Sooo..... would this mean that the Pentagon could *bogart* all of the power when needed, or reduce power generation at critical times?
This is only proof of concept, 5 or 10 megawatts is a drop in the bucket for commercial or military use. Heck, there are operating 5 megawatt wind generators.
The point is that somebody should at least try to demonstrate the feasibility (or infeasibility) of space-based solar power stations, and NASA isn't going to do it so who else is there?
The important thing is to develop the technology and techniques to build solar power stations. Once we have those, commercial power companies can just contract out to Boeing or Lockheed to have them built. But it's developing the technology and techniques that are critical.
It's like the Navy is funding Dr. Bussard's Polywell project. The Navy can ostensively use it for powering naval vessels, but once (if!) it works, the technology will be available for commercial use. The military has a long history of sponsoring R&D that has dual military and commercial uses.
After all, if the Pentagon (US government) plays its cards right,...
I'm curious, do you have any examples of the US "playing its cards right" in any foreign policy matters?
I was just thinking about Sputnik and thinking how in the 30+ years since the Apollo missions international cooperation couldn't get us back to the moon, but maybe international competition will.
I don't know if there's a shortage of research ideas, though I wouldn't be surprised. Zero-gravity research is a fairly specialized area.
My recollection is that the ISS was designed for a crew of 7, but because the Soyuz emergency reentry capsule can only hold 3 people, they only allow 3 people to stay on the ISS between shuttle flights. NASA was suppose to have a 7-person reentry vehicle by now. The problem is that 3 people are barely enough to maintain the ISS, so there's relatively little spare time to do actual science.
My problem is that I'm old enough to remember the "Golden Age" of space travel; Mercury, Gemini, Apollo (and the Russian flights also, credit where credit is due). If you asked anyone back then, they'd tell you we'd have a moon base by the end of the century and be on Mars shortly after that.
What we have is a gold plated brick in LEO and then we congratulate ourselves on what a great job we're doing.
Scientific exploration always has risks, and thus sometimes it goes sour.
I don't really blame anybody for not forcasting an idea drought.
Sometimes they do know things are not going to work out right and for whatever reason (politics usually) they go ahead and do it anyway.
Originally, as I understand it, the ISS was suppose to be manned by 7 scientists/astronauts/janitors, which they decided was enough to do "real" science and maintain the station. The ISS is currently manned by, what, 3 or 4 astronauts the last time I checked. Which, I understand, is just enough to maintain the station almost full time and maybe do a little science on the side.
I'm not really blaming anyone for where the ISS is today. I think the most valuable thing we learned from the ISS is building and maintaining it. The science is almost secondary (but is the major political reason).
My concern is that NASA is blinded by the mere existance of the ISS and refuses to admit even the possibility of any alternative till at least 2015 (probably longer, politics trumps all).
It could be compared to spending billions building a giant super-collider and never finding any interesting particle collisions.
But would you continue to spend billions of dollars maintaining it? Or would you learn from your mistakes and try something else?
Well, realistically, after the ISS is complete, what can you do with it?
It's in too high an orbital inclination to be used as a way station for a lunar or mars mission.
It's too small to use for any spaced-based manufacturing, like semiconductors, specialty materials or pharmaceuticals.
It's too small for a real staff of scientists and/or engineers (who have to double as janitors anyway).
It's too small for a tourist destination (yes, I know, some "tourists" have visited).
It's already designed, so it can't be used for experimental construction techniques (like solar-power station construction, for example).
So it's really a small, very expensive, high maintenance science laboratory and I have to ask myself, except for the experience gained in building it, how many science experiments are worth the huge expense.
Wouldn't it be better to take what we learned from the ISS and use that to build a larger, easier to maintain, more versatile space station? Perhaps in a lower inclination orbit? Someplace you could do real science and manufacturing without scientists and engineers doubling as janitors?
*Sigh* Yes, I know this is NASA, they're "only" going to support the ISS till 2015. Then they'll worry about replacing it.
