Jeb is gonna want some kind of a cabinet position in the Trump administration, so he better start catching up on past episodes of The Apprentice.
We could do worse than Trump... But.... We could do a LOT better too. I sure hope Trump get's tired of spending his money on this side show pretty soon...
Jeb was already on his way to irrelevant, just another nail in his political coffin.
We are about 5 months away from any "voting" taking place. That's a LONG time politically, where the public's attention span has a hard time lasting more than 2 weeks on anything. Jeb's got money so I'd not count him out. He's just biding time, as are a whole host of other candidates, sitting on their war chests and getting their ad buys ready for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
Right now it's all about getting enough money to make a good showing late in January and making it though the four February primaries. Even though I don't like it, it's obvious that Jeb will make a good showing though this process because of his money, the hope is that some other candidate will best him though February and suck up the uncommitted funding.
So, the only "nails in the coffin" that count are loosing an actual primary...
And the comparison with Concord is utterly bizarre! No plane has ever come close to matching Concord, not at the time, nor since.
Thank God. That thing was a beast, expensive to operate, expensive to build, and not very safe in the end.. The only thing it really had was speed, which in this day and age turned out to be not as important as cost for the traveling public.
And Space X is on it's second version of the Falcon 9 AND has had failures while the H2B has had none, yet..
Look, the question was abut there being an "indication" that H2 is safer than Falcon (look up about 5 messages ago). An indication exists in the perfect reliability record of the H2B verses the less than reliable Falcon 9 V1.1, which was the point in my response. I'm not claiming we have proof, only that there IS some *indication* that H2B is safer and more reliable given it's PERFECT (albeit shorter) record over the Falcon 9 V1.1's blemished record...
So you want to make the claim that the Falcon 9 is more reliable and safer... I don't think you have any real evidence of that, even if you want to believe it. Space X has too many problems in other areas and the latest booster failure is evidence of that. Is it proof? Nope, and I'm not claiming to have proof, only claiming that their are *indications*, which is obviously true.
It may not be *enough* data to determine if it's safe, but there is *indications* that the H2 system is reliable. The Falcon, on the other hand, has had it's share of issues.
3. First attempt was scrubbed AFTER engine start, second attempt was successful.
4. Engine failure on Boost, lower than intended orbit left half of the payload stranded.
6. New Design First flown with booster recovery option, recovery system fails.
7. Had an in flight fire in the Booster.
8. USAF evaluation failed on safety grounds based on this launch telemetry and flight 7's fire.
10. Booster recovery fails again, though it wasn't a primary objective.
14. Another booster recovery failure.
15. And another..
17. Again....
19. Total loss of vehicle under booster power.
Even if you take out all the attempts at recovering the booster it leaves 4 out of 19 launches where there was a significant anomaly with the vehicle and when you consider H2's 2 failures out of 13 launches it seems to me that the H2 is the more reliable system here.
So there ARE indications that H2 (and specifically H2B with 5 successes in a row) is more reliable and safer...
83.68% load factor is like having Ethernet segments loaded to 83%... This is historically high, very high.
True there are flights which go below 50%, but these flights running at low capacity are usually due to positioning requirements, where they need to move the aircraft from A to B at these off peak times. It's better to take half a load of paying passengers at 2AM than just fly the aircraft empty. Many times it's about not tying up a gate parking an aircraft overnight, or needing the aircraft ready for a 100% full segment first thing in the morning.
Recently I took a 5am flight between two major cities that was about half full, but they where really just positioning the aircraft for it's return trip that left at 7 AM from the destination city and returning to where I got on. They *could* have waited until 7AM to leave and likely would have had a fuller flight, but then the segment back to the origin would be less loaded as well. Sometimes it pays to fly less than full.
But what's not happening right now is the Airlines are not putting bigger equipment into service so they have more seats to sell, even though we are seeing historically high load factors. There is a reason for this.
1: Is the data center going to be on a ship? If so, will it be in US waters? If not it is free game for any naval force whatsoever who feels like boarding the data center. There are a lot of issues about maritime property rights that make property disputes on land look tame in comparison, especially in international waters.
2: Reliable power? Ships are not static objects.
3: Stability. The closest thing to a stable platform is the prison barge attached to Riker's Island, and that thing requires a naval staff, bilge pumps, ballast tanks, and many other items. If they don't do their job, the barge can sink. A data center barge only will be worse.
