From the blurb "And if it holds true for Earth's location in the universe, it's not too much of a leap to imagine it's true elsewhere."
It is a big leap. We have experienced only a miniscule of space time. The conditions may be remarkably different in other parts of the Universe - say the center of a black hole, or the fringe of the universe, or at some point in past (like the big bang), or in future.
The extent of work required upon the failure of a single cell depends on configuration of the cells and the Battery Management System. (BMS).
If Tesla is using 8000 cells, it is probably putting something like 6-12 cells in parallel packs, and then wiring up each of these packs of cells in series. The parallel cell packs provide the current capacity while the packs in series provide the high voltage required to operate the motors.
If an individual cell in a pack goes bad by having a degraded capacity, the capacity of the pack is degraded. However the pack can keep on operating.
If an individual cell in the pack goes bad by having a dead short a potentially catastrophic failure could occur as current from other cells in the pack flows through the shorted cell. There are probably fuses in the pack to prevent this.
The reaction of the BMS to such events will determine whether the car is dead in water or keeps on operating.
There are, of course, many more failure modes - the wiring harness of the cells could be bad, a bolt could come loose, the BMS electronics could fail and any of them could possibly cause the pack to go dead, till repairs are carried out. The engineers who designed this probably err on the side of safety, shutting everything down to prevent catastrophic failure..
Looking at the posts recently..I think Slashdot may be seeing mod ups and occasionally posts by organized or semi organized Microsoft PR operatives. The operation seems sophisticated. Somehow posts favoring MS modded up. It is the same half truths but presented in geek speak instead of traditional big corporation PR speak.
These guys may be explicitly paid directly or indirectly by MS to do PR here
or
Given the huge numbers of people employed at the Microsoft it would be a relatively small matter to have a few posting here and modding up favorable posts
There are tons of embedded systems. Many of them run moderns equivalents of older PC CPUs. The instruction set stays the same but the chip is fabricated using modern methods resulting in smaller size and lower power consumption.
This would imply that each user would have to reinvent large portions of what they need.
The real trade offs are between the portions that are made available as libraries and the portions that are made available as core features of the language.
When choosing a language for a commercial project the out of box ability to solve a large part of the problem is a big factor.
English (or your native language) is a large language. Very few of us can claim to know it all. However we all use it and are comfortable with it.
The problem with large languages is not that they are large but that it is very difficult to arrive at a consistent useful description. Our modern languages have evolved over a very long time. A modern theory is that the capacity for language is hardwired into our genes and is the primary differentiator of humans from animals.
Programming lanaguages on the other hand are small. While Turing completeness may imply that all languages are equivalent, it is easier to interface with languages that most closely match the domain being modelled and are closer to the way we humans think.
For all this the large number of operators in Perl are not bad as long as they are internally consistent and consistent with the way we think.
I think the natural progression of programming languages is to become more
like human languages. We are a long way from it but coming closer everyday.
What most people don't realize is that most of the developments in
programming languages knowingly or unknowingly follow this trend.
For example, object oriented programming (a la C++, Java etc etc) is
closely related to how our brain sees the world as a hierarchy of objects.
Type inference (as in ML) is closely related to how our brain derives
useful information from incomplete data.
Computer languages are moving away from small languages to bigger more
expressive languages. The evolution of Perl I think reflects this trend.
XML etc are just syntactic sugar. They don't reflect any fundamental steps.
The difficult parts have yet to be done.
In many ways we are at the beginning of the evolution of computer
languages. I think the next 10-20 years are going to be very exciting.
While agreeing with Paul Graham that programming languages represent
notation, I don't quite agree that they must evolve as slowly as changes in
notation. I think there is a real difference between how notation is used
to represent meaning in programming languages and how they are used in
human languages. Different domains demand different notations of differing
precision
In conclusion, computer or programming languages will evolve
to be closer to human languages. There will be specializations of the
language for different domains. This is akin to using mathematical notation
to describe mathematics rather than write each rlationship out in wordy
English (or other language).
The problem with VOIP and phone service is usage in real emergency situations.
In my area power goes out for a few days at least once a year. Once this happens
the VOIP service no longer works
cell phone battery dies after some time
The only thing that really works is land line phones. These are backed by batteries and gensets at the CO.
So I would still go with at least one land line.
The other option would be to use my car to keep the cell phone charged. However I do not trust the cell phone company to keep the towers working in an extended power outage. So I keep at least one land line working
It depends on the kind of system you are building.
If you are building a small system and need a couple of libraries it makes sense to use a great language and write the couple of libraries yourself.
If you are building a largish system with many dependencies you may be better off with an inferior language but with large parts of the system prefabricated as standard libraries.
That's why I read Slashdot. Think about life 200 years from now. What would be more important?
That two geeks on Slashdot sped up the speed of light in special optical fibres or all the other stuff.
You are talking about OCaml. To your list I would like to add
large set of high level standard libraries
This is the only prerequisite that prevents me from using Ocaml in most of my work.
R
Slashdot Mirror
From the blurb "And if it holds true for Earth's location in the universe, it's not too much of a leap to imagine it's true elsewhere." It is a big leap. We have experienced only a miniscule of space time. The conditions may be remarkably different in other parts of the Universe - say the center of a black hole, or the fringe of the universe, or at some point in past (like the big bang), or in future.
If Tesla is using 8000 cells, it is probably putting something like 6-12 cells in parallel packs, and then wiring up each of these packs of cells in series. The parallel cell packs provide the current capacity while the packs in series provide the high voltage required to operate the motors.
If an individual cell in a pack goes bad by having a degraded capacity, the capacity of the pack is degraded. However the pack can keep on operating.
If an individual cell in the pack goes bad by having a dead short a potentially catastrophic failure could occur as current from other cells in the pack flows through the shorted cell. There are probably fuses in the pack to prevent this.
The reaction of the BMS to such events will determine whether the car is dead in water or keeps on operating.
There are, of course, many more failure modes - the wiring harness of the cells could be bad, a bolt could come loose, the BMS electronics could fail and any of them could possibly cause the pack to go dead, till repairs are carried out. The engineers who designed this probably err on the side of safety, shutting everything down to prevent catastrophic failure..
Looking at the posts recently..I think Slashdot may be seeing mod ups and occasionally posts by organized or semi organized Microsoft PR operatives. The operation seems sophisticated. Somehow posts favoring MS modded up. It is the same half truths but presented in geek speak instead of traditional big corporation PR speak.
These guys may be explicitly paid directly or indirectly by MS to do PR here
or
Given the huge numbers of people employed at the Microsoft it would be a relatively small matter to have a few posting here and modding up favorable posts
I agree. I pretty much follow the same algorithm. Slashdot is invaluable. In addition if you are the builder type I would recommend Makezine Blog
There are tons of embedded systems. Many of them run moderns equivalents of older PC CPUs. The instruction set stays the same but the chip is fabricated using modern methods resulting in smaller size and lower power consumption.
Having written large programs in several languages, I think Perl's features, if used properly, make writing large programs much easier.
I agree with you that C will rule OS and database system kind of programs.
The real trade offs are between the portions that are made available as libraries and the portions that are made available as core features of the language.
When choosing a language for a commercial project the out of box ability to solve a large part of the problem is a big factor.
The problem with large languages is not that they are large but that it is very difficult to arrive at a consistent useful description. Our modern languages have evolved over a very long time. A modern theory is that the capacity for language is hardwired into our genes and is the primary differentiator of humans from animals.
Programming lanaguages on the other hand are small. While Turing completeness may imply that all languages are equivalent, it is easier to interface with languages that most closely match the domain being modelled and are closer to the way we humans think.
For all this the large number of operators in Perl are not bad as long as they are internally consistent and consistent with the way we think.
What most people don't realize is that most of the developments in programming languages knowingly or unknowingly follow this trend. For example, object oriented programming (a la C++, Java etc etc) is closely related to how our brain sees the world as a hierarchy of objects. Type inference (as in ML) is closely related to how our brain derives useful information from incomplete data.
Computer languages are moving away from small languages to bigger more expressive languages. The evolution of Perl I think reflects this trend. XML etc are just syntactic sugar. They don't reflect any fundamental steps. The difficult parts have yet to be done.
In many ways we are at the beginning of the evolution of computer languages. I think the next 10-20 years are going to be very exciting.
While agreeing with Paul Graham that programming languages represent notation, I don't quite agree that they must evolve as slowly as changes in notation. I think there is a real difference between how notation is used to represent meaning in programming languages and how they are used in human languages. Different domains demand different notations of differing precision
In conclusion, computer or programming languages will evolve to be closer to human languages. There will be specializations of the language for different domains. This is akin to using mathematical notation to describe mathematics rather than write each rlationship out in wordy English (or other language).
C is the universal assembly language. For example, for itty bitty microcontrollers it is either C or Assembly. I much prefer C.
I did write a couple of small programs in 1s and 0s . It is not too difficult especially for small programs.
In my area power goes out for a few days at least once a year. Once this happens
The only thing that really works is land line phones. These are backed by batteries and gensets at the CO.
So I would still go with at least one land line.
The other option would be to use my car to keep the cell phone charged. However I do not trust the cell phone company to keep the towers working in an extended power outage. So I keep at least one land line working
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If you are building a small system and need a couple of libraries it makes sense to use a great language and write the couple of libraries yourself.
If you are building a largish system with many dependencies you may be better off with an inferior language but with large parts of the system prefabricated as standard libraries.
That's why I read Slashdot. Think about life 200 years from now. What would be more important? That two geeks on Slashdot sped up the speed of light in special optical fibres or all the other stuff.
You are talking about OCaml. To your list I would like to add large set of high level standard libraries This is the only prerequisite that prevents me from using Ocaml in most of my work. R
I looked through the website but could not find and GIS related modules. I also did a Google search (gis site:pdl.perl.org)but that too came up blank.