Yes, shit happens, and it happened in a very large way here. It doesn't reflect on EDS as a company, it doesn't reflect on Microsot products either. Localised error. That's all. Nothing to see here. Except some faulty machines.
It's this willingness to say "Localised error. That's all. Nothing to see here" that gives IT it's bad reputation. With properly designed processes and appropriate tools, localised error cannot have catastrophic consequences. In a system like this, I can see no excuse for pushing something out to 60K desktops in a nightly update without at least one, and probably both of:
a) Pushing it out to (say) 600 representative desktops a night or two before and monitoring
b) Having a cast-iron, regularly practiced and tested, process for pulling it back again.
Look at somewhere like SEI who make the Space shuttle flight control software. It cannot go wrong and it doesn't. Why, because they have processes! There are checks and testing and simulation and code walk-throughs and whatever, and if a problem NEARLY makes it through, and is caught in late testing or whatever, there are processes to look back and see how it got that far and make sure that the processes are improved so it doesn't happen again. The process writes the software and the people carry out the various roles prescribed by the process. There are processes for monitoring and improving the processes, etc.
You have to find two measurements that you can compare which will be affected in different ways by the changing constants. I'm not sure of the details but I imagine you end up comparing the ratios of the fundamental frequencies of two different atomic transitions or something like that. If one beats 2.34567891011 times to each beat of the other now and 2.34567891012 times to each beat next year, and all sources of error have been eliminated then you have discovered something.
What they really mean is more stable. If you compare a bunch of cesium clocks, or compare one cesium clock now with its behaviour at a different time (having bounced the signal off the moon or something) you get a random variation of (with the very best cesium clocks) about 1 part in 10^15. With these clocks, they expect to be able to get this variation down to 1 in 10^18 over the next few years.
What you get are a series of (say) laser pulses whose intervals are extremely regular, or a single laser source whose frequency is extremely steady. So long as you carry them all on the same path, you won't lose that regularity. The pulse (or laser wavecrest) a year later will be within 10 picoseconds of exactly when it is supposed to be, in relation to the one a year earlier.
The accuracy of caesium clocks is one of the factors limiting GPS accuracy to a meter or so. These clocks could get that down to a millimeter allowing, for instance, GPS based automated guidance for trucks and automated landing for planes.
There are also applications in scientific research -- I mentioned detecting changes in fundmental constants in the story, it might also help allow very long baseline interferometry (where two radio telescopes thousands of miles apart obtain the same resolution as one telescope thousands of miles wide) at higher frequencies, pushing into the long IR.
Gravity waves show up as (very) slight distortions of everything. So, for instance things might get a bit longer North-South and a bit shorter East-West for a bit, and then the other way for a bit, and so on.
The changes are VERY tiny, something like 1 part in 10^20, so detecting them is not easy.
Existing detectors measure tiny changes in the length of bars of metal. Results are borderline at best.
Straight-forward detectors like LIGO and the much larger space-based proposal whose name I have forgotten for the moment use lasers to measure changes in much longer lengths (a few km for LIGO, a few million km for the space-based one.
I surmise that this detector looks for waves whose frequency is just right to set this sphere "ringing" at one of its fundamental frequencies. This "ringing" can dramatically amplify the oscillation, producing something that might just barely be detected after a series of further stages of mechanical and electrical amplification. I guess the sphere needs to be so ultra-cold to stop thermal oscilations masking the signal.
Pure CO2 would freeze at that temperature, but the partial pressure of CO2 in air is only about 3 * 10^-4 atmospheres so what is relevant is the freezing point at this pressure. Another poster helpfully supplied a phase diagram which suggests that this is below -140C, so there will not be CO2 frost even at dome A.
Not on the top of the domes at night. The main winds at night away from the sea are what is called "katabatic" winds -- the surface is cooled by radiation and cools a layer of air, which then flows downhill becoming denser but (since it's hugging a cold surface) staying cold. At the top of a dome, this can't happen.
On the other hand, I imagine that they have really crappy weather sometimes. Mauna Kea has something like 325 clear nights each year, and the temperature at worst never drops below about ten below (Celsius). I fear that the weather at an Antarctic station is likely to be somewhat more hostile....
