The VIRGINIA class submarines are examples of completely modern, state-of-the-art systems and are leading the way in the implimentation of modern commercial-off-the-shelf technology. Designed for operations in the "littoral" regions of the ocean these boats are designed for the kind of operations we can envision in the future rather than the blue-water cold-war requirements of the past.
We are desperate for submarines - no carrier task force leaves without a pair to cover them - and the CNO has said that the failure of a single fast attack submarine to deploy on schedule will have a substantial impact on the national security because there is no backup for the missions that boat would be required to support.
So please, get your facts at least remotely correct.
And you could buy a source license for the OS as well so you could modify the OS if you had sufficient skill.
Much of VMS was written in BLISS-32 whose back-end produced fantastic code - sure it was code no human being would have written - but damn good code just the same.
Being able to pull out the microfiche and check out the BLISS source was often useful when learning to program deep into the OS.
Not to mention the DECUS meetings where you could talk to the developers. I can remember the meeting in LA when at a small session DEC and the guys from MIT revealed the 782 - assymmetric multi-processing. It was exciting stuff. DEC had some really good engineers.
Remember - the VAX was about the ultimate CISC processor. Memory was scarce in those days - having 64MB of RAM was a big deal! The processor was very efficient in the use of memory.
Well I have a list of working authors you might want to try.
Lucius Shepard
Life During Wartime
Green Eyes
Kim Stanley Robinson
Pacific Edge
Red Mars
Icehenge
The Years of Rice and Salt
Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon
Lew Shiner
Deserted Cities of the Heart
Vernor Vinge
A Fire Upon the Deep
A Deepness in the Sky
David Brin
The Uplift series are fun
David Gerrold
Voyage of the Star Wolf
Starhung
War Against the Chtorr series are fun esp if you like RAH
Iain Banks
The Culture novels
Connie Willis
To Say Nothing About the Dog (humor/timetravel)
There were more than enough votes for Gene Wolf who is a real writer's writer, incredibly talented. Sane? I'm not sure, but talented. And Gregory Benford's Galactic Center novels are excellent.
Is this a good use for technology? Seems like a vast amount over over-kill to replace something that's very straightforward and which has worked reliably for years.
Think of the backups required to make this system work. Power backups for the magnets, for their cooling system, probably mooring lines in case the magnets croak.
What have we gained really? Put some folks out of work.
This seems like a product that fixes what ain't broke.
I note that the languages he mentions as the ones in which me most often works are substantially scripting languages and so their deep roots into the OS are to be expected.
This is not what I thought I would find before I read the article. I thought I would be reading about a Smalltalk environment which really IS an OS abstracted on top of an OS. Or a Java IDE perhaps
I would say that old languages like FORTRAN, PL/1, C are all quite separate from the OS that supports them. Indeed C was abstracted by design with its run-time libraries holding the only knowledge about the environment in which they work.
More modern languages are seeming to migrate closer to the OS that holds them. But I would argue this is not a Good Thing because it binds a language too close to a given OS designer's viewpoint of what is important and how to look at the mechanisms under which data are displayed.
For the continued health of human-interface design, and of operating system design, I would hope that languages continue to hold the environment at bay and deal with abstractions, letting interface libraries or processes take care of display and human interaction.
I have to say that the Honor Harrington series has outlived the ability of its author who has fallen into the Tom Clancy trap and now thinks himself as a master political analyst.
Unfortunately, when anyone with a point of view different that the military's must be a rotten coward and intellectual bigot then story becomes nothing more than melodrama with endless pages of exposition.
The best Honor stories were the first three or maybe four. Fortunately you can read them on the CD.
Me, I'll stay with Patrick O'Brian whose Aubry and Maturin are more alien to our 21st century sensibilities than anyone in Weber's work. If you want works that rich and that spark a sense of wonder, then look back not forward.
First it's a book written for and aimed at children and it resonates with themes that are important for children. It's incredibly creative so the milieu is as important as the characters. In that way it's much like LOTR or Dune which are also novels of Milieu.
It's the classic English boarding-school story (why on earth parents would send their children away to be raised by a peer group is a mystery to me) with magic tossed in to give Harry something to discover.
As a parent of grown children, all of whom have read the novels, I find much to like. If my kids had been of reading-to age we'd have read all of them. (One summer I read aloud the entire Lord of the Rings to them - a great hit)
I find the parent figures of Dumbledore and Minerva quite appealing - they give the kids quite a room to grow and quite a bit of compassion - providing an adult view for Harry when he has to understand the consequences of the horrendous events he has been involved with.
