There is a growing power shortage. California has brownouts in the peak air conditioning season. A single point failure, plus some sensor and software cockups, takes out the whole of the North Eastern US - a sign of a system well into the amber zone.
Power demand is increasing. To start with, there are more people. And, on average, those people are getting richer. Which means bigger houses, needing more aircon and more lighting. And PCs are becoming endemic, and consuming their bit of power. And big widescreen TVs use more power than their predecessors. And hundreds of other power-consuming gadgets. And people want more streetlights. And cheap and reliable power promotes economic growth... jobs.
A power system near 100% capacity is prone to oscillation (there was a Scientific American article about this recently). For stability, you need capacity of perhaps 120-130% of peak load, to allow for surges, mismatch of distribution and supply, failures (remember that if a component is going to fail it will probably fail when most stressed). But the generators would like to run at perhaps 80% of peak load: the generating capacity to cover the last 20%, which would be run only a few hours a year, would be "uneconomic". If you just pay for kilowatts consumed, the last few percent are a waste. So you need penalties for powercuts, to kick the generators into installing at least some extra capacity.
Or you need a system with lots of spare capacity - which is worth paying (some amount) for. Price vs. eliability is a tradeof. The best system for establishing such tradeoffs is the market. But we don't have such a market. For all I know, the current balance may be right. Or it may not - how do we know? The UK used to have a different balance, mandated by govenment. Was that more right? I may believe so, but I don't know. Nobody does.
No it isn't that good, though it is better than I believe you have in the US. However, this started in the days of a government monopoly generation system. Since privatisation, margins have been steadily eroded. I would expect our power system to reach the same level as the US power system (the level where consumer pain starts reaching politicians ears) in 5 to 8 years.
Consumers tend to have a short-term view of supply: price counts for much more than reliability at the moment they are making their purchasing decisions. Until there is some method of delivering different levels of reliability to the house, the marketplace cannot work.
Actually, the technology described in the referenced article could work the other way round here. If intelligent power manipulation can be applied at house-by-house level, then the utility can cut power off slowly rather than breaking the whole lot off. You could then buy a place further down the list of cutoffs, so you are less likely to be blacked out. And the utilities could spend the extra revenue paid for reliability on increased investment in it.
Firstly, don't take the internet analogy too far - it's just a system which allows power routing to be managed locally in an intelligent manner, rather than depending upon some central authority. One of the reasons for last year's NW USA blackouts was that data failed to get to the central control centre because of localised breakdowns.
However, decentralised systems can also faile - indeed, given perfect information at the centre (a big given, which often fails) a central overview can outperform a local intelligence. With a distributed system, you would probably get smaller but more frequent outages as local subsystems panic, with a larger total number of houshold outage minutes. This migh, of course, be less damaging if humans don't panic because it is only a few tens of blocks down.
The big potential gain, mentioned lower down in the article, is the potential structural changes to allow small scale generators to generate and distribute power locally. Lots of places have backup power generators, which cut in only when the mains fails. If the economics are right, it would be weorth while their running these continuosly, selling surplus power to the grid, and using the grid as a backup for their own power generation rather than the other way round. This saves the capital investment required for power stations, since it is using capital already invested instead of new capital - which may therefore overcome the diseconomies of small scale. It also saves the losses of long-distance power distribution. However, where you really win is that each area hasa a large proportion of its own power generated locally, so it doesn't care if the grid goes away. Suddently, it soean't matter what happens elswehere. there is also a cewrtain natural balance, as electricity is used in workplaces dirung the day, and when the workers go home the power is available for their domestic evening peak.
The real pie-in-the-sky payoff is when we all get hydrogen-powered cars, which generate electricity for no wear and tear on the fuel cell (we hope). If every car parked at home or work plugs into the grid, you have more generating capacity than you will need in the near future. (It is quoted that the power output of one year of US car sales exceeds the installed generating capacity of the entire world).
And not all are disabling. Because my company works with images, a colour blindness test is part of the recruitment process (not a go-nogo - we have several colour-blind people, but it helps to know). One guy who failed the red-green colour blindness test was currently working as a film colour grader. He may not have seen the colours the way the director saw them, but he could make them like the director wanted them.
