In terms of size, yes. I wonder how they'd compare in terms of efficiency. I've seen quotes as low as 2% for 1900-era steam engines. The Wartsila runs at about 50%, so we've come a long way...
It's certainly possible, you'd just have to recoup the extra R&D cost. Also, naval reactors are designed for minimum size, that's why they use highly enriched uranium. A reactor for low-grade fuel would be larger. reactor size data The Los Angeles-class submarines have about 35000 shp available, from a reactor compartment weighing an estimated 1600 tons. The Wartsila diesel from TFA has 100000 shp from 2300 tons. So the power density of a nuclear reactor is lower. You do save on fuel storage, though.
There have been 4 nuclear-powered freighters so far. The Otto Hahn and NS Savannah proved to be more expensive to operate than their fossil-fueled counterparts, the Mutsu never carried any cargo, and only Sevmorput is still in (Russian) service. Cost will still be an issue. Modern reactor designs can go without refueling for their entire lifetime, eliminating one huge problem/cost factor. Also, a nuclear reactor requires more (and more qualified) manning than a diesel engine. Modern cargo ships are operated by maybe 2 dozen men for a 500,000 ton ship, in an effort to minimize cost.
Putting a naval reactor (with naval-grade fuel) in a civilian ship may pose a security risk (fuel getting stolen and used for a bomb).
Modern rail engines are not 2/3 of the locomotive's length. The linked engine is the largest of the MTU 4000 series. It's 3.6 m long, weighs 10 tons, displaces 90 litres and supplies 3000 kW. It's a four-stroke diesel.
A two-stroke diesel of the same output (the EMD 16-710) has twice the displacement (186 litres). This suggests that two-strokes aren't that space-efficient.
A few months ago I did an experiment: I left my watch at home for two weeks. Most of the day I have access to other time sources, so no problem there. I did miss it when traveling (walking/biking), and when cooking dinner: I don't have a clock in the kitchen, so I had to walk into the living room to do time checks. Also, it kept feeling weird not to wear a watch. It's a relief not to have the watch getting in the way all the time [1], but at the same time I felt I was missing something. I kept having to remind myself 'no, it didn't fall off, you just left it at home'. I went back to wearing it eventually.
1: when in the office, I always take off my watch because it's uncomfortable when resting my wrist on the desk.
would anyone use a 1.5 kW bomb-proof blender in a home kitchen? I mean, the ability to disintegrate solid objects is fun, but most foodstuffs succumb well enough to a non-overkill appliance. I don't use a chainsaw to slice bread, either.
I use one, but then again, I frequent/. so am !'ordinary'. I hate mobile phones. I've got one for emergencies but refuse to spend money on it, so the one I have was a gift, some horrible featureless Toshiba with a prepaid number (spent about $10 in calls over the last 2 years). But I do want my address book, the ability to take notes, etc. I also want a satnav system for my car. Cue the PDA, which provides the best satnav platform yet.
All this spinning off, reabsorbing, licensing shit has done the company no good. Meantime we're stuck with an OS that has all the drawbacks of old Palm OS 3.5 (no multitasking) and less flexibility (e.g. no more hacks to add system-level functionality). Syncing sucks, etc. Not that the competition is any better; after playing with a family member's WinCE device I am grateful for my decision to replace my Vx with a new Palm and not with the Microsoft monstrosity.
It's time to develop something new. A palmtop OS that provides the same sort of quantum leap that the first Macintosh did in the PC world. We need an OS that isn't merely bearable but insanely great. Palm has had some good ideas in the past. Their lightweight approach makes for responsive devices. Couple that with the application integration from the Newton, and some intelligent synchronisation, and we may have a winner. Stick in a phone module, and wipe the floor with the abysmal competition in that market as well.
No, it is controlled by a small subset of society, i.e. the decision makers of the (small number of) companies that control the market. Since their mandate is to increase shareholder value, their view of 'society' tends to be myopic.
I'm sure there must be a lot more energy in that than in the wind in the same area.
Maybe that's part of the problem. Building a structure that can withstand tidal forces for 30+ years, including watertight compartments for the electrical parts, isn't cheap.
FTA: [his political umbrella group] The Other Russia
Considering that umbrellas were used at least once by the KGB in an assassination (poison dart gun hidden in an umbrella), I wonder what sort of 'umbrella group' we're talking about here.
Um, because the most important aspects of a mouse (how it fits your hand, and how it feels) are unquantifiable? I don't care about dpi or whatever, I want to be able to use it all day without getting RSI.
Given that the job posting talks about nothing more than 'enhancements' to Aqua, we seem to have basically no data to go by.
Apart from that, I do think it's time for Apple to revisit Aqua. Not for a pointless 'replace it with another theme to keep up with Aero' exercise, though. The OS X UI needs a more fundamental redesign, to improve the way we interact with our data. The Finder is one app in dire need of an update.
Sad thing is, mansonry conducts heat. While some regions might not consider this a problem, try living in a brick house when the temperature drops below 0 farenheight. It can't be fun, so the solution is to build a brick exterior and set up a wooden insulated studwall on the interior.
Yes, we use double walls. The exterior is brick. The interior can be another layer of brick, or some form of concrete, often lightweight porous concrete blocks. These blocks are large (30x50x8 cm) so you can build a wall much quicker (cheaper) than with brick. Insulation (styrofoam plates or pellets, or glass wool) is put between the two walls. The interior wall is often the loadbearing structure, strong enough to carry a concrete second floor. The interior and floors are put up first, then the insulation is applied and the exterior wall is put up. This way, the concrete floor isn't exposed to the elements, this improves the insulation.
In the ideal world, concrete and metal buildings are as inexpensive as wood. In the real world, this just isn't so.
Over here (.nl) wood has to be imported. Concrete is available from local sources. Also, factor in the lifetime cost of maintaining a wooden house in our (wet) climate. Brick stands up much better to the humidity than wood. In a densely-populated country, having good sound isolation is important as well. A 30 cm thick brick and concrete wall offers much better sound isolation than a wooden structure.
Depends on now you define 'open source car', of course. Kit cars in various forms have been on the market for years. Parts are supplied either by the kit manufacturer or the buyer has to get them from a donor car. There's an instruction manual, but the owner is free to modify the car (and can do so far more easily than with a conventional car). Some countries (the UK for one) have special regulations that allow these cars on the road after a thorough inspection but without having to pass destructive tests. It's not quite design-by-committee, but I'd call it an open source approach.
I don't think anybody's expecting they can forego the cooling plant entirely. But the plant can be a bit smaller, and it won't need to run at 100% for most of the year, saving on wear and electricity.
Water cooling is nice, but you need a fairly deep pond/lake nearby to do it well.
If companies as large as Google, IBM, and Microsoft get together on this, pulling enough fibre to a new datacenter location might become affordable. If not, let the government lend a hand. Maybe there's too much at stake here to leave it to blind market forces.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody expects the InformationWeek?
In terms of size, yes. I wonder how they'd compare in terms of efficiency. I've seen quotes as low as 2% for 1900-era steam engines. The Wartsila runs at about 50%, so we've come a long way...
It's certainly possible, you'd just have to recoup the extra R&D cost. Also, naval reactors are designed for minimum size, that's why they use highly enriched uranium. A reactor for low-grade fuel would be larger.
reactor size data
The Los Angeles-class submarines have about 35000 shp available, from a reactor compartment weighing an estimated 1600 tons. The Wartsila diesel from TFA has 100000 shp from 2300 tons. So the power density of a nuclear reