Presuming the article means the power will cost 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt hour, that's not all that cheap. I get electricity for about 5.8 cents per kwh plus a monthly "customer charge" of $5.77. That's the "retail" price from the local utility, not the "wholesale" price they buy electricity from the generator for.
When Apollo 12 was struck by lightning (technically it generated its own lightning), the Saturn guidance computer was still running; everything else tripped. It wasn't a "computer glitch" and they didn't trust anyone's intuition. The "book" said reset the breakers, so they did. They got struck again after a minute, but that time they only lost the 8 balls; the astronauts reset them again and they came back.
They did what they were supposed to do. If the guidance computer had tripped, they'd have aborted (without the other systems they couldn't fly the Saturn manually). Since the guidance computer was on-line the whole time, there was no reason to abort the mission at that point. If they'd been in Earth orbit and something didn't check out okay, they'd have aborted.
I asked Alan Bean about this several years ago and Dick Gordon this past weekend; both said it was "interesting" for a bit.
Once again: SpaceShipOne did not reach orbit. It is a long way from a suborbital (ballistic shot just to the edge of space) vehicle to an orbital vehicle. SpaceShipOne was designed simply to do what it did; it is not really even the basis for the design of an orbital vehicle.
Re:6 months off on their estimates - inexcusable
on
Katrina Delays Shuttle
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I know Ring TFA is passe on/., but one big part of the problem is that, as they processed the data from the last flight, they found out that the computer models and wind tunnel testing did not match up with the actual data. Computational fluid dynamics is a tough thing to understand, and now they have found out that they've got to go back to the model and try to understand how it is wrong (and even more, figure out why the wind tunnel tests were wrong). This is like basing your models and testing on 1+1=2 and then finding out that 1+1=3; you've got to step back and figure out where you went wrong before you can figure out how to fix it.
Ask Burt Rutan how hard CFD and modeling is; SpaceShipOne had some serious stability problems. They just ignored them (even when their flight rules said they'd abort) and went on. If NASA did that, they'd be grounded and have Congressional investigations, but everybody thinks it is great that Scaled Composites did it.
Standard analog phone lines (aka POTS) are powered by the telephone company from the central office (or from the nearest fiber concentrator if the line isn't copper all the way to the CO). The COs have standby power (battery banks and generators), so they can continue to provide POTS line power. In this area, BellSouth puts natural gas generators at the fiber concentrators so they can also continue to provide POTS line power.
Some cell tower sites have generators to keep the node up as well. Around here though, the cable companies do not backup power in the cabinets where the fiber headend feeds the local coax (so if the power fails, so does the cable TV/phone/Internet as soon as the small battery pack runs out). Typically, the cable phone access is powered by house power, so unless you have it on UPS/generator, you'll lose phone when you lose power.
Traditional telcos have numerous regulations relating to backup power; their competitors like cell, cable, and VOIP are not typically covered. Remember that when you choose your phone service.
An HD level real-time compressor costs around 15-20 thousand dollars, so I doubt TiVo would sell many of those. A box with only OTA ATSC tuners wouldn't sell enough to recoup development costs either. I love TiVo and I love HD, but I wouldn't buy a $500-$1000 box to record from the local OTA ATSC network stations.
The current DirecTV TiVO DVRs (both SD and HD) have a USB port, and with the proper Google searches, you can find out how to modify them to enable networking. It is definately unsupported; YMMV.
HD TiVo has been out for a while now (from DirecTV). It didn't make sense to do a stand-alone until CableCard took hold (although CableCard is only available from one of the local cable companies). DirecTV controls the feature set on the DirecTiVo; TiVo would love to upgrade them all with networking but DirecTV doesn't want that.
Google says Browns Ferry is on 850 acres, so you could compare that as 500/4500 = 1/9 megawatts per acre for solar vs. (eventually) 3825/850 = 4.5 megawatts per acre for nuclear (or 40.5 times as much power per acre).
There are different requirements for the two power sources of course. The solar array has to be in an area with lots of sunlight year round, while the nuclear plant needs to be at a large enough body of water for cooling.
Also, the summary (I didn't RTFA) says the solar array can generate 500 megawatts. Is that peak during sunlight? If so, the overall average (assuming perfect storage) would only be half that; people do like to use power at night.
TVA is bringing Unit 1 at Browns Ferry back on line and upgrading it in the process to produce 1275 megawatts. The other two units will also be upgraded to the same capacity, so the total plant capacity will be 3825 megawatts or about 7.65 times the capacity of the solar project.
I'm not going to pay every month for a POTS line that I use at most once a year to upgrade a remote 2501. You also have to take a 2501 off-line for too long to upgrade (because they run from flash). I'll have to play musical routers; visit one site, put an upgraded spare in place, upgrade the removed router, visit the next site, install, and so on. I might can get away with just rebooting the switches.
In any case, it isn't a good idea to do a remote upgrade of a critical piece of equipment when, if there's a failure, it'll take a couple of hours to get there.
In the case of the Cisco IOS problems, nobody knew there was a problem to be patched. That was the biggest part of the problem: Cisco's silence.
When you run services that must be up 24x7, you don't donwload every new IOS release and load it on dozens or hundreds (or more) of devices just because there was a new release. IOS often has more new bugs in each release than bugs fixed; when you find a release that has the features you require and is stable with those features running, you don't touch it until you find a bug, require a new feature, or Cisco announces a security problem.
I run a relatively small network, and I'm looking at having to upgrade around two dozen devices running IOS in six cities (a number of which require visiting an unmanned office because some things can't be upgraded remotely) plus another dozen or so devices in our spares inventory in two cities. I'm not going to upgrade any operating devices until I can test new releases in a test setup. All of that takes a lot of time, which means something else has to get pushed back.
In both cases: weight is a big limiting factor. If they add some type of extra protective covering to either the orbiter or the tank, that's a whole lot of weight that they can't put into a payload now.
You don't want to combine an ablative (burn-off) heat protection with the tiles. When the ablative layer burns off, it doesn't just disappear; you have chunks of it flying off at high velocity that could cause more damage.
As for the tank, I'm not sure what they'll do to stop the foam fall-off. One possibility may be to go back to painting it (it was painted white for the first two shuttle flights). This still takes a lot of weight (and of course dollars), but may help seal up some of the areas where the humid air gets in and forms ice. It also would give the tank foam a little bit stronger surface.
My understanding is that the current DVD spec (or really the patent holders) require any DVD player that puts out a signal that is better than 480p use HDCP copy protection on that signal (either DVI-HDCP or HDMI). That is why all the "up-convert" DVD players available only put out the 720p or 1080i signal on a DVD-HDCP or HDMI port; the component video port only gets 480p.
So if Blu-Ray or HD-DVD supports "old-style" DVDs and has 720p or 1080i outputs, they will have to have copy protection on them already. I don't expect to ever see a Blu-Ray player that doesn't have HDCP on the high-def outputs, even if they did drop the requirement.
HTTP doesn't really have much to do with hypertext. A small percentage of the bits transferred via HTTP are text/html (think images, flash and java, and of course PDFs). In many ways, HTTP is a better file download protocol than FTP:
doesn't need a second port for transfers (so no firewall "fun")
byte ranges allow a client to only request part of the file (great for file completions)
easier to do per site, per directory, or per file authentication (since authentication is per request, not per "session")
You need to stop shouting and read what I wrote before you reply.
Recording off the air for time-shifting is considered fair use and is non-infringing; recording off the air for unlicensed redistribution is not fair use and is copywright infringement.. Since Sony promoted time-shifting and not redistribution (IIRC they had a "don't redistribute" note in the manual), it was okay.
If Sony had shown advertisements with people recording shows and swapping tapes with their friends, they most likely would have lost, as that would have been promoting copyright infrigement.
In the Sony case, Sony was promoting personal recording for time-shifting. They argued (successfully) that recording for time-shifting was covered under fair use. They did not promote taking recordings and distributing them.
Grokster on the other hand was promoting sharing with others (unlicensed redistribution), which is not covered under fair use.
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power...
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries;
Because Congress, the media, and enough of the American people don't see it that way. Any mistake is cause to stop all work, have an investigation (that probably has to report to Congress), and draw back even more.
How many of the early attempts at automobiles and airplanes get the driver/pilot seriously injured or killed? If every time something bad happened they had stopped all attempts, we'd still be riding horses, steamboats, and trains pulled by steam locomotives for all transportation. When they had the first 747 crash, they didn't ground all 747s for 2+ years.
Panix thought that they had all of their domains in registrar-lock status. When they checked panix.net and panix.org after panix.com got swiped, they were no longer locked.
However, this has nothing to do with them being locked or not. The registrar Panix uses is Dotster, and they show no record of panix.com being transferred. In other words, Verisign (who is in charge of all.com registrations) allowed a domain to be transferred to a different regsitrar without following the published procedures. Even if a domain is not locked, there is a notification and waiting period that was ignored. Somehow MelbourneIT and Verisign short-circuited the system (quite possibly an inside job at both).
IIRC the.net control is up for renewal soon and other companies may bid to take it away from Verisign; let's hope that happens (my main domains are all.net).
FTP: I run a Fedora mirror server; a large part of the access is via FTP. Also, most web hosting customers upload sites with FTP.
sendmail: I am updating our sendmail configs on our mail servers this week to improve the spam blocking. Most people use m4 macros to configure sendmail these days, but I do a lot of custom stuff in the.cf language.
NFS: I used NFS last week to do an automated kickstart install of Fedora to a new firewall.
You may not need to know how to do these things, but a good system amdinistrator would at least read about them for future reference (so you'll at least know what to look for when you do need that info).
I'll give a big second to Penguin; they rock. They have high quality, reliable servers designed to run Linux (so no compatibility issues). We have had a couple of failures (we've bought around 35 Penguin servers over the last 3 or so years), but they are right on top of them and ship replacement parts ASAP (we haven't paid for the on-site service). Plus, servers from Penguin come with a cool Penguin t-shirt and a stuffed Tux (another local company with dozens of Penguins has combined their Tuxes with wire coat hangers to form Tux-mobiles - penguins can fly!).
For desktops, we typically go on-line and build one or just push a cart full of parts around CompUSA. We don't have a lot of desktops, and they aren't as critical (if there's a problem, there is usually another system someone can use for a while).
The Alabama standard form and schedules are done in fillable PDFs that have the proper fields linked together and calculating. You enter the numbers from your various statements into the correct fields and then Acrobat does the calculations. They even set up the form to print a 2-D barcode of all the filled-in data so that entering your form into their computer takes one quick scan.
However, it doesn't seem to work in Acrobat 5.x under Linux, so I'll still have to fire up Windows on something. Then I can use Acrobat Reader 7 so I can save the filled in form (since v7 isn't available for Linux quite yet).
Slashdot Mirror
Presuming the article means the power will cost 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt hour, that's not all that cheap. I get electricity for about 5.8 cents per kwh plus a monthly "customer charge" of $5.77. That's the "retail" price from the local utility, not the "wholesale" price they buy electricity from the generator for.
When Apollo 12 was struck by lightning (technically it generated its own lightning), the Saturn guidance computer was still running; everything else tripped. It wasn't a "computer glitch" and they didn't trust anyone's intuition. The "book" said reset the breakers, so they did. They got struck again after a minute, but that time they only lost the 8 balls; the astronauts reset them again and they came back.
They did what they were supposed to do. If the guidance computer had tripped, they'd have aborted (without the other systems they couldn't fly the Saturn manually). Since the guidance computer was on-line the whole time, there was no reason to abort the mission at that point. If they'd been in Earth orbit and something didn't check out okay, they'd have aborted.
I asked Alan Bean about this several years ago and Dick Gordon this past weekend; both said it was "interesting" for a bit.
Once again: SpaceShipOne did not reach orbit. It is a long way from a suborbital (ballistic shot just to the edge of space) vehicle to an orbital vehicle. SpaceShipOne was designed simply to do what it did; it is not really even the basis for the design of an orbital vehicle.
I know Ring TFA is passe on /., but one big part of the problem is that, as they processed the data from the last flight, they found out that the computer models and wind tunnel testing did not match up with the actual data. Computational fluid dynamics is a tough thing to understand, and now they have found out that they've got to go back to the model and try to understand how it is wrong (and even more, figure out why the wind tunnel tests were wrong). This is like basing your models and testing on 1+1=2 and then finding out that 1+1=3; you've got to step back and figure out where you went wrong before you can figure out how to fix it.
Ask Burt Rutan how hard CFD and modeling is; SpaceShipOne had some serious stability problems. They just ignored them (even when their flight rules said they'd abort) and went on. If NASA did that, they'd be grounded and have Congressional investigations, but everybody thinks it is great that Scaled Composites did it.
Woodcrest is a street a block over from my parents' house in Huntsville, AL, but I don't think any Intel folks live there.
