Congratulations, my friend, you didn't read the article!
UFS already has inodes, files, and blocks.
Isn't that nice? My file system has no inode, no directories, the files are very loose in their definition, and block allocation is done at a meta-data level.
. When you were talking about application folders, you were suggesting that the folders should have an extension to identify them as an application. Or at least the is the way it is done in NeXT/OSX. Later on you suggest that one possibility for identifying documents is to add a prefix (eg #) to them.
Ah, I see your confusion! No, I wasn't talking about the document name. Reread the section. I was referring to the INode number (which is really an index ID in a DBFS) of the file. Using a scheme like "#(INode ID)" would allow for legacy applications to uniquely identify a given file. For example, say I have the document "My Text File.txt". Now since there are no directories, that file could be anywhere on the system at any given time. So instead of referencing "My Text File.txt", an application *could* reference "/Documents/#12345" where 12345 is the INode number of "My Text File.txt".
Hmmm, I and likely many others consider anything on the desktop to be a shortcut. From a true user perspective the desktop may be an actual storage place, but people like you and I realize the the desktop is just a metaphor for a special kind of directory.
Yep. It's always fun having a sudden shift in technology, and the terminology to go along with it. I tried to remain internally consistent, but that doesn't always get the point across.
My next article (due in a day or two; once per week!) should hopefully address things that people missed. Maybe I can even get them to forget everything they've learned and go re-read it.;-)
Everything else should be kept off the desktop. In particular, it is rather important for the system to NOT have desktop shortcuts in order to prevent the common glut of special offers and installers
My entire point was to get rid of shortcuts. They shouldn't exist in the system and only lead to the issues I described. If the user wishes to make a conscious decision to add the *file* to the Desktop, he may do so.
Maybe your audience would appreciate your work better if you were less condescending and actually treated these widespread misconceptions as potential flaws in your own work?
Given that a lot of people did misunderstand key pieces of my article (although many cases are no fault of my own, I can't force them to keep reading before responding) my work is flawed. Since there is really no such thing as a perfect work, I will attempt to "patch" it in an upcoming article. Believe it or not, I was being completely serious about that, and not intending to be condescending.
However, had Mr. Smith finished reading the next sentence he could have pointed out the seeming inconsistency. I would have happily explained the situation. Instead he chose to ignore the remainder.
Nice article. Particularly nice as you suggested some solutions rather than just complaining about the current situation.
Thank you, I'm glad you liked it.:-)
I am curious though as to why you proposed prefixes to folder/file names as the way of identitifying different folder/file types.
Prefixes? Do you mean extensions? Extensions are a required part of any modern OS as they are the multi-OS "standard" meta-data for identifying a type of file. While one could easily add meta-data for the type of application that opened the file, the file's MIME type, and other tidbits, you still need the extension if you're going to be compatible across OSes.
Hello, Mr. Smith. You might want to reread my article. Immediately after the sentence you quoted is this:
For the purposes of easy to access files, it is in the user's interest to allow selected files to appear on the Desktop. In the proposed interface, the Desktop would be merely a label used by the system to identify which files should appear. As a result, the right click menu and/or toolbars can provide the user with the option to add or remove the file from the Desktop.
It tends to help to read the entire article before commenting. Don't worry, though. You're in good company. A large vocal user base has been misinterpreting my ideas since they've been posted. I'm working on a followup blog to see if I can hammer a few of these misunderstanding out.;-)
Mods? How about a few points so that this correction will appear on par with parent post?
Witness above where you assign 'human carrying capacity' to an unmanned spacecraft!
Hmm... seems you're right. What am I thinking of then?/Me starts digging
Ah, the Soyuz capsule of which the Progress is a derivative of. My bad.:-)
Actually, it's probably considerably *more* than four flights - since your quoted capacity to LEO is based on the 28 degree orbit of Skylab rather than the 56 degree orbit of ISS.
Considerably more? Doubtful. Four flights is 472,000 kg to LEO. The final weight of the ISS is supposed to be 419,000 kg. That leaves us with 53,000 kg to spare.
Now the Shuttle drops about 8,000 kg of cargo capacity to reach the 51 degree orbit. (If you've got a good calculation for the Delta-V required to get there, now's a good time to jump in. Otherwise I'm going for the educated guess.) 8,000 kg is about 28% of the 28,000 kg to LEO. Using the decrease of 28%, we get a S-V rating of ~84,960 kg per flight. Which works out to about 5 flights with some room to spare. Just to be on the safe side, we'll call it six flights. That's still far less than the 21 you're suggesting. It's true that the shuttle also carries people up, but I'll get to that in a moment.
