There would actually be a significant reduction in maint with this system. Remember that the existing lines are cooled by circulating mineral oil along the lines. As some have pointed out around here, the HV lines do indeed have lower losses than the low voltage equivilant, but do the math. Lets assume it's a
500KV line (and I think that is actually a bit
high), running 10MVA - That is still 5A. lets assume 4AWG for the HV line, after all, 5A is not that much, is it? I^2R losses give us 25*0.00292 W/ft or 0.073W/ft. Not so much, right? But then that is 385W/mile - still small. But what if it's only a 125KV line (more likely for underground)? Then for the same 10MVA its 20A - or close to 6KW/Mile lost to the cooling oil. Suddenly, this starts to look a lot better, no? Of course, 125KV lines are used for long haul only. Most utilities use 14KV lines for 'local-area' distribution. Then 10MVA requires about 180A. So switch to 0AWG wire (*MUCH* heavier) and you still see a loss of 17KW/Mile. That is a lot of heat to get rid of.
as far as safety: I notice they are running 3 lines. My guess would be that 2 lines carry the normal load, with the 3rd the 'spare' shunt for failure switchover.
Normally, the costs associated with a virus are measured in a combination of lost productivity, as well as the actual time spent undoing the damage. Assuming your IT department is not clueless (well, you are running winblows - one wonders) the actual impact can be minor, but not insignificant. Factors that would go into comuting the cost:
1) Cost of anti-virus software, after all, if there were no viruses, you wouldn't have to buy that crap. (At our company, I think this is on the order of 5K/yr)
2) Cost of system admin's time to either answer stupid questions when the virus software warns the user, and/or the luser actually runs the damn thing despite the warnings. [What part of 'don't run attachments from outside the company did you not understand?] For each virus that comes around, that usually gets us for 15-20 hours of work.
3) Lost engineering time while machines are fixed. This is the one that kills us.
I'd say, on average, we wind up losing between 5 and 10K for each virus that hits the waves, but then we are fairly well protected.
On the other hand, there are some places that may acutally be put out of business. Back in the days of the boot-sector virus, a legal firm I did some consulting for lost all soft copies of a few cases when one of their machines was wiped. [The secretary had removed the tape from the backup system because 'it made too much noise'] They figured their cost to recover from that was on the order of 50K in time spent putting the data back in, when they could have been doing something else]
Just a couple of things:
Unfortunately, the sentence should have been
in the past tense, as we lost the dear Dr. back
in 1992, as any decent hard-SF fan knows:(
That aside - it is highly unlikely that the
Asimov would penned anything with humanoid robots
piloting anything that could harm a human - as
he introduced the '3 Laws of Robotics' with his
first humanoid robot.
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There would actually be a significant reduction in maint with this system. Remember that the existing lines are cooled by circulating mineral oil along the lines. As some have pointed out around here, the HV lines do indeed have lower losses than the low voltage equivilant, but do the math. Lets assume it's a 500KV line (and I think that is actually a bit high), running 10MVA - That is still 5A. lets assume 4AWG for the HV line, after all, 5A is not that much, is it? I^2R losses give us 25*0.00292 W/ft or 0.073W/ft. Not so much, right? But then that is 385W/mile - still small. But what if it's only a 125KV line (more likely for underground)? Then for the same 10MVA its 20A - or close to 6KW/Mile lost to the cooling oil. Suddenly, this starts to look a lot better, no? Of course, 125KV lines are used for long haul only. Most utilities use 14KV lines for 'local-area' distribution. Then 10MVA requires about 180A. So switch to 0AWG wire (*MUCH* heavier) and you still see a loss of 17KW/Mile. That is a lot of heat to get rid of. as far as safety: I notice they are running 3 lines. My guess would be that 2 lines carry the normal load, with the 3rd the 'spare' shunt for failure switchover.
Normally, the costs associated with a virus are measured in a combination of lost productivity, as well as the actual time spent undoing the damage. Assuming your IT department is not clueless (well, you are running winblows - one wonders) the actual impact can be minor, but not insignificant. Factors that would go into comuting the cost: 1) Cost of anti-virus software, after all, if there were no viruses, you wouldn't have to buy that crap. (At our company, I think this is on the order of 5K/yr) 2) Cost of system admin's time to either answer stupid questions when the virus software warns the user, and/or the luser actually runs the damn thing despite the warnings. [What part of 'don't run attachments from outside the company did you not understand?] For each virus that comes around, that usually gets us for 15-20 hours of work. 3) Lost engineering time while machines are fixed. This is the one that kills us. I'd say, on average, we wind up losing between 5 and 10K for each virus that hits the waves, but then we are fairly well protected. On the other hand, there are some places that may acutally be put out of business. Back in the days of the boot-sector virus, a legal firm I did some consulting for lost all soft copies of a few cases when one of their machines was wiped. [The secretary had removed the tape from the backup system because 'it made too much noise'] They figured their cost to recover from that was on the order of 50K in time spent putting the data back in, when they could have been doing something else]
Look on the bright side... at least you won't get hit with a six-figure bandwidth bill :)
Just a couple of things: Unfortunately, the sentence should have been in the past tense, as we lost the dear Dr. back in 1992, as any decent hard-SF fan knows :(
That aside - it is highly unlikely that the
Asimov would penned anything with humanoid robots
piloting anything that could harm a human - as
he introduced the '3 Laws of Robotics' with his
first humanoid robot.