If you don't have the time, what you normally do is buy a rebuilt engine - you do not buy a 'new' engine' However a good rebuild is as good as a new engine. I don't know how often a given engine can be rebuilt as eventually major parts will need replacement.
Given the extent to which bits are replaced on Atlantis, we can say that something of the name Atlantis entered service in 85 and is still flying now but what percentage has been totally refurbished/replaced in that time?
The rovers and Voyager were designed as unmanned probes. Essentially they are limited to the capabilities they were launched with. Mir and ISS were designed to be things that wree manned and had a more dynamic profile. To be fair, science isn't their strong-point, rather, orbital/space engineering.
From desert to steppe to Arctic tundra, you will find the Lada/Zhiguli which was based loosely on a Fiat 124. It has absolutely no style. It is unreliable. It breaks down everywhere but is very easily fixed. This sort of explains Russia, they have loads of people who can fix things, they have the parts and given the range of conditions (weather, roads), it is impossible to build something that is 100% reliable, so they build something that is 100% fixable instead.
It takes a lot of energy to move something the size of the ISS into an orbit high enough not to fall on our heads in the relatively near future;
Correct, but as we are in space, we can talk a little push but for a very long time. Something like an ion engine. The ISS has loads of power now, all that is need for an ion engine is just reaction mass.
I like asymmetric warfare as it is the only realistic way that a small force can engage hugely superior force. It is extremely relevent to current conflicts and probably to future ones..
As you rightly point out though, it is difficult if the superior force lacks political constraints, but even there they can fail, for example the USSR and Afghanistan. The problem is that it really stops being FPS and goes strategic (a different kind of game).
Das Boot was made some four decades(!) - that's just short of three generations - after WWII and the holocaust, and people - worldwide, not just holocaust survivors & families - had a huge problem accepting it
Few of my friends or immediate relatives had a problem with it. Our family hadn't been directly attacked during the war other than being at the receiving end of the blitz, but had for a long time lived in one of the convoy ports. Most Germans were not seen as animals by those of my family who served during the war because in combat, they generally behaved themselves.
The films that stired up the big questions were things like Schindler's List which was more about the life behind the lines.
This directly came back to the Ultra thing where Bletchley park could read Rommel's pleas for fuel and then attack the convoys carrying same to North Africa. All Monty had to do was to work out when Rommel was particularly limited by fuel and attack at that point.
The Korean war was easier as both fought fairly conventionally. Vietnam would be interesting, if I could choose to fight as either side. Some of the set pieces were quite fascinating but it is the long-term conflict where the real challenges emerge.
Once you start with the issues of asymmetrical warfare and the political constraints (Rules of Engagement in current parlance) then you choose to be a tyrant in the south and use pre-emptive strikes against possibly hostile civilians and see if you can be more effective against VC infiltration.
Talk to some real germans soldiers when they are willing to let their guard down. The knew, just didn't want to know and sure as hell couldn't admit to knowing after the war.
Not quite correct because most soldiers saw the front and little else. Only special units were used for rounding up and dealing with the jews/other undesirables. However the treatment generally given to the enemy civilians in both Russia and the Ukraine was quite harsh, there were little of the 'cleaning up operations' near the front-lines. For the soldiers of occupation, things would have been different.
What is interesting though is the civilian machinery behind the camps. Moving vast numbers of people around required a massive infrastructure with corresponding paperwork (we are talking Germans here) and it has been shown that many people in the Reichsbahn (Railway service of the time) must have known about extermination implied movements of people in the cattle trucks into the extermination camps with no movement out.
You can indeed leave a GPS fixed in a point and average the readings to reduce the margin of uncertainty, but you'll never achieve the high accuracy needed for surveying.
I have relatives who were there for the first triangulation of Ireland and West Africa. I first looked through a theodolite aged about 5 and helped my father with surveys since I was 10. You could say that it is the blood.
Survey is about measurement from and back to a fixed point. Surveyors used to use trig points, typically on mountain or hill tops and so-called bench marks. Bench marks exist in built-up areas and are simply known locations where you stick an optical instrument. You meausre things relative to the instrument.
So what happens when you build out of town, say a road, pipeline or whatever. You need to link back to a known reference point such as a trig point. Sometime that can be difficult and you have to survey multiple 'legs'. Theodolites measured angles, these became extended toi give range, by optical rangefinding (split prisms and horizontal staves), by microwaves and later by lasers. The main innovation there was the creation of the total station which captured data directly for input into a computer system for creating the digital ground model.