Apart from being a bit chilly, the weather at night on top of the domes of the Antarctic plateau is surprisingly clement. The air is almost totally dry and very still. Recent measurements on dome C revealed the best seeing ever recorded on the surface of the Earth.
I don't know if it's particularly the Chinese, but there are serious proposals to site major telescopes at Dome A in the not-so-far future. Thin, still cold dry air makes for excellent seeing in the visible and IR and the cold is a positive advantage for IR work, since it reduces thermal IR in the environment.
It's not the world's easiest spot to ship to (no FedEx service, even) or build at, but it's cheaper than the South pole of the moon, or Earth-Sun L2, which are suggested alternatives.
There are brilliant designs that are both simple to use and secure (and usually simple to build into the bargain). The problem is that there are not so many brilliant designers out there. Coming up with these designs often involves novel functional decompositions, new UI metaphors, unusually structures interfaces or something else that is hard to get to by "normal" design processes.
I read this as "more heat per acre than most smelters". This piqued my curiousity.
A Pentium 4 seems to run around 217 mm^2 and produce about 100W of heat. This is quickly converted to almost exactly 2.5 million horsepower/acre. Leaving aside the livestock management problems of fitting 2.5 million horses into your 1 acre field, we now turn to a smelter, running, according to ask Jeeves at about 1400K. Radiated heat output per unit area is sigma*T^4 for a black body, less for a real material (where sigma is the Stefan Boltzman contstant), although there will also be quite a bit of convection and so on, which we ignore because it's too hard.
So, thanks to the magic of the units program, we find that the Smelter puts out about 1.18 million hp/acre, or about half the power output of the PIV.
So parent was right, P4s really do put out more heat per area (or acre) than most smelters!
I'm not unshakingly, go to my death protesting it, deep-rootedly certain of these points from my own personal knowledge and experience.
Indeed, if you get picky there is bound to be some connection between the various things we are talking about, but I do maintain that, from my wide reading over a long period, that the accepted view of the scientific community based on decades of observation and experiment is that any such connections are very tiny, and are swamped, for instance, by random variations due to atmospheric turbulence.
I would be fascinated to hear of any PEER-REVIEWED research showing, or even suggesting, that such connections explain more than, say, one part in a trillion of the observed ozone depletion and magnetic field variations.
Ozone is O3, as I think you subsequently realised. O1 is atomic oxygen.
The ozone in the stratosphere is created by solar ultraviolet dissociateing oxygen This produces free oxygen atoms which latch onto basically anything they can find. If what they find is an oxygen molecule then you have ozone. This happens wherever there is sunlight and oxygen and there is no electrical current involved.
Over the poles, during the winter, in the presence of chlorine (which is mainly there due to human activity) there is a chemical reaction which breaks down the ozone causing the holes.
None of this has anything to do with the Earth's magnetic field, which is generated far underground, or with surface ozone, which is mainly man-made.
What about some goals/prizes to propel things along towards tethers, skyhooks and space elevators? Materials of specified tensile strength/weight, self-supporting tethers of specified length, deployment of orbital tethers at various lengths and altitudes, etc.
Concrete and conclusive are different words. Scientists have long surmised (since Darwin himself, in fact) that the eye evolved from a very crude light-dark sensor by way of various kinds of primitive eye. Now we actually see common chemistry between an existing primitive light-dark sensor and the vertebrate eye. This provides concrete (ie real) evidence to support this view. It is not conclusive (the same chemistry could conceivably have evolved independently), but they don't say it is.
It's not so much a landing as a crash. If it lands on something reasonably level soft and solid, or possibly on a dense liquid that doesn't cause any immediate chemical or electrical problems, it MIGHT still be alive enough to transmit for a few minutes after it lands.
It's not cut and dried on the "beyond a shadow of a doubt" scale. On the "balance of probabilities", in my judgement it's been clear for a decade or more and it's now becoming pretty convincing at "beyond reasonable doubt". Many details, some pretty important, and still unclear, but the basic picture is standing up very well.
Since you ask. One theory based on almost no knowledge -- some gas in condensing out as a liquid or solid at the bottom of Pluto's atmosphere as it moves away from the Sun, releasing latent heat. Some kind of atmospheric heat engine is pumping this heat up to the levels of the atmosphere that we can (very occasionally) observe and warming them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's this willingness to say "Localised error. That's all. Nothing to see here" that gives IT it's bad reputation. With properly designed processes and appropriate tools, localised error cannot have catastrophic consequences. In a system like this, I can see no excuse for pushing something out to 60K desktops in a nightly update without at least one, and probably both of:
a) Pushing it out to (say) 600 representative desktops a night or two before and monitoring
b) Having a cast-iron, regularly practiced and tested, process for pulling it back again.