What you are failing to take into account is that, if the PC as we knew it back when IBM was "the hardware to have", didn't exist, everyone would have gravitated to at least ONE of the other platforms. THAT platform would have taken off, gotten cheaper, and ended up where MS/Intel is now.
I think that's a big assumption. Corporate IBM was all about mainframes. The PC was developed by a special team in Boca Raton, but corporate IBM had no clue how to market it (I would argue that Microsoft is really the one that pushed the PC and made it a ubiquitous platform). Apple was good at marketing, but was (and is) all about proprietary hardware (I'm thinking of the Macintosh, not Apple II). Amiga and BeOS were really ahead of their time, but suffered from mediocre marketing and competition from Microsoft. Atari and Commodore were good, but nothing special and also suffered from mediocre marketing.
I don't see any of them (except maybe Apple, but then you're stuck with their proprietary hardware and software) having the marketing clout to dominate the market.
I would argue that the fortuitous combination of IBM PC's open architecture (which allowed cloning) and Microsoft's ruthless marketing of first DOS and then Windows (and pirating of DOS and Windows on cloned PC hardware! don't want to forget that!) that drove their competitors (expect Apple) out of business and, almost accidently, established the PC as the industry standard architecture.
No. If there had been no Microsoft, someone else would have done that.
Sometimes I wonder. What if there had been no Microsoft and instead the market was divided between, say, Apple, Atari, Amiga, BeOS, OS/2 (though OS/2 was arguably IBM's response to Microsoft Windows). So (at least) 5 incompatable operating system and 5 incompatable hardware platforms. So I picture a smaller overall market with little standardization between platforms. Linus would probably have been an Amiga or BeOS fanboy and wouldn't have been forced to write Linux.
Through Bill Gate's sheer ruthlessness Microsoft incidentally created an ubiquitous hardware platform that allowed the development of standardized interfaces; everything from keyboards and mice to video cards and optical drives. Which, arguably, incidentally allowed Google to standardize on massive numbers of cheap, industrial standard computers running Linux instead of more expensive, proprietary computers with a proprietary operating system; i.e. Apple, Amiga, Atari or BeOS.
Mainframes have features that just aren't available in commodity or even server PC.
Mainframes are designed not just for speed, but also for reliability and throughput.
Throughput is limited in a standard PC because everything has to go through the northbridge chip and all I/O has to go though both the northbridge and southbridge chip. Depending on the make and model, a mainframe will have multiple and redundant I/O buses for drives and networking. And multiple CPUs with multiple redundant banks of memory.
Everything is monitored. If a stick of RAM starts to fail (they use ECC RAM of course), programs and data are dynamically moved to another bank and a service call is automatically logged. Same thing with drives, CPUs, power supplies, etc. Everything is monitored and redundant.
Mainframes are designed so they don't even have to be powered-down for service. Anything; CPUs, memory, drives, power supplies, can be replaced or upgraded while it's running. Users won't even notice.
Mainframes are designed from the ground-up for companies that absolutely, positively can not afford downtime. It's a completely different market than a typical server PC.
(And after Lockheed's disastrous hovering shuttle replacement in the late 1990s, it's not wise to just assume they'll automatically win such a race.)
I think you're confusing the hovering McDonnell Douglas DC-X (which was a successful test vehicle until NASA got ahold of it) and the Shuttle replacement Lockheed Martin X-33 (which was a diaster).
4. Wave power is too ugly to be built (too lazy to Google for it but Kennedy / Kerry vetoed the idea because it was too close to THEIR vacataion home).
Wait til they can implant nanowire processors right into your eyeballs. Then they can decrypt the video when it reaches your retina. That'll close that nasty analog hole.
From what I've read about the press conference (and from the various opinion pieces I've read on it), it seems that Sony has grown overconfident--and with over 65% market share, can you blame them?
I'm not so sure the problem is overconfidence. I think the fundamental problem is that blue-ray HD-DVD drive.