It's less of a savings than you might think. The marginal cost of a single Shuttle mission is around 50-80 million dollars US. OTOH - a single Saturn V costs around 500 million dollars US. (Shuttle flight costs are sensitive to flight rate, whereas Saturn V flights are virtually non sensitive to flight rate.)
The Space Shuttle currently flies for about 500 million per flight. This article suggests that the average cost of a shuttle flight is 1.3 billion! (backed up here)
For each shuttle flight vs. S-V flight you get less cargo, and more costs! And using the 1.3 billion figure per flight, you could launch TWO Saturn V's per shuttle flight! One with Space Station parts, the other with a dozen or so humans in a capsule.
Which is hardly surprising - as it's role isn't as a lunar support base. Even if it were in a more friendly orbit, it's hideously unsuited to being a lunar support base. (More millions to convert it - less saving than you suppose above.)
Except that one of the original roles of Space Station Freedom was as a lunar staging point.
NASA's budget wasn't significantly cut during the Clinton years - it was virtually level.
The funding cuts to the Space Station Freedom program, not the cuts to NASA as a whole. Budgeted funding for the program was cut time and time again until the plan was finally cancelled and the ISS given the go-ahead in its place.
That's your quote. They put the stuff in the furnace, then they say the furnace is hotter than normal.
It's called an atomic pile. Get enough together and it fissions. Why is that so hard to understand?
Your enrichment post is a joke. Apparently you missed it though.
Are you American? I'm guessing not, because you seem to have some difficulty following the words that are coming out of my mouth. The word "cutesy" in slang means "something that has an amusing quality to it."
i.e. Of *course* it's a joke! Or more specifically, it's satire. Satire is the practice of taking something that is serious and showing the amusing side of it. In this case the article shows how to make UHF in your backyar. The qualifiers that demonstrate how dangerous it is and how long it will take are intended to add humor to the article, and show how unreasonable it is to make a bomb. That doesn't mean that you can't make a simple fission pile, though.
The Saturn V only furnished the ability to lift 3 people into space at a time as it was constructed.
That's incorrect. The Saturn V could lift any vehicle/cargo that was under 118,000 kg. Which means that it could have lifted far more than three people in LEO. However, the Saturn V was not used for lifting people into LEO, it was used for obtaining the necessary Delta V to send 3 people, a command module, a lunar lander, plus enough fuel for the return flight, to the moon.
While this was enough in the past, it simply isn't enough to construct something like the ISS, unless you want to have robots do it all, which adds lots of mass.
You still need humans to construct it, yes. Which is why there were/are ~30 Progress Flights scheduled in addition to the 50 construction flights (39 shuttle).
3rd, you missed a valid point about the Saturn V's design. You can always extend the Saturn V's lifting capacity by adding bigger engines, making it taller, making it wider, making it weigh less. The only thing you can do on the space shuttle without having to redesign the world is make the shuttle weigh less, which currently isn't even a notion since the damned things are so old that anyone's afraid to.
1. The Saturn V wasn't going to be very easy to extend in the fashion you suggest. The fact that the thing flew was a marvel of engineering. Adding more engines, however, would only have destabilized the design.
2. My point was that if you ditch the orbiter (the thing that costs more than a brand new rocket every flight, more than even a mass produced Saturn V) and use the engines in a shuttle-derived vehicle, you'll have something even more powerful than the S-V.
If you put an emitting source in a furnace, heck, even in a campfire, how would you tell now that it is emitting? Its warmth is not noticeable.
I really have no idea what you're getting at. The rocks would have been warm to the touch. That's it. Why you think it matters that they were hot in an unfissioned furnace is beyond me. Once the pile starts fissioning, though, you'd get plenty of heat and light.
I didn't think that it was possible to feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. But it appears I am wrong, because down below ColaMan links to a site with info that seems to indicate that it happened.
Of course you can survive. Radiation doesn't melt you. It just starts breaking down the occasional molecular bond. The problem is that in the presence of a lot of radiation, your DNA is toast. Unfortunately, you won't feel those effects until the next few generations of cells begin to attempt to make use of the massive number of transcription errors.
I still think it is very unlikely alchemists were making piles (as you say). To create a criticality with materials you just find around is quite difficult. You really need enriched materials, and these are difficult to make even if you know you are making them, let alone by accident!
