What about people who aren't capable of doing these high-level, un-automatable jobs? Half the population has an IQ below 100. Easy to forget that when your real-world milieu consists of other highly educated, intelligent people and your online reading leans toward sites like Slashdot.
I completely disagree. People have a very deep need for meaningful work. A world in which we all work meaningless jobs selling each other coffee (assuming we haven't automated the barista!), even the necessities of life are cheap, would not be a very happy place. Sadly I think the reality of the 12-hour work week would be more "drugs and mindless entertainment" than "leisurely creation of art and science".
Are you at MIT and is your benefactor David Koch? Because in that case, we have some researchers up at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center that do simulation work that could definitely use access to a bigger cluster. As long as you can compile FORTRAN on it, the TRANSP runs and GYRO simulations that we do are already run on a (smaller) cluster. This falls under "energy research" and is way cool to boot.
I'm not joking, if you are at MIT, please get in touch with Martin Greenwald (contact info on the PSFC staff page).
It's really not that complicated to know what is the right thing to do here. Harsh terms in a contract, fine. The person you're negotiating with can take it or leave it. Opaque and intentionally misleading terms, not okay.
To repeat: nothing wrong with both parties in a transaction negotiating vigorously on their own behalf. When the one party, which has the support of teams of lawyers skilled in writing opaque legal sourcecode that no ordinary person can read, uses that to their advantage, it may be legal, but it's wrong.
Bigger news than a new fastest supercomputer on the planet would be one that had as its primary mission peaceful uses. The Roadrunner (fastest computer in the USA) is for H-bomb simulations ("stockpile stewardship") and gives some of its time to climate change and magnetically-confined plasma (for fusion power) simulations. (Possibly just for PR.) Hopefully since Japan doesn't have a nuclear weapons program this machine will be used 100% for peaceful purposes!
So you want your engineers to stop acting purely as trusted advisors, and start thinking more about how they might push your own companies products. That seems like a good way to have your clients stop trusting your engineers. If your product is the best for the job, they should already be advising the clients to use it.
I mean, it's a tough economy, you gotta do what you gotta do. But still, I'm not sure you're going to get a lot of good advice on here.
Go to the NIF site. What are the first things you see?
NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY AND PHOTON SCIENCE: THE POWER OF LIGHT
Schwarzenegger touts NIF energy innovations
Creating a miniature star on Earth: that's the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's largest laser. When ignition experiments begin in 2010, NIF will focus the intense energy of 192 giant laser beams on a BB-sized target filled with hydrogen fuel â" fusing, or igniting, the hydrogen atoms' nuclei. This is the same fusion energy process that makes the stars shine and provides the life-giving energy of the sun.
Missions:
National Security
Energy for the Future.
You can't tell me that there isn't a very deliberate marketing plan being put into action here.
Well we (meaning humanity, not the United States) have achieved plasma discharges several hours long in the TRIAM-1M tokamak in Japan.
We have also achieved plasma conditions in pure deuterium plasmas in which, had the reactors been fueled with "live" fuel (50% deuterium, 50% tritium), the Q-value (energy out / energy in) would have been greater than one.
There have also been two experiments in which 50%D/50%T "live" fuel has been used. One is the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England, near Oxford. It's still operating today, albeit on "inert" fuel (100% D). Even with 100%D, some amount of fusion still goes on, so it's not totally "inert", but it's far less than with 50%D/50%T. The other experiment was the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the United States at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL). That's now disassembled.
The problem is that we haven't done all of these things at the same time, yet. That's why we're building ITER
ITER, the big reactor being built in Cadarache, France, will achieve Q=10. It was supposed to achieve "ignition", in which self-heating of the plasma is enough to keep it hot, and you can turn off the external heating (corresponding to Q=infinity), but the ITER consortium had to cut the budget when the U.S. pulled out of the project in 1998. Of course, then the U.S. rejoined in 2003, but by then the plan was set on "ITER Lite". It's not supposed to be done construction until 2018, though, and there's a chance of further schedule slippage approaching 100%. It's going to run for 25 years.
If you go to slide #25 of this presentation by Chris Llewellyn-Smith, you can see that the current "fast-track" plan for a commercial fusion plant has the first plants operating in 2048. Of course, that presentation was in 2005, and the ITER schedule has slipped by about four years since then, so we can say that if we somehow manage to stick to the "fast-track" plan from now on (we won't), there could be operating fusion power plants in the 2050s.