Look at somewhere like SEI who make the Space shuttle flight control software. It cannot go wrong and it doesn't. Why, because they have processes! There are checks and testing and simulation and code walk-throughs and whatever, and if a problem NEARLY makes it through, and is caught in late testing or whatever, there are processes to look back and see how it got that far and make sure that the processes are improved so it doesn't happen again. The process writes the software and the people carry out the various roles prescribed by the process. There are processes for monitoring and improving the processes, etc.
You have to find two measurements that you can compare which will be affected in different ways by the changing constants. I'm not sure of the details but I imagine you end up comparing the ratios of the fundamental frequencies of two different atomic transitions or something like that. If one beats 2.34567891011 times to each beat of the other now and 2.34567891012 times to each beat next year, and all sources of error have been eliminated then you have discovered something.
What they really mean is more stable. If you compare a bunch of cesium clocks, or compare one cesium clock now with its behaviour at a different time (having bounced the signal off the moon or something) you get a random variation of (with the very best cesium clocks) about 1 part in 10^15. With these clocks, they expect to be able to get this variation down to 1 in 10^18 over the next few years.
They claim that this setup is simpler than the NIST one, as well as 3 times more accurate.
It also seems to be understood that once some sort of optical resonance technique becomes established, the second will be redefined in terms of it.
Steve
Because they're interested in deviations of much less than a second.
What you get are a series of (say) laser pulses whose intervals are extremely regular, or a single laser source whose frequency is extremely steady. So long as you carry them all on the same path, you won't lose that regularity. The pulse (or laser wavecrest) a year later will be within 10 picoseconds of exactly when it is supposed to be, in relation to the one a year earlier.
The accuracy of caesium clocks is one of the factors limiting GPS accuracy to a meter or so. These clocks could get that down to a millimeter allowing, for instance, GPS based automated guidance for trucks and automated landing for planes.
There are also applications in scientific research -- I mentioned detecting changes in fundmental constants in the story, it might also help allow very long baseline interferometry (where two radio telescopes thousands of miles apart obtain the same resolution as one telescope thousands of miles wide) at higher frequencies, pushing into the long IR.
Gravity waves show up as (very) slight distortions of everything. So, for instance things might get a bit longer North-South and a bit shorter East-West for a bit, and then the other way for a bit, and so on.
The changes are VERY tiny, something like 1 part in 10^20, so detecting them is not easy.
Existing detectors measure tiny changes in the length of bars of metal. Results are borderline at best.
Straight-forward detectors like LIGO and the much larger space-based proposal whose name I have forgotten for the moment use lasers to measure changes in much longer lengths (a few km for LIGO, a few million km for the space-based one.
I surmise that this detector looks for waves whose frequency is just right to set this sphere "ringing" at one of its fundamental frequencies. This "ringing" can dramatically amplify the oscillation, producing something that might just barely be detected after a series of further stages of mechanical and electrical amplification. I guess the sphere needs to be so ultra-cold to stop thermal oscilations masking the signal.
Pure CO2 would freeze at that temperature, but the partial pressure of CO2 in air is only about 3 * 10^-4 atmospheres so what is relevant is the freezing point at this pressure. Another poster helpfully supplied a phase diagram which suggests that this is below -140C, so there will not be CO2 frost even at dome A.
Not on the top of the domes at night. The main winds at night away from the sea are what is called "katabatic" winds -- the surface is cooled by radiation and cools a layer of air, which then flows downhill becoming denser but (since it's hugging a cold surface) staying cold. At the top of a dome, this can't happen.
Apart from being a bit chilly, the weather at night on top of the domes of the Antarctic plateau is surprisingly clement. The air is almost totally dry and very still. Recent measurements on dome C revealed the best seeing ever recorded on the surface of the Earth.
I don't know if it's particularly the Chinese, but there are serious proposals to site major telescopes at Dome A in the not-so-far future. Thin, still cold dry air makes for excellent seeing in the visible and IR and the cold is a positive advantage for IR work, since it reduces thermal IR in the environment.