Basic enrichment isn't too bad. I used to have some cutesy instructions laying around for how to do it in your backyard with a few buckets. Ah, here we are. Keep in mind that you don't need the same purity for an atomic pile as you need for a bomb. Just as long as you can get enough of it (say, from the Ozark cave I linked to) and can purify it to a reasonable degree (basic metallurgy/smelting, perhaps?) then you should be able to increase the rate of fission in the materials.
Yes it does. Or more precisely, it warms the material itself. You feel the heat by old-fashion convection. That's why Pu238 (an Alpha emitter) is warm to the touch and can be used as a power source inside RTGs.
In either case, the theory is that these alchemists created a critical mass of a radioactive material. It would have begun fissioning, thus producing all kinds of radiation; including thermal, infrared, gamma, neutron, and others.
A good idea, except that they had no idea what radium was back then. And silver that killed you wasn't very good for business, as these poor fellowsfigured out.:-)
The notes are written about alchemy, which some scientists in Newton's time believed to hold the secret for transforming base metals, such as lead, into the more precious metals of gold or silver
*Ahem*
Simply place the lead into the path of a strong neutron stream. Wait awhile. You should get some gold if you're patient. However, the gold will be highly radioactive and otherwise generally unsuitable for use. Given enough time, it will also turn back into lead.
I read an interesting article once that suggested that alchemists had developed some of the earliest atomic piles. Apparently, many accounts of alchemists include information such as "they had a furnace straight from hell" and that they "suddenly developed lesions and died a few days later." Considering that radioactivity/atomic reactions were not understood until later, it is not a bad hypothesis that alchemists figured out that "warm rocks" such as pseudo-silver (radium) deposits might have special properties. If they piled enough up to create a critical mass, then they would have had a very interesting furnace.
Yes, there are 50 flights to ISS during the construction phase - but that includes the manned Soyuz flights, which carry crew, not construction materials. Of the 39 Shuttle flights only about 20-21 of them carry construction materials, the remainder carry crew and/or consumables. 419,000/21= approx 20,000kg/flight.
While I was being simplistic, you forget that I left off the ~30 Progress flights that support the ISS. That's where the brunt of the human carrying capacity is.
Even if we take your figures at face value, 20-21 flights is still significantly more than the four flights required by the Saturn V. And since things would go up in fewer pieces, the number of humans sent up to do construction would be reduced. Which means fewer expensive flights charged toward the construction of the station.:-)
(The missing 8,000 odd kg/flight (on average) from nominal capacity is due to the performance hit caused by placing ISS in the 51 degree orbit that the Russians can reach vice the 28 degree orbit the Shuttles nominal payload is specified for.)
Correct. If we were smart, we never would have stuck the ISS there. Its current position is useless as a lunar staging point. But the cutbacks during the Clinton administration pushed NASA into being more Internationally Friendly than Exploration Friendly. Kind of sad, actually. The ISS will never be useful for anything long term other than just being there.:-/
The Crew Exploration Vehicle is certainly nothing new. Nor am I surprised by NASA's desire for a more powerful booster. It is, however, good to see NASA again contemplating super boosters. While many people feel that such boosters are useless (hi Rei!), there are certain circumstances under which they can be tremendously useful.
Take the case of SkyLab vs. the International Space Station. According to Wikipedia, the two stack up as follows:
Mass:
SkyLab: 77,088 kg
ISS: 419,000 kg (when completed; currently 183,283 kg)
# of Lauches for complete construction:
SkyLab: 1
ISS: 50 (39 Shuttle flights)
Now with some simple math, we find that SkyLab averaged 77,088 kg per launch which the ISS averages about 8,380 kg per launch.
If you didn't just do a double take, you should have. The booster that lifted SkyLab stuck over 9 times the mass into orbit that current ISS flights do! Just what is going on here?
The answer lies in the Saturn V Booster vs. the current Space Shuttle. A three stage Saturn V had a maximum payload of 118,000 kg. (That's enough to send the entire ISS up in only 4 flights.) The Space Shuttle, OTOH, only has a cargo of 28,800 kg to LEO. So why does NASA want to reuse the tech? Because of the weight of the shuttle itself.
The Space Shuttle orbiter weighs in at a whopping 104,000 kg! Combined with its cargo capacity, the Space Shuttle is capable of 132,800 kg to LEO! That's way more than the Saturn V could manage on all three stages. So if we ditch the orbiter itself, the shuttle's infrastructure could be the most powerful superbooster ever designed.