Yes, it's a long-term plan. That doesn't mean it's not worth funding. There still is no other energy source that can compete with its theoretical benefit. The only ones that come close in ability to provide a large amount of energy are fission and solar, and they have the disadvantages, respectively, of long-lived actinide waste, and massive land use.
Let's be clear here. The purpose of the NIF is not to achieve fusion for energy production purposes. They just sell it that way. Its main goal isn't even simulations of the interior of Jupiter, or whatever they're hyping up this week.
You just need to look at the operating agency to see what its goal is: the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That is, the people who make and control the H-bombs. See, the U.S. doesn't detonate H-bombs anymore, and needs to figure out whether the old warheads are still reliable. Instead, giant simulations of H-bomb detonations are used: hence the 20-petaflop Sequoia being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
But these simulations are no good if the physics model being used isn't accurate. How do you get an equation of state for deuterium at a billion atmospheres of pressure and 10 million kelvin temperature? You do an experiment: NIF. (And also the Z-Machine at Sandia.)
I get annoyed that the DOE sells NIF as a fusion energy machine. It's not, and it was never meant to be, and when people realize that target implosion fusion is never going to put a watt onto the grid, they're going to get even more annoyed at broken promises from fusion. It's basically avoiding the hard marketing problem of H-bombs by selling the machine as energy research.
(disclaimer: I work in a magnetic fusion lab and while I'm not a pacifist, I don't generally like H-bombs and don't like that my field is associated with them)
Humanity put several people on the moon. It's bullshit to think that a one-second boot is simply out of the question. Maybe with the current PC architecture with all the legacy support that entails.
Start with a clean slate. PCI express only (no slow PCI bus, no quasi-ISA bus), a mandatory flash drive on the motherboard which stores the 500 MB of "boot-up" data that you need to get to a desktop. So maybe it takes another 2 seconds to get an IP address; that's okay because it takes the user that long to double-click the Firefox icon anyway. But you should be able to click the Firefox icon and start the program loading in one second.
And I don't know shit about computer architecture. Whoever it was up above that said this needs a Steve Jobs to inspire the geeks to just figure out how to do it was right on.
So design the system so it can only handle new hardware. Just clearly post on the website for One-Second Linux that it won't handle your ISA scanner controller card from 1992. Tonnes of people would still be interested.
Until "Linux people" start recognizing that to the average user, these distinctions are totally irrelevant, it's not going to be a success on the desktop. Maybe you don't care, but if you want users to embrace the OS, the whole system has to work well, not just the kernel.
Video drivers. Video drivers. Video drivers.
Or possibly X11. Or possibly the whole multi-layered graphics approach.
I'm not sure whether it's the fault of the Linux kernel or the graphics card companies that won't release their hardware specs / open-source drivers. To the "newbie" Linux user, that's more-or-less irrelevant. I just know that I installed Linux for the first time two months ago on a brand new computer (AMD Athlon X2 6400+, Asus M3N78-VM with onboard GeForce 8200 graphics, 2 x 2 GB DDR2-800 [PC2-6400] memory) and gave up last week and installed Windows XP after spending eight weeks dicking around with video drivers / KDE vs. GNOME / xorg.conf / etc. trying to get the desktop performance up to the level where it doesn't take a good half-second for a bloody Firefox window to stutter its way up to full-screen from the minimized state.
There's no rule that says there has to be an answer to every problem.
Maybe the only sustainable solution is that we can't all drive cars?
(Not that I'm saying I necessarily agree with this, just that when someone offers no viable alternative, maybe it's because they believe there isn't one.)
In which bizarro version of Canada do you live? I (and nearly everybody in my class) paid about $7500/year for tuition in engineering school. It's not even close to what it costs in the States, but it's hardly "for free, for as long as you want".
Or were you talking about graduate school? Because even then I disagree with you... the American schools are more generous than the Canadian schools with graduate funding, in my experience.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. ISO (and ANSI, BSI, etc.) standards are very important in basically every field of industry. Just because they fucked up bad on digital document formats doesn't mean that we don't need them to define, you know, the standard root radius of a bolt.
It's interesting how in the example article from 1969 they use the real quote (in which Armstrong flubbed the line). I wonder when the revisionism started?
For that kind of money, just print it onto a film for the long-term archive? Hell, maybe they could encode the digital data on film as patterns of white and black squares?