Doesn't always work, even so. I heard of a one-way valve in the fuel line of a light aircraft, which had different threads on the two ends so it couldn't be inserted the wrong way round. Except some mechanic though there was a mistake, and removed and retapped the fittings so as to make them go in the other way.
Einstein said he knew of only two infinite things - the universe and human stupidity. And he wasn't so sure about the universe.
Well, the sort of thing Customs do is get from the manufacturer the serial number ranges that they assign to different countries, so they can tell if a particular machine was manufactured for the US or UK market. They don't do this for everything - but pricey laptops are exactly the sort of think they might consider worth doing.
Ah - which London Bridge? The belief of many is that he thought he was buying Tower Bridge, which is much more memorable, and thought it was a very special price.
But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out.
That's just silly. Europa will undoubtedly have its own sources of radioactives, and the hypothetical biosphere under the ice is hundreds of cubic kilometers in volume. The amount of radioactivity one probe could release would produce a minor localised accident, probably much smaller than local vulcanism.
Which is a pity, because it misses a more important point - biological contamination. Unlike radioactivity, viruses and bacteria could grow if the medium under the ices provides a suitable environment. This would certainly contaminate any pre-existing life with earth-type life, and possibly wipe it out. I think that the probability is small - but that is just an uniformed guess. It is very important that this be discusses in a very open forum before any such probe is sent. Total certainty is impossible, but we must reduce the probability of contaminating Europa to a very, very small value.
But it is probably not patentable. It is not an invention, it is precise settings which have to be worked out over hours and hours of testing. Exact timings for injectors at all speeds and load conditions, while allowing reasonable margins so that performance does not fall off with wear. This data - just a huge look-up table - costs millions of dollars to obtain, because it required many hours of running. But you cannot patent it. You can copyright it, of course, but if a copier made a number of minor, not very significant, changes in the tables, it would be very difficult to prove they had copied the original tables. "Of course we got the same results - they are the right results for this engine".
... the term is "hacker". A guy who makes computers do what they ought to do, whatever the circumstances.
Re:The multi million dollar question...
on
In Google We Trust
·
· Score: 1
Ooodles and oodles of cash. The shares they own may have a mind boggling paper value, but the founders cannot get their hands on that cash until their company is traded on some market. (They couls sell out to a single entity like Microsoft, but that would probably be even more demanding than the market).
The concept of Planets should no longer be regarded as a formal (as opposed to colloquial) classification. We have four rocky inners, four gassy outers, and a vast number of planetismals. Forming a group of the first two classes, with or without a few of the last, is a false classification.
True. Throwing up the brickwork is one of the fastest parts of building. Usually laying in the site services and getting good foundations down take an age, then the shell appears in a trice, then fitting oudt take another age.
I can see the machine itself being installed quickly - after its track has been carefully laid.
The interesting bit, as the original/. post said, is the possibility to build in wierd shapes. However., after reading How Buildings Learn,, it seems thst this is not generally a good idea for long term use use of buildings. Square may be a bit, erm, square, but it is much more adapatable - and successful buildings are above all adaptable.
Knife carrying is also illegal in Britain unless you have a good reason to have one.
Not, I think, provided the blade is less than 3 inches in length - and the blade of my Swiss Army Knife is 2.5 inches. On the other hand, the list of exceptions is not as well explained as the NSW law quoted: a chef got fined for leaving his butchers knives in the car.
Plenty of prior art in Science Fiction, for the general problem; this guy could only patent a technique, not the general idea.
One of the best ones I saw was a short-short by, I think, Arthur C Clarke, which obviously dates from the Cold War days. General panic in Washington when the Soviet Union manages to paint the moon Red, displaying the power of Communist technology. Don't worry, say NASA. A few daya later, the Coca-Cola "swirl" appears across it, displaying the power of Capitalist technology.
ps: on a side note its interesting to see how the design of drives have changed over the years, from heads actuated by stepping motors to voice-coil actuators, and from the full-height monsters with 7 platters to single platter drives with 10x capacity, yet the platters have stayed the exact same radial size on every 3.5" drive I have taken apart.
The latest units from Seagate have smaller platters - about the same as the same as the 2.5" drives. This means they can make the enclosure thicker to reduce vibration and increases air circulation space.