But did he get a raise? Say about half of what he saved them
Most executives have bonus programs in place that encourages them to take steps like this. In some companies, the amount of the bonus is directly proportional to the amount of money saved or earned. The only problem with these programs is that they often encourage execs to take measures such as drastic layoffs even thought those layoffs will hurt the business in the long term.
No, you are the front lines army. The backup army was the reason you were paying the annual fees. Without those annual fees, there is no backup army. i.e. If you can't get it right, there's no one else to come in and fix it for you.
Take a tweak which gains a 1% performance gain, multiply that against 4000 machines, and it's quite an advantage.
That's something of a straw man argument. If 3 Sun machines and 10 LinTel boxes have the same Flop capacity, then a 1% increase in either one will add up to the same increase in computing power. The key difference is that there are only three Sun machines to update.
There isn't a vendor in the world that can totally support their infrastructure, so Google does it themselves.
That doesn't mean that there couldn't be. Google made their choice to go with a large number of decentralized systems. It works for them and it works well. But they have to do everything internally *because* of that decision. Had they gone the EBay route, they would be able to get that backup army, but then they would pay for the priveledge.
If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.
Not to detract from your point, but mainframes don't break as a single piece unless the machine blows up or is otherwise completely destroyed. Big Iron systems are designed with redundant *everything* including motherboards, CPU, memory, network cards, power supplies, and disk drives. If any one part fails, the system will route around it. The part can then be powered down and ejected from the machine. To bring it back up to full capacity, you simply plug in the replacement part and walk away.
In that light, Linux system failures are actually going to be more difficult to repair. However, the cost of repairing a Linux system is far less (disposable box) despite the inherent difficulty.:-)
This news is all well and great, but it's been known for a while that moving from UNIX->Linux was cheaper.
That's not entirely true. If you look at the TCO, Linux is only cheaper if you're willing to cut out the safety nets that are so expensive. i.e. If you get an annual mantenence contract with RedHat and Dell, then how much are you actually saving over a Sun machine with a contract for both?
Corporate purchasing decisions are never as simple as the upfront cost. The key is that if you're willing to take a little bit of risk, you can save a lot of money. That's effectively what this article is about.
Lutz's IT group rewrote a complex, real-time airline pricing application that serves hundreds of thousands of travel agents around the world and that also acts as the system of record for all of United Airlines' ticket reservations. When this application came up on Linux, it proved to be so demanding--it handles up to 700 pricing requests per second--that it completely redefined Cendant's expectations about what it would take to get Linux to work. "We have broken every piece of software we've ever thrown at this platform, including Linux itself," says Lutz.
With Big Iron you're paying a LOT of money. But you're not paying it for nothing. Big Iron will give you a lot of guarantees for stability, reliability, and thoroughput that don't exist on other systems. The key to this CIO's success is that he was willing to accept the challenges of doing Big Iron work on Little Brass systems. As long as you work all the details out yourself, this *can* work. (As Google has so eloquently proven.) The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things. (And trust me, if you're paying enough money you'll have your own personal army of techs.)
The upshot to all of this is that if the gamble pays off, it pays off in a big way. All that money you were spending for a personal army, plus some other company's R&D now goes into your own pockets. You don't get away scott free (someone has to maintain the systems), but you see your rewards. And isn't that what business is about? Taking risks and making profits? If you've got the infrastructure to go for something like this, then go ahead and grab fate by the balls. No one ever got anywhere in life by playing it safe.;-)
The "black box" of open source has transformed into something any CIO can appreciate: reliable performance and consistent uptime. The penguin can fly now.
If the President of the United States, the Governor of California, and various other politicians can hold political office regardless of what they did in their past, then there should be no reason why this should even be a minor concern for Cohen or BitTorrent.
Arguably, there's nothing preventing Mr. Cohen from continuing his work. And in fact, it's still likely that a court would find in his favor considering the materials that have been published relevant to the case. (Which is to say, any and all promotional materials about BitTorrent.) The key is that Mr. Cohen is now a public figure, and just like Presidents and Senators who get their pasts drug out as a "reward" for being in the public eye, journalists are also dragging out Mr. Cohen's past.
Just sit tight. This entire thing will blow over and life will be fine and dandy again. Unfortunately, Mr. Cohen will need to stay on his guard about what he says or does, because there are quite a few people who'd like to see him shut down even though a lot of us users DO use BT for legal purposes.:-/
Actually? No. I just skimmed it, so I am a bit guilty of a flub there. But if you read the page, it does state that 150 lb catfish have been recorded in the United States, and links to an ESPN story about an 80 pound catfish. The picture in the article is a 167 lb. catfish caught in Italy.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's really too bad no one listened. :-(
;-)
However, I do recommend spreading the link. If people see it enough times, the new ideas might start percolating into their subconcious.