I just wanted to let people know about the Volt concept which is quickly coming to life (planned to be released in 2010 for the 2011 model year). GM calls it an "E-REV" for "extended-range electric vehicle". It's an electric vehicle with a 40 mile range on pure electric, but then has a high-efficiency (it always runs at its maximum-efficiency rotation rate) 1.0 L diesel engine which gives it 55 MPG. With a 12-gal. diesel fuel tank, that means that you can go 700 miles on one battery charge and 12 gal. of fuel!
This is the first time I've been excited about an American-made vehicle in my adult life, and I've been evangelizing it to everyone I know. I think it has a lot of promise.
There is a lot of good discussion at this guy's blog: GM-Volt and here is the Wikipedia article.
Spread-spectrum frequency domain watermarking is the most desirable "solution" that the studios can implement right now. The algorithms are designed so that the watermark is not detectible by humans watching the video (or listening to the audio) but any leaked copies can be traced back to their source.
This way, if I buy a DVD (or Blu-ray or whatever) I can continue to use various tools to copy it to my hard drive, make a copy for my friends (as long as I trust them not to put it on the Internet), etc. but the guys at the theatres that are releasing 0-day telecines of new movies can be caught and fired/blacklisted from the industry/whatever.
I don't really see a disadvantage to this, other than the supply of videos on the torrent sites drying up somewhat. Plus if this kind of thing becomes widespread it should be interesting to see the tools that are written to strip the watermarks!
It seems to me that the only reason the industry would be scared of tracks selling individually for $1/song is because they have built a nice business around selling CDs with 10 filler songs and 2 catchy ones for $15.
I can't imagine buying the catchiest half of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" even if it saved me $6, but I'd happily buy just one or two songs from either of Snow Patrol's latest two albums.
A cool option for electric cars are ultracapacitors. Batteries that charge in like three minutes (As mentioned above) are also really cool.
The only problem with these is if you're charging a battery that can run a (say) 30-kW engine for two hours, that's 216 MJ of energy you're putting into the batteries (more, because of losses, but whatever). Say you want to charge the thing, for convenience, in two minutes. That's 1.8 MW power draw to charge the battery (again, neglecting losses). On a (say) 240V RMS home circuit, that's a 7500 amp current draw! Yikes, that's one thick wire to charge your car...
Slashdot Mirror
What about people who aren't capable of doing these high-level, un-automatable jobs? Half the population has an IQ below 100. Easy to forget that when your real-world milieu consists of other highly educated, intelligent people and your online reading leans toward sites like Slashdot.
This article/rant is very much worth reading: http://www.fredoneverything.net/Commentators.shtml
I completely disagree. People have a very deep need for meaningful work. A world in which we all work meaningless jobs selling each other coffee (assuming we haven't automated the barista!), even the necessities of life are cheap, would not be a very happy place. Sadly I think the reality of the 12-hour work week would be more "drugs and mindless entertainment" than "leisurely creation of art and science".
Are you at MIT and is your benefactor David Koch? Because in that case, we have some researchers up at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center that do simulation work that could definitely use access to a bigger cluster. As long as you can compile FORTRAN on it, the TRANSP runs and GYRO simulations that we do are already run on a (smaller) cluster. This falls under "energy research" and is way cool to boot.
I'm not joking, if you are at MIT, please get in touch with Martin Greenwald (contact info on the PSFC staff page).
It's really not that complicated to know what is the right thing to do here. Harsh terms in a contract, fine. The person you're negotiating with can take it or leave it. Opaque and intentionally misleading terms, not okay.
To repeat: nothing wrong with both parties in a transaction negotiating vigorously on their own behalf. When the one party, which has the support of teams of lawyers skilled in writing opaque legal sourcecode that no ordinary person can read, uses that to their advantage, it may be legal, but it's wrong.
Bigger news than a new fastest supercomputer on the planet would be one that had as its primary mission peaceful uses. The Roadrunner (fastest computer in the USA) is for H-bomb simulations ("stockpile stewardship") and gives some of its time to climate change and magnetically-confined plasma (for fusion power) simulations. (Possibly just for PR.) Hopefully since Japan doesn't have a nuclear weapons program this machine will be used 100% for peaceful purposes!
So you want your engineers to stop acting purely as trusted advisors, and start thinking more about how they might push your own companies products. That seems like a good way to have your clients stop trusting your engineers. If your product is the best for the job, they should already be advising the clients to use it.
