.
2. In just about every country in the world you lose the ability to patent an invention if you disclose it to a 3rd party prior to filing. You may put in place a change to US law that makes it impossible for a US company to patent an idea in both the US and the rest of the world unless you get every other country to change its laws. Not going to happen.
3. Many patents are intermediate steps to a final product. Placing a restriction that each patent be practiced in a fixed time frame will discourage R&D into some very complex problems - precisely the kinds of problems that most need solving, and generate the most valuable type of innovations.
4. Some inventions (most famously drugs) have a lengthy regulatory process associated with them. It may take a biotech company 10 years after patent grant to get through the FDA approval process.
5. Selling a patent before it is granted insures the inventor will not get a good price for the invention. A granted patent is worth FAR more than an application.
6. There may be technological or other obstacles to bringing a patent to commercialization completely outside the control of the inventor. In these cases your proposal punishes the inventor for things outside his control.
7. Forcing the inventor to sell a patent before it is granted or even filed raises the possibility that the buyer will just withdraw the application (or not even file) and bury the invention. This is contrary to the whole concept of patents; that is they are a contract between the government and the inventor where the inventor completely discloses the invention and how to practice it in exchange for a grant which allows the inventor to prevent anyone else from practicing the invention.*
*Note: On Slashdot you often see the statement that patents are a state sanctioned monopoly. That is not accurate. A patent does NOT give you the exclusive right to practice an invention. It only grants you the right to prevent OTHERS from practicing the invention. Your right to practice may be blocked by others in a variety of ways - laws, regulations, other patents, etc. This is ANOTHER reason why the concept of requiring that the invention be practiced in order to be granted a patent is just flat out undoable.
The reason golden rice fails is simple - it does not deliver a high enough amount of vitamin A. It takes 300 gm of golden rice to deliver the dietary requirement of vitamin A to a child. Most target children eat less than one half that amount of rice. Then there is the question of bioavailability. For it to be useful their needs to be a certain level of body fat present, something that is often lacking in the target population.
Ultimately there are a lot of OTHER micronutrients missing too. Golden rice doesn't do anything for these. Poverty and overpopulation are the real issues. GE rice isn't going to fix these.
There is a saying - for any problem there is a quick, easy and obvious answer that is wrong. You have clearly found that answer here.
There are MANY companies that conduct research only that have no interest whatsoever in being in the business of making any thing. Most of the research conducted in biotechnology is performed in such companies. And the individual inventor? You have just wiped him out completely. There is NOTHING wrong with a company or individual focusing on inventing things, and then using the licensing of those inventions to support itself.
And of course what of universities? Your idea makes it very difficult for any university to obtain a patent.
And copyrights? To begin with the TFA is making a serious error incorporating copyrights into this discussion. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a copyright is, so much so as to completely discredit the author. With your application of copyright law you have wiped out freelance photographers, artists, individuals writing books with hopes of being discovered, and millions of other individual content creators.
Copyrights owned by defunct companies are something of an inconvenience, but it is not a really large one thanks to the existence of fair use, right of first sale, libraries, etc.
That may actually be a more insightful comment than you know. Georgia has been making progress towards NATO membership, and under article 5 of the NATO treaty this attack by Russia would have to be responded by all of NATO.
Slashdot Mirror
Turning on verbose logging doesn't help you after the process has gone tits up. It's ok if you are debugging, but really if you are debugging you want to use a debugger, not a log.
As far as hardware being cheap etc. as other posters have posited, I'd sure like to know where you work that a Sun E10000 and an EMC Symmetrix are considered cheap.
The fact is that if you are running apps on big iron hardware is not cheap, and the economic effectiveness of an application can well depend on how many transactions it can process in a given period of time.
Yes, it can be tough to figure out what went wrong with a sparse log. But that's the way it is, sorry.
On the other hand I do agree with people who state disk space is usually not a factor. There are ways to manage that issue.
Log the starting conditions so you can reconstruct data. Otherwise don't do much logging because it will hurt application performance, sometimes drastically.
People have been doing hardhacks to HP calcs for decades.
Here is a good place to go for info on HP stuff.
http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/forum.cgi?read=139798#139798
By charging you for it it you do it too often.
I think this direct forwarding concept is pretty cool.
Netflix has the biggest volunteer distributed backup system on the planet. If they were smart they could have planned for this outage and had their customers supply backup disks to other customers who were not getting shipments on time.