Oh, and thanks for your support. I have to have one of the most hostile "fan bases" in the world!
Congratulations, my friend, you didn't read the article!
:-)
UFS already has inodes, files, and blocks.
Isn't that nice? My file system has no inode, no directories, the files are very loose in their definition, and block allocation is done at a meta-data level.
Read first. Then comment.
. When you were talking about application folders, you were suggesting that the folders should have an extension to identify them as an application. Or at least the is the way it is done in NeXT/OSX. Later on you suggest that one possibility for identifying documents is to add a prefix (eg #) to them.
:-)
Ah, I see your confusion! No, I wasn't talking about the document name. Reread the section. I was referring to the INode number (which is really an index ID in a DBFS) of the file. Using a scheme like "#(INode ID)" would allow for legacy applications to uniquely identify a given file. For example, say I have the document "My Text File.txt". Now since there are no directories, that file could be anywhere on the system at any given time. So instead of referencing "My Text File.txt", an application *could* reference "/Documents/#12345" where 12345 is the INode number of "My Text File.txt".
Is that a bit clearer?
Hmmm, I and likely many others consider anything on the desktop to be a shortcut. From a true user perspective the desktop may be an actual storage place, but people like you and I realize the the desktop is just a metaphor for a special kind of directory.
;-)
Yep. It's always fun having a sudden shift in technology, and the terminology to go along with it. I tried to remain internally consistent, but that doesn't always get the point across.
My next article (due in a day or two; once per week!) should hopefully address things that people missed. Maybe I can even get them to forget everything they've learned and go re-read it.
*Ahem*
Everything else should be kept off the desktop. In particular, it is rather important for the system to NOT have desktop shortcuts in order to prevent the common glut of special offers and installers
My entire point was to get rid of shortcuts. They shouldn't exist in the system and only lead to the issues I described. If the user wishes to make a conscious decision to add the *file* to the Desktop, he may do so.
Maybe your audience would appreciate your work better if you were less condescending and actually treated these widespread misconceptions as potential flaws in your own work?
Given that a lot of people did misunderstand key pieces of my article (although many cases are no fault of my own, I can't force them to keep reading before responding) my work is flawed. Since there is really no such thing as a perfect work, I will attempt to "patch" it in an upcoming article. Believe it or not, I was being completely serious about that, and not intending to be condescending.
However, had Mr. Smith finished reading the next sentence he could have pointed out the seeming inconsistency. I would have happily explained the situation. Instead he chose to ignore the remainder.
Nice article. Particularly nice as you suggested some solutions rather than just complaining about the current situation.
:-)
Thank you, I'm glad you liked it.
I am curious though as to why you proposed prefixes to folder/file names as the way of identitifying different folder/file types.
Prefixes? Do you mean extensions? Extensions are a required part of any modern OS as they are the multi-OS "standard" meta-data for identifying a type of file. While one could easily add meta-data for the type of application that opened the file, the file's MIME type, and other tidbits, you still need the extension if you're going to be compatible across OSes.
It tends to help to read the entire article before commenting. Don't worry, though. You're in good company. A large vocal user base has been misinterpreting my ideas since they've been posted. I'm working on a followup blog to see if I can hammer a few of these misunderstanding out.
Mods? How about a few points so that this correction will appear on par with parent post?
Witness above where you assign 'human carrying capacity' to an unmanned spacecraft!
/Me starts digging
:-)
Hmm... seems you're right. What am I thinking of then?
Ah, the Soyuz capsule of which the Progress is a derivative of. My bad.
Actually, it's probably considerably *more* than four flights - since your quoted capacity to LEO is based on the 28 degree orbit of Skylab rather than the 56 degree orbit of ISS.
Considerably more? Doubtful. Four flights is 472,000 kg to LEO. The final weight of the ISS is supposed to be 419,000 kg. That leaves us with 53,000 kg to spare.
Now the Shuttle drops about 8,000 kg of cargo capacity to reach the 51 degree orbit. (If you've got a good calculation for the Delta-V required to get there, now's a good time to jump in. Otherwise I'm going for the educated guess.) 8,000 kg is about 28% of the 28,000 kg to LEO. Using the decrease of 28%, we get a S-V rating of ~84,960 kg per flight. Which works out to about 5 flights with some room to spare. Just to be on the safe side, we'll call it six flights. That's still far less than the 21 you're suggesting. It's true that the shuttle also carries people up, but I'll get to that in a moment.