4: Marine environments are by far the worst environments to even think of putting a data center in. There is a reason why anything related to boating costs 10-20 times as much as normal landlubber stuff. For example, just attaching a lug to a battery wire requires a $4000 hydraulic crimp tool as well as proper shrink wrap insulation. Same job for a car? $10 pair of pliers can do it.
5. Data connections will be difficult, high speed ones even worse.
6. Provisioning and resupply of fuel, maintenance spares, personnel and food will be very expensive.
7. Emergencies will be hard to deal with, fires, accidents, taking on water etc..
8. Storms, wind, waves, etc will all cause you issues.
But, as you point out, on board power will be the largest cost issue they face and will make this very difficult to accomplish, even if they can get it from natural sources and not have to generate it from fossil fuels.
Is anyone considering the local effects of warming the water in the harbors these centers will be docked in? It seems to me, given the current toxic algal bloom off the west coast of the US at the moment, we might be just a bit concerned, right?
Artificial way to produce an "El Niño"... Environmentalists will be coming unglued... (Grin)
Actually, airlines in the USA are generally running almost all their flights at full capacity right now. Especially the major carriers. Competition has made them run with nearly 100% load factors nearly every day of the week.
Business travelers dominate Sunday, Monday, Friday and Saturday leaving Tuesday - Thursday for non-business travelers. Middle of the week is where the deals are now, but because they have reduced capacity so much, business travel is being squished into these days as well.
It doesn't affect cost, no. But it does affect what people are willing to pay. If I have something that costs me $10, and I normally sell it for $15 but you are willing to pay me $20, why shouldn't I take the $20?
The real question here is why the $20 paying customer somehow thinks it's unfair that somebody paid less for the same service when they willingly agreed to pay $20?
This whole thing is rooted in the "Big Corporation's are always bad" mindset, which is demonstrably false, by people who don't think twice about putting their $0.25 garage sale fodder on E-Bay for $20. These same folks would jump at the chance to buy the same seat for $5 should there be a surplus and the airline put them on sale to fill them even though others already had purchased tickets for $10.
Big corporations are rarely "bad" though they sometimes do stupid things to their customers trying to be clever. Xerox is being stupid, but I do not think what they are trying to do is bad, just how they where trying to enforce this was a bit too much. Like Kureg, they will pay for being stupid...
No, not really. As I understand this, what happened is they experienced multiple failures of the AC power coming into the facility which happened to be lighting induced. When the power went out the first few times, the UPS's switched to battery power and everything kept going as the batteries provided the necessary power. Eventually, after repeated dependence on the UPS batteries during the multiple failures, the batteries had no more power left and the UPS output power stopped.
This is really a process problem. Apparently nobody recognized that they had lost their redundant power system's battery capacity and took the necessary steps to move the processing to a system where full redundancy still remained. Their process failed them, although it apparently took *four* power failures to expose the issue.
Actually, this seems to be a problem with their power redundancy systems not really a lighting protection problem.
After three lighting induced power outages, the UPS ran out of reserve capacity so on the fourth power outage the UPS dropped the system's power.
Really, what they have is a process failure... They should have their standby AC generator running until the UPS batteries where charged enough to safely handle another fail over process. Either that, or they should have quickly moved the processing out of the facility until full redundancy could be restored.
If you don't get directly hit by lightning, it can still do a lot of damage to things... There are two ways this happens...
1. Induced currents into wires close to the strike - This is where the huge amounts of current flowing into the ground from the lighting strike induces currents in other wires. It's basically cross talk, but with a really large impulse input in one wire, you get some pretty impressive signals in parallel wires. This is what fries your corded phones and electronics which are plugged in when lighting hits the tree down the street.
2. Disruption of the local "ground" reference - Lighting pumps a boat load of charge into the ground at one point and it takes a bit of time for this to dissipate. What this causes is a very large voltage potential to exist between points on the ground. So if you have multiple ground reference points spread around, any device that bridges the gap between two ground references can experience huge voltages. A common example is an electric fence charger which has a ground rod. It will see the voltage differential between it's local ground reference and the power company ground which may be feet apart and see hundreds of thousands volts between the "common" and it's local ground and arc over.
You avoid lighting damage by first keeping yourself from being hit directly and then being very careful to lower your exposure to the above two risks.