I'll admit fat slob, but not mindless.
Eh. The company I was working for until last week crashed into a brick wall and exploded. Basically they ran out of money to pay their employees and did an 80% layoff.
Still haven't been paid for the last few weeks of work. I'm trying to decide if the 20% left are better or worse off. At least I am collecting unemployment. They are working without pay.
What is really shocking about this is many stock analysts view Apple's stock as significantly undervalued.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/88230-replacing-p-e-in-valuing-apple-stock
Of course if Steve Jobs were run over by a truck tomorrow it would dive hard.
It is a fundamental principle that radio receivers are radio transmitters as well.
There are GPS detectors available commercially, however because of the vast array of GPS devices on the market their reliability is not great.
Much better to just wrap your car in tinfoil.
Plenty of people drive after death (usually into a fixed object), and I haven't had a vision test in 40 years. I have a friend who is legally blind and drives. He has a big old Chevy Suburban because it stands up to the frequent minor collisions he has quite well.
The eternal optimist in me feels some will see this as a step too far.
Eventually something so repugnant will happen that all of this will be swept away. The shame of it is that it will take that repugnant event. In the US we went through a lot of this during Vietnam and the civil protests - eventually the FBI and CIA were raked over the coals for excessive surveillance of US citizens.
Now I think we are going through the same cycle again - and the result will be the same.
Urban myth.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html
We have plenty of examples of glass objects that are unchanged from Roman times.
The Library of Congress has an archival project:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1216161
This is going the other way - from digital to 78's. Shellac 78's appear to be the best archival format.
I am not from New Zeland, whatever that is. I'm from Massachusetts. Not Marlboro though. Some members of my family certainly would have been surprised at how politics in that state have evolved.
I did find this article:
http://www.freeradical.co.nz/content/44/sturm.php
Which does seem to tackle the idea of whether New Zealand is libertarian. The conclusion seems to be not so much.
I worked as an R&D chemist for 20+ years, and can understand why the town would be alarmed. A large scale lab (which it sounds like was in place here) should not be run on a hobby basis. The EPA and OSHA have significant regulatory impact on lab operations including safety and disposal requirements (no you can't just pour it down the drain) which sound like were being completely ignored here. Not to mention the fire department would be very concerned if they were called to a place where they did not know what they were going to be exposed to (exactly what happened here).
As part of my job I was involved in training local fire and rescue teams on hazmat response. Fire departments in particular take this sort of thing VERY seriously, and it was no surprise they acted the way they did when they found this home R&D lab.
Aside from the zoning issues I'd bet this operation was in violation of a large number of EPA and OSHA rules. Some of which could invoke criminal penalties and jail time. If the owner is not getting hit with any of this he should consider himself damn lucky.
I can't imagine how they would have reacted if they found the basement lab I had when I was a teenager. I did some of the synthesizing explosives and making my own fireworks, along with some other experiments I am sure the local police would now find very alarming.
Crikey, it is now definitely a "everything not compulsory is forbidden" country.
I think that the idea that this requires no moving parts is something of a red herring. Yes it requires no moving parts to accomplish the phase transition, however there is still the issue of heat removal from the polymer. Some sort of heat exchanger will be needed, presumably convectively cooled by something, and of course there is the issue of how do you prevent the polymer from heating whatever you are trying to cool while the electric field is applied.
I think that there are some practical applications to this, particularly where you would want direct contact between the coolant and whatever is being cooled. The solid coolant may provide advantages in terms of not requiring a downstream separation process.
But this isn't going to replace conventional compressor-evaporator-condenser systems.
TFA is written very poorly and describes a phenomena involving polymers that is already widely known. There are many examples. Here is one you can try using something far less exotic than the polymers mentioned in the article.
For this example, take a rubber band. Stretch it out. Touch the stretched rubber band to your lips. It will feel warm. Hold it in the stretched position for a few seconds to let it cool down to room temperature. Now let the rubber band relax, and once again touch it to your lips. You should now notice that it will feel cool.
The above process uses exactly the same principles described in TFA. Stretching the rubber band causes reduction of disorder by aligning the polymer chains. It also warms the rubber band because of the work applied. As you hold the rubber band in the stretched state it will cool to room temperature releasing some of the energy needed to heat it. This is equivalent to the step where the electrical field is applied.
