There is a lot of ignorance showing in the posts!!! I was surprised in fact that slashdotters would be so ignorant.
Argonne labs designed the Fast Integral Reactor and proved its concept by 1994 before Clinton shut them down. This is a very good design and much better than breeder reactors.
With a reactor fleet such as this, the spent fuel can be burned as well as the depleated uranium and this would provide about 5,000 years energy supply using just the exisiting depleated uranium and spent uranium.... this is meeting 100% of USA energy requirments as well, and that means no oil, no gas, no hydro, no solar or anything else - just nuclear.
Doing something like this would mean building about 1300 reactors each in the GWe size range. However clearly there is no reason to not use traditional energy sources other than perhaps coal and oil and gas which should be saved for chemical feedstocks...
Furthermore Canada has offered to take the spent fuel because it is a lot hotter than natural uranium and our CANDU reactors can easily burn it. It should be re-processed though so that the nuclear poisons are removed - but this costs money and makes mined uranium a little cheaper than the USA spent fuel. The impass seems to be that the USA wants Canada to pay for the re-processing. The logic of this idea fails me.
Nevertheless, the spent fuel can be used and will supply a fleet of about 100 CANDU reactors for about 50 years. Then the Fast Integral reactor can kick in and run for additional 1000's of years.
The best idea however is to re-instate the Argonne Labs Fast Integral reactor program and get fuel reprocessing underway.... these are programs which have been shut down for political reasons.
With these two programs underway the waste problem actually disappears because a reactor like the Fast Integral will burn up the actinides and turn them into electricity. In addition there is also spallation technology that can be deployed.
So, the technology is there. Its the politics that is standing in the way and creating the problem. Many lives will unnecessarily be lost before this problem gets resolved. But I guess this is not unlike religeous wars in the past, the difference being that the public has been lied to so much about nuclear energy that it has almost taken on a religeous tone.
I've read through many of the comments and there are many un-enlightened people out there.
1) Natural Gas production peaked in North America between 2000 and 2001 at a level of about 786.8 Billion Cubic Meters. In 2003 it was at 766.3 so that represents about 2.5%. Expect this decline rate to increase. The McKensie Valley pipeline was shedualed to carry about 800 million cubic feet per day or about 0.3 tcf per year. This makes a small dent. Note that the conversion factor from m^3 to ft^3 is about 35.3 so 766.3 bu ft^3 = 27 tcf and this is total North American production incl Mexico.
2) if we assume a 3% decline rate from here on in then we lose about 1/3 of gas production by say 2015.
3) Tar Sands operations are anticipated to climb into the 5 million barrels per day region over the next 10-15 years. In order to do this they will need in the vicinity of 2 tcf per year using present technology.
Canada produced about 6.3 tcf in 2003 and of that about 52% was exported.
We can calculate the expected gas supplies as follows. I'm going to EXPAND the McKensie pipeline to 1 TCF/year from the 0.3 tcf currently being considered for two reasons: a) with more compressor stations they can about double it. b) there is already talk of doubling it. So maybe they will triple it before it gets underway.
6.3 tcf current production -2.0 tcf expected decline -2.0 tcf increased consumption from tar sands ops +1.0 tcf new gas via McKensie etc. --------
3.3 tcf available.in time frame 2015
Here is another way to look at this.
6.3 tcf total production now -3.3 tcf exports to the USA (52% of 6.3) --------
3.0 tcf current Canadian consumption
So clearly if Canada ceases to export ANY gas to the USA then with a HUGE pipeline we can carry enough new gas to meet Canadian needs including offsetting current production and meeting the needs of tar sands operations. However if Canada attempts to continue the current export ratios then Canada has to push about 1/2 of the current consumers out of the market.
Meanwhile the USA will have to push about 1/3 of present consumers out of the market.
This can only be offset if significant new production comes on stream -OR- if LNG imports can make up the declines.
However since the current production in the USA is about (2003) 549.5 Billion cubic meters = 19.4 tcf it will be very difficult to keep up these levels.
Personally I doubt the LNG imports can be ramped up enough to make much of a difference.
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The obvious conclusion is that any plan to produce more electricity from Natural Gas is doomed before it starts. The real question is how much of the present consumption we can sustain and who gets weaned from their gas consumption.
As for the CO2 issues. That just makes me laugh! If they are going to produce liquid CO2 then put it into bottles and sell it!
From the Green House gasses issue - one has to look at the total water vapour and the percentage increase in same because Water Vapour is a stronger green house gas than CO2. In addition there is about 100x greater concentration of H2O in the atmosphere. Thus a 1% increase in H2O totally overwhelms the effect of _ALL_ the other green house gasses. The IPCC reports in their technical documents that water vapour increases per decade are several percent.
The IPCC ALSO reports that the changes in water vapour concentrations are not included in the models (its in chap 7).
The bottom line is that IF Global Warming is actually happening (which is not proven) then it COULD be due to water vapour increases and irrigation would be probably the greatest factor. CO2 woudl be blamed simply because it increased at the same time and the models don't consider the real cause (H2O).
At this point there is no reason to liquify CO2 at GREAT EXPENSE.
So - pretty much all these ideas are non-starters.
Boycotting Cameras probably will not go anywhere because most dummies don't give a shit about what our industry faces.
But what of the Corporate Printer down the hallway. haha.
So a few systems admins have to give up their jobs! Well this causes strife and it will not be the first time progress was made because of people willing to be a martyr. haha.
On a more serious note, I think we can see just how serious this attack is.
While I do not wish calamity on anyone, if it turns out that a development platform like Java is shot down and crashes and burns from the Patent bullets that are being shot at it, then maybe this is what our industry needs.
Something like this would cause SERIOUS havok and clearly billions in development $$$ and many major Java projects would be part of the collateral damage.
Since Java is taught in many institutions around the world it might be visible enough for people to actually see how an ill thought out set of laws administered by a PTO that is out of control can have a devastating effect on the industry. So on this basis maybe the more damage the better!!!
USA light water pressureized reactors have about 1/3 of their fuel exchanged each year. If we assume they have been running for 45 years then we have about 15 fuel loads sitting in swimming pools. Note the last reactor was completed in 1979. Also note that the electricity produced from nuclear sources has increased about 25% since 1993. (From 145.4 to 181.9 million tonnes of oil equivalent).
Now - the fuel used in the USA reactors is Enriched. USEC (NYSE:USU) for instance does this. Typically the natural uranium (0.7% U235) is enriched to about 4% U235. Thus the fuel going into the USA light water reactors is 96% U238 and 4% U235. This is accomplished by discarding 88% of the uranium (called "depleated") and this depleated still contains about 3% U235 so really about 93% of the incomming uranium is discarded..
When the enriched uranium comes out three years later it is 1% U235, 1% Plutonium for a combined high radioactvity of 2% which is about 3x hotter than natural uranium. About 95% is U238 so about 3% is nuclear debris.
On this note we need to look at the CANDU reactors . These were designed to burn natural uranium and with this reactor it goes in at about 0.7% and comes out 0.3% U235 and 0.25% Pu for a total residual high radioactivity of 0.55%. What this means is that a CANDU can use the "spent" fuel from the USA reactors and since it burns more efficiently than the USA reactors the CANDU's will get about as much power from the "spent" fuel as the lightwater pressured reactors got in the first place.
On this basis there is about a 45 year supply of fuel for 100 CANDU reactors and this is without mining a single additional gram of uranium. The fuel for them is already sitting in swimming pools across the USA.
If you conclude the USA nuclear program is nutz you are probably pretty close to the truth.
Now - the spent fuel from the CANDU can be reporcessed as is done in Europe. The Plutonium is easily separated chemically and from a Candu there is about 0.25%. If we add this 0.25% from 1/2 the reprocessed fuel to the other 1/2 which is at 0.55% we get 0.8% so this is radioactive enough to stuff right back into the Candu.
On this basis we get another 3 years out of 1/2 of the fuel so that works out to another 22.5+ years supply of fuel bringing the total to 45+22.5 = 67.5 years.
Now look at the U238. What can be done with that? Can we burn it for instance? The answer is yes we can - but we need either a breeder or spallation. France has a breeder called the Phenix.
One way to look at this is that the USA light pressure water reactors burn about 1% of their fuel load per year. If a reactor system could burn 100% of the uranium, then a single load will last 100 years. This means there is about 4500 years of fuel on hand sitting in swimming pools ready to be used and this will fuel about 100 reactors of the Gigawatt range.
But - if we can burn the U238 from the "spent" fuel then we can burn the U238 in the "depleated" uranium as well. Since only about 7% of the uranium that enters an enrichment plant ever seens the insides of a nuclear reactor, then we have 93/7 = 13.29 times as much fuel available and that works out to about 60,000 years availablity for 100 reactors. This is without mining a single gram of new uranium.
Now - the USA's equivalent energy needs expressed in millions of tonnes of oil works out to about 2297.8 according to page 39 of the BP statistical energy review. Of this about 181.9 is nuclear.
181.9/2297.8 = 8% (about) so if the USA were to produce 100% of its current energy needs from Nuclear then the USA would need about 12 times as many reactors or about 1200 of them. That 60,000 year supply of fuel dwindles to only 5,000 years on this basis. This is without mining more uranium.
I think these facts make it very clear there is no long term energy crisis and there is no shortage of energy either. However - there is a gap between our ability to produce it and what people want
We have an 1800 sq ft "solar" home here in Calgary. Look up "Ostrawski" via google. His first name is "jorg".
The home is very practical and very livable.
He is available as a consultant and were I building a place I would send him a retainer. I think access to his expericances will really pay off.
The home he built is insulated to R50 in the walls and R70 in the Ceiling. He is not connected to the gas nor to the city water/sewer. He is connected to the electrical grid.
In the winter he does need some suplimental heat which is provided by a fireplace. He says he burns less than 1/2 cord per year.
1) if we could burn 100% we'd have 100 years supply at 1% per year not 300 years. Boy that is a dumb error.
2) it should read Spallation and not scintillation. Spallation is when you smash the nucleus with a proton and scintillation is when you tickle it with a gamma ray. Cleary I know the difference. I was asleep at the keyboard I guess.
Redundant?? Must be the same stoopid moderator as with the previous post... either that or his evil twin!
I'll comment on the nuclear issue touched upon in the post. Yes it is true that environmental groups are pointing their fingers at Yuca mountain. Alas!
The spent nuclear fuel problem is not nearly the problem people make it out to be. Let me explain.
First we need to look at the nuclear fuel cycles. There are three (3) that are very significant.
First off, natural uranium contains about 0.7% U235 and 99.3% U238. Both are fissonable but U235 is about 6x more fissionable than U238. Also U235 is more senitive to the "thermal" neutrons in a reactor hense reactors tend to burn U235 in preference to U238.
In a PWR (enriched) reactor system such as used in the USA, the fuel goes in with about 4% U235, 96% U238 and when it comes out it is about 1% U235, 93% U238 and 1% Pu 239. Thus only about 3% of the fuel is burned and this is over a three (3) year period of time when it is in the reactor. These reactors are fueled with about 75 tonnes of uranium oxide fuel and 25 tonnes are exchanged per year.
Note that the "spent" fuel with is 2% highly fissionable material (U235 and Pu239) is alomst 3x as "hot" as natural uranium. Candu reactors burn natural uranium so a Candu system clearly can burn the "spent" fuel sitting around in the swimming pools.
So why isn't this being done? The answer is that in other countries the combined Candu / Enriched reactor program is being built and used. It was the USA that decided unilaterally to ban fuel reprocessing. The only reason I can hypothesis for not using CANDU style reactors to burn the "spent fuel" from the PWR reactors is national pride.
Ok. we have 97% of the fuel that goes into a reactor comming back out unused. Now look at the ENRICHMENT phase of the operation. USEC is an example of a company involved in this... (NYSE:USU).
Here we start with 0.7% and enrich to 4% for approximately a 6 fold increase. Thus we need to discard 5/6th of the original natural uranium. This is actually not quite correct because the discarded fraction still contains anywhere from 0.2% to 0.3% U235. Thus the fraction of the fuel that is discarded is closer to 90% or more.
Note that U235 is about 6x more radioactive than U238 so what this means is that the difference in radioactivity between the discarded uranium and the reactor grade uranium is actually quite small. It is less than 12% different in fact. The discarded uranium fraction is called "DEPLETED URANIUM" and we can clearly see it really isn't all that depeleted!
To calculate the percentage of the original natural uranium that is burned we take 10% x 3% and get 0.3% so we did NOT burn 99.7%.
Note the reactor burns 3% over a 3 year time frame or 1% per year. Thus, if the reactor could burn 100% of the original uranium then a fuel load of 75 tonnes would last over 300 years.
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We've had over 100 reactors running in the USA now for over 30 years. This is 10 complete fuel exchanges and at 300 years per load we clearly have 3000 years supply of fuel sitting in pools at the present moment.
So how do we burn up 100% of the uranium (U238)?
The answer is via two technologies: (1) Breader reactors and (2) scintillation technology or Intense neutron sources. France uses breader technology in the Phenix system. As for scintillation... it works like this. You use an acclerator to fire protons into a target - probably lead/bismuth. When these protons hit a nucleus in the target they smash it to shit and you get all sorts of nuclear trash flying about... including 100's of neutrons. The flux close to the target is far too dangerous to place uranium near - it would just explode!!! Chain reaction anyone!
However this high flux zone is perfect for the long lived atomic wastes (actinides) and this burns them into non-radioactive ash and we are rid of it forever! Farther away from the targ
Through over-regulation it is possible to turn any project into a money loser. In spite of this the USA produces a LOT of nuclear power. Furthermore with the prospect of oil production starting to decline on a world wide basis I suspect that the anti- nuclear group will lose any credibility it ever had!
As to your comment about attacking nuclear here being worse than supporting the al-Quaeda, ya - you are probably correct. The reason is not that nuclear is geeky. The reason is more likely that geeks see the truth and are able to actually do the calculations that refute the crap the anti-nuclear bigots and the media spread around.
1) the 1st reactor was built under Stagg Feild statium as I recall and not in the metallurgical lab. Can someone else verify this?
2) Leo Szillard's name is somehow not mentioned in the History.
now to the meat of the artical...
They talk about the number of reactors but I don't see the size mentioned. As I recall pebble bed reactors are small - about 165 MW in size. (this is the Eskom design). The HTR-10 is a prototype and produces only 10 MW. There are plans for a 200 MW plant for 2007. If this is successful then by 2020 we could see 30 of these little reactors for a total installed cpacity of 6,000 MW.
The enriched reactors in the USA like those at Three Mile Island are about 1000-1300 MW. Again - can someone confirm? Most of the operating reactors in the US are licenced for 2500 to 3500 MW. For example the Arkanas Nuclear I reactor is 6 miles WNW of Russellville and is licenced for 2568 MW.
Candu style reactors are about 750 MW.
Total installed capacity in the USA is about 100,000 MW. Total installed capacity in China is about 6,000 MW with about 2,600 planned. China has 8 reactors now with 3 under construction. The USA has 104 reactors.
In terms of MILLION TONNES of oil equivalent the USA increased its nuclear energy production from 145.4 to 181.9 during the period from 1993 to 2003. Meanwhile China went from 0.4 to 9.8.
At this point the total installed capacity in China is about 1/4 of the increase in production of the USA. China produces about 1/20th of the amount of nuclear power the USA produces. Source: BP statistical energy review June 2004.
Actually it was very easy to come to this conclusion by 1973. By then IBM had a high quality PL/I compiler on its OS's. Furthermore this compiler had good multilanguage capabilities and it was quite easy to interface to Fortran and Cobol code as well as assembler if required.
Some of the "studies" at the time were enough to make you laugh. One I recall was that PL/I was condemed for being "less efficient" than Cobol. The computational speed was reported to be a little "slower". When one looked in detail at the study it turns out that Cobol was not doing overflow and underflow checking and Pl/1 was. So much for the study!!!
The biggest issue seems to be corporate inertia.
In the company I worked for before I left the IBM world basically forever, we did use PL/1 but the main IT department found many reasons not to. Next, the IT department decided that they didn't need degree people developing software and furthermore it would be ok for programmers to work from cubicles.
I left the company over this. Within a year I was managing a small development group and the programmers I hired had degrees. I would say that today this may not be an issue, but back then this rule did serve to separate the men from the boys so to speak.
Productivity differences by any measurement were more than 5:1.
There really is a HUGE difference that escaped most of the managers I knew at the time, and perhaps one of the reasons for this is that most of the managers I knew at the time grew out of the hardware side of the IT department. In that game, all you needed to do was parrot what the vendor's salesmen told you. You were thus pretty much guarenteed that you could supply say 20% more horsepower for 10% less year after year so you always looked good.
Now the developers usually looked bad. They were usually behind schedual and over budget. The systems often didn't work properly and took forever to debug. Productivity was usually in the toilet. Typically they were too afraid to change their ways because if the "next" project using the "better" language were tried and came in late and over budget, then they would be attacked mercilessly. Office politics can be pretty dirty when you have the hardware manager looking like a white knight after signing the maintenance contract and the software manager slugging it out in the trenches using horrible tools.
So my experiance was that the software development side of the IT department used "herd" think whenever possible probably mostly for protection!
But mixed into this was a tremendous amount of incompetance and managers who knew dick all about the technical side of systems development. It was so bad in fact that many "programmers" did not even know the basic number types their machine supported. For example, when a Cobol programmer with 5 years experiance does not even know the difference between COMP-1, COMP-2 and COMP-3 this is IMHO totally unacceptable.
Cobol is a bad language and it always has been! There is just so much that is bad about Cobol that it is unbelievable that people would use it.
Flow control like PERFORM, no good way to set up storage classes, akward syntax, horrible verbosity are just a few things.
Setting up linkage sections is a pain in the ass. It is no wonder Cobol programers hated calling subroutines. What is worse is the spagetti code they rouintly wrote and then painfully debugged.
There is a language that is quite good as a replacement for Cobol - IE PL/I. It has all the data types Cobol has, a nice syntax, good flow control, good I/O control - you name it - PL/I has it.
In many respect I consider PL/I to be superior to C. Its purpose however is different. C is a systems development language that has been adopted for applications work. Pl/I is an applications development language by design.
Where C falls down IMHO is that it allows the programmer to become too cleaver. What one needs to strive for is readable code and clear logic. While one can write good C programs, it is also true that one can get carried away. PL/I is a little more restrictive in this.
There is a really good analysis of the difference between PL/I and C on the net. Lokk here: http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZIV/Mitarbeiter/Eberhar dSturm/PL1andC.html
The programming language does make a difference. In fact - it can hobble really good programmers and seriously cut their productivity. The opposite however is not necessarily the case... a poor programmer is not encumbered all that much be a bad programming language because he/she will not have the productivity anyways and will find a tremendous amount of time must be spent debugging.
There is another way to look at this. If you are trying to get a system going and you find random bugs all over the place in pretty much everything you try to use - then you are not going to make good progress regardless how good or bad the language is. On the other hand, team a good language up with a brilliant programmer and it is like making beautiful music.
Hey - I buy my salt in 100 lbs bags. I can get 100 lbs of table salt in a 100 lbs bag for about the same cost as 3 x 1 lbs packages. Such is the economics of the grocery store.
Note - the salt I buy is typically Sifto Salt and it comes from Silurian deposits. This makes the salt about 425 million years old (from the deposit that is - the salt was around before the deposit) I figure the bag has good shelf life so to speak. Also - people that talk about water getting stale make be laugh. haha.
I do not think I would eat better. My deep freeze is full of farm raised elk, trout, salmon and baby octopus and so forth. How could I improve on this? My wine cellar is full of bordeaux wines which I made from choice grapes from Washington State and as for beers, well our western 2 row barley produces some of the best - and I brew it too.
Food is so cheap that it is virtually free.
Life is tough when you have to scratch your head and ask if you want tee bone steak or something different.
Sure. Linux is cheap. Linux is free. Does one thus conclude my consumption of linux increases?
Even if you made food free I wouldn't eat any more than I currently do. Well - I suppose SOME people might try to consume more - but then they will just get fat.
What she misses is that at ANY price there is a maximum amount people will consume and once the price drops low enough then further price declines have no meaning.
Funny that over 70 years later we still have not caught on that Russell is correct.
In fact, what people need to start realizing is that in an economy one person's expense is another person's income. When we eliminate people from the workforce we do not benefit from the "savings" because there may well be none. By leaving a segment of our work force idle all we accomplish is that we lose what they can contribute.
This is one reason that NASA really does not cost what anti-space antagonists suggest it costs. If we eliminate NASA then somewhere else a would be engineer gets pushed out of a job and can't contribute his talents to the economy. Ditto with programmers.
I agree with much of what you say. A massive nuclear program should be undertaken immediately. However I suspect this will not occur until after about 3 years of sky high oil prices and rather long lineups. Then there will be a 10 year wait while the plants are built.
Horrible prospect isn't it? Thank the Pollies and the anti-nuke tree huggers!
Well - there are lots of naive comments here. I was especially entertained by the ideas that since oil reserves have "increased" since 1971 that there is now no problem and there never will be one.
This is especially funny with oil approaching $50 bux per barrel and the peak of world production now estimated to be occuring within 5 years. Perhaps a better way to look at this however is by considering incresing demand. When you do this, it becomes clear that demand has already outpaced supply. Unless the supply side gets a considerable boost (which Saudi Arabia says it can do: 1.3 million bbls/day in fact) or the demand side dips, then we are already in the oil shortage senero that many have predicted for a long time now.
So it really doesn't matter what year the supply peaks.... the shortage is already here and probably will get worse from here on in... year after year... until by 2025 we are burning as much oil as was burned in the 1950's.
This is unless alternatives can be found. Nuclear fission is probably the only reasonable source of relief, but we would need to undertake a reactor building program that results in 1000 new reactors each in the gw(e) range. This is 10x the number of reactors presently in North American. It is a MAJOR undertaking.
Furthermore these reactors should probably be heavy water moderated natural uranium buring reactors like the Candu. Meanwhile fuel re-processing technology must be developed at break neck speed. This will solve the waste problem for the most part.
And what of the fuel cells?
I suspect they will not be viable for the foreseeable future for the simple reason that hydrogen is hard to transport. In fact, the easiest way I know of to handle hydrogen is to mix a little carbon into the molecules!!! Once we get the ratio of H:C into the 2:1 area we have nice, relatively safe and easy to use liquid fuels.
To do this we need a carbon source and one of the best I know of is the Tar Sands of Alberta. The upgrading facilities to do the chemistry are already built, being built or are in design. All we need to add are some rather large nuclear reactors and we are well on our way to making the fuels we need.
So lets start lobying the Alberta and Canadian governments and lets get some reactors underway.
Hmm - with about 300 million in North American, $771 billion would out to about $2,100 per person for each man woman and child.
Are people _really_ willing to pay this much for what nature provided for free? Well - I suppose the regulators need to justify their salaries somehow!!!
We could add a nice feature to things like the graphical file manager so that when the user clicks on "properties" they can elect to "encrypt" . We can just grab the user's password and create a cert that is used to strongly encrypt the file.
We could use this technique without telling the user and at the same time implement it in such as way that only the GUI interface can deal with it. We would not want to touch the CLI interface because we would want to preserve backward compatibility for all those old apps that don't know about our nifty new encryption scheme.
Next, when the user loses their password and the systems adminstrator has to assign a new password we of course would not tell the user about all the files the system has lost access to. This would only create fear in the mind of the user's anyway and it is much better to say nothing.
We can add some silly permission bits as well that again only the GUI interface knows about. This way the user can lose access to his own files and never know about it. When we do this, we need to set the system up so it says you NEED to be an "adminstrator" in order to access the files, and then set it up so an adminstrator actually cannot access the file, but can only change some of the permissions. We should issure no message when the adminstrator TRIES to access the file and not tell him that the system didn't let him do anything, because if we issue a message then the administrator might get the idea something is wrong with the way we implemented this.
Another thing we can do is remove all error messages that the file system can issue and instead point the finger at the application and claim there is an "Unavoidable Application Error".
We can set it up so that if for instance the user powers down say an external disk drive while it is being accessed that no message is sent to the application other than "normal END OF FILE". This is pretty obvious anyways because if the drive get powered off clearly access to the file has ended, right?
Also, we should stream line the I/O so that when an application asks for data to be written to the disk, then EVERYTHING else in the computer stops until this has been completed. We can justify this because hardware is getting cheaper and faster and writing data is the single most important activity we can do when it is requested.
Also, benchmarks are typically run "stand alone" so as to get the highest numbers and if we program the machine so that there are no "background" tasks then the benchmarks will yeild higher marks.
RIGHT?
While we are at it, why don't we get rid of the concept of "users" and just make everyone root?
The first feature I would like to see added would provide the capabilities of a Partition Data Set from the IBM TSO days. We would not copy what IBM did of course because they did some stupid things meant to sell more hardware. One thing was deleted files were not really deleted and you needed to "re-generate" the PDS when it filled up. Nice trick!
Suppose you had an infinit number of loop back devices and these were hidden and used internally by the file system and when you started an application you could "mount" what for many intents and purposes looks like a TARBALL and the application in question and ONLY the application in question got to see all the files in this TARBALL. Well, the files inside a "TARBALL" of this nature would probably not be compressed, but, they could be if desired... Well, that is the concept of a Partition Data Set.
In the case of a user logging in, when the shell is started a mount could take place against the user's private data set. By doing this on a shared machine, file security can be guaranteed. For export and import the system could mount a "shared" dataset.
This sort of secutiry is far superior to ACL's and anything present file systems offer for the very simple reason that normal people including systems administrators would not normally see any of the files inside one of these datasets. Consider the advantages of running an apache server where you KNOW all associated files needed by that release of apache are in a single dataset. There IS not easy way to lose a file or clobber it or accidently delete it and so forth. Next consider that when that copy of apache starts up it _could_ simply mount a set of files each of which contains the whole website for a given domain.
Upgrading to a new copy of apache would be as simple as copying in a new dataset and mounting it against the web datasets. If a glitch is found, simply restart the old copy.
Backing up a set of files becomes a simple copy operation. Replication can be accomodated as well.
Systems Administration in those old IBM mainframes was MUCH easier than with UNIX systems and this is in large part because of the way the system handled partition datasets.
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Now, with this we would want to be able to mark certain files as being external sort of like opening up a window, and through this window we could for instance access certain files which might be the executables and supporting scripts.
Of course people will point out we can accomplish some of this with a loop back mount. The problem with the loopback mount is that it populates the directory tree and this is what I really want to avoid. Frankly there really *IS* no reason for even a sysadmin to be able to see 90% of the files that say consitute a web server, or say PostFix, or PostgreSQL. We accomplish a lot if the executable which needs access to its supporting files has a "private" loopback and only this executable by default gets to see the mounted dataset.
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Next idea is versioning the way Digital Equipment Corporation did it in the VAX. We simply append a version number and what the delete does is append a version number. With disk drive capacities heading into the stratoshere there is no reason to be conservative.
And this leads to the next idea which has been mentioned before... that is replication - across machines.
I can buy for $20 bux a machine (P1 200mHz) that can run a 20 GB hard drive and in fact I think they can run 80 GB hard drives as well. Rsync is useful, but a full replicating filesystem at the kernel level, or at least at the level of a deamon close to the kernel would mean that a machine can be backed up to another machine in perhaps another building automatically and with little effort.
Well, I'm sure other people have other things they might like to add. This is my wish list.
Since I hate the background music, will this make it go away? Hmm, the argeement with the publishing industry as I recall is that you are allowed to listen to music you buy "for your own personal enjoyment". Maybe this means the cops can confisgate the getto blaters and throw the bastards that own them into Jail!! hahaha.
What irony.
Turn your stereo down folks or face the music cops.
By 2010 the world may well be gripped in a huge energy crisis. It will be man made of course, predicated on our refusal to heed the warnings of experts. You can read about it here: www.hubbertpeak.com and here: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Here is another really good artical on the subject, published July 17, 2004: http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/040717/forweekendedgeenerg y_oil_imports_1.html
I'll quote from the artical:
"Reuters U.S. Addiction to Foreign Oil Deepens Saturday July 17, 7:58 am ET By Timothy Gardner
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. domestic oil production has dropped five percent since this year's peak in February and near-record oil prices are unlikely to inspire drillers to slow the country's deepening dependence on foreign oil, experts say.
From the artical: the US pumps 5.43 Million barrels per day (early July down from 5.70 in Feb). The USA burns about 20 million barrels per day. (this is a short fall of 14.57 million barrels per day which must come from imports and oil in storage). The next paragraph states: " As domestic output dropped this summer, crude imports averaged more than 10 million bpd for a record two months, the EIA said this week."
Well - the numbers may be wrong I suppose. But the USA has drawn down its oil in storage to a 17 year low.
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later in the story we have: "... rising U.S. demand, and a fall in domestic drilling since 2001 won't cut reliance on record imports, experts said."
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One reason to go into space is to harvest the vast energy stores. There are many ways to do this including building mirrors to light our cities at night and to provide heat through reflected radiant energy. Of course, while system such as this have been proposed, they have not to the best of my knowledge been proven to be workable much less practical.
Nevertheless, it is clear that UNLESS an alternative to fossil fuels is found - and quickly - we will have no alternatives IMHO other than to build nuclear plants and to do so at breakneck speed.
Our energy buffer is ebbing away - rather quickly I think. With the North Sea production dropping since 1999 (at a horendous rate in fact) there is no suprise to me that Britain and the USA was interested IMHO in liberating Iraq oil.
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Roll the film forward to 2010. What sort of world do we expect to be living in? Line ups at the gas station and fuel shortages for the last 3-5 years? Tree huggers and pro-nukes chasing each other with tire irons and baseball bats? Crazy pollies lying to the public proclaiming that if we vote for them the we will be once again self sufficient in energy?
Science missions in space and energy research on space based energy capture systems proclaimed as a reckless waste of our dwindling resources?
Looming food shortages as the urban population demands access to fuel at the expense of the rural community and justifies this "for economic reasons"... and outvotes those who use the fuel to supply food?
Fertilizer shortages caused by a total shutdown of the North American fertilizer industry and an inability of the industry to ramp up African / Middle East and Russian production fast enough.
Permenant rotating power blackouts both is the hot summer months and the coldest winter months due to further declines in North American gas production (which peaked in 2000) and an inability to ramp up LNG imports (or even build ships fast enough). This compounded by an inability to do fuel switching to other than coal... and not enough coal fired power generating capcity because nobody built the plants.
Well, I guess I could suggest that we might have the USA taking over the administration of ALBERTA and the Tar Sands, proclaiming that we are shirking our responsibilities to increase production, when the truth of the matter is that the total Canadian Natural Gas supply is insufficient for even 10% of the Recoverable Bitumin in the Tar Sands
A friend had this done and has had continuing problems because of it. I'm not entirely sure the exact issues but if you send me your email I can put the two of you in touch with each other.
One issue is that she now has serious night vision problems.
My brother had an RK which is an older corrective technique and he felt it was well worth it. However, you may want to read the book "Left for Dead" because it was the eye surgery that left Seaborn Beck Weathers incapacitated and he really was left for dead, twice in fact. So there can be serious consequences.
I where glasses and did consider surgery at one time. The glasses don't really bother me and since I am short sighted I have found that this is actually a blessing in disguise.
The glasses fix the distance vision perfectly and I can see perfectly from about 24" to infinity. Under 18" I take off the glasses and can then focus to the tip of my nose. Thus I can do close up work that others can't.
If you do elect for the surgery, then make sure you get a good doctor... there are some who try to cut a few corners (pardon the pun)
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of ignorance showing in the posts!!! I was surprised in fact that slashdotters would be so ignorant.
Argonne labs designed the Fast Integral Reactor and proved its concept by 1994 before Clinton shut them down. This is a very good design and much better than breeder reactors.
With a reactor fleet such as this, the spent fuel can be burned as well as the depleated uranium and this would provide about 5,000 years energy supply using just the exisiting depleated uranium and spent uranium.... this is meeting 100% of USA energy requirments as well, and that means no oil, no gas, no hydro, no solar or anything else - just nuclear.