Brief is apparently long enough to cause data loss. But power disruptions to running systems don't have to be very long to shut them down.
However, Google apparently hasn't really engineered a proper solution here. In the data center, batteries are there only to bridge you over until the onsite power generator can come on line or until you can perform a safe and orderly shutdown. Plus, you *DON'T* shutdown the generator or reboot shutdown systems after power comes back until you have enough battery capacity and fuel for the generator built back up to survive the next power transient.
Few people think beyond the first event, but Google should know better.
Falcon 9's 19th launch had the catastrophic failure... That we are this far into the program and THEN have a failure says something.... (Not to mention that there have been a lot of partial failures of this system, where components failed to function as intended and ONE partial failure where only one payload of two got delivered as intended. )
The cost per launch is around 15 Billion yen, $121m USD.
The Falcon 9 by comparison has a launch cost of $57 million.
Yea, but with the falcon you have to launch two of them to get one to the space station... (Grin).
Look, Personally I like their approach over Space-X's. Build a reliable platform, even if it's more expensive. Gain experience with the technology and the launch process then start to pare down your costs by looking for your cheaper ways to do parts of your already working system. Space-X has an "all or nothing" approach where they are cutting costs up front and trying to push the technology at the same time. Space X struggles with reliability and will suffer more front loaded failures because they are pushing the technology AND costs, AND reliability at the same time.
Basically, you need to concentrate on ONE major advancement at a time to have a high probability of success and Space-X is pushing more than one advancement (arguably they are trying to advance on three fronts). The Japanese know this, Musk doesn't. Musk has divided his attention between multiple interesting things and will struggle to master all of them at once, the Japanese are concentrating on but one thing at a time and will eventually surpass Musk and Space-X in all areas, and will suffer less catastrophic failures in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlikely, he has a lot of money to spend and name recognition galore...
Nice dig....
I wonder how many people get this... Although, I disagree with your point. I think the bad intolerant people are on the left this time..
Jeb is gonna want some kind of a cabinet position in the Trump administration, so he better start catching up on past episodes of The Apprentice.
We could do worse than Trump... But.... We could do a LOT better too. I sure hope Trump get's tired of spending his money on this side show pretty soon...
Jeb was already on his way to irrelevant, just another nail in his political coffin.
We are about 5 months away from any "voting" taking place. That's a LONG time politically, where the public's attention span has a hard time lasting more than 2 weeks on anything. Jeb's got money so I'd not count him out. He's just biding time, as are a whole host of other candidates, sitting on their war chests and getting their ad buys ready for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
Right now it's all about getting enough money to make a good showing late in January and making it though the four February primaries. Even though I don't like it, it's obvious that Jeb will make a good showing though this process because of his money, the hope is that some other candidate will best him though February and suck up the uncommitted funding.
So, the only "nails in the coffin" that count are loosing an actual primary...
At least back to the Wright brothers 1909 flyer right?
Exactly this.. Mod parent up!
You forgot that it was expensive to build and hard to fly at low speeds...
And the comparison with Concord is utterly bizarre! No plane has ever come close to matching Concord, not at the time, nor since.
Thank God. That thing was a beast, expensive to operate, expensive to build, and not very safe in the end.. The only thing it really had was speed, which in this day and age turned out to be not as important as cost for the traveling public.
And Space X is on it's second version of the Falcon 9 AND has had failures while the H2B has had none, yet..
Look, the question was abut there being an "indication" that H2 is safer than Falcon (look up about 5 messages ago). An indication exists in the perfect reliability record of the H2B verses the less than reliable Falcon 9 V1.1, which was the point in my response. I'm not claiming we have proof, only that there IS some *indication* that H2B is safer and more reliable given it's PERFECT (albeit shorter) record over the Falcon 9 V1.1's blemished record...
So you want to make the claim that the Falcon 9 is more reliable and safer... I don't think you have any real evidence of that, even if you want to believe it. Space X has too many problems in other areas and the latest booster failure is evidence of that. Is it proof? Nope, and I'm not claiming to have proof, only claiming that their are *indications*, which is obviously true.
It may not be *enough* data to determine if it's safe, but there is *indications* that the H2 system is reliable. The Falcon, on the other hand, has had it's share of issues.