I understand Sony is trying to make blue-ray drives the defacto next generation HD-DVD standard, but the problem is that the 1st generation drives are so expensive ($400 by one estimate I read) that it's pushing the overall cost of the system out of the market. Even at $500 Sony is priced well above Microsoft and Nintendo and still must be losing big money on each system.
If they swallowed their pride and released a system with a standard DVD drive and dropped the price to $400, they could probably sell as many systems as they can make. At $500 (and $600 for the good one), I think they're going to have problems.
History shows, repeatedly, that countries and/or markets with little or no IP protection flourish
Please citations on this one.
One example is the movie industry, which moved to California in the early 1900s in part to make "it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his motion picture patents."
Arguably China is currently undergoing an economic revolution, at least in part, because its weak intellectual property laws allow it to copy western technology with few consequencies. Although I'm sure that will change as soon as they have something worth copying.
Most switching power supplies are very efficient and take power factor into consideration. There are some high-end units that approach ~0.99+. I would imagine most to be around ~0.85.
Beware of assumptions!
Remeasuring the power consumption of my (2 year old) Pentium IV in an Antec case w/Antec SmartPower PS, I read a PF of about 0.7, 120 watts and 180 volt-amps.
Measuring an old, old AMD system with a generic case and PS shows a PF of about 0.63, 90 watts and 135 volt-amps.
I'd bet that your "two very old machines" don't have a PF anywhere near 0.85.
Really, seriously, for a measly $30, get a Kill-A-Watt from ThinkGeek and get some real numbers, not guesses. The accumulated kilowatt-hour feature is worth it by itself.
Last I saw they are on the C7 chip. Not so famous as AMD, but for certain tasks, get the job done nicely.
For certain tasks, I can't argue with you.
The nice thing about a low-power Pentium-M or AMD Turion CPU on an ATX or mini-ATX MB is expandability (a.k.a., PCI slots) and form factor (a.k.a., easily fits in an ATX case).
For example, if you're building a RAID file server, you can easily install an ATX MB into a tower case, plug-in a PCI raid card and drives and you're good to go. Plenty of room and good ventilation.
Want to use your file server as a web/mail server on your broadband connection and/or as a firewall? Just plug in a second (or third) network card. No sweat.
A Pentium-M or AMD Turion gives you much more CPU power than a Via chip but doesn't consume that much more power at idle.
You can easily measure how much power your computer draws with a multimeter from the hardware store - last time I was there I saw them for about $10. Put the meter on the AC amps scale, make sure the wires are plugged into the amp reading ports, and then wire it in series with your computer.
Don't forget, what you're measuring is apparent power, which is really volt-amps. Computer power supplies have a significant power factor, so what you really want to do is measure the corrected real power which is in watts.
Go to ThinkGeek and pick up a Kill-A-Watt, which will not only tell you how many watts your computer actually consumes, but also things like power-factor and kilowatt-hours, which is a much more accurate measure of power consumption.
I'm still baffled into how you can efficiently break up a game into 8 threads.
You don't simply break up a game into 8 threads. Remember 7 of those 8 processors are not really general-purpose CPUs, but SPEs, more like vector processors. Moreover, the SPEs don't have direct access to main memory, they have to be spoon fed from the main processor or some sort of DMA controller.
So the main CPU would have to set up the SPEs and then handle all of the networking and I/O and stuff, while the SPEs would handle the computationally intensive stuff like the physics, sound, AI, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooo..... would this mean that the Pentagon could *bogart* all of the power when needed, or reduce power generation at critical times?
...
This is only proof of concept, 5 or 10 megawatts is a drop in the bucket for commercial or military use. Heck, there are operating 5 megawatt wind generators.
The point is that somebody should at least try to demonstrate the feasibility (or infeasibility) of space-based solar power stations, and NASA isn't going to do it so who else is there?
The important thing is to develop the technology and techniques to build solar power stations. Once we have those, commercial power companies can just contract out to Boeing or Lockheed to have them built. But it's developing the technology and techniques that are critical.