Now release the rubber band. The polymer chains now revert back to a disordered state, cooling the rubber. Since the rubber band started in a stretched room temperature state the relaxed rubber band will now be below room temperature. this is equivalent to turning off the electric field as mentioned in the article.
Voila. This is a wonderful new refrigeration system that will replace all existing known cooling systems. NOT.
There are so many issues with practical application of this it is not funny. If these issues didn't exist we would have been using rubber band refrigerators for many decades already.
Also, please note that from a thermodynamics point of view this is essentially how a conventional refrigeration system works (albeit fat far more efficiently).
It sound like they have essentially developed a solid refrigerant. That has got to be far less useful than a liquid refrigerant that can me moved around to where it is needed. Not to mention since there is no phase change involved you need a buttload more of this fancy polymer to get the same heat capacity.
Nah. This will never be economically competitive.
These ideas won't work for many reasons. Here are a few.
1. Patents are often granted on improvements to processes that are owned by other companies. The commercial resolution may involve complex cross licensing including other technologies and patents. Your ideas do not account for these agreements.
2. In just about every country in the world you lose the ability to patent an invention if you disclose it to a 3rd party prior to filing. You may put in place a change to US law that makes it impossible for a US company to patent an idea in both the US and the rest of the world unless you get every other country to change its laws. Not going to happen.
3. Many patents are intermediate steps to a final product. Placing a restriction that each patent be practiced in a fixed time frame will discourage R&D into some very complex problems - precisely the kinds of problems that most need solving, and generate the most valuable type of innovations.
4. Some inventions (most famously drugs) have a lengthy regulatory process associated with them. It may take a biotech company 10 years after patent grant to get through the FDA approval process.
5. Selling a patent before it is granted insures the inventor will not get a good price for the invention. A granted patent is worth FAR more than an application.
6. There may be technological or other obstacles to bringing a patent to commercialization completely outside the control of the inventor. In these cases your proposal punishes the inventor for things outside his control.
7. Forcing the inventor to sell a patent before it is granted or even filed raises the possibility that the buyer will just withdraw the application (or not even file) and bury the invention. This is contrary to the whole concept of patents; that is they are a contract between the government and the inventor where the inventor completely discloses the invention and how to practice it in exchange for a grant which allows the inventor to prevent anyone else from practicing the invention.*
*Note: On Slashdot you often see the statement that patents are a state sanctioned monopoly. That is not accurate. A patent does NOT give you the exclusive right to practice an invention. It only grants you the right to prevent OTHERS from practicing the invention. Your right to practice may be blocked by others in a variety of ways - laws, regulations, other patents, etc. This is ANOTHER reason why the concept of requiring that the invention be practiced in order to be granted a patent is just flat out undoable.
The reason golden rice fails is simple - it does not deliver a high enough amount of vitamin A. It takes 300 gm of golden rice to deliver the dietary requirement of vitamin A to a child. Most target children eat less than one half that amount of rice. Then there is the question of bioavailability. For it to be useful their needs to be a certain level of body fat present, something that is often lacking in the target population.
Ultimately there are a lot of OTHER micronutrients missing too. Golden rice doesn't do anything for these. Poverty and overpopulation are the real issues. GE rice isn't going to fix these.
There is a saying - for any problem there is a quick, easy and obvious answer that is wrong. You have clearly found that answer here.
There are MANY companies that conduct research only that have no interest whatsoever in being in the business of making any thing. Most of the research conducted in biotechnology is performed in such companies. And the individual inventor? You have just wiped him out completely. There is NOTHING wrong with a company or individual focusing on inventing things, and then using the licensing of those inventions to support itself.
And of course what of universities? Your idea makes it very difficult for any university to obtain a patent.
And copyrights? To begin with the TFA is making a serious error incorporating copyrights into this discussion. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a copyright is, so much so as to completely discredit the author. With your application of copyright law you have wiped out freelance photographers, artists, individuals writing books with hopes of being discovered, and millions of other individual content creators.
Copyrights owned by defunct companies are something of an inconvenience, but it is not a really large one thanks to the existence of fair use, right of first sale, libraries, etc.
Flat earthers etc. are fine with me so long as they don't all join the school board and force the teaching of their ideas in public schools.
Or slapping the backside of a volleyball player.
That may actually be a more insightful comment than you know. Georgia has been making progress towards NATO membership, and under article 5 of the NATO treaty this attack by Russia would have to be responded by all of NATO.