3. First attempt was scrubbed AFTER engine start, second attempt was successful.
4. Engine failure on Boost, lower than intended orbit left half of the payload stranded.
6. New Design First flown with booster recovery option, recovery system fails.
7. Had an in flight fire in the Booster.
8. USAF evaluation failed on safety grounds based on this launch telemetry and flight 7's fire.
10. Booster recovery fails again, though it wasn't a primary objective.
14. Another booster recovery failure.
15. And another..
17. Again....
19. Total loss of vehicle under booster power.
Even if you take out all the attempts at recovering the booster it leaves 4 out of 19 launches where there was a significant anomaly with the vehicle and when you consider H2's 2 failures out of 13 launches it seems to me that the H2 is the more reliable system here.
So there ARE indications that H2 (and specifically H2B with 5 successes in a row) is more reliable and safer...
83.68% load factor is like having Ethernet segments loaded to 83%... This is historically high, very high.
True there are flights which go below 50%, but these flights running at low capacity are usually due to positioning requirements, where they need to move the aircraft from A to B at these off peak times. It's better to take half a load of paying passengers at 2AM than just fly the aircraft empty. Many times it's about not tying up a gate parking an aircraft overnight, or needing the aircraft ready for a 100% full segment first thing in the morning.
Recently I took a 5am flight between two major cities that was about half full, but they where really just positioning the aircraft for it's return trip that left at 7 AM from the destination city and returning to where I got on. They *could* have waited until 7AM to leave and likely would have had a fuller flight, but then the segment back to the origin would be less loaded as well. Sometimes it pays to fly less than full.
But what's not happening right now is the Airlines are not putting bigger equipment into service so they have more seats to sell, even though we are seeing historically high load factors. There is a reason for this.
There are a few issues with this idea:
1: Is the data center going to be on a ship? If so, will it be in US waters? If not it is free game for any naval force whatsoever who feels like boarding the data center. There are a lot of issues about maritime property rights that make property disputes on land look tame in comparison, especially in international waters.
2: Reliable power? Ships are not static objects.
3: Stability. The closest thing to a stable platform is the prison barge attached to Riker's Island, and that thing requires a naval staff, bilge pumps, ballast tanks, and many other items. If they don't do their job, the barge can sink. A data center barge only will be worse.
4: Marine environments are by far the worst environments to even think of putting a data center in. There is a reason why anything related to boating costs 10-20 times as much as normal landlubber stuff. For example, just attaching a lug to a battery wire requires a $4000 hydraulic crimp tool as well as proper shrink wrap insulation. Same job for a car? $10 pair of pliers can do it.
5. Data connections will be difficult, high speed ones even worse.
6. Provisioning and resupply of fuel, maintenance spares, personnel and food will be very expensive.
7. Emergencies will be hard to deal with, fires, accidents, taking on water etc..
8. Storms, wind, waves, etc will all cause you issues.
But, as you point out, on board power will be the largest cost issue they face and will make this very difficult to accomplish, even if they can get it from natural sources and not have to generate it from fossil fuels.
True, you just reflag the vessel to a country that has data retention laws you like and move into international waters.
No. no.. That's where the servers end up...
Is anyone considering the local effects of warming the water in the harbors these centers will be docked in? It seems to me, given the current toxic algal bloom off the west coast of the US at the moment, we might be just a bit concerned, right?
Artificial way to produce an "El Niño"... Environmentalists will be coming unglued... (Grin)
Good: more efficient cooling, which is better for the environment
Bad: ... but not if power is supplied by inefficient on-board generation
Ugly: Piracy
Serious problem... Redundant high speed Data connections...
Actually, airlines in the USA are generally running almost all their flights at full capacity right now. Especially the major carriers. Competition has made them run with nearly 100% load factors nearly every day of the week.
Business travelers dominate Sunday, Monday, Friday and Saturday leaving Tuesday - Thursday for non-business travelers. Middle of the week is where the deals are now, but because they have reduced capacity so much, business travel is being squished into these days as well.
It doesn't affect cost, no. But it does affect what people are willing to pay. If I have something that costs me $10, and I normally sell it for $15 but you are willing to pay me $20, why shouldn't I take the $20?
The real question here is why the $20 paying customer somehow thinks it's unfair that somebody paid less for the same service when they willingly agreed to pay $20?