It's like the Navy is funding Dr. Bussard's Polywell project. The Navy can ostensively use it for powering naval vessels, but once (if!) it works, the technology will be available for commercial use. The military has a long history of sponsoring R&D that has dual military and commercial uses.
After all, if the Pentagon (US government) plays its cards right,
I'm curious, do you have any examples of the US "playing its cards right" in any foreign policy matters?
I was just thinking about Sputnik and thinking how in the 30+ years since the Apollo missions international cooperation couldn't get us back to the moon, but maybe international competition will.
I don't know if there's a shortage of research ideas, though I wouldn't be surprised. Zero-gravity research is a fairly specialized area.
My recollection is that the ISS was designed for a crew of 7, but because the Soyuz emergency reentry capsule can only hold 3 people, they only allow 3 people to stay on the ISS between shuttle flights. NASA was suppose to have a 7-person reentry vehicle by now. The problem is that 3 people are barely enough to maintain the ISS, so there's relatively little spare time to do actual science.
My problem is that I'm old enough to remember the "Golden Age" of space travel; Mercury, Gemini, Apollo (and the Russian flights also, credit where credit is due). If you asked anyone back then, they'd tell you we'd have a moon base by the end of the century and be on Mars shortly after that.
What we have is a gold plated brick in LEO and then we congratulate ourselves on what a great job we're doing.
Scientific exploration always has risks, and thus sometimes it goes sour.
I don't really blame anybody for not forcasting an idea drought.
Sometimes they do know things are not going to work out right and for whatever reason (politics usually) they go ahead and do it anyway.
Originally, as I understand it, the ISS was suppose to be manned by 7 scientists/astronauts/janitors, which they decided was enough to do "real" science and maintain the station. The ISS is currently manned by, what, 3 or 4 astronauts the last time I checked. Which, I understand, is just enough to maintain the station almost full time and maybe do a little science on the side.
I'm not really blaming anyone for where the ISS is today. I think the most valuable thing we learned from the ISS is building and maintaining it. The science is almost secondary (but is the major political reason).
My concern is that NASA is blinded by the mere existance of the ISS and refuses to admit even the possibility of any alternative till at least 2015 (probably longer, politics trumps all).
It could be compared to spending billions building a giant super-collider and never finding any interesting particle collisions.
But would you continue to spend billions of dollars maintaining it? Or would you learn from your mistakes and try something else?
Well, realistically, after the ISS is complete, what can you do with it?
It's in too high an orbital inclination to be used as a way station for a lunar or mars mission.
It's too small to use for any spaced-based manufacturing, like semiconductors, specialty materials or pharmaceuticals.
It's too small for a real staff of scientists and/or engineers (who have to double as janitors anyway).
It's too small for a tourist destination (yes, I know, some "tourists" have visited).
It's already designed, so it can't be used for experimental construction techniques (like solar-power station construction, for example).
So it's really a small, very expensive, high maintenance science laboratory and I have to ask myself, except for the experience gained in building it, how many science experiments are worth the huge expense.
Wouldn't it be better to take what we learned from the ISS and use that to build a larger, easier to maintain, more versatile space station? Perhaps in a lower inclination orbit? Someplace you could do real science and manufacturing without scientists and engineers doubling as janitors?
*Sigh* Yes, I know this is NASA, they're "only" going to support the ISS till 2015. Then they'll worry about replacing it.
White-collar job security FTW!
What you are failing to take into account is that, if the PC as we knew it back when IBM was "the hardware to have", didn't exist, everyone would have gravitated to at least ONE of the other platforms. THAT platform would have taken off, gotten cheaper, and ended up where MS/Intel is now.
I think that's a big assumption. Corporate IBM was all about mainframes. The PC was developed by a special team in Boca Raton, but corporate IBM had no clue how to market it (I would argue that Microsoft is really the one that pushed the PC and made it a ubiquitous platform). Apple was good at marketing, but was (and is) all about proprietary hardware (I'm thinking of the Macintosh, not Apple II). Amiga and BeOS were really ahead of their time, but suffered from mediocre marketing and competition from Microsoft. Atari and Commodore were good, but nothing special and also suffered from mediocre marketing.