I liked this second film much better than the first. It didn't seem as long as its running time.
Re:Perfect for cable operations
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 1
Boy, you've been reading "Cryptonomicon" way too much and not thinking about the problems involved in cable tapping either. Sure you can get to where the cable IS, doing something with the cable itself is a very different kettle of fish.
Clearly you are forgetting the Apollo I fire which resulted from a spark in a pure O2 atmosphere. The spark was caused by a frayed wire. That's a hardware problem for sure.
I wonder why people can't get even the VAGUE details right.
The modifications to the JIMMY CARTER are being done in new-construction, a modification to SEA WOLF design. It's an expensive change, sure. But it's not a retrofit. What PARCHE got was a retrofit.
It wasn't anyway if the pixels chosen were too small. You can often see this for yourself by blinking rapidly while watching a pixelated face. You be able to see added detail - often enough to recognize a face. I notice that more recent use of pixelation uses fall fewer pixels which make this technique ineffective.
Is that the highly ambiguous one about the guy headed to the wedding?
If so it's my favorite ad. Also missing is the sepia tinted ad with man and woman in separate cars who appear to be having a "moment" but then the rubber octopus hits the windshield.
The NASA chief spoke to the Naval Submarine League last month. His talk focused on the difficulty for getting anywhere in the solar system in a reasonable time. A scientist who wants to study Pluto, for example, would effectively devote an entire life-time to the project because of the length of time a probe would take to get there.
No one, he pointed out, has been in space long enough to know that a human would function after being weightless on the trip to and/or from Mars. It just takes too long - and the effects of living in micro-gravity aren't well understood.
What was proposed was a look at nuclear propulsion in space. The best case would be a reactor launched into space BEFORE it had ever achieve criticality. At that point a horrendous event at launch would not spread highly radioactive substances all over the place. (For those who don't have a clue you can walk up to the reactor core of a nuclear submarine before it's installed with no danger at all - I've done it.)
A nuclear engine in space would give us a substantial power boost than traditional chemical rockets.
How such a beastie would work, precisely, isn't clear but it's certain that NASA is looking into it.
With such an engine a trip to Mars could be accomplished much faster. The engine could be, presumably, be reused for other trips, so you could build an automated tug that might be able to take probes to distant planets and return. After you're done just point that puppy into the Oort Cloud - it won't ever have to come back to Earth.
The Jimmy Carter is the designated replacement for the USS PARCHE SSN-683 which operates out of SUBDEVRON FIVE.
She is multi-mission, the last of her very expensive (and small) class (SEAWOLF and CONNECTICUT being the other two, and altogether reasonable to be used as PARCHE was used.
Whatever that might be. VERY VERY few people really know which is a good thing.
I doubt if I have read anything more ludicrous than this.
First nomenclature: it's a nuclear reactor, not a pile. The whole damn thing is filled with pressurized water all the time. High angles of attack won't uncover the core. They might do bad things on the secondary side, though. (That's where the steam to run the propulsion plant is, on the secondary side.)
Another post regarding things nuclear, and submarines, that are unconnected with reality. I can see why it was posted anonymously.
You have some nomenclature right but you appear to be clueless about what a core melt-down is all about really.
A core melt-down typically happens as the end result of a reactor accident in which the ability to cool the core has been lost. With no way to discharge heat the temperature of the core rises. By this time moderation has been totally lost and the nuclear reaction has ended. Decay of fission fragments, however, has not and that decay can add heat of about 5% of full power operation after criticality has been lost.
So the temperature rises and the core distorts, the materials that support the fuel rods melt. Still no nuclear reactions happening but heat transfer is even worse now. TMI reached the point where core geometry was changed as a result of the accident. With no moderator you won't achieve criticality and the geometry of a puddle of fuel is definately NOT that to easily create a critical reaction.
If cooling is not achieved the hot fuel will eventually melt its surrounds and puddle at the bottom of the reactor vessel making it even harder to cool, and it will begin to melt the vessel and head downwards toward the concrete and steel of the supporting structures. It will continue to do this until something either cools it and carries away the heat or it melts entirely through all of it and heads down through the earth. Hence the "China Syndrome" name.
To my knowledge there as been no accident which did this. Chernobyl caught fire (worse even) and fission fragments were lifted into the environment.
One last note: just pushing two pieces of uranium together to make a critica mass won't necessarily make an explosion although the neutron burst would probably be ugly, if rather short. It takes more than that to make things go BOOM.
