The head lab instructor in the EE labs at University was know to be a little "off". Having worked with him a bit, I think people were being very generous.
I've heard since that he was a relatively normal person, doing a masters degree in Electrical Engineering. One spring his thesis project (a large box of punch cards) was destroyed when his mother's basement was flooded.
He's still single, living with his mother -- 20 years after I left university.
Small scale personal works. Large scale, anonymous almost always fails.
Paternalistic policies create dependence. We in the west can help, but we can't solve much of anything.
for food aid: Famine aid is needed for short term survival of some people. All too often it ends up in the wrong places and hurts local farmers. Real famines are usually the result of wars, not drought.
For overall aid policies: Obama was in Kenya in 2006. Every politician wanted to be seen with him. He gave a speech telling africa to get their own house in order and not to think that the US or anyone else would bail them out. African problems require african solutions. Politicians were pissed off. They thought they were befriending someone powerful who would fill their pockets with more aid money.
Used computers are only useful if there is someone to go with them, and that is only temporary. New computers are available in Nairobi for about the same price as in the west. They all come from China anyway. Just make sure you have a UPS to go with it! Sustainability requires a generations worth of support and training. It is just starting to show up in Kenya. Getting technology training to the masses will still take a long time.
The outer Calandria is a Steel Vessel with a low pressure rating -- rupture disks that blow at 35 kPa or so. It is about 10 meters in diameter. It is full of heavily tritiated heavy water, so it is well sealed for personnel safety. The Calandria is on its side, so fuel is loaded from one side, and pushed out the other.
There are 380 (or so, depending on model) pressure tubes (6" diameter?) made of Zirconium/Niobium Alloy that will withstand the 13 MPa and contain 12 (again, or so) fuel bundles that can be changed out online.
A straight pressure tube is much easier to make, but the alloys are a pain to work with, and the QA/QC for Nuclear class 1 materials are very rigorous./in Candu land
I'm wondering how you can get true colour from lasers. One of the defining characteristics of lasers is that they emit only a single wavelength. Even if you have true RGB lasers, will it be possible to truly get a yellow from G and B?
The problem isn't backup generators, the problem is seismically qualified backup generators. I gather that they are already on site, but it will take a bit of time to get them installed properly. It was planned to have them in by January, but the CNSC stepped in and said they couldn't restart without them.
CNSC is sticking to ever stiffening safety requirements. They are fulfilling their mandate.
I was a little concerned when I heard the first partial news on it. Now it seems that the govt was just allowing things to keep working as they were for a short period of time while AECL proceeds with the required work.
An extra month or two without a seismically qualified backup doesn't seem to be that much of an added risk to me./Canadian Nuclear engineer
Another convenient feature: a built-in air compressor can be plugged in to refill the tanks within minutes.
Imagine that. Power up a compressor for just a few minutes to keep going on a full tank! Presumably a full tank lasts more than a few minutes of propulsion.
Wow, can we go one step further and power the compressor from the cigarette lighter? I've got one of those compressors -- will only go up to 250psi, but if you ran it continuously, you should be able to keep the car going forever!!
That's the whole point. From an analog bandwidth standpoint, limited by the capacitance/inductance of the twisted pair cable (probably central office filtering as well) the 1200 bps was not a bad number. There were innovative ways to deal with it, e.g. use 4 "symbols" rather than 2 "states" and you can double your throughput.
It is really about "thinking outside the box" that allowed these changes in the first place. It was 10 years later that DSL came in widespread use.
I believe the assumption at fault was "using a 2-tone audio modem through the standard phone system". The university had these incredibly high speed modems (9600 baud) running through dedicated lines at the time. That was the "internet" of the time.
I did that last night. Put an old laptop HD into a more recent laptop. Ubuntu 6.06 booted up minus graphics.
dpg-reconfigure xserver.xorg or something readily memorizable fixed that for me. Now have to update to 7.1.
I haven't tried to boot XP off the drive yet. Something tells me I'm into update hell on it. Does XP rewrite the boot sector on a repair? I forget how to fix the boot for GRUB after windows has toasted the bootsector.