Basically, the processor speed is set by the speed of the weakest link. If 99.9% of the processor clocks at 3.0 and the last bit at 2.4, the whole chip has to be sold as 2.4. Yes, processor manufacture is incredibly accurate - but there are some micro defects in any wafer, som tiny residual vibrations in the masking stages, tiny scourings in the chemical washes. Thes will make minute variations in the chip. Most will do nothing - but a few will, for example, minutely increase the resistance of a single trace. Given this suceptibility to a singel defect, it is suprising they get as many full speed parts as they do.
The world has plenty of fresh water - it is just not in the right places, and it is very wexpensive to shift. Wateraid and similar organisations are trying to get relatively small amounts of clean water to places where there is very little water indeed. By contrast, Canada has thousands of times more fresh water thanit will ever need for drinking and agriculture. Aside from the pollution question, ther is no harm in Canada "wasting" a bit of its fresh water. The same water consumption would be criminal in Namibia.
You have to distinguish between professional and amateur users. This Volvo can be opened by a professional mechanic. Software for work purposes should be opernd by a professional software mechanic - aka/.er.
It may well be a good idea to keep unskilled hands - male or female - out of the engine of a car. We effectively already have this with "trust me" software installations. But if you are employed to write software (not just web pages), you should be trusted with tools for your job.
This Volvo doesn't have the hood welded shut - it has it locked shut. Fine. Make sure you know where the key is.
Current advice in Britain is not to wait inside your car if the weather permits because of the remarkably high chance of getting shunted - hard - by another vehicle. You should get out of the vehicle and as far from the road as possible (e.g. behind the crash barrier). Basically, your chance of getting hit by a massive truck is much greater than your chance of a bad guy spotting you and stopping. I can't remember the fraction of accidents involving breakdowns on the side of the road, but I remember being startled by it. Emergency services now park their vehicle about 20 yards behind the breakdown to ensure that, if there is a hit, it is the empty emergency service van that gets hit. Even so, and despite their being covered with flashing lights, they still get hit.
You need a sense of priorities. Outside know "no go" areas, ordinary "innocent" traffic is a far greater danger than muggers, serial killers etc.
"We may take it for granted, but there are still a number of business (especially small businesses) that likely don't have a web presence."
Nor do they need one. It's a common misconception. A "keeping up with the jones".
I think almost any business should have a basic one-page web presence, just so they can be looked up. Contact details, basic statement of what they do and where. Simply because people are using the Web instead of (e.g.) Yellow Pages. If I hear of a buziness, my first reaction will be to chuck its name into Google. Any business which doesn't come up is a bit behind one that doesn't. It wouldn't be a killer, but I will check out the one with an online presence first.
The exceptios would be businesses with purely ad-hoc sales: mostly fast food - a mobile burger stand really doen't need a web page.
Opposite effect round me. I pass a secondary school on the way to work which, quite correctly, has a pedestrian controlled light to stop the traffic as the children (including mine) stream into or out of the school. The timing of the light is obviously set for town-centre use, where little old ladies may wobble slowly across. But this light serves only the secondary school full of healthy teenagers. When they get the green, they flood across in a big wave, crossing the road in less than 50% of the time the green is on. We the have to sit there for what feels like forever while the crossing in front of us is empty.
Who would have thought that the sun heated the earth through convection eh?
The sun is about 6000K: you are about 300K. Since radiation goes as the fourth power of temperature, the sun is about 20^4 times as good a radiator as a human body.
You would, of course, eventually freeze in space. But it would be many hours after you suffocated.
Some web text is occasionally too small, so I do view->text->larger
Use Opera - Keypad +/- zoom up down very nicely.
Although a TV lacks the resolution of a monitor, skin tones and pictures look better due to some sort of airbrushing effect.
TV's are optimised for linearity: monitors are optimised for sharpness. Monitors often have greater persistance, which reduces flicker but tends to give blurry trails on movement.
For those with normal sight, a monitor is undoubtedly better than a TV for computer use. But for someone with impaired vision, all rules change. Either a large TV or a mrojector might work. If you can borrow one, give it a try.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a growing power shortage. California has brownouts in the peak air conditioning season. A single point failure, plus some sensor and software cockups, takes out the whole of the North Eastern US - a sign of a system well into the amber zone.