It's less of a savings than you might think. The marginal cost of a single Shuttle mission is around 50-80 million dollars US. OTOH - a single Saturn V costs around 500 million dollars US. (Shuttle flight costs are sensitive to flight rate, whereas Saturn V flights are virtually non sensitive to flight rate.)
The Space Shuttle currently flies for about 500 million per flight. This article suggests that the average cost of a shuttle flight is 1.3 billion! (backed up here)
For each shuttle flight vs. S-V flight you get less cargo, and more costs! And using the 1.3 billion figure per flight, you could launch TWO Saturn V's per shuttle flight! One with Space Station parts, the other with a dozen or so humans in a capsule.
Which is hardly surprising - as it's role isn't as a lunar support base. Even if it were in a more friendly orbit, it's hideously unsuited to being a lunar support base. (More millions to convert it - less saving than you suppose above.)
Except that one of the original roles of Space Station Freedom was as a lunar staging point.
NASA's budget wasn't significantly cut during the Clinton years - it was virtually level.
The funding cuts to the Space Station Freedom program, not the cuts to NASA as a whole. Budgeted funding for the program was cut time and time again until the plan was finally cancelled and the ISS given the go-ahead in its place.
That's your quote. They put the stuff in the furnace, then they say the furnace is hotter than normal.
It's called an atomic pile. Get enough together and it fissions. Why is that so hard to understand?
Your enrichment post is a joke. Apparently you missed it though.
Are you American? I'm guessing not, because you seem to have some difficulty following the words that are coming out of my mouth. The word "cutesy" in slang means "something that has an amusing quality to it."
i.e. Of *course* it's a joke! Or more specifically, it's satire. Satire is the practice of taking something that is serious and showing the amusing side of it. In this case the article shows how to make UHF in your backyar. The qualifiers that demonstrate how dangerous it is and how long it will take are intended to add humor to the article, and show how unreasonable it is to make a bomb. That doesn't mean that you can't make a simple fission pile, though.
The Saturn V only furnished the ability to lift 3 people into space at a time as it was constructed.
That's incorrect. The Saturn V could lift any vehicle/cargo that was under 118,000 kg. Which means that it could have lifted far more than three people in LEO. However, the Saturn V was not used for lifting people into LEO, it was used for obtaining the necessary Delta V to send 3 people, a command module, a lunar lander, plus enough fuel for the return flight, to the moon.
While this was enough in the past, it simply isn't enough to construct something like the ISS, unless you want to have robots do it all, which adds lots of mass.
You still need humans to construct it, yes. Which is why there were/are ~30 Progress Flights scheduled in addition to the 50 construction flights (39 shuttle).
3rd, you missed a valid point about the Saturn V's design. You can always extend the Saturn V's lifting capacity by adding bigger engines, making it taller, making it wider, making it weigh less. The only thing you can do on the space shuttle without having to redesign the world is make the shuttle weigh less, which currently isn't even a notion since the damned things are so old that anyone's afraid to.
1. The Saturn V wasn't going to be very easy to extend in the fashion you suggest. The fact that the thing flew was a marvel of engineering. Adding more engines, however, would only have destabilized the design.
2. My point was that if you ditch the orbiter (the thing that costs more than a brand new rocket every flight, more than even a mass produced Saturn V) and use the engines in a shuttle-derived vehicle, you'll have something even more powerful than the S-V.
If you put an emitting source in a furnace, heck, even in a campfire, how would you tell now that it is emitting? Its warmth is not noticeable.
I really have no idea what you're getting at. The rocks would have been warm to the touch. That's it. Why you think it matters that they were hot in an unfissioned furnace is beyond me. Once the pile starts fissioning, though, you'd get plenty of heat and light.
I didn't think that it was possible to feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. But it appears I am wrong, because down below ColaMan links to a site with info that seems to indicate that it happened.
Of course you can survive. Radiation doesn't melt you. It just starts breaking down the occasional molecular bond. The problem is that in the presence of a lot of radiation, your DNA is toast. Unfortunately, you won't feel those effects until the next few generations of cells begin to attempt to make use of the massive number of transcription errors.
I still think it is very unlikely alchemists were making piles (as you say). To create a criticality with materials you just find around is quite difficult. You really need enriched materials, and these are difficult to make even if you know you are making them, let alone by accident!