It's not the world's easiest spot to ship to (no FedEx service, even) or build at, but it's cheaper than the South pole of the moon, or Earth-Sun L2, which are suggested alternatives.
There are brilliant designs that are both simple to use and secure (and usually simple to build into the bargain). The problem is that there are not so many
brilliant designers out there. Coming up with these designs often involves novel functional decompositions, new UI metaphors, unusually structures interfaces or something else that is hard to get to by "normal" design processes.
I'm thinking of the power per acre coming off the INSIDE of a smelter, not the outside!
I read this as "more heat per acre than most smelters". This piqued my curiousity.
A Pentium 4 seems to run around 217 mm^2 and produce about 100W of heat. This is quickly converted to almost exactly 2.5 million horsepower/acre. Leaving aside the livestock management problems of fitting 2.5 million horses into your 1 acre field, we now turn to a smelter, running, according to ask Jeeves at about 1400K. Radiated heat output per unit area is sigma*T^4 for a black body, less for a real material (where sigma is the Stefan Boltzman contstant), although there will also be quite a bit of convection and so on, which we ignore because it's too hard.
So, thanks to the magic of the units program, we find that the Smelter puts out about 1.18 million hp/acre, or about half the power output of the PIV.
So parent was right, P4s really do put out more heat per area (or acre) than most smelters!
I'm not unshakingly, go to my death protesting it, deep-rootedly certain of these points from my own personal knowledge and experience.
Indeed, if you get picky there is bound to be some connection between the various things we are talking about, but I do maintain that, from my wide reading over a long period, that the accepted view of the scientific community based on decades of observation and experiment is that any such connections are very tiny, and are swamped, for instance, by random variations due to atmospheric turbulence.
I would be fascinated to hear of any PEER-REVIEWED research showing, or even suggesting, that such connections explain more than, say, one part in a trillion of the observed ozone depletion and magnetic field variations.
Ozone is O3, as I think you subsequently realised. O1 is atomic oxygen.
The ozone in the stratosphere is created by solar ultraviolet dissociateing oxygen
This produces free oxygen atoms which latch onto basically anything they can find. If what they find is an oxygen molecule then you have ozone. This happens wherever there is sunlight and oxygen and there is no electrical current involved.
Over the poles, during the winter, in the presence of chlorine (which is mainly there due to human activity) there is a chemical reaction which breaks down the ozone causing the holes.
None of this has anything to do with the Earth's magnetic field, which is generated far underground, or with surface ozone, which is mainly man-made.
What about some goals/prizes to propel things along towards tethers, skyhooks and space elevators? Materials of specified tensile strength/weight, self-supporting tethers of specified length, deployment of orbital tethers at various lengths and altitudes, etc.
Steve
No. There are loads of light-sensitive proteins in plants, for instance, which have no chemistry in common with either the vertebrate eye or the worm.
Concrete and conclusive are different words. Scientists have long surmised (since Darwin himself, in fact) that the eye evolved from a very crude light-dark sensor by way of various kinds of primitive eye. Now we actually see common chemistry between an existing primitive light-dark sensor and the vertebrate eye. This provides concrete (ie real) evidence to support this view. It is not conclusive (the same chemistry could conceivably have evolved independently), but they don't say it is.
Activity is the number of sunspots and related magnetic disturbances.
There's an article Buyer s guide to telescopes at the best sites which considers deep space lunar and Antartica locations in detail. All have pros and cons.
It's not so much a landing as a crash. If it lands on something reasonably level soft and solid, or possibly on a dense liquid that doesn't cause any immediate chemical or electrical problems, it MIGHT still be alive enough to transmit for a few minutes after it lands.
It's not cut and dried on the "beyond a shadow of a doubt" scale. On the "balance of probabilities", in my judgement it's been clear for a decade or more and it's now becoming pretty convincing at "beyond reasonable doubt". Many details, some pretty important, and still unclear, but the basic picture is standing up very well.
Since you ask. One theory based on almost no knowledge -- some gas in condensing out as a liquid or solid at the bottom of Pluto's atmosphere as it moves away from the Sun, releasing latent heat. Some kind of atmospheric heat engine is pumping this heat up to the levels of the atmosphere that we can (very occasionally) observe and warming them.