Power demand is increasing. To start with, there are more people. And, on average, those people are getting richer. Which means bigger houses, needing more aircon and more lighting. And PCs are becoming endemic, and consuming their bit of power. And big widescreen TVs use more power than their predecessors. And hundreds of other power-consuming gadgets. And people want more streetlights. And cheap and reliable power promotes economic growth... jobs.
A power system near 100% capacity is prone to oscillation (there was a Scientific American article about this recently). For stability, you need capacity of perhaps 120-130% of peak load, to allow for surges, mismatch of distribution and supply, failures (remember that if a component is going to fail it will probably fail when most stressed). But the generators would like to run at perhaps 80% of peak load: the generating capacity to cover the last 20%, which would be run only a few hours a year, would be "uneconomic". If you just pay for kilowatts consumed, the last few percent are a waste. So you need penalties for powercuts, to kick the generators into installing at least some extra capacity.
Or you need a system with lots of spare capacity - which is worth paying (some amount) for. Price vs. eliability is a tradeof. The best system for establishing such tradeoffs is the market. But we don't have such a market. For all I know, the current balance may be right. Or it may not - how do we know? The UK used to have a different balance, mandated by govenment. Was that more right? I may believe so, but I don't know. Nobody does.
No it isn't that good, though it is better than I believe you have in the US. However, this started in the days of a government monopoly generation system. Since privatisation, margins have been steadily eroded. I would expect our power system to reach the same level as the US power system (the level where consumer pain starts reaching politicians ears) in 5 to 8 years.
Consumers tend to have a short-term view of supply: price counts for much more than reliability at the moment they are making their purchasing decisions. Until there is some method of delivering different levels of reliability to the house, the marketplace cannot work.
Actually, the technology described in the referenced article could work the other way round here. If intelligent power manipulation can be applied at house-by-house level, then the utility can cut power off slowly rather than breaking the whole lot off. You could then buy a place further down the list of cutoffs, so you are less likely to be blacked out. And the utilities could spend the extra revenue paid for reliability on increased investment in it.
Firstly, don't take the internet analogy too far - it's just a system which allows power routing to be managed locally in an intelligent manner, rather than depending upon some central authority. One of the reasons for last year's NW USA blackouts was that data failed to get to the central control centre because of localised breakdowns.
However, decentralised systems can also faile - indeed, given perfect information at the centre (a big given, which often fails) a central overview can outperform a local intelligence. With a distributed system, you would probably get smaller but more frequent outages as local subsystems panic, with a larger total number of houshold outage minutes. This migh, of course, be less damaging if humans don't panic because it is only a few tens of blocks down.
The big potential gain, mentioned lower down in the article, is the potential structural changes to allow small scale generators to generate and distribute power locally. Lots of places have backup power generators, which cut in only when the mains fails. If the economics are right, it would be weorth while their running these continuosly, selling surplus power to the grid, and using the grid as a backup for their own power generation rather than the other way round. This saves the capital investment required for power stations, since it is using capital already invested instead of new capital - which may therefore overcome the diseconomies of small scale. It also saves the losses of long-distance power distribution. However, where you really win is that each area hasa a large proportion of its own power generated locally, so it doesn't care if the grid goes away. Suddently, it soean't matter what happens elswehere. there is also a cewrtain natural balance, as electricity is used in workplaces dirung the day, and when the workers go home the power is available for their domestic evening peak.
The real pie-in-the-sky payoff is when we all get hydrogen-powered cars, which generate electricity for no wear and tear on the fuel cell (we hope). If every car parked at home or work plugs into the grid, you have more generating capacity than you will need in the near future. (It is quoted that the power output of one year of US car sales exceeds the installed generating capacity of the entire world).
There are varying degrees of colour-blindness
And not all are disabling. Because my company works with images, a colour blindness test is part of the recruitment process (not a go-nogo - we have several colour-blind people, but it helps to know). One guy who failed the red-green colour blindness test was currently working as a film colour grader. He may not have seen the colours the way the director saw them, but he could make them like the director wanted them.