The important innovation that GPS gave was to free up the first fixed point. Note first that some kinds of compensation are needed because the earth isn't a perfect sphere, but aside from that, leave a survey grade GPS running so it can average the passes and it will get cm level accuracy. This can then kick out DGPS which the surveyors can use with those funny back-pack units which will fix their position relative to the base station to a matter of centimetres. The surveyor simply adds commentary to say what the point is that they have just digitised. For greater accuracy, they use laser based units to measure back to the fixed point (I belive it will give you a better Z axis) but the base remains GPS.
As the base needs a long time to stabilise, and they are quite expensive other fixed points are still used to locate the base, especially if there is already some construction around. So in cities, you will usually see purely optical methods used.
You can write without any memory management. You can even write it in assembler. You will be faster but less resilient. Yep, you can write code in your super-safe language but ultimately you are talking about buffers that change ownership and not so easy to implement in a way can be implemented without synchronisation problems.
Yep, many, many years ago, I worked at Excerpta Medica (when they were on the Herrengracht) who were essentially a medical publisher, primarily of some specialist abstracting journals in medecine and closely related subjects. Occasionally they also produced specialist books such as Marler's Pharmaceutical and Chemical Synonyms, a quick lookup of trade and proper names for drugs and pharmaceutically active chemicals. They are part of Elsevier group who were reputed to be getting up to some very questionable activities, but Excerpta Medica was run at a loss.
In those days, Excerpta Medica had the Dutch great and good acting as editors and it was considered a valuable service by the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (which put Elsevier in a slightly more positive light with the authorities).
After I left, it was incorporated more into the main part of Elsevier and it may be then that it started to be seen as a profit centre in its own right. It certainly always had close links to the drug companies and occassionally printed some stuff for them - but never vanity publishing research journals.
Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.
And the web. Nothing directly to do with HEP, but it was necessary as a way of distributing data from so many different computers. Other people had worked on proprietary toys (remember Gopher) but TBL's idea succeeded because it was open, developed at a public research institute and not protected.
Oh and all those expensive toys that the physicists use, they are carefully spread out amongst the contributing countries.
if you curse at a bureaucrat, those worthless sacks of shit of which there are way too many, that's "Beamten Beleidigung" and you can get fined 5000 Euro on their word.
Agreed. The literal English translation of Beamten is 'office holders'. but we call these people in the US or UK public/civil servants. Gives them a different level of expectation. Oh, and totally forget any kind of whistle-blowing website, it would have to be hosted offshore.
To everyone that keeps wanting to raise prices to fair levels, please consider the R word, yon know, Recession. We are in one, well most of the western world is in one. Most people's disposable income has got rather less, not more and games are not a necessity of life.
Sure someone may invent some really super game with lots of online content (to reduce piracy) that may end up costing lots more and if people like it, they may buy it. OTOH, they may not.
One of the nastiest bits of code that I wrote after a four rather strong beer lunch. It was in the early days of graphics when we had a DEC VT11, vector graphic display where we had to draw the screen within the phosphor decay time so it didn't flicker. Typically you would have a sequence of instructions for the graphic controller and then you interrupted the CPU which would do cleverer things. The problem was that every cycle spend in the interrupt code, the phosphor was decaying and it limited the number of things we could draw as the CPU was involved every time we drew a new component on the screen.
In the pub, I just thought "Sod it" and shaved a few cycles by having self modifying code. Ugly as hell and hard to maintain but it meant we could display more on the screen.
Most companies don't have bars on their campus. There could be a ton of reasons they switched their opinion. But suddenly coming out and saying the mormons are now the master of Microsoft is ridiculous.
Smaller companies not, but if you are big enough to have a sports and social club, then you often have a bar. There is a reason for this, a beer or two in a convivial atmosphere loosens tongues, and you don't want people talking shop in front of every Tom, Dick or Harry.
Line X, or whatever the Soviet technology transfer programme was called certainly existed but this is not some nice neat thing that can be acquired and transferred like a chip. My own suspicion is that the CIA side of this was just someone making money selling on substandard chips.
The explosion may of been caused by code in the pump system itself (sourced from Canada), but it would have been very difficult with the main SCADA system which was sourced from the UK. Neither would have been 'clean' deliveries of turn-key systems as western engineers from the respective vendors would have been hopping around fixing things and this would have included messing with the code. Any dangerous mods would have been spotted very quickly as the engineers themselves may have been killed.
You give references, but all the information comes out of the disinformation spread by a throw away paragraph in the memoirs of one retired cold warrior Thomas Reed which has been contradicted from the Russian side. The construction teams were local and the welds were of varying quality.