And we learned, in Electrical Engineering, that the theoretical maximum bandwidth for a phone line was 2400 bps.
Using basic bandwidth calcs for voice (500 to 4000hz?) and imposing a modulated signal inside that, the distortion created by the physical arrangement of the wires would cause the limit.
I'm glad that some people aren't scared off by theoretical physical limits.
(That was in about 1986, A Hayes 1200 baud modem was an amazing piece of equipment and cost about $700)
I worked with a bunch of missionaries who routinely sent out email newsletters to hundreds. Our server was blocked alternately by AOL and hotmail, along with a few others. It was locked down, but legit users were sending out "mass" mailings to people who had requested them.
Between being blocked and email going to hotmail junk boxes, we gave up on complaints.
We got on a few other blacklists from time to time, but it usually had to do with other users in the IP block our ISP had us on.
Cell phone companies in Canada annoy the hell out of me. Just spent 2 years in Kenya -- backwards African country -- where:
-You can buy an activated GSM phone with SIM card for $35. -Air time is prepaid by almost everyone, costs about CDN 25c/min voice to anywhere in the country, 8c/SMS, free to receive calls and SMS -All phones are unlocked -International calls to North America are about 50c/min -New SIM card is about $3. -GPRS data access 30c/MB -Airtime scratch cards can be bought anywhere in values between about $1 and $15.
And to top it all: The two main mobile companies are bringing in some of the largest profits for Kenyan corporations and are being pushed to reduce costs.
Brought a nice phone back with me (cheaper at the dealer there than used on ebay) to connect up with Rogers. $35 activation fee $25 SIM card $10 Airtime
$75 later, my phone was working on prepaid, but: can't send SMS (config somewhere I suppose) -- doesn't really matter as you can't do international SMS. $10/month minimum. GPRS data is expensive! Coverage isn't the greatest.
Then again, mobile there is almost a necessity. Landlines are not too common and the average person may be able to save up for a mobile, but doesn't have a chance of getting a landline.
"Slow" reentry is not possible. Orbital mechanics dictates that a lower orbit will result in a higher speed. In orbit, if you slow down, you rise to a higher orbit. You speed up to go to a lower orbit. The two go hand in hand until to get to atmospheric drag.
To do a "slow" reentry you would have to have another solid booster to push you downwards as you slowed down. Not feasible.
I call BS on this one. While I'm sure the $$ figures are higher in the west, it affects the rich who want something done that isn't quite above board. In Kenya the common people have to pay bribes to get the simplest government work done. Drivers expect to pay bribes at every police check (every 5km or so). You pay bribes to pass a driving test, to get a title deed. You name it, it costs money "under the table".
There are three ways to get things done in Kenya, have a friend in the right place, pay some money under the table, or wait -- and wait and wait.
Nairobi is the only place that they could reasonably put this. With a population of about 3 million (10% of the country) and the place to go for anyone who has any education.
Power only goes out once or twice a day, but every computer sold in the country comes with a UPS, so it isn't that big a deal. Any power-dependant business has it's own backup generator.
Of course we just had a 48 hour internet outage because a microwave link belonging to the telephone company went down for some unknown reason.
Kenya is in the middle of a huge IT boom. The fibre sure would be nice. Our community has about 300 computers connected via a 64kb/s ISDN microwave link and a 768kb/s satelite downlink. For the privelege of half a typical DSL line, we pay about $3200/month.
They actually are putting down a fibre cable about 5km from here. That would simplify things dramatically -- if there were any access points to it!
In Kenya policy is decided by the highest bidder. Everyone else ignores it. You can't possibly follow all the laws here, so you pick and choose those that are most likely to be enforced.
Apart from that your choice is to bribe inspectors to ignore violations, or bribe lawmakers to change them.
Actually, the skew is more based on AIDS. There is a huge mortality of the 20-30 year old group due to AIDS. Yes, infant/child mortality is higher than average, but the 10-15 year drop in life expectancy is due almost entirely to AIDS.