The chernobyl reactors were graphite MODERATED not graphite cooled. The coolant is the working fluid that transfers the heat energy out of the core. The coolant in Chernobyl was water flowing through tubes that penetrated the graphite.
The moderator is the mechanism by which the fast neutrons born from fission are slowed down to thermal equilibrium where they are much more likely to create a fission when they encounter the appropriate nucleus, say U238 or U235.
It seems that there were operating modes in which the alpha-T of the soviet reactors could be positive. (shudder) which means that the hotter the plant got the higher the reactor power went which made it hotter...positive feedback is a BAD thing in reactions that increase power exponentially.
Of course it appears that the operators had intentionally disabled reactor protection equipment before beginning the evolution that lead to the disaster.
This says some UGLY things about their views for maintaining reactor safety and makes clear that very detailed oversight is required to make sure that all power plant operators take the appropriate precautions.
Actually, as I recall from when I was involved with stuff like this, one of the "maximum credible accidents" for which a reactor containment vessel was designed involved a direct hit by the largest aircraft available at the time.
And that's the containment vessel, not the reactor vessel or other equipment. Which provides another layer of damage control.
Large reactors are more difficult to seriously damage than you might think.
A couple folks have already observed that the casting of child actors would be difficult. I suggest it's impossible. Most of Ender's Game happens with VERY young children - preturnaturally brilliant kids. In fact the kids are written like adults, or at least adolescents, which is one of downsides of the novels. Now Scott will defend his characterization of children to the death but having raised three I say he seriously over-wrote them.
The average CD price is about $14. There are many film DVDs that are selling in this price range. Which price reflects more accurately the underlying value of the material recorded?
I don't for a moment believe that the cost to make an album is approximately the same as the cost of a major motion picture. Not even the same order of magnitude! Or two! If most films are in the $10-15 million range...does it really cost $1 million to produce a CD?
Slashdot Mirror
Who did your research for you?
The VIRGINIA class submarines are examples of completely modern, state-of-the-art systems and are leading the way in the implimentation of modern commercial-off-the-shelf technology. Designed for operations in the "littoral" regions of the ocean these boats are designed for the kind of operations we can envision in the future rather than the blue-water cold-war requirements of the past.
We are desperate for submarines - no carrier task force leaves without a pair to cover them - and the CNO has said that the failure of a single fast attack submarine to deploy on schedule will have a substantial impact on the national security because there is no backup for the missions that boat would be required to support.
So please, get your facts at least remotely correct.
And you could buy a source license for the OS as well so you could modify the OS if you had sufficient skill.
Much of VMS was written in BLISS-32 whose back-end produced fantastic code - sure it was code no human being would have written - but damn good code just the same.
Being able to pull out the microfiche and check out the BLISS source was often useful when learning to program deep into the OS.
Not to mention the DECUS meetings where you could talk to the developers. I can remember the meeting in LA when at a small session DEC and the guys from MIT revealed the 782 - assymmetric multi-processing. It was exciting stuff. DEC had some really good engineers.
Remember - the VAX was about the ultimate CISC processor. Memory was scarce in those days - having 64MB of RAM was a big deal! The processor was very efficient in the use of memory.
The Hike hercules was an air defense weapon which was typically deployed in a ring around large urban areas.
I don't remember that they used nuclear warheads and they certainly were not ICBMs.
Good to see more options out there in general. But I wonder if this means we might see an OS X version from Apple.
Well I have a list of working authors you might want to try.
Lucius Shepard
Life During Wartime
Green Eyes
Kim Stanley Robinson
Pacific Edge
Red Mars
Icehenge
The Years of Rice and Salt
Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon
Lew Shiner
Deserted Cities of the Heart
Vernor Vinge
A Fire Upon the Deep
A Deepness in the Sky
David Brin
The Uplift series are fun
David Gerrold
Voyage of the Star Wolf
Starhung
War Against the Chtorr series are fun esp if you like RAH
Iain Banks
The Culture novels
Connie Willis
To Say Nothing About the Dog (humor/timetravel)
There were more than enough votes for Gene Wolf who is a real writer's writer, incredibly talented. Sane? I'm not sure, but talented. And Gregory Benford's Galactic Center novels are excellent.
Is this a good use for technology? Seems like a vast amount over over-kill to replace something that's very straightforward and which has worked reliably for years.
Think of the backups required to make this system work. Power backups for the magnets, for their cooling system, probably mooring lines in case the magnets croak.
What have we gained really? Put some folks out of work.