The particular SCADA system had been first rolled out in the UK for monitoring a gas pipeline in around 1980. The company then acquired the contract to do the Trans-Sib pipeline. This is not off-the-shelf coding and everything needed lots of care and feeding to get it working. This is not like selling a dodgy engine management system for a car (closed box system).
Unlikely, the Soviets used to take a lot of interest in any imported equipment, first the customs and then later the people who had to work with it. Russians, in particular, are engineers and like to understand things so they can fix them.
There are batteries that are just sealed with vent valves that must be kept upright but there are also gel batteries that can be operated at any angle. These look like gel models (they are kept on their side to conserve space). There are so few possible failure modes with a simple constant current charger circuit that these are considered suitable for safety equipment.
Most burglaries are more opportunistic than anything else with little planning. Streetview wouldn't help that much other than broadly locating wealthy areas and possibly eliminating houses with alarms. A driveby can do the same
Having police actually do something about burglary would be a better improvement which is one good reason why they need to lose some of their workload, running after phantom terrorists and users of mild narcotics.
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If you don't have the time, what you normally do is buy a rebuilt engine - you do not buy a 'new' engine' However a good rebuild is as good as a new engine. I don't know how often a given engine can be rebuilt as eventually major parts will need replacement.
Given the extent to which bits are replaced on Atlantis, we can say that something of the name Atlantis entered service in 85 and is still flying now but what percentage has been totally refurbished/replaced in that time?
The rovers and Voyager were designed as unmanned probes. Essentially they are limited to the capabilities they were launched with. Mir and ISS were designed to be things that wree manned and had a more dynamic profile. To be fair, science isn't their strong-point, rather, orbital/space engineering.
From desert to steppe to Arctic tundra, you will find the Lada/Zhiguli which was based loosely on a Fiat 124. It has absolutely no style. It is unreliable. It breaks down everywhere but is very easily fixed. This sort of explains Russia, they have loads of people who can fix things, they have the parts and given the range of conditions (weather, roads), it is impossible to build something that is 100% reliable, so they build something that is 100% fixable instead.
Unfortunately, I know exactly what you mean.
Correct, but as we are in space, we can talk a little push but for a very long time. Something like an ion engine. The ISS has loads of power now, all that is need for an ion engine is just reaction mass.
I like asymmetric warfare as it is the only realistic way that a small force can engage hugely superior force. It is extremely relevent to current conflicts and probably to future ones..
As you rightly point out though, it is difficult if the superior force lacks political constraints, but even there they can fail, for example the USSR and Afghanistan. The problem is that it really stops being FPS and goes strategic (a different kind of game).
Few of my friends or immediate relatives had a problem with it. Our family hadn't been directly attacked during the war other than being at the receiving end of the blitz, but had for a long time lived in one of the convoy ports. Most Germans were not seen as animals by those of my family who served during the war because in combat, they generally behaved themselves.
The films that stired up the big questions were things like Schindler's List which was more about the life behind the lines.
This directly came back to the Ultra thing where Bletchley park could read Rommel's pleas for fuel and then attack the convoys carrying same to North Africa. All Monty had to do was to work out when Rommel was particularly limited by fuel and attack at that point.
The Korean war was easier as both fought fairly conventionally. Vietnam would be interesting, if I could choose to fight as either side. Some of the set pieces were quite fascinating but it is the long-term conflict where the real challenges emerge.
Once you start with the issues of asymmetrical warfare and the political constraints (Rules of Engagement in current parlance) then you choose to be a tyrant in the south and use pre-emptive strikes against possibly hostile civilians and see if you can be more effective against VC infiltration.
Not quite correct because most soldiers saw the front and little else. Only special units were used for rounding up and dealing with the jews/other undesirables. However the treatment generally given to the enemy civilians in both Russia and the Ukraine was quite harsh, there were little of the 'cleaning up operations' near the front-lines. For the soldiers of occupation, things would have been different.
What is interesting though is the civilian machinery behind the camps. Moving vast numbers of people around required a massive infrastructure with corresponding paperwork (we are talking Germans here) and it has been shown that many people in the Reichsbahn (Railway service of the time) must have known about extermination implied movements of people in the cattle trucks into the extermination camps with no movement out.
You can write without any memory management. You can even write it in assembler. You will be faster but less resilient. Yep, you can write code in your super-safe language but ultimately you are talking about buffers that change ownership and not so easy to implement in a way can be implemented without synchronisation problems.