I mean, it's a tough economy, you gotta do what you gotta do. But still, I'm not sure you're going to get a lot of good advice on here.
Go to the NIF site. What are the first things you see?
You can't tell me that there isn't a very deliberate marketing plan being put into action here.
Well we (meaning humanity, not the United States) have achieved plasma discharges several hours long in the TRIAM-1M tokamak in Japan.
We have also achieved plasma conditions in pure deuterium plasmas in which, had the reactors been fueled with "live" fuel (50% deuterium, 50% tritium), the Q-value (energy out / energy in) would have been greater than one.
There have also been two experiments in which 50%D/50%T "live" fuel has been used. One is the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England, near Oxford. It's still operating today, albeit on "inert" fuel (100% D). Even with 100%D, some amount of fusion still goes on, so it's not totally "inert", but it's far less than with 50%D/50%T. The other experiment was the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the United States at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL). That's now disassembled.
The problem is that we haven't done all of these things at the same time, yet. That's why we're building ITER
ITER, the big reactor being built in Cadarache, France, will achieve Q=10. It was supposed to achieve "ignition", in which self-heating of the plasma is enough to keep it hot, and you can turn off the external heating (corresponding to Q=infinity), but the ITER consortium had to cut the budget when the U.S. pulled out of the project in 1998. Of course, then the U.S. rejoined in 2003, but by then the plan was set on "ITER Lite". It's not supposed to be done construction until 2018, though, and there's a chance of further schedule slippage approaching 100%. It's going to run for 25 years.
If you go to slide #25 of this presentation by Chris Llewellyn-Smith, you can see that the current "fast-track" plan for a commercial fusion plant has the first plants operating in 2048. Of course, that presentation was in 2005, and the ITER schedule has slipped by about four years since then, so we can say that if we somehow manage to stick to the "fast-track" plan from now on (we won't), there could be operating fusion power plants in the 2050s.
Yes, it's a long-term plan. That doesn't mean it's not worth funding. There still is no other energy source that can compete with its theoretical benefit. The only ones that come close in ability to provide a large amount of energy are fission and solar, and they have the disadvantages, respectively, of long-lived actinide waste, and massive land use.
Let's be clear here. The purpose of the NIF is not to achieve fusion for energy production purposes. They just sell it that way. Its main goal isn't even simulations of the interior of Jupiter, or whatever they're hyping up this week.
You just need to look at the operating agency to see what its goal is: the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That is, the people who make and control the H-bombs. See, the U.S. doesn't detonate H-bombs anymore, and needs to figure out whether the old warheads are still reliable. Instead, giant simulations of H-bomb detonations are used: hence the 20-petaflop Sequoia being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
But these simulations are no good if the physics model being used isn't accurate. How do you get an equation of state for deuterium at a billion atmospheres of pressure and 10 million kelvin temperature? You do an experiment: NIF. (And also the Z-Machine at Sandia.)
I get annoyed that the DOE sells NIF as a fusion energy machine. It's not, and it was never meant to be, and when people realize that target implosion fusion is never going to put a watt onto the grid, they're going to get even more annoyed at broken promises from fusion. It's basically avoiding the hard marketing problem of H-bombs by selling the machine as energy research.
(disclaimer: I work in a magnetic fusion lab and while I'm not a pacifist, I don't generally like H-bombs and don't like that my field is associated with them)
Humanity put several people on the moon. It's bullshit to think that a one-second boot is simply out of the question. Maybe with the current PC architecture with all the legacy support that entails.
Start with a clean slate. PCI express only (no slow PCI bus, no quasi-ISA bus), a mandatory flash drive on the motherboard which stores the 500 MB of "boot-up" data that you need to get to a desktop. So maybe it takes another 2 seconds to get an IP address; that's okay because it takes the user that long to double-click the Firefox icon anyway. But you should be able to click the Firefox icon and start the program loading in one second.
And I don't know shit about computer architecture. Whoever it was up above that said this needs a Steve Jobs to inspire the geeks to just figure out how to do it was right on.
So design the system so it can only handle new hardware. Just clearly post on the website for One-Second Linux that it won't handle your ISA scanner controller card from 1992. Tonnes of people would still be interested.
Black paper is opaque to visible light but you can still set black paper on fire with a visible-light laser.
So you might just deposit the energy on your cornea instead of your retina.