Doing something like this would mean building about 1300 reactors each in the GWe size range. However clearly there is no reason to not use traditional energy sources other than perhaps coal and oil and gas which should be saved for chemical feedstocks...
Furthermore Canada has offered to take the spent fuel because it is a lot hotter than natural uranium and our CANDU reactors can easily burn it. It should be re-processed though so that the nuclear poisons are removed - but this costs money and makes mined uranium a little cheaper than the USA spent fuel. The impass seems to be that the USA wants Canada to pay for the re-processing. The logic of this idea fails me.
Nevertheless, the spent fuel can be used and will supply a fleet of about 100 CANDU reactors for about 50 years. Then the Fast Integral reactor can kick in and run for additional 1000's of years.
The best idea however is to re-instate the Argonne Labs Fast Integral reactor program and get fuel reprocessing underway.... these are programs which have been shut down for political reasons.
With these two programs underway the waste problem actually disappears because a reactor like the Fast Integral will burn up the actinides and turn them into electricity. In addition there is also spallation technology that can be deployed.
So, the technology is there. Its the politics that is standing in the way and creating the problem. Many lives will unnecessarily be lost before this problem gets resolved. But I guess this is not unlike religeous wars in the past, the difference being that the public has been lied to so much about nuclear energy that it has almost taken on a religeous tone.
I have a book on Interactive Computer Graphics, written by Newman and dated about 1973 and these techniques are described there.
The ISBN number is: 0-07-046337-9
That should provide sufficient prior art.
I've read through many of the comments and there are many un-enlightened people out there.
1) Natural Gas production peaked in North America between 2000 and 2001 at a level of about 786.8 Billion Cubic Meters. In 2003 it was at 766.3 so that represents about 2.5%. Expect this decline rate to increase. The McKensie Valley pipeline was shedualed to carry about 800 million cubic feet per day or about 0.3 tcf per year. This makes a small dent. Note that the conversion factor from m^3 to ft^3 is about 35.3 so 766.3 bu ft^3 = 27 tcf and this is total North American production incl Mexico.
2) if we assume a 3% decline rate from here on in then we lose about 1/3 of gas production by say 2015.
3) Tar Sands operations are anticipated to climb into the 5 million barrels per day region over the next 10-15 years. In order to do this they will need in the vicinity of 2 tcf per year using present technology.
Canada produced about 6.3 tcf in 2003 and of that about 52% was exported.
We can calculate the expected gas supplies as follows. I'm going to EXPAND the McKensie pipeline to 1 TCF/year from the 0.3 tcf currently being considered for two reasons: a) with more compressor stations they can about double it. b) there is already talk of doubling it. So maybe they will triple it before it gets underway.
6.3 tcf current production
-2.0 tcf expected decline
-2.0 tcf increased consumption from tar sands ops
+1.0 tcf new gas via McKensie etc.
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3.3 tcf available.in time frame 2015
Here is another way to look at this.
6.3 tcf total production now
-3.3 tcf exports to the USA (52% of 6.3)
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3.0 tcf current Canadian consumption
So clearly if Canada ceases to export ANY gas to the USA then with a HUGE pipeline we can carry enough new gas to meet Canadian needs including offsetting current production and meeting the needs of tar sands operations. However if Canada attempts to continue the current export ratios then Canada has to push about 1/2 of the current consumers out of the market.
Meanwhile the USA will have to push about 1/3 of present consumers out of the market.
This can only be offset if significant new production comes on stream -OR- if LNG imports can make up the declines.
However since the current production in the USA is about (2003) 549.5 Billion cubic meters = 19.4 tcf it will be very difficult to keep up these levels.
Personally I doubt the LNG imports can be ramped up enough to make much of a difference.
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The obvious conclusion is that any plan to produce more electricity from Natural Gas is doomed before it starts. The real question is how much of the present consumption we can sustain and who gets weaned from their gas consumption.
As for the CO2 issues. That just makes me laugh! If they are going to produce liquid CO2 then put it into bottles and sell it!
From the Green House gasses issue - one has to look at the total water vapour and the percentage increase in same because Water Vapour is a stronger green house gas than CO2. In addition there is about 100x greater concentration of H2O in the atmosphere. Thus a 1% increase in H2O totally overwhelms the effect of _ALL_ the other green house gasses. The IPCC reports in their technical documents that water vapour increases per decade are several percent.
The IPCC ALSO reports that the changes in water vapour concentrations are not included in the models (its in chap 7).
The bottom line is that IF Global Warming is actually happening (which is not proven) then it COULD be due to water vapour increases and irrigation would be probably the greatest factor. CO2 woudl be blamed simply because it increased at the same time and the models don't consider the real cause (H2O).
At this point there is no reason to liquify CO2 at GREAT EXPENSE.
So - pretty much all these ideas are non-starters.
Boycott the cameras too.
Boycotting Cameras probably will not go anywhere because most dummies don't give a shit about what our industry faces.
But what of the Corporate Printer down the hallway. haha.
So a few systems admins have to give up their jobs! Well this causes strife and it will not be the first time progress was made because of people willing to be a martyr. haha.
On a more serious note, I think we can see just how serious this attack is.
While I do not wish calamity on anyone, if it turns out that a development platform like Java is shot down and crashes and burns from the Patent bullets that are being shot at it, then maybe this is what our industry needs.
Something like this would cause SERIOUS havok and clearly billions in development $$$ and many major Java projects would be part of the collateral damage.
Since Java is taught in many institutions around the world it might be visible enough for people to actually see how an ill thought out set of laws administered by a PTO that is out of control can have a devastating effect on the industry. So on this basis maybe the more damage the better!!!
55 watts eh? Seems I read the P4 from Intel radiates something like 73 watts!!!
I always knew the P4 was a dog power wise - but its nice to know that the nuclear battery you talk about is too small to run it!!! haha.
USA light water pressureized reactors have about 1/3 of their fuel exchanged each year. If we assume they have been running for 45 years then we have about 15 fuel loads sitting in swimming pools. Note the last reactor was completed in 1979. Also note that the electricity produced from nuclear sources has increased about 25% since 1993. (From 145.4 to 181.9 million tonnes of oil equivalent).
Now - the fuel used in the USA reactors is Enriched. USEC (NYSE:USU) for instance does this. Typically the natural uranium (0.7% U235) is enriched to about 4% U235. Thus the fuel going into the USA light water reactors is 96% U238 and 4% U235. This is accomplished by discarding 88% of the uranium (called "depleated") and this depleated still contains about 3% U235 so really about 93% of the incomming uranium is discarded..
When the enriched uranium comes out three years later it is 1% U235, 1% Plutonium for a combined high radioactvity of 2% which is about 3x hotter than natural uranium. About 95% is U238 so about 3% is nuclear debris.
On this note we need to look at the CANDU reactors . These were designed to burn natural uranium and with this reactor it goes in at about 0.7% and comes out 0.3% U235 and 0.25% Pu for a total residual high radioactivity of 0.55%. What this means is that a CANDU can use the "spent" fuel from the USA reactors and since it burns more efficiently than the USA reactors the CANDU's will get about as much power from the "spent" fuel as the lightwater pressured reactors got in the first place.
On this basis there is about a 45 year supply of fuel for 100 CANDU reactors and this is without mining a single additional gram of uranium. The fuel for them is already sitting in swimming pools across the USA.
If you conclude the USA nuclear program is nutz you are probably pretty close to the truth.
Now - the spent fuel from the CANDU can be reporcessed as is done in Europe. The Plutonium is easily separated chemically and from a Candu there is about 0.25%. If we add this 0.25% from 1/2 the reprocessed fuel to the other 1/2 which is at 0.55% we get 0.8% so this is radioactive enough to stuff right back into the Candu.
On this basis we get another 3 years out of 1/2 of the fuel so that works out to another 22.5+ years supply of fuel bringing the total to 45+22.5 = 67.5 years.
Now look at the U238. What can be done with that? Can we burn it for instance? The answer is yes we can - but we need either a breeder or spallation. France has a breeder called the Phenix.