It is a different world here. Death is accepted a part of life. In the west, it seems to be something that is to be prevented at all cost.
Water is much better at turning corners than Gamma rays.
As for water getting into things: In our nuclear plant we went to great lengths to prevent water from getting into junction boxes following an accident and douse (millions of litres of water dumped into containment to cool and lower pressure).
We sealed all conduits coming into the box with RTV, ensured that seals on the door were in good condition -- then drilled a hole in the lowest point in the box.
Water will get in. You can often shield gamma rays using a wall or curtain between people and the gamma source.
Go ahead and set up one more proxy. We have dozens blocked, and if another one starts getting used we will block it as well. We have a responsibility to these kids to provide a safe environment, and we also have to block things that use too much bandwidth.
If the school is actually monitoring their filter usage, you might just give kids a day or two to get around the filter. I don't think it is really a question of morals as much as enforcement.
I must say though, that mathcookbook.com evaded me for weeks. I figured that it had some useful math stuff on it. Nope.
I live in Kenya. Our community has dial-up internet and the school is all networked. People move files from home to work and vice versa all the time.
The USB key has replaced the floppy. Everyone has one. You download something on the network, then carry it home on the USB drive. In practical terms, email is limited to about 300k. A Gig USB drive does wonders.
I find it pretty hard to get worked up about. It doesn't sound like it is one person in a basement deciding what Canadians can and can't look at, but rather an attempt to keep world-wide recognized child exploitation off the net.
The submitters reaction sounds very American. We Canadians don't tend to get so worked up about individual freedoms when the common good is at stake.
I run a filter at the school I work at. I can understand the need to block content for the kids who are our responsibility. Legal issues fall under the government. Why not allow them to block obviously illegal material?
Slashdot Mirror
The head lab instructor in the EE labs at University was know to be a little "off". Having worked with him a bit, I think people were being very generous.
I've heard since that he was a relatively normal person, doing a masters degree in Electrical Engineering. One spring his thesis project (a large box of punch cards) was destroyed when his mother's basement was flooded.
He's still single, living with his mother -- 20 years after I left university.
yep, you've got it.
Small scale personal works. Large scale, anonymous almost always fails.
Paternalistic policies create dependence. We in the west can help, but we can't solve much of anything.
for food aid: Famine aid is needed for short term survival of some people. All too often it ends up in the wrong places and hurts local farmers. Real famines are usually the result of wars, not drought.
For overall aid policies: Obama was in Kenya in 2006. Every politician wanted to be seen with him. He gave a speech telling africa to get their own house in order and not to think that the US or anyone else would bail them out. African problems require african solutions. Politicians were pissed off. They thought they were befriending someone powerful who would fill their pockets with more aid money.
Used computers are only useful if there is someone to go with them, and that is only temporary. New computers are available in Nairobi for about the same price as in the west. They all come from China anyway. Just make sure you have a UPS to go with it! Sustainability requires a generations worth of support and training. It is just starting to show up in Kenya. Getting technology training to the masses will still take a long time.
Random thoughts with african experience....
The outer Calandria is a Steel Vessel with a low pressure rating -- rupture disks that blow at 35 kPa or so. It is about 10 meters in diameter. It is full of heavily tritiated heavy water, so it is well sealed for personnel safety. The Calandria is on its side, so fuel is loaded from one side, and pushed out the other.
/in Candu land
There are 380 (or so, depending on model) pressure tubes (6" diameter?) made of Zirconium/Niobium Alloy that will withstand the 13 MPa and contain 12 (again, or so) fuel bundles that can be changed out online.
A straight pressure tube is much easier to make, but the alloys are a pain to work with, and the QA/QC for Nuclear class 1 materials are very rigorous.
The great thing about being Canadian is that we can understand both the yanks and brits -- and have our choice as to which terminology to use.
Center happens to be the usual choice here.
Good to see my university on here, though I took EE.
I'm wondering how you can get true colour from lasers. One of the defining characteristics of lasers is that they emit only a single wavelength. Even if you have true RGB lasers, will it be possible to truly get a yellow from G and B?