Until "Linux people" start recognizing that to the average user, these distinctions are totally irrelevant, it's not going to be a success on the desktop. Maybe you don't care, but if you want users to embrace the OS, the whole system has to work well, not just the kernel.
Video drivers. Video drivers. Video drivers. Or possibly X11. Or possibly the whole multi-layered graphics approach.
I'm not sure whether it's the fault of the Linux kernel or the graphics card companies that won't release their hardware specs / open-source drivers. To the "newbie" Linux user, that's more-or-less irrelevant. I just know that I installed Linux for the first time two months ago on a brand new computer (AMD Athlon X2 6400+, Asus M3N78-VM with onboard GeForce 8200 graphics, 2 x 2 GB DDR2-800 [PC2-6400] memory) and gave up last week and installed Windows XP after spending eight weeks dicking around with video drivers / KDE vs. GNOME / xorg.conf / etc. trying to get the desktop performance up to the level where it doesn't take a good half-second for a bloody Firefox window to stutter its way up to full-screen from the minimized state.
There's no rule that says there has to be an answer to every problem.
Maybe the only sustainable solution is that we can't all drive cars?
(Not that I'm saying I necessarily agree with this, just that when someone offers no viable alternative, maybe it's because they believe there isn't one.)
but... 15 to 30 minutes? Seriously? I've never worked at a job where the computer took more than maybe 2 minutes to boot to desktop.
In which bizarro version of Canada do you live? I (and nearly everybody in my class) paid about $7500/year for tuition in engineering school. It's not even close to what it costs in the States, but it's hardly "for free, for as long as you want".
Or were you talking about graduate school? Because even then I disagree with you... the American schools are more generous than the Canadian schools with graduate funding, in my experience.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. ISO (and ANSI, BSI, etc.) standards are very important in basically every field of industry. Just because they fucked up bad on digital document formats doesn't mean that we don't need them to define, you know, the standard root radius of a bolt.
It's interesting how in the example article from 1969 they use the real quote (in which Armstrong flubbed the line). I wonder when the revisionism started?
For that kind of money, just print it onto a film for the long-term archive? Hell, maybe they could encode the digital data on film as patterns of white and black squares?
I just wanted to let people know about the Volt concept which is quickly coming to life (planned to be released in 2010 for the 2011 model year). GM calls it an "E-REV" for "extended-range electric vehicle". It's an electric vehicle with a 40 mile range on pure electric, but then has a high-efficiency (it always runs at its maximum-efficiency rotation rate) 1.0 L diesel engine which gives it 55 MPG. With a 12-gal. diesel fuel tank, that means that you can go 700 miles on one battery charge and 12 gal. of fuel!
This is the first time I've been excited about an American-made vehicle in my adult life, and I've been evangelizing it to everyone I know. I think it has a lot of promise.
There is a lot of good discussion at this guy's blog: GM-Volt and here is the Wikipedia article.
Spread-spectrum frequency domain watermarking is the most desirable "solution" that the studios can implement right now. The algorithms are designed so that the watermark is not detectible by humans watching the video (or listening to the audio) but any leaked copies can be traced back to their source. This way, if I buy a DVD (or Blu-ray or whatever) I can continue to use various tools to copy it to my hard drive, make a copy for my friends (as long as I trust them not to put it on the Internet), etc. but the guys at the theatres that are releasing 0-day telecines of new movies can be caught and fired/blacklisted from the industry/whatever. I don't really see a disadvantage to this, other than the supply of videos on the torrent sites drying up somewhat. Plus if this kind of thing becomes widespread it should be interesting to see the tools that are written to strip the watermarks!
Physiotherapists?
It seems to me that the only reason the industry would be scared of tracks selling individually for $1/song is because they have built a nice business around selling CDs with 10 filler songs and 2 catchy ones for $15. I can't imagine buying the catchiest half of "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" even if it saved me $6, but I'd happily buy just one or two songs from either of Snow Patrol's latest two albums.
The only problem with these is if you're charging a battery that can run a (say) 30-kW engine for two hours, that's 216 MJ of energy you're putting into the batteries (more, because of losses, but whatever). Say you want to charge the thing, for convenience, in two minutes. That's 1.8 MW power draw to charge the battery (again, neglecting losses). On a (say) 240V RMS home circuit, that's a 7500 amp current draw! Yikes, that's one thick wire to charge your car...