One way to look at this is that the USA light pressure water reactors burn about 1% of their fuel load per year. If a reactor system could burn 100% of the uranium, then a single load will last 100 years. This means there is about 4500 years of fuel on hand sitting in swimming pools ready to be used and this will fuel about 100 reactors of the Gigawatt range.
But - if we can burn the U238 from the "spent" fuel then we can burn the U238 in the "depleated" uranium as well. Since only about 7% of the uranium that enters an enrichment plant ever seens the insides of a nuclear reactor, then we have 93/7 = 13.29 times as much fuel available and that works out to about 60,000 years availablity for 100 reactors. This is without mining a single gram of new uranium.
Now - the USA's equivalent energy needs expressed in millions of tonnes of oil works out to about 2297.8 according to page 39 of the BP statistical energy review. Of this about 181.9 is nuclear.
181.9/2297.8 = 8% (about) so if the USA were to produce 100% of its current energy needs from Nuclear then the USA would need about 12 times as many reactors or about 1200 of them. That 60,000 year supply of fuel dwindles to only 5,000 years on this basis. This is without mining more uranium.
I think these facts make it very clear there is no long term energy crisis and there is no shortage of energy either. However - there is a gap between our ability to produce it and what people want
We have an 1800 sq ft "solar" home here in Calgary. Look up "Ostrawski" via google. His first name is "jorg".
The home is very practical and very livable.
He is available as a consultant and were I building a place I would send him a retainer. I think access to his expericances will really pay off.
The home he built is insulated to R50 in the walls and R70 in the Ceiling. He is not connected to the gas nor to the city water/sewer. He is connected to the electrical grid.
In the winter he does need some suplimental heat which is provided by a fireplace. He says he burns less than 1/2 cord per year.
Good luck with your project.
1) if we could burn 100% we'd have 100 years supply at 1% per year not 300 years. Boy that is a dumb error.
2) it should read Spallation and not scintillation. Spallation is when you smash the nucleus with a proton and scintillation is when you tickle it with a gamma ray. Cleary I know the difference. I was asleep at the keyboard I guess.
Redundant?? Must be the same stoopid moderator as with the previous post... either that or his evil twin!
I'll comment on the nuclear issue touched upon in the post. Yes it is true that environmental groups are pointing their fingers at Yuca mountain. Alas!
The spent nuclear fuel problem is not nearly the problem people make it out to be. Let me explain.
First we need to look at the nuclear fuel cycles. There are three (3) that are very significant.
First off, natural uranium contains about 0.7% U235 and 99.3% U238. Both are fissonable but U235 is about 6x more fissionable than U238. Also U235 is more senitive to the "thermal" neutrons in a reactor hense reactors tend to burn U235 in preference to U238.
In a PWR (enriched) reactor system such as used in the USA, the fuel goes in with about 4% U235, 96% U238 and when it comes out it is about 1% U235, 93% U238 and 1% Pu 239. Thus only about 3% of the fuel is burned and this is over a three (3) year period of time when it is in the reactor. These reactors are fueled with about 75 tonnes of uranium oxide fuel and 25 tonnes are exchanged per year.
Note that the "spent" fuel with is 2% highly fissionable material (U235 and Pu239) is alomst 3x as "hot" as natural uranium. Candu reactors burn natural uranium so a Candu system clearly can burn the "spent" fuel sitting around in the swimming pools.
So why isn't this being done? The answer is that in other countries the combined Candu / Enriched reactor program is being built and used. It was the USA that decided unilaterally to ban fuel reprocessing. The only reason I can hypothesis for not using CANDU style reactors to burn the "spent fuel" from the PWR reactors is national pride.
Ok. we have 97% of the fuel that goes into a reactor comming back out unused. Now look at the ENRICHMENT phase of the operation. USEC is an example of a company involved in this... (NYSE:USU).
Here we start with 0.7% and enrich to 4% for approximately a 6 fold increase. Thus we need to discard 5/6th of the original natural uranium. This is actually not quite correct because the discarded fraction still contains anywhere from 0.2% to 0.3% U235. Thus the fraction of the fuel that is discarded is closer to 90% or more.
Note that U235 is about 6x more radioactive than U238 so what this means is that the difference in radioactivity between the discarded uranium and the reactor grade uranium is actually quite small. It is less than 12% different in fact. The discarded uranium fraction is called "DEPLETED URANIUM" and we can clearly see it really isn't all that depeleted!
To calculate the percentage of the original natural uranium that is burned we take 10% x 3% and get 0.3% so we did NOT burn 99.7%.
Note the reactor burns 3% over a 3 year time frame or 1% per year. Thus, if the reactor could burn 100% of the original uranium then a fuel load of 75 tonnes would last over 300 years.
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We've had over 100 reactors running in the USA now for over 30 years. This is 10 complete fuel exchanges and at 300 years per load we clearly have 3000 years supply of fuel sitting in pools at the present moment.
So how do we burn up 100% of the uranium (U238)?
The answer is via two technologies: (1) Breader reactors and (2) scintillation technology or Intense neutron sources. France uses breader technology in the Phenix system. As for scintillation... it works like this. You use an acclerator to fire protons into a target - probably lead/bismuth. When these protons hit a nucleus in the target they smash it to shit and you get all sorts of nuclear trash flying about... including 100's of neutrons. The flux close to the target is far too dangerous to place uranium near - it would just explode!!! Chain reaction anyone!
However this high flux zone is perfect for the long lived atomic wastes (actinides) and this burns them into non-radioactive ash and we are rid of it forever! Farther away from the targ
Why anyone would mod the above post as a troll is beyond me. The post is very appropriate.
I guess this is just another example of a moderator who doesn't know what he's doing. Perhaps he pressed the wrong button!
Yup - your post is nonsense.
Through over-regulation it is possible to turn any project into a money loser. In spite of this the USA produces a LOT of nuclear power. Furthermore with the prospect of oil production starting to decline on a world wide basis I suspect that the anti- nuclear group will lose any credibility it ever had!
As to your comment about attacking nuclear here being worse than supporting the al-Quaeda, ya - you are probably correct. The reason is not that nuclear is geeky. The reason is more likely that geeks see the truth and are able to actually do the calculations that refute the crap the anti-nuclear bigots and the media spread around.
I've read the artical and there are errors.
1) the 1st reactor was built under Stagg Feild statium as I recall and not in the metallurgical lab. Can someone else verify this?
2) Leo Szillard's name is somehow not mentioned in the History.
now to the meat of the artical...
They talk about the number of reactors but I don't see the size mentioned. As I recall pebble bed reactors are small - about 165 MW in size. (this is the Eskom design). The HTR-10 is a prototype and produces only 10 MW. There are plans for a 200 MW plant for 2007. If this is successful then by 2020 we could see 30 of these little reactors for a total installed cpacity of 6,000 MW.
The enriched reactors in the USA like those at Three Mile Island are about 1000-1300 MW. Again - can someone confirm? Most of the operating reactors in the US are licenced for 2500 to 3500 MW. For example the Arkanas Nuclear I reactor is 6 miles WNW of Russellville and is licenced for 2568 MW.
Candu style reactors are about 750 MW.
Total installed capacity in the USA is about 100,000 MW. Total installed capacity in China is about 6,000 MW with about 2,600 planned. China has 8 reactors now with 3 under construction. The USA has 104 reactors.
In terms of MILLION TONNES of oil equivalent the USA increased its nuclear energy production from 145.4 to 181.9 during the period from 1993 to 2003. Meanwhile China went from 0.4 to 9.8.
At this point the total installed capacity in China is about 1/4 of the increase in production of the USA. China produces about 1/20th of the amount of nuclear power the USA produces. Source: BP statistical energy review June 2004.
Actually it was very easy to come to this conclusion by 1973. By then IBM had a high quality PL/I compiler on its OS's. Furthermore this compiler had good multilanguage capabilities and it was quite easy to interface to Fortran and Cobol code as well as assembler if required.
Some of the "studies" at the time were enough to make you laugh. One I recall was that PL/I was condemed for being "less efficient" than Cobol. The computational speed was reported to be a little "slower". When one looked in detail at the study it turns out that Cobol was not doing overflow and underflow checking and Pl/1 was. So much for the study!!!