Doesn't always work, even so. I heard of a one-way valve in the fuel line of a light aircraft, which had different threads on the two ends so it couldn't be inserted the wrong way round. Except some mechanic though there was a mistake, and removed and retapped the fittings so as to make them go in the other way.
Einstein said he knew of only two infinite things - the universe and human stupidity. And he wasn't so sure about the universe.
Well, the sort of thing Customs do is get from the manufacturer the serial number ranges that they assign to different countries, so they can tell if a particular machine was manufactured for the US or UK market. They don't do this for everything - but pricey laptops are exactly the sort of think they might consider worth doing.
Ah - which London Bridge? The belief of many is that he thought he was buying Tower Bridge, which is much more memorable, and thought it was a very special price.
But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out.
That's just silly. Europa will undoubtedly have its own sources of radioactives, and the hypothetical biosphere under the ice is hundreds of cubic kilometers in volume. The amount of radioactivity one probe could release would produce a minor localised accident, probably much smaller than local vulcanism.
Which is a pity, because it misses a more important point - biological contamination. Unlike radioactivity, viruses and bacteria could grow if the medium under the ices provides a suitable environment. This would certainly contaminate any pre-existing life with earth-type life, and possibly wipe it out. I think that the probability is small - but that is just an uniformed guess. It is very important that this be discusses in a very open forum before any such probe is sent. Total certainty is impossible, but we must reduce the probability of contaminating Europa to a very, very small value.
But it is probably not patentable. It is not an invention, it is precise settings which have to be worked out over hours and hours of testing. Exact timings for injectors at all speeds and load conditions, while allowing reasonable margins so that performance does not fall off with wear. This data - just a huge look-up table - costs millions of dollars to obtain, because it required many hours of running. But you cannot patent it. You can copyright it, of course, but if a copier made a number of minor, not very significant, changes in the tables, it would be very difficult to prove they had copied the original tables. "Of course we got the same results - they are the right results for this engine".
... the term is "hacker". A guy who makes computers do what they ought to do, whatever the circumstances.
Ooodles and oodles of cash. The shares they own may have a mind boggling paper value, but the founders cannot get their hands on that cash until their company is traded on some market. (They couls sell out to a single entity like Microsoft, but that would probably be even more demanding than the market).
The concept of Planets should no longer be regarded as a formal (as opposed to colloquial) classification. We have four rocky inners, four gassy outers, and a vast number of planetismals. Forming a group of the first two classes, with or without a few of the last, is a false classification.
Relying purely on fiction (Kipling, IIRC), being an Inuit Goddess, Sedna was a goddess of the frozen sea.
True. Throwing up the brickwork is one of the fastest parts of building. Usually laying in the site services and getting good foundations down take an age, then the shell appears in a trice, then fitting oudt take another age.
/. post said, is the possibility to build in wierd shapes. However., after reading How Buildings Learn,, it seems thst this is not generally a good idea for long term use use of buildings. Square may be a bit, erm, square, but it is much more adapatable - and successful buildings are above all adaptable.
I can see the machine itself being installed quickly - after its track has been carefully laid.
The interesting bit, as the original
Knife carrying is also illegal in Britain unless you have a good reason to have one.
Not, I think, provided the blade is less than 3 inches in length - and the blade of my Swiss Army Knife is 2.5 inches. On the other hand, the list of exceptions is not as well explained as the NSW law quoted: a chef got fined for leaving his butchers knives in the car.
Plenty of prior art in Science Fiction, for the general problem; this guy could only patent a technique, not the general idea.
One of the best ones I saw was a short-short by, I think, Arthur C Clarke, which obviously dates from the Cold War days. General panic in Washington when the Soviet Union manages to paint the moon Red, displaying the power of Communist technology. Don't worry, say NASA. A few daya later, the Coca-Cola "swirl" appears across it, displaying the power of Capitalist technology.
ps: on a side note its interesting to see how the design of drives have changed over the years, from heads actuated by stepping motors to voice-coil actuators, and from the full-height monsters with 7 platters to single platter drives with 10x capacity, yet the platters have stayed the exact same radial size on every 3.5" drive I have taken apart.
The latest units from Seagate have smaller platters - about the same as the same as the 2.5" drives. This means they can make the enclosure thicker to reduce vibration and increases air circulation space.