The problem isn't backup generators, the problem is seismically qualified backup generators. I gather that they are already on site, but it will take a bit of time to get them installed properly. It was planned to have them in by January, but the CNSC stepped in and said they couldn't restart without them.
/Canadian Nuclear engineer
CNSC is sticking to ever stiffening safety requirements. They are fulfilling their mandate.
I was a little concerned when I heard the first partial news on it. Now it seems that the govt was just allowing things to keep working as they were for a short period of time while AECL proceeds with the required work.
An extra month or two without a seismically qualified backup doesn't seem to be that much of an added risk to me.
My 9yo son wants mindstorms. Now that is an expandable toy to go along with his large bin full of lego.
Imagine that. Power up a compressor for just a few minutes to keep going on a full tank! Presumably a full tank lasts more than a few minutes of propulsion.
Wow, can we go one step further and power the compressor from the cigarette lighter? I've got one of those compressors -- will only go up to 250psi, but if you ran it continuously, you should be able to keep the car going forever!!
/time to get back to real world engineering.
That's the whole point. From an analog bandwidth standpoint, limited by the capacitance/inductance of the twisted pair cable (probably central office filtering as well) the 1200 bps was not a bad number. There were innovative ways to deal with it, e.g. use 4 "symbols" rather than 2 "states" and you can double your throughput.
It is really about "thinking outside the box" that allowed these changes in the first place. It was 10 years later that DSL came in widespread use.
I believe the assumption at fault was "using a 2-tone audio modem through the standard phone system". The university had these incredibly high speed modems (9600 baud) running through dedicated lines at the time. That was the "internet" of the time.
I did that last night. Put an old laptop HD into a more recent laptop. Ubuntu 6.06 booted up minus graphics.
dpg-reconfigure xserver.xorg or something readily memorizable fixed that for me. Now have to update to 7.1.
I haven't tried to boot XP off the drive yet. Something tells me I'm into update hell on it. Does XP rewrite the boot sector on a repair? I forget how to fix the boot for GRUB after windows has toasted the bootsector.
And we learned, in Electrical Engineering, that the theoretical maximum bandwidth for a phone line was 2400 bps.
Using basic bandwidth calcs for voice (500 to 4000hz?) and imposing a modulated signal inside that, the distortion created by the physical arrangement of the wires would cause the limit.
I'm glad that some people aren't scared off by theoretical physical limits.
(That was in about 1986, A Hayes 1200 baud modem was an amazing piece of equipment and cost about $700)
You heard about the Chinese brothers who built an airplane?
Two Wongs made a Wright.
I worked with a bunch of missionaries who routinely sent out email newsletters to hundreds. Our server was blocked alternately by AOL and hotmail, along with a few others. It was locked down, but legit users were sending out "mass" mailings to people who had requested them.
Between being blocked and email going to hotmail junk boxes, we gave up on complaints.
We got on a few other blacklists from time to time, but it usually had to do with other users in the IP block our ISP had us on.
Wouldn't using bcc fix this issue?
Cell phone companies in Canada annoy the hell out of me. Just spent 2 years in Kenya -- backwards African country -- where:
-You can buy an activated GSM phone with SIM card for $35.
-Air time is prepaid by almost everyone, costs about CDN 25c/min voice to anywhere in the country, 8c/SMS, free to receive calls and SMS
-All phones are unlocked
-International calls to North America are about 50c/min
-New SIM card is about $3.
-GPRS data access 30c/MB
-Airtime scratch cards can be bought anywhere in values between about $1 and $15.
And to top it all: The two main mobile companies are bringing in some of the largest profits for Kenyan corporations and are being pushed to reduce costs.
Brought a nice phone back with me (cheaper at the dealer there than used on ebay) to connect up with Rogers.
$35 activation fee
$25 SIM card
$10 Airtime
$75 later, my phone was working on prepaid, but: can't send SMS (config somewhere I suppose) -- doesn't really matter as you can't do international SMS. $10/month minimum. GPRS data is expensive! Coverage isn't the greatest.