The biggest issue seems to be corporate inertia.
In the company I worked for before I left the IBM world basically forever, we did use PL/1 but the main IT department found many reasons not to. Next, the IT department decided that they didn't need degree people developing software and furthermore it would be ok for programmers to work from cubicles.
I left the company over this. Within a year I was managing a small development group and the programmers I hired had degrees. I would say that today this may not be an issue, but back then this rule did serve to separate the men from the boys so to speak.
Productivity differences by any measurement were more than 5:1.
There really is a HUGE difference that escaped most of the managers I knew at the time, and perhaps one of the reasons for this is that most of the managers I knew at the time grew out of the hardware side of the IT department. In that game, all you needed to do was parrot what the vendor's salesmen told you. You were thus pretty much guarenteed that you could supply say 20% more horsepower for 10% less year after year so you always looked good.
Now the developers usually looked bad. They were usually behind schedual and over budget. The systems often didn't work properly and took forever to debug. Productivity was usually in the toilet. Typically they were too afraid to change their ways because if the "next" project using the "better" language were tried and came in late and over budget, then they would be attacked mercilessly. Office politics can be pretty dirty when you have the hardware manager looking like a white knight after signing the maintenance contract and the software manager slugging it out in the trenches using horrible tools.
So my experiance was that the software development side of the IT department used "herd" think whenever possible probably mostly for protection!
But mixed into this was a tremendous amount of incompetance and managers who knew dick all about the technical side of systems development. It was so bad in fact that many "programmers" did not even know the basic number types their machine supported. For example, when a Cobol programmer with 5 years experiance does not even know the difference between COMP-1, COMP-2 and COMP-3 this is IMHO totally unacceptable.
Cobol is a bad language and it always has been! There is just so much that is bad about Cobol that it is unbelievable that people would use it.
r dSturm/PL1andC.html
.
Flow control like PERFORM, no good way to set up storage classes, akward syntax, horrible verbosity are just a few things.
Setting up linkage sections is a pain in the ass. It is no wonder Cobol programers hated calling subroutines. What is worse is the spagetti code they rouintly wrote and then painfully debugged.
There is a language that is quite good as a replacement for Cobol - IE PL/I. It has all the data types Cobol has, a nice syntax, good flow control, good I/O control - you name it - PL/I has it.
In many respect I consider PL/I to be superior to C. Its purpose however is different. C is a systems development language that has been adopted for applications work. Pl/I is an applications development language by design.
Where C falls down IMHO is that it allows the programmer to become too cleaver. What one needs to strive for is readable code and clear logic. While one can write good C programs, it is also true that one can get carried away. PL/I is a little more restrictive in this.
There is a really good analysis of the difference between PL/I and C on the net. Lokk here: http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZIV/Mitarbeiter/Eberha
The programming language does make a difference. In fact - it can hobble really good programmers and seriously cut their productivity. The opposite however is not necessarily the case... a poor programmer is not encumbered all that much be a bad programming language because he/she will not have the productivity anyways and will find a tremendous amount of time must be spent debugging
There is another way to look at this. If you are trying to get a system going and you find random bugs all over the place in pretty much everything you try to use - then you are not going to make good progress regardless how good or bad the language is. On the other hand, team a good language up with a brilliant programmer and it is like making beautiful music.
Hey - I buy my salt in 100 lbs bags. I can get 100 lbs of table salt in a 100 lbs bag for about the same cost as 3 x 1 lbs packages. Such is the economics of the grocery store.
Note - the salt I buy is typically Sifto Salt and it comes from Silurian deposits. This makes the salt about 425 million years old (from the deposit that is - the salt was around before the deposit) I figure the bag has good shelf life so to speak. Also - people that talk about water getting stale make be laugh. haha.
I do not think I would eat better. My deep freeze is full of farm raised elk, trout, salmon and baby octopus and so forth. How could I improve on this? My wine cellar is full of bordeaux wines which I made from choice grapes from Washington State and as for beers, well our western 2 row barley produces some of the best - and I brew it too.
Food is so cheap that it is virtually free.
Life is tough when you have to scratch your head and ask if you want tee bone steak or something different.
Sure. Linux is cheap. Linux is free. Does one thus conclude my consumption of linux increases?
Even if you made food free I wouldn't eat any more than I currently do. Well - I suppose SOME people might try to consume more - but then they will just get fat.
What she misses is that at ANY price there is a maximum amount people will consume and once the price drops low enough then further price declines have no meaning.
Bertrand Russell pointed this out in an essay in 1932: In Praise of Idleness
Funny that over 70 years later we still have not caught on that Russell is correct.
In fact, what people need to start realizing is that in an economy one person's expense is another person's income. When we eliminate people from the workforce we do not benefit from the "savings" because there may well be none. By leaving a segment of our work force idle all we accomplish is that we lose what they can contribute.
This is one reason that NASA really does not cost what anti-space antagonists suggest it costs. If we eliminate NASA then somewhere else a would be engineer gets pushed out of a job and can't contribute his talents to the economy. Ditto with programmers.
I agree with much of what you say. A massive nuclear program should be undertaken immediately. However I suspect this will not occur until after about 3 years of sky high oil prices and rather long lineups. Then there will be a 10 year wait while the plants are built.
Horrible prospect isn't it? Thank the Pollies and the anti-nuke tree huggers!
Well - there are lots of naive comments here. I was especially entertained by the ideas that since oil reserves have "increased" since 1971 that there is now no problem and there never will be one.
This is especially funny with oil approaching $50 bux per barrel and the peak of world production now estimated to be occuring within 5 years. Perhaps a better way to look at this however is by considering incresing demand. When you do this, it becomes clear that demand has already outpaced supply. Unless the supply side gets a considerable boost (which Saudi Arabia says it can do: 1.3 million bbls/day in fact) or the demand side dips, then we are already in the oil shortage senero that many have predicted for a long time now.
So it really doesn't matter what year the supply peaks.... the shortage is already here and probably will get worse from here on in... year after year... until by 2025 we are burning as much oil as was burned in the 1950's.
This is unless alternatives can be found. Nuclear fission is probably the only reasonable source of relief, but we would need to undertake a reactor building program that results in 1000 new reactors each in the gw(e) range. This is 10x the number of reactors presently in North American. It is a MAJOR undertaking.
Furthermore these reactors should probably be heavy water moderated natural uranium buring reactors like the Candu. Meanwhile fuel re-processing technology must be developed at break neck speed. This will solve the waste problem for the most part.
And what of the fuel cells?
I suspect they will not be viable for the foreseeable future for the simple reason that hydrogen is hard to transport. In fact, the easiest way I know of to handle hydrogen is to mix a little carbon into the molecules!!! Once we get the ratio of H:C into the 2:1 area we have nice, relatively safe and easy to use liquid fuels.
To do this we need a carbon source and one of the best I know of is the Tar Sands of Alberta. The upgrading facilities to do the chemistry are already built, being built or are in design. All we need to add are some rather large nuclear reactors and we are well on our way to making the fuels we need.
So lets start lobying the Alberta and Canadian governments and lets get some reactors underway.
The sooner we start the better!!!
Hmm - with about 300 million in North American, $771 billion would out to about $2,100 per person for each man woman and child.
Are people _really_ willing to pay this much for what nature provided for free? Well - I suppose the regulators need to justify their salaries somehow!!!
We could add a nice feature to things like the graphical file manager so that when the user clicks on "properties" they can elect to "encrypt" . We can just grab the user's password and create a cert that is used to strongly encrypt the file.
We could use this technique without telling the user and at the same time implement it in such as way that only the GUI interface can deal with it. We would not want to touch the CLI interface because we would want to preserve backward compatibility for all those old apps that don't know about our nifty new encryption scheme.
Next, when the user loses their password and the systems adminstrator has to assign a new password we of course would not tell the user about all the files the system has lost access to. This would only create fear in the mind of the user's anyway and it is much better to say nothing.
We can add some silly permission bits as well that again only the GUI interface knows about. This way the user can lose access to his own files and never know about it. When we do this, we need to set the system up so it says you NEED to be an "adminstrator" in order to access the files, and then set it up so an adminstrator actually cannot access the file, but can only change some of the permissions. We should issure no message when the adminstrator TRIES to access the file and not tell him that the system didn't let him do anything, because if we issue a message then the administrator might get the idea something is wrong with the way we implemented this.