I don't see any of them (except maybe Apple, but then you're stuck with their proprietary hardware and software) having the marketing clout to dominate the market.
I would argue that the fortuitous combination of IBM PC's open architecture (which allowed cloning) and Microsoft's ruthless marketing of first DOS and then Windows (and pirating of DOS and Windows on cloned PC hardware! don't want to forget that!) that drove their competitors (expect Apple) out of business and, almost accidently, established the PC as the industry standard architecture.
No. If there had been no Microsoft, someone else would have done that.
Sometimes I wonder. What if there had been no Microsoft and instead the market was divided between, say, Apple, Atari, Amiga, BeOS, OS/2 (though OS/2 was arguably IBM's response to Microsoft Windows). So (at least) 5 incompatable operating system and 5 incompatable hardware platforms. So I picture a smaller overall market with little standardization between platforms. Linus would probably have been an Amiga or BeOS fanboy and wouldn't have been forced to write Linux.
Through Bill Gate's sheer ruthlessness Microsoft incidentally created an ubiquitous hardware platform that allowed the development of standardized interfaces; everything from keyboards and mice to video cards and optical drives. Which, arguably, incidentally allowed Google to standardize on massive numbers of cheap, industrial standard computers running Linux instead of more expensive, proprietary computers with a proprietary operating system; i.e. Apple, Amiga, Atari or BeOS.
Mainframes have features that just aren't available in commodity or even server PC.
Mainframes are designed not just for speed, but also for reliability and throughput.
Throughput is limited in a standard PC because everything has to go through the northbridge chip and all I/O has to go though both the northbridge and southbridge chip. Depending on the make and model, a mainframe will have multiple and redundant I/O buses for drives and networking. And multiple CPUs with multiple redundant banks of memory.
Everything is monitored. If a stick of RAM starts to fail (they use ECC RAM of course), programs and data are dynamically moved to another bank and a service call is automatically logged. Same thing with drives, CPUs, power supplies, etc. Everything is monitored and redundant.
Mainframes are designed so they don't even have to be powered-down for service. Anything; CPUs, memory, drives, power supplies, can be replaced or upgraded while it's running. Users won't even notice.
Mainframes are designed from the ground-up for companies that absolutely, positively can not afford downtime. It's a completely different market than a typical server PC.
HortiBot - A Plant Nursing Robot
Doesn't look like they've gone too far yet, but interesting nevertheless.
(And after Lockheed's disastrous hovering shuttle replacement in the late 1990s, it's not wise to just assume they'll automatically win such a race.)
I think you're confusing the hovering McDonnell Douglas DC-X (which was a successful test vehicle until NASA got ahold of it) and the Shuttle replacement Lockheed Martin X-33 (which was a diaster).
4. Wave power is too ugly to be built (too lazy to Google for it but Kennedy / Kerry vetoed the idea because it was too close to THEIR vacataion home).
You mean the Nantucket Sound wind power project.
Elite Trader, for example.
At one point they were able to turn the DC-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X) around in 26-hours.
It's just a matter of designing for reliability and servicability instead of cutting-edge performance like NASA does.
It helps that this is a sub-orbital vehicle.
A French robot that runs on beer? I don't think so!
Free wine perhaps.
// TODO: insert linux/wine joke here.
--------
Still doesn't close the analog hole, though...
Wait til they can implant nanowire processors right into your eyeballs. Then they can decrypt the video when it reaches your retina. That'll close that nasty analog hole.
From what I've read about the press conference (and from the various opinion pieces I've read on it), it seems that Sony has grown overconfident--and with over 65% market share, can you blame them?
I'm not so sure the problem is overconfidence. I think the fundamental problem is that blue-ray HD-DVD drive.