Basically, the processor speed is set by the speed of the weakest link. If 99.9% of the processor clocks at 3.0 and the last bit at 2.4, the whole chip has to be sold as 2.4. Yes, processor manufacture is incredibly accurate - but there are some micro defects in any wafer, som tiny residual vibrations in the masking stages, tiny scourings in the chemical washes. Thes will make minute variations in the chip. Most will do nothing - but a few will, for example, minutely increase the resistance of a single trace. Given this suceptibility to a singel defect, it is suprising they get as many full speed parts as they do.
The world has plenty of fresh water - it is just not in the right places, and it is very wexpensive to shift. Wateraid and similar organisations are trying to get relatively small amounts of clean water to places where there is very little water indeed. By contrast, Canada has thousands of times more fresh water thanit will ever need for drinking and agriculture. Aside from the pollution question, ther is no harm in Canada "wasting" a bit of its fresh water. The same water consumption would be criminal in Namibia.
'Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?'
/.er.
You have to distinguish between professional and amateur users. This Volvo can be opened by a professional mechanic. Software for work purposes should be opernd by a professional software mechanic - aka
It may well be a good idea to keep unskilled hands - male or female - out of the engine of a car. We effectively already have this with "trust me" software installations. But if you are employed to write software (not just web pages), you should be trusted with tools for your job.
This Volvo doesn't have the hood welded shut - it has it locked shut. Fine. Make sure you know where the key is.
I'd be inside it with the doors locked
Current advice in Britain is not to wait inside your car if the weather permits because of the remarkably high chance of getting shunted - hard - by another vehicle. You should get out of the vehicle and as far from the road as possible (e.g. behind the crash barrier). Basically, your chance of getting hit by a massive truck is much greater than your chance of a bad guy spotting you and stopping. I can't remember the fraction of accidents involving breakdowns on the side of the road, but I remember being startled by it. Emergency services now park their vehicle about 20 yards behind the breakdown to ensure that, if there is a hit, it is the empty emergency service van that gets hit. Even so, and despite their being covered with flashing lights, they still get hit.
You need a sense of priorities. Outside know "no go" areas, ordinary "innocent" traffic is a far greater danger than muggers, serial killers etc.
"We may take it for granted, but there are still a number of business (especially small businesses) that likely don't have a web presence."
Nor do they need one. It's a common misconception. A "keeping up with the jones".
I think almost any business should have a basic one-page web presence, just so they can be looked up. Contact details, basic statement of what they do and where. Simply because people are using the Web instead of (e.g.) Yellow Pages. If I hear of a buziness, my first reaction will be to chuck its name into Google. Any business which doesn't come up is a bit behind one that doesn't. It wouldn't be a killer, but I will check out the one with an online presence first.
The exceptios would be businesses with purely ad-hoc sales: mostly fast food - a mobile burger stand really doen't need a web page.
Opposite effect round me. I pass a secondary school on the way to work which, quite correctly, has a pedestrian controlled light to stop the traffic as the children (including mine) stream into or out of the school. The timing of the light is obviously set for town-centre use, where little old ladies may wobble slowly across. But this light serves only the secondary school full of healthy teenagers. When they get the green, they flood across in a big wave, crossing the road in less than 50% of the time the green is on. We the have to sit there for what feels like forever while the crossing in front of us is empty.
Who would have thought that the sun heated the earth through convection eh?
The sun is about 6000K: you are about 300K. Since radiation goes as the fourth power of temperature, the sun is about 20^4 times as good a radiator as a human body.
You would, of course, eventually freeze in space. But it would be many hours after you suffocated.
Some web text is occasionally too small, so I do view->text->larger
Use Opera - Keypad +/- zoom up down very nicely.
Although a TV lacks the resolution of a monitor, skin tones and pictures look better due to some sort of airbrushing effect.
TV's are optimised for linearity: monitors are optimised for sharpness. Monitors often have greater persistance, which reduces flicker but tends to give blurry trails on movement.
For those with normal sight, a monitor is undoubtedly better than a TV for computer use. But for someone with impaired vision, all rules change. Either a large TV or a mrojector might work. If you can borrow one, give it a try.