Yep, many, many years ago, I worked at Excerpta Medica (when they were on the Herrengracht) who were essentially a medical publisher, primarily of some specialist abstracting journals in medecine and closely related subjects. Occasionally they also produced specialist books such as Marler's Pharmaceutical and Chemical Synonyms, a quick lookup of trade and proper names for drugs and pharmaceutically active chemicals. They are part of Elsevier group who were reputed to be getting up to some very questionable activities, but Excerpta Medica was run at a loss.
In those days, Excerpta Medica had the Dutch great and good acting as editors and it was considered a valuable service by the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (which put Elsevier in a slightly more positive light with the authorities).
After I left, it was incorporated more into the main part of Elsevier and it may be then that it started to be seen as a profit centre in its own right. It certainly always had close links to the drug companies and occassionally printed some stuff for them - but never vanity publishing research journals.
And the web. Nothing directly to do with HEP, but it was necessary as a way of distributing data from so many different computers. Other people had worked on proprietary toys (remember Gopher) but TBL's idea succeeded because it was open, developed at a public research institute and not protected.
Oh and all those expensive toys that the physicists use, they are carefully spread out amongst the contributing countries.
Agreed. The literal English translation of Beamten is 'office holders'. but we call these people in the US or UK public/civil servants. Gives them a different level of expectation. Oh, and totally forget any kind of whistle-blowing website, it would have to be hosted offshore.
Some are.
How many times have we heard the defence "I downloaded it only for research purposes".
To everyone that keeps wanting to raise prices to fair levels, please consider the R word, yon know, Recession. We are in one, well most of the western world is in one. Most people's disposable income has got rather less, not more and games are not a necessity of life.
Sure someone may invent some really super game with lots of online content (to reduce piracy) that may end up costing lots more and if people like it, they may buy it. OTOH, they may not.
What about the Progress Bar?
What about the Progress Bar?
One of the nastiest bits of code that I wrote after a four rather strong beer lunch. It was in the early days of graphics when we had a DEC VT11, vector graphic display where we had to draw the screen within the phosphor decay time so it didn't flicker. Typically you would have a sequence of instructions for the graphic controller and then you interrupted the CPU which would do cleverer things. The problem was that every cycle spend in the interrupt code, the phosphor was decaying and it limited the number of things we could draw as the CPU was involved every time we drew a new component on the screen.
In the pub, I just thought "Sod it" and shaved a few cycles by having self modifying code. Ugly as hell and hard to maintain but it meant we could display more on the screen.
Smaller companies not, but if you are big enough to have a sports and social club, then you often have a bar. There is a reason for this, a beer or two in a convivial atmosphere loosens tongues, and you don't want people talking shop in front of every Tom, Dick or Harry.
Line X, or whatever the Soviet technology transfer programme was called certainly existed but this is not some nice neat thing that can be acquired and transferred like a chip. My own suspicion is that the CIA side of this was just someone making money selling on substandard chips.
The explosion may of been caused by code in the pump system itself (sourced from Canada), but it would have been very difficult with the main SCADA system which was sourced from the UK. Neither would have been 'clean' deliveries of turn-key systems as western engineers from the respective vendors would have been hopping around fixing things and this would have included messing with the code. Any dangerous mods would have been spotted very quickly as the engineers themselves may have been killed.
You give references, but all the information comes out of the disinformation spread by a throw away paragraph in the memoirs of one retired cold warrior Thomas Reed which has been contradicted from the Russian side. The construction teams were local and the welds were of varying quality.
The particular SCADA system had been first rolled out in the UK for monitoring a gas pipeline in around 1980. The company then acquired the contract to do the Trans-Sib pipeline. This is not off-the-shelf coding and everything needed lots of care and feeding to get it working. This is not like selling a dodgy engine management system for a car (closed box system).
Unlikely, the Soviets used to take a lot of interest in any imported equipment, first the customs and then later the people who had to work with it. Russians, in particular, are engineers and like to understand things so they can fix them.
There are batteries that are just sealed with vent valves that must be kept upright but there are also gel batteries that can be operated at any angle. These look like gel models (they are kept on their side to conserve space). There are so few possible failure modes with a simple constant current charger circuit that these are considered suitable for safety equipment.
Most burglaries are more opportunistic than anything else with little planning. Streetview wouldn't help that much other than broadly locating wealthy areas and possibly eliminating houses with alarms. A driveby can do the same
Having police actually do something about burglary would be a better improvement which is one good reason why they need to lose some of their workload, running after phantom terrorists and users of mild narcotics.