I understand Sony is trying to make blue-ray drives the defacto next generation HD-DVD standard, but the problem is that the 1st generation drives are so expensive ($400 by one estimate I read) that it's pushing the overall cost of the system out of the market. Even at $500 Sony is priced well above Microsoft and Nintendo and still must be losing big money on each system.
If they swallowed their pride and released a system with a standard DVD drive and dropped the price to $400, they could probably sell as many systems as they can make. At $500 (and $600 for the good one), I think they're going to have problems.
Please citations on this one.
One example is the movie industry, which moved to California in the early 1900s in part to make "it more difficult for Thomas Edison to enforce his motion picture patents."
Arguably China is currently undergoing an economic revolution, at least in part, because its weak intellectual property laws allow it to copy western technology with few consequencies. Although I'm sure that will change as soon as they have something worth copying.
Microsoft is a software company. IBM is a hardware/service company that happens to sell some software.
Microsoft thinks they understand the "business enterprise" computer market, but it's just the bottom, low-end stuff compared to IBM.
And don't even bother comparing Microsoft customer "service" to IBM customer service, there's just no comparison.
Most switching power supplies are very efficient and take power factor into consideration. There are some high-end units that approach ~0.99+. I would imagine most to be around ~0.85.
Beware of assumptions!
Remeasuring the power consumption of my (2 year old) Pentium IV in an Antec case w/Antec SmartPower PS, I read a PF of about 0.7, 120 watts and 180 volt-amps.
Measuring an old, old AMD system with a generic case and PS shows a PF of about 0.63, 90 watts and 135 volt-amps.
I'd bet that your "two very old machines" don't have a PF anywhere near 0.85.
Really, seriously, for a measly $30, get a Kill-A-Watt from ThinkGeek and get some real numbers, not guesses. The accumulated kilowatt-hour feature is worth it by itself.
Last I saw they are on the C7 chip. Not so famous as AMD, but for certain tasks, get the job done nicely.
For certain tasks, I can't argue with you.
The nice thing about a low-power Pentium-M or AMD Turion CPU on an ATX or mini-ATX MB is expandability (a.k.a., PCI slots) and form factor (a.k.a., easily fits in an ATX case).
For example, if you're building a RAID file server, you can easily install an ATX MB into a tower case, plug-in a PCI raid card and drives and you're good to go. Plenty of room and good ventilation.
Want to use your file server as a web/mail server on your broadband connection and/or as a firewall? Just plug in a second (or third) network card. No sweat.
A Pentium-M or AMD Turion gives you much more CPU power than a Via chip but doesn't consume that much more power at idle.
You can easily measure how much power your computer draws with a multimeter from the hardware store - last time I was there I saw them for about $10. Put the meter on the AC amps scale, make sure the wires are plugged into the amp reading ports, and then wire it in series with your computer.
Don't forget, what you're measuring is apparent power, which is really volt-amps. Computer power supplies have a significant power factor, so what you really want to do is measure the corrected real power which is in watts.
Go to ThinkGeek and pick up a Kill-A-Watt, which will not only tell you how many watts your computer actually consumes, but also things like power-factor and kilowatt-hours, which is a much more accurate measure of power consumption.
1-2233 don't post anymore because when they do, readers minds litterally get slashdotted, sometimes leading to hemorrage and irreperable server crash.
And the problem is... ?
That was unusually informative and insightful for Slashdot, as befits your low UID.
I'm still baffled into how you can efficiently break up a game into 8 threads.
You don't simply break up a game into 8 threads. Remember 7 of those 8 processors are not really general-purpose CPUs, but SPEs, more like vector processors. Moreover, the SPEs don't have direct access to main memory, they have to be spoon fed from the main processor or some sort of DMA controller.
So the main CPU would have to set up the SPEs and then handle all of the networking and I/O and stuff, while the SPEs would handle the computationally intensive stuff like the physics, sound, AI, etc.
Sounds like a bitch to program to me.
The book stores are glutted with D&D books. My read is they are just trying to move 'em.
Maybe they should offer rebates.