Standard analog phone lines (aka POTS) are powered by the telephone company from the central office (or from the nearest fiber concentrator if the line isn't copper all the way to the CO). The COs have standby power (battery banks and generators), so they can continue to provide POTS line power. In this area, BellSouth puts natural gas generators at the fiber concentrators so they can also continue to provide POTS line power.
Some cell tower sites have generators to keep the node up as well. Around here though, the cable companies do not backup power in the cabinets where the fiber headend feeds the local coax (so if the power fails, so does the cable TV/phone/Internet as soon as the small battery pack runs out). Typically, the cable phone access is powered by house power, so unless you have it on UPS/generator, you'll lose phone when you lose power.
Traditional telcos have numerous regulations relating to backup power; their competitors like cell, cable, and VOIP are not typically covered. Remember that when you choose your phone service.
An HD level real-time compressor costs around 15-20 thousand dollars, so I doubt TiVo would sell many of those. A box with only OTA ATSC tuners wouldn't sell enough to recoup development costs either. I love TiVo and I love HD, but I wouldn't buy a $500-$1000 box to record from the local OTA ATSC network stations.
The current DirecTV TiVO DVRs (both SD and HD) have a USB port, and with the proper Google searches, you can find out how to modify them to enable networking. It is definately unsupported; YMMV.
HD TiVo has been out for a while now (from DirecTV). It didn't make sense to do a stand-alone until CableCard took hold (although CableCard is only available from one of the local cable companies). DirecTV controls the feature set on the DirecTiVo; TiVo would love to upgrade them all with networking but DirecTV doesn't want that.
Google says Browns Ferry is on 850 acres, so you could compare that as
500/4500 = 1/9 megawatts per acre for solar vs. (eventually) 3825/850 =
4.5 megawatts per acre for nuclear (or 40.5 times as much power per
acre).
There are different requirements for the two power sources of course.
The solar array has to be in an area with lots of sunlight year round,
while the nuclear plant needs to be at a large enough body of water for
cooling.
Also, the summary (I didn't RTFA) says the solar array can generate 500
megawatts. Is that peak during sunlight? If so, the overall average
(assuming perfect storage) would only be half that; people do like to
use power at night.
TVA is bringing Unit 1 at Browns Ferry back on line and upgrading it in the process to produce 1275 megawatts. The other two units will also be upgraded to the same capacity, so the total plant capacity will be 3825 megawatts or about 7.65 times the capacity of the solar project.
I'm not going to pay every month for a POTS line that I use at most once a year to upgrade a remote 2501. You also have to take a 2501 off-line for too long to upgrade (because they run from flash). I'll have to play musical routers; visit one site, put an upgraded spare in place, upgrade the removed router, visit the next site, install, and so on. I might can get away with just rebooting the switches.
In any case, it isn't a good idea to do a remote upgrade of a critical piece of equipment when, if there's a failure, it'll take a couple of hours to get there.
In the case of the Cisco IOS problems, nobody knew there was a problem
to be patched. That was the biggest part of the problem: Cisco's
silence.
When you run services that must be up 24x7, you don't donwload every new
IOS release and load it on dozens or hundreds (or more) of devices just
because there was a new release. IOS often has more new bugs in each
release than bugs fixed; when you find a release that has the features
you require and is stable with those features running, you don't touch
it until you find a bug, require a new feature, or Cisco announces a
security problem.
I run a relatively small network, and I'm looking at having to upgrade
around two dozen devices running IOS in six cities (a number of which
require visiting an unmanned office because some things can't be
upgraded remotely) plus another dozen or so devices in our spares
inventory in two cities. I'm not going to upgrade any operating devices
until I can test new releases in a test setup. All of that takes a lot
of time, which means something else has to get pushed back.
In both cases: weight is a big limiting factor. If they add some type of extra protective covering to either the orbiter or the tank, that's a whole lot of weight that they can't put into a payload now.
You don't want to combine an ablative (burn-off) heat protection with the tiles. When the ablative layer burns off, it doesn't just disappear; you have chunks of it flying off at high velocity that could cause more damage.
As for the tank, I'm not sure what they'll do to stop the foam fall-off. One possibility may be to go back to painting it (it was painted white for the first two shuttle flights). This still takes a lot of weight (and of course dollars), but may help seal up some of the areas where the humid air gets in and forms ice. It also would give the tank foam a little bit stronger surface.