Another thing we can do is remove all error messages that the file system can issue and instead point the finger at the application and claim there is an "Unavoidable Application Error".
We can set it up so that if for instance the user powers down say an external disk drive while it is being accessed that no message is sent to the application other than "normal END OF FILE". This is pretty obvious anyways because if the drive get powered off clearly access to the file has ended, right?
Also, we should stream line the I/O so that when an application asks for data to be written to the disk, then EVERYTHING else in the computer stops until this has been completed. We can justify this because hardware is getting cheaper and faster and writing data is the single most important activity we can do when it is requested.
Also, benchmarks are typically run "stand alone" so as to get the highest numbers and if we program the machine so that there are no "background" tasks then the benchmarks will yeild higher marks.
RIGHT?
While we are at it, why don't we get rid of the concept of "users" and just make everyone root?
The first feature I would like to see added would provide the capabilities of a Partition Data Set from the IBM TSO days. We would not copy what IBM did of course because they did some stupid things meant to sell more hardware. One thing was deleted files were not really deleted and you needed to "re-generate" the PDS when it filled up. Nice trick!
Suppose you had an infinit number of loop back devices and these were hidden and used internally by the file system and when you started an application you could "mount" what for many intents and purposes looks like a TARBALL and the application in question and ONLY the application in question got to see all the files in this TARBALL. Well, the files inside a "TARBALL" of this nature would probably not be compressed, but, they could be if desired... Well, that is the concept of a Partition Data Set.
In the case of a user logging in, when the shell is started a mount could take place against the user's private data set. By doing this on a shared machine, file security can be guaranteed. For export and import the system could mount a "shared" dataset.
This sort of secutiry is far superior to ACL's and anything present file systems offer for the very simple reason that normal people including systems administrators would not normally see any of the files inside one of these datasets. Consider the advantages of running an apache server where you KNOW all associated files needed by that release of apache are in a single dataset. There IS not easy way to lose a file or clobber it or accidently delete it and so forth. Next consider that when that copy of apache starts up it _could_ simply mount a set of files each of which contains the whole website for a given domain.
Upgrading to a new copy of apache would be as simple as copying in a new dataset and mounting it against the web datasets. If a glitch is found, simply restart the old copy.
Backing up a set of files becomes a simple copy operation. Replication can be accomodated as well.
Systems Administration in those old IBM mainframes was MUCH easier than with UNIX systems and this is in large part because of the way the system handled partition datasets.
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Now, with this we would want to be able to mark certain files as being external sort of like opening up a window, and through this window we could for instance access certain files which might be the executables and supporting scripts.
Of course people will point out we can accomplish some of this with a loop back mount. The problem with the loopback mount is that it populates the directory tree and this is what I really want to avoid. Frankly there really *IS* no reason for even a sysadmin to be able to see 90% of the files that say consitute a web server, or say PostFix, or PostgreSQL. We accomplish a lot if the executable which needs access to its supporting files has a "private" loopback and only this executable by default gets to see the mounted dataset.
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Next idea is versioning the way Digital Equipment Corporation did it in the VAX. We simply append a version number and what the delete does is append a version number. With disk drive capacities heading into the stratoshere there is no reason to be conservative.
And this leads to the next idea which has been mentioned before... that is replication - across machines.
I can buy for $20 bux a machine (P1 200mHz) that can run a 20 GB hard drive and in fact I think they can run 80 GB hard drives as well. Rsync is useful, but a full replicating filesystem at the kernel level, or at least at the level of a deamon close to the kernel would mean that a machine can be backed up to another machine in perhaps another building automatically and with little effort.
Well, I'm sure other people have other things they might like to add. This is my wish list.
Since I hate the background music, will this make it go away? Hmm, the argeement with the publishing industry as I recall is that you are allowed to listen to music you buy "for your own personal enjoyment". Maybe this means the cops can confisgate the getto blaters and throw the bastards that own them into Jail!! hahaha.
What irony.
Turn your stereo down folks or face the music cops.
Funny.
By 2010 the world may well be gripped in a huge energy crisis. It will be man made of course, predicated on our refusal to heed the warnings of experts. You can read about it here: www.hubbertpeak.com and here: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Here is another really good artical on the subject, published July 17, 2004: http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/040717/forweekendedgeenerg y_oil_imports_1.html
I'll quote from the artical:
"Reuters
U.S. Addiction to Foreign Oil Deepens
Saturday July 17, 7:58 am ET
By Timothy Gardner
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. domestic oil production has dropped five percent since this year's peak in February and near-record oil prices are unlikely to inspire drillers to slow the country's deepening dependence on foreign oil, experts say.
From the artical: the US pumps 5.43 Million barrels per day (early July down from 5.70 in Feb). The USA burns about 20 million barrels per day. (this is a short fall of 14.57 million barrels per day which must come from imports and oil in storage). The next paragraph states: " As domestic output dropped this summer, crude imports averaged more than 10 million bpd for a record two months, the EIA said this week."
Well - the numbers may be wrong I suppose. But the USA has drawn down its oil in storage to a 17 year low.
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later in the story we have: "... rising U.S. demand, and a fall in domestic drilling since 2001 won't cut reliance on record imports, experts said."
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One reason to go into space is to harvest the vast energy stores. There are many ways to do this including building mirrors to light our cities at night and to provide heat through reflected radiant energy. Of course, while system such as this have been proposed, they have not to the best of my knowledge been proven to be workable much less practical.
Nevertheless, it is clear that UNLESS an alternative to fossil fuels is found - and quickly - we will have no alternatives IMHO other than to build nuclear plants and to do so at breakneck speed.
Our energy buffer is ebbing away - rather quickly I think. With the North Sea production dropping since 1999 (at a horendous rate in fact) there is no suprise to me that Britain and the USA was interested IMHO in liberating Iraq oil.
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Roll the film forward to 2010. What sort of world do we expect to be living in? Line ups at the gas station and fuel shortages for the last 3-5 years? Tree huggers and pro-nukes chasing each other with tire irons and baseball bats? Crazy pollies lying to the public proclaiming that if we vote for them the we will be once again self sufficient in energy?
Science missions in space and energy research on space based energy capture systems proclaimed as a reckless waste of our dwindling resources?
Looming food shortages as the urban population demands access to fuel at the expense of the rural community and justifies this "for economic reasons"... and outvotes those who use the fuel to supply food?
Fertilizer shortages caused by a total shutdown of the North American fertilizer industry and an inability of the industry to ramp up African / Middle East and Russian production fast enough.
Permenant rotating power blackouts both is the hot summer months and the coldest winter months due to further declines in North American gas production (which peaked in 2000) and an inability to ramp up LNG imports (or even build ships fast enough). This compounded by an inability to do fuel switching to other than coal... and not enough coal fired power generating capcity because nobody built the plants.
Well, I guess I could suggest that we might have the USA taking over the administration of ALBERTA and the Tar Sands, proclaiming that we are shirking our responsibilities to increase production, when the truth of the matter is that the total Canadian Natural Gas supply is insufficient for even 10% of the Recoverable Bitumin in the Tar Sands
A friend had this done and has had continuing problems because of it. I'm not entirely sure the exact issues but if you send me your email I can put the two of you in touch with each other.
One issue is that she now has serious night vision problems.
My brother had an RK which is an older corrective technique and he felt it was well worth it. However, you may want to read the book "Left for Dead" because it was the eye surgery that left Seaborn Beck Weathers incapacitated and he really was left for dead, twice in fact. So there can be serious consequences.
I where glasses and did consider surgery at one time. The glasses don't really bother me and since I am short sighted I have found that this is actually a blessing in disguise.
The glasses fix the distance vision perfectly and I can see perfectly from about 24" to infinity. Under 18" I take off the glasses and can then focus to the tip of my nose. Thus I can do close up work that others can't.
If you do elect for the surgery, then make sure you get a good doctor... there are some who try to cut a few corners (pardon the pun)
I'm trying to see these picture and I think the NASA website has been slashdotted!!!