Then again, mobile there is almost a necessity. Landlines are not too common and the average person may be able to save up for a mobile, but doesn't have a chance of getting a landline.
Hang it under a balloon to get it to altitude. You'd lose a bit of altitude when it launched at zero forward speed though...
"Slow" reentry is not possible. Orbital mechanics dictates that a lower orbit will result in a higher speed. In orbit, if you slow down, you rise to a higher orbit. You speed up to go to a lower orbit. The two go hand in hand until to get to atmospheric drag.
To do a "slow" reentry you would have to have another solid booster to push you downwards as you slowed down. Not feasible.
I call BS on this one. While I'm sure the $$ figures are higher in the west, it affects the rich who want something done that isn't quite above board. In Kenya the common people have to pay bribes to get the simplest government work done. Drivers expect to pay bribes at every police check (every 5km or so). You pay bribes to pass a driving test, to get a title deed. You name it, it costs money "under the table".
There are three ways to get things done in Kenya, have a friend in the right place, pay some money under the table, or wait -- and wait and wait.
Nairobi is the only place that they could reasonably put this. With a population of about 3 million (10% of the country) and the place to go for anyone who has any education.
Power only goes out once or twice a day, but every computer sold in the country comes with a UPS, so it isn't that big a deal. Any power-dependant business has it's own backup generator.
Of course we just had a 48 hour internet outage because a microwave link belonging to the telephone company went down for some unknown reason.
I know "*THE* Linux expert in Kenya. They will need to import some talent.
Kenya is in the middle of a huge IT boom. The fibre sure would be nice. Our community has about 300 computers connected via a 64kb/s ISDN microwave link and a 768kb/s satelite downlink. For the privelege of half a typical DSL line, we pay about $3200/month.
They actually are putting down a fibre cable about 5km from here. That would simplify things dramatically -- if there were any access points to it!
In Kenya policy is decided by the highest bidder. Everyone else ignores it. You can't possibly follow all the laws here, so you pick and choose those that are most likely to be enforced.
Apart from that your choice is to bribe inspectors to ignore violations, or bribe lawmakers to change them.
Actually, the skew is more based on AIDS. There is a huge mortality of the 20-30 year old group due to AIDS. Yes, infant/child mortality is higher than average, but the 10-15 year drop in life expectancy is due almost entirely to AIDS.
It is a different world here. Death is accepted a part of life. In the west, it seems to be something that is to be prevented at all cost.
Water is much better at turning corners than Gamma rays.
As for water getting into things: In our nuclear plant we went to great lengths to prevent water from getting into junction boxes following an accident and douse (millions of litres of water dumped into containment to cool and lower pressure).
We sealed all conduits coming into the box with RTV, ensured that seals on the door were in good condition -- then drilled a hole in the lowest point in the box.
Water will get in. You can often shield gamma rays using a wall or curtain between people and the gamma source.
Go ahead and set up one more proxy. We have dozens blocked, and if another one starts getting used we will block it as well. We have a responsibility to these kids to provide a safe environment, and we also have to block things that use too much bandwidth.
If the school is actually monitoring their filter usage, you might just give kids a day or two to get around the filter. I don't think it is really a question of morals as much as enforcement.
I must say though, that mathcookbook.com evaded me for weeks. I figured that it had some useful math stuff on it. Nope.
I live in Kenya. Our community has dial-up internet and the school is all networked. People move files from home to work and vice versa all the time.
The USB key has replaced the floppy. Everyone has one. You download something on the network, then carry it home on the USB drive. In practical terms, email is limited to about 300k. A Gig USB drive does wonders.
Michael
I find it pretty hard to get worked up about. It doesn't sound like it is one person in a basement deciding what Canadians can and can't look at, but rather an attempt to keep world-wide recognized child exploitation off the net.
The submitters reaction sounds very American. We Canadians don't tend to get so worked up about individual freedoms when the common good is at stake.
I run a filter at the school I work at. I can understand the need to block content for the kids who are our responsibility. Legal issues fall under the government. Why not allow them to block obviously illegal material?