My understanding is that the current DVD spec (or really the patent holders) require any DVD player that puts out a signal that is better than 480p use HDCP copy protection on that signal (either DVI-HDCP or HDMI). That is why all the "up-convert" DVD players available only put out the 720p or 1080i signal on a DVD-HDCP or HDMI port; the component video port only gets 480p.
So if Blu-Ray or HD-DVD supports "old-style" DVDs and has 720p or 1080i outputs, they will have to have copy protection on them already. I don't expect to ever see a Blu-Ray player that doesn't have HDCP on the high-def outputs, even if they did drop the requirement.
You need to stop shouting and read what I wrote before you reply.
Recording off the air for time-shifting is considered fair use and is
non-infringing; recording off the air for unlicensed redistribution is
not fair use and is copywright infringement.. Since Sony promoted
time-shifting and not redistribution (IIRC they had a "don't
redistribute" note in the manual), it was okay.
If Sony had shown advertisements with people recording shows and
swapping tapes with their friends, they most likely would have lost, as
that would have been promoting copyright infrigement.
In the Sony case, Sony was promoting personal recording for
time-shifting. They argued (successfully) that recording for
time-shifting was covered under fair use. They did not promote taking
recordings and distributing them.
Grokster on the other hand was promoting sharing with others (unlicensed
redistribution), which is not covered under fair use.
You are mistaken.
...
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries;
That is the basis for patent and copyright law.
Because Congress, the media, and enough of the American people don't see it that way. Any mistake is cause to stop all work, have an investigation (that probably has to report to Congress), and draw back even more.
How many of the early attempts at automobiles and airplanes get the driver/pilot seriously injured or killed? If every time something bad happened they had stopped all attempts, we'd still be riding horses, steamboats, and trains pulled by steam locomotives for all transportation. When they had the first 747 crash, they didn't ground all 747s for 2+ years.
Gravity has lots of effect on mass. Usually it makes it fall down.
And maybe with this article someone can decipher if the Cell technology will eventually make a /. dupe detector that works in real-time.
Panix thought that they had all of their domains in registrar-lock status. When they checked panix.net and panix.org after panix.com got swiped, they were no longer locked.
.com registrations) allowed a domain to be transferred to a different regsitrar without following the published procedures. Even if a domain is not locked, there is a notification and waiting period that was ignored. Somehow MelbourneIT and Verisign short-circuited the system (quite possibly an inside job at both).
.net control is up for renewal soon and other companies may bid to take it away from Verisign; let's hope that happens (my main domains are all .net).
However, this has nothing to do with them being locked or not. The registrar Panix uses is Dotster, and they show no record of panix.com being transferred. In other words, Verisign (who is in charge of all
IIRC the
- FTP: I run a Fedora mirror server; a large part of the access is via FTP. Also, most web hosting customers upload sites with FTP.
- sendmail: I am updating our sendmail configs on our mail servers this week to improve the spam blocking. Most people use m4 macros to configure sendmail these days, but I do a lot of custom stuff in the
.cf language.
- NFS: I used NFS last week to do an automated kickstart install of Fedora to a new firewall.
You may not need to know how to do these things, but a good system amdinistrator would at least read about them for future reference (so you'll at least know what to look for when you do need that info).I'll give a big second to Penguin; they rock. They have high quality, reliable servers designed to run Linux (so no compatibility issues). We have had a couple of failures (we've bought around 35 Penguin servers over the last 3 or so years), but they are right on top of them and ship replacement parts ASAP (we haven't paid for the on-site service). Plus, servers from Penguin come with a cool Penguin t-shirt and a stuffed Tux (another local company with dozens of Penguins has combined their Tuxes with wire coat hangers to form Tux-mobiles - penguins can fly!).
For desktops, we typically go on-line and build one or just push a cart full of parts around CompUSA. We don't have a lot of desktops, and they aren't as critical (if there's a problem, there is usually another system someone can use for a while).
The Alabama standard form and schedules are done in fillable PDFs that have the proper fields linked together and calculating. You enter the numbers from your various statements into the correct fields and then Acrobat does the calculations. They even set up the form to print a 2-D barcode of all the filled-in data so that entering your form into their computer takes one quick scan.
However, it doesn't seem to work in Acrobat 5.x under Linux, so I'll still have to fire up Windows on something. Then I can use Acrobat Reader 7 so I can save the filled in form (since v7 isn't available for Linux quite yet).