Basic enrichment isn't too bad. I used to have some cutesy instructions laying around for how to do it in your backyard with a few buckets. Ah, here we are. Keep in mind that you don't need the same purity for an atomic pile as you need for a bomb. Just as long as you can get enough of it (say, from the Ozark cave I linked to) and can purify it to a reasonable degree (basic metallurgy/smelting, perhaps?) then you should be able to increase the rate of fission in the materials.
Alpha and beta radiation doesn't feel warm.
Yes it does. Or more precisely, it warms the material itself. You feel the heat by old-fashion convection. That's why Pu238 (an Alpha emitter) is warm to the touch and can be used as a power source inside RTGs.
In either case, the theory is that these alchemists created a critical mass of a radioactive material. It would have begun fissioning, thus producing all kinds of radiation; including thermal, infrared, gamma, neutron, and others.
How long until Apple sues?
Sues for what?
A good idea, except that they had no idea what radium was back then. And silver that killed you wasn't very good for business, as these poor fellowsfigured out. :-)
The notes are written about alchemy, which some scientists in Newton's time believed to hold the secret for transforming base metals, such as lead, into the more precious metals of gold or silver
:-/
*Ahem*
Simply place the lead into the path of a strong neutron stream. Wait awhile. You should get some gold if you're patient. However, the gold will be highly radioactive and otherwise generally unsuitable for use. Given enough time, it will also turn back into lead.
I read an interesting article once that suggested that alchemists had developed some of the earliest atomic piles. Apparently, many accounts of alchemists include information such as "they had a furnace straight from hell" and that they "suddenly developed lesions and died a few days later." Considering that radioactivity/atomic reactions were not understood until later, it is not a bad hypothesis that alchemists figured out that "warm rocks" such as pseudo-silver (radium) deposits might have special properties. If they piled enough up to create a critical mass, then they would have had a very interesting furnace.
I wish I still had a link to that article.
Yes, there are 50 flights to ISS during the construction phase - but that includes the manned Soyuz flights, which carry crew, not construction materials. Of the 39 Shuttle flights only about 20-21 of them carry construction materials, the remainder carry crew and/or consumables. 419,000/21= approx 20,000kg/flight.
:-)
:-/
While I was being simplistic, you forget that I left off the ~30 Progress flights that support the ISS. That's where the brunt of the human carrying capacity is.
Even if we take your figures at face value, 20-21 flights is still significantly more than the four flights required by the Saturn V. And since things would go up in fewer pieces, the number of humans sent up to do construction would be reduced. Which means fewer expensive flights charged toward the construction of the station.
(The missing 8,000 odd kg/flight (on average) from nominal capacity is due to the performance hit caused by placing ISS in the 51 degree orbit that the Russians can reach vice the 28 degree orbit the Shuttles nominal payload is specified for.)
Correct. If we were smart, we never would have stuck the ISS there. Its current position is useless as a lunar staging point. But the cutbacks during the Clinton administration pushed NASA into being more Internationally Friendly than Exploration Friendly. Kind of sad, actually. The ISS will never be useful for anything long term other than just being there.
Take the case of SkyLab vs. the International Space Station. According to Wikipedia, the two stack up as follows:Now with some simple math, we find that SkyLab averaged 77,088 kg per launch which the ISS averages about 8,380 kg per launch.
If you didn't just do a double take, you should have. The booster that lifted SkyLab stuck over 9 times the mass into orbit that current ISS flights do! Just what is going on here?
The answer lies in the Saturn V Booster vs. the current Space Shuttle. A three stage Saturn V had a maximum payload of 118,000 kg. (That's enough to send the entire ISS up in only 4 flights.) The Space Shuttle, OTOH, only has a cargo of 28,800 kg to LEO. So why does NASA want to reuse the tech? Because of the weight of the shuttle itself.
The Space Shuttle orbiter weighs in at a whopping 104,000 kg! Combined with its cargo capacity, the Space Shuttle is capable of 132,800 kg to LEO! That's way more than the Saturn V could manage on all three stages. So if we ditch the orbiter itself, the shuttle's infrastructure could be the most powerful superbooster ever designed.
But did he get a raise? Say about half of what he saved them
Most executives have bonus programs in place that encourages them to take steps like this. In some companies, the amount of the bonus is directly proportional to the amount of money saved or earned. The only problem with these programs is that they often encourage execs to take measures such as drastic layoffs even thought those layoffs will hurt the business in the long term.
Well, there is a backup Army, and it's you.
No, you are the front lines army. The backup army was the reason you were paying the annual fees. Without those annual fees, there is no backup army. i.e. If you can't get it right, there's no one else to come in and fix it for you.
Take a tweak which gains a 1% performance gain, multiply that against 4000 machines, and it's quite an advantage.
That's something of a straw man argument. If 3 Sun machines and 10 LinTel boxes have the same Flop capacity, then a 1% increase in either one will add up to the same increase in computing power. The key difference is that there are only three Sun machines to update.
There isn't a vendor in the world that can totally support their infrastructure, so Google does it themselves.
That doesn't mean that there couldn't be. Google made their choice to go with a large number of decentralized systems. It works for them and it works well. But they have to do everything internally *because* of that decision. Had they gone the EBay route, they would be able to get that backup army, but then they would pay for the priveledge.
If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.
:-)
Not to detract from your point, but mainframes don't break as a single piece unless the machine blows up or is otherwise completely destroyed. Big Iron systems are designed with redundant *everything* including motherboards, CPU, memory, network cards, power supplies, and disk drives. If any one part fails, the system will route around it. The part can then be powered down and ejected from the machine. To bring it back up to full capacity, you simply plug in the replacement part and walk away.
In that light, Linux system failures are actually going to be more difficult to repair. However, the cost of repairing a Linux system is far less (disposable box) despite the inherent difficulty.
This news is all well and great, but it's been known for a while that moving from UNIX->Linux was cheaper.
That's not entirely true. If you look at the TCO, Linux is only cheaper if you're willing to cut out the safety nets that are so expensive. i.e. If you get an annual mantenence contract with RedHat and Dell, then how much are you actually saving over a Sun machine with a contract for both?
Corporate purchasing decisions are never as simple as the upfront cost. The key is that if you're willing to take a little bit of risk, you can save a lot of money. That's effectively what this article is about.
This pretty much sums it up:
;-)
Lutz's IT group rewrote a complex, real-time airline pricing application that serves hundreds of thousands of travel agents around the world and that also acts as the system of record for all of United Airlines' ticket reservations. When this application came up on Linux, it proved to be so demanding--it handles up to 700 pricing requests per second--that it completely redefined Cendant's expectations about what it would take to get Linux to work. "We have broken every piece of software we've ever thrown at this platform, including Linux itself," says Lutz.
With Big Iron you're paying a LOT of money. But you're not paying it for nothing. Big Iron will give you a lot of guarantees for stability, reliability, and thoroughput that don't exist on other systems. The key to this CIO's success is that he was willing to accept the challenges of doing Big Iron work on Little Brass systems. As long as you work all the details out yourself, this *can* work. (As Google has so eloquently proven.) The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things. (And trust me, if you're paying enough money you'll have your own personal army of techs.)
The upshot to all of this is that if the gamble pays off, it pays off in a big way. All that money you were spending for a personal army, plus some other company's R&D now goes into your own pockets. You don't get away scott free (someone has to maintain the systems), but you see your rewards. And isn't that what business is about? Taking risks and making profits? If you've got the infrastructure to go for something like this, then go ahead and grab fate by the balls. No one ever got anywhere in life by playing it safe.
The "black box" of open source has transformed into something any CIO can appreciate: reliable performance and consistent uptime. The penguin can fly now.
And exactly how are they going to pull off that many assasinations simultaneously?
Load them all into the same bus?
If the President of the United States, the Governor of California, and various other politicians can hold political office regardless of what they did in their past, then there should be no reason why this should even be a minor concern for Cohen or BitTorrent.
:-/
Arguably, there's nothing preventing Mr. Cohen from continuing his work. And in fact, it's still likely that a court would find in his favor considering the materials that have been published relevant to the case. (Which is to say, any and all promotional materials about BitTorrent.) The key is that Mr. Cohen is now a public figure, and just like Presidents and Senators who get their pasts drug out as a "reward" for being in the public eye, journalists are also dragging out Mr. Cohen's past.
Just sit tight. This entire thing will blow over and life will be fine and dandy again. Unfortunately, Mr. Cohen will need to stay on his guard about what he says or does, because there are quite a few people who'd like to see him shut down even though a lot of us users DO use BT for legal purposes.
Actually? No. I just skimmed it, so I am a bit guilty of a flub there. But if you read the page, it does state that 150 lb catfish have been recorded in the United States, and links to an ESPN story about an 80 pound catfish. The picture in the article is a 167 lb. catfish caught in Italy. :-)