This whole thing is rooted in the "Big Corporation's are always bad" mindset, which is demonstrably false, by people who don't think twice about putting their $0.25 garage sale fodder on E-Bay for $20. These same folks would jump at the chance to buy the same seat for $5 should there be a surplus and the airline put them on sale to fill them even though others already had purchased tickets for $10.
Big corporations are rarely "bad" though they sometimes do stupid things to their customers trying to be clever. Xerox is being stupid, but I do not think what they are trying to do is bad, just how they where trying to enforce this was a bit too much. Like Kureg, they will pay for being stupid...
No, not really. As I understand this, what happened is they experienced multiple failures of the AC power coming into the facility which happened to be lighting induced. When the power went out the first few times, the UPS's switched to battery power and everything kept going as the batteries provided the necessary power. Eventually, after repeated dependence on the UPS batteries during the multiple failures, the batteries had no more power left and the UPS output power stopped.
This is really a process problem. Apparently nobody recognized that they had lost their redundant power system's battery capacity and took the necessary steps to move the processing to a system where full redundancy still remained. Their process failed them, although it apparently took *four* power failures to expose the issue.
Actually, this seems to be a problem with their power redundancy systems not really a lighting protection problem.
After three lighting induced power outages, the UPS ran out of reserve capacity so on the fourth power outage the UPS dropped the system's power.
Really, what they have is a process failure... They should have their standby AC generator running until the UPS batteries where charged enough to safely handle another fail over process. Either that, or they should have quickly moved the processing out of the facility until full redundancy could be restored.
If you don't get directly hit by lightning, it can still do a lot of damage to things... There are two ways this happens...
1. Induced currents into wires close to the strike - This is where the huge amounts of current flowing into the ground from the lighting strike induces currents in other wires. It's basically cross talk, but with a really large impulse input in one wire, you get some pretty impressive signals in parallel wires. This is what fries your corded phones and electronics which are plugged in when lighting hits the tree down the street.
2. Disruption of the local "ground" reference - Lighting pumps a boat load of charge into the ground at one point and it takes a bit of time for this to dissipate. What this causes is a very large voltage potential to exist between points on the ground. So if you have multiple ground reference points spread around, any device that bridges the gap between two ground references can experience huge voltages. A common example is an electric fence charger which has a ground rod. It will see the voltage differential between it's local ground reference and the power company ground which may be feet apart and see hundreds of thousands volts between the "common" and it's local ground and arc over.
You avoid lighting damage by first keeping yourself from being hit directly and then being very careful to lower your exposure to the above two risks.
Brief is apparently long enough to cause data loss. But power disruptions to running systems don't have to be very long to shut them down.
However, Google apparently hasn't really engineered a proper solution here. In the data center, batteries are there only to bridge you over until the onsite power generator can come on line or until you can perform a safe and orderly shutdown. Plus, you *DON'T* shutdown the generator or reboot shutdown systems after power comes back until you have enough battery capacity and fuel for the generator built back up to survive the next power transient.
Few people think beyond the first event, but Google should know better.
Falcon 9's 19th launch had the catastrophic failure... That we are this far into the program and THEN have a failure says something.... (Not to mention that there have been a lot of partial failures of this system, where components failed to function as intended and ONE partial failure where only one payload of two got delivered as intended. )
Yes there is... H2 hasn't failed any of it's launches, the Falcon has numerous failures and partial failures.
The cost per launch is around 15 Billion yen, $121m USD.
The Falcon 9 by comparison has a launch cost of $57 million.
Yea, but with the falcon you have to launch two of them to get one to the space station... (Grin).
Look, Personally I like their approach over Space-X's. Build a reliable platform, even if it's more expensive. Gain experience with the technology and the launch process then start to pare down your costs by looking for your cheaper ways to do parts of your already working system. Space-X has an "all or nothing" approach where they are cutting costs up front and trying to push the technology at the same time. Space X struggles with reliability and will suffer more front loaded failures because they are pushing the technology AND costs, AND reliability at the same time.
Basically, you need to concentrate on ONE major advancement at a time to have a high probability of success and Space-X is pushing more than one advancement (arguably they are trying to advance on three fronts). The Japanese know this, Musk doesn't. Musk has divided his attention between multiple interesting things and will struggle to master all of them at once, the Japanese are concentrating on but one thing at a time and will eventually surpass Musk and Space-X in all areas, and will suffer less catastrophic failures in the process.