This seems like a product that fixes what ain't broke.
I note that the languages he mentions as the ones in which me most often works are substantially scripting languages and so their deep roots into the OS are to be expected.
This is not what I thought I would find before I read the article. I thought I would be reading about a Smalltalk environment which really IS an OS abstracted on top of an OS. Or a Java IDE perhaps
I would say that old languages like FORTRAN, PL/1, C are all quite separate from the OS that supports them. Indeed C was abstracted by design with its run-time libraries holding the only knowledge about the environment in which they work.
More modern languages are seeming to migrate closer to the OS that holds them. But I would argue this is not a Good Thing because it binds a language too close to a given OS designer's viewpoint of what is important and how to look at the mechanisms under which data are displayed.
For the continued health of human-interface design, and of operating system design, I would hope that languages continue to hold the environment at bay and deal with abstractions, letting interface libraries or processes take care of display and human interaction.
I have to say that the Honor Harrington series has outlived the ability of its author who has fallen into the Tom Clancy trap and now thinks himself as a master political analyst.
Unfortunately, when anyone with a point of view different that the military's must be a rotten coward and intellectual bigot then story becomes nothing more than melodrama with endless pages of exposition.
The best Honor stories were the first three or maybe four. Fortunately you can read them on the CD.
Me, I'll stay with Patrick O'Brian whose Aubry and Maturin are more alien to our 21st century sensibilities than anyone in Weber's work. If you want works that rich and that spark a sense of wonder, then look back not forward.
First it's a book written for and aimed at children and it resonates with themes that are important for children. It's incredibly creative so the milieu is as important as the characters. In that way it's much like LOTR or Dune which are also novels of Milieu.
It's the classic English boarding-school story (why on earth parents would send their children away to be raised by a peer group is a mystery to me) with magic tossed in to give Harry something to discover.
As a parent of grown children, all of whom have read the novels, I find much to like. If my kids had been of reading-to age we'd have read all of them. (One summer I read aloud the entire Lord of the Rings to them - a great hit)
I find the parent figures of Dumbledore and Minerva quite appealing - they give the kids quite a room to grow and quite a bit of compassion - providing an adult view for Harry when he has to understand the consequences of the horrendous events he has been involved with.
I liked this second film much better than the first. It didn't seem as long as its running time.
Boy, you've been reading "Cryptonomicon" way too much and not thinking about the problems involved in cable tapping either. Sure you can get to where the cable IS, doing something with the cable itself is a very different kettle of fish.
I thought there were serious problems getting current SlashCode to run under OS X. Isn't this the case?
Not ONE hardware problem...ever?
Clearly you are forgetting the Apollo I fire which resulted from a spark in a pure O2 atmosphere. The spark was caused by a frayed wire. That's a hardware problem for sure.
I just installed a DirecTiVo system, replacing my cable TV system. I'm move the current TiVo box to my vacation home.
TiVo is so elegant: easy to use - in fact trivial. With the satellite system it's a no-brainer natural.
I wnt it for radio also.
I wonder why people can't get even the VAGUE details right.
The modifications to the JIMMY CARTER are being done in new-construction, a modification to SEA WOLF design. It's an expensive change, sure. But it's not a retrofit. What PARCHE got was a retrofit.
It wasn't anyway if the pixels chosen were too small. You can often see this for yourself by blinking rapidly while watching a pixelated face. You be able to see added detail - often enough to recognize a face. I notice that more recent use of pixelation uses fall fewer pixels which make this technique ineffective.
Is that the highly ambiguous one about the guy headed to the wedding?
If so it's my favorite ad. Also missing is the sepia tinted ad with man and woman in separate cars who appear to be having a "moment" but then the rubber octopus hits the windshield.
Another just GREAT ad.
Story, mood, ambiguity, things to think about.
The NASA chief spoke to the Naval Submarine League last month. His talk focused on the difficulty for getting anywhere in the solar system in a reasonable time. A scientist who wants to study Pluto, for example, would effectively devote an entire life-time to the project because of the length of time a probe would take to get there.
No one, he pointed out, has been in space long enough to know that a human would function after being weightless on the trip to and/or from Mars. It just takes too long - and the effects of living in micro-gravity aren't well understood.
What was proposed was a look at nuclear propulsion in space. The best case would be a reactor launched into space BEFORE it had ever achieve criticality. At that point a horrendous event at launch would not spread highly radioactive substances all over the place. (For those who don't have a clue you can walk up to the reactor core of a nuclear submarine before it's installed with no danger at all - I've done it.)
A nuclear engine in space would give us a substantial power boost than traditional chemical rockets.
How such a beastie would work, precisely, isn't clear but it's certain that NASA is looking into it.
With such an engine a trip to Mars could be accomplished much faster. The engine could be, presumably, be reused for other trips, so you could build an automated tug that might be able to take probes to distant planets and return. After you're done just point that puppy into the Oort Cloud - it won't ever have to come back to Earth.
The Jimmy Carter is the designated replacement for the USS PARCHE SSN-683 which operates out of SUBDEVRON FIVE.
She is multi-mission, the last of her very expensive (and small) class (SEAWOLF and CONNECTICUT being the other two, and altogether reasonable to be used as PARCHE was used.
Whatever that might be. VERY VERY few people really know which is a good thing.
It's the Navy's submarine not the NSA's, they just get to play with the data it might generate.
I doubt if I have read anything more ludicrous than this.
First nomenclature: it's a nuclear reactor, not a pile. The whole damn thing is filled with pressurized water all the time. High angles of attack won't uncover the core. They might do bad things on the secondary side, though. (That's where the steam to run the propulsion plant is, on the secondary side.)
Another post regarding things nuclear, and submarines, that are unconnected with reality. I can see why it was posted anonymously.
You have some nomenclature right but you appear to be clueless about what a core melt-down is all about really.
A core melt-down typically happens as the end result of a reactor accident in which the ability to cool the core has been lost. With no way to discharge heat the temperature of the core rises. By this time moderation has been totally lost and the nuclear reaction has ended. Decay of fission fragments, however, has not and that decay can add heat of about 5% of full power operation after criticality has been lost.
So the temperature rises and the core distorts, the materials that support the fuel rods melt. Still no nuclear reactions happening but heat transfer is even worse now. TMI reached the point where core geometry was changed as a result of the accident. With no moderator you won't achieve criticality and the geometry of a puddle of fuel is definately NOT that to easily create a critical reaction.
If cooling is not achieved the hot fuel will eventually melt its surrounds and puddle at the bottom of the reactor vessel making it even harder to cool, and it will begin to melt the vessel and head downwards toward the concrete and steel of the supporting structures. It will continue to do this until something either cools it and carries away the heat or it melts entirely through all of it and heads down through the earth. Hence the "China Syndrome" name.
To my knowledge there as been no accident which did this. Chernobyl caught fire (worse even) and fission fragments were lifted into the environment.
One last note: just pushing two pieces of uranium together to make a critica mass won't necessarily make an explosion although the neutron burst would probably be ugly, if rather short. It takes more than that to make things go BOOM.
The chernobyl reactors were graphite MODERATED not graphite cooled. The coolant is the working fluid that transfers the heat energy out of the core. The coolant in Chernobyl was water flowing through tubes that penetrated the graphite.
The moderator is the mechanism by which the fast neutrons born from fission are slowed down to thermal equilibrium where they are much more likely to create a fission when they encounter the appropriate nucleus, say U238 or U235.
It seems that there were operating modes in which the alpha-T of the soviet reactors could be positive. (shudder) which means that the hotter the plant got the higher the reactor power went which made it hotter...positive feedback is a BAD thing in reactions that increase power exponentially.
Of course it appears that the operators had intentionally disabled reactor protection equipment before beginning the evolution that lead to the disaster.
This says some UGLY things about their views for maintaining reactor safety and makes clear that very detailed oversight is required to make sure that all power plant operators take the appropriate precautions.
Actually, as I recall from when I was involved with stuff like this, one of the "maximum credible accidents" for which a reactor containment vessel was designed involved a direct hit by the largest aircraft available at the time.
And that's the containment vessel, not the reactor vessel or other equipment. Which provides another layer of damage control.
Large reactors are more difficult to seriously damage than you might think.
A couple folks have already observed that the casting of child actors would be difficult. I suggest it's impossible. Most of Ender's Game happens with VERY young children - preturnaturally brilliant kids. In fact the kids are written like adults, or at least adolescents, which is one of downsides of the novels. Now Scott will defend his characterization of children to the death but having raised three I say he seriously over-wrote them.
The average CD price is about $14. There are many film DVDs that are selling in this price range. Which price reflects more accurately the underlying value of the material recorded?
I don't for a moment believe that the cost to make an album is approximately the same as the cost of a major motion picture. Not even the same order of magnitude! Or two! If most films are in the $10-15 million range...does it really cost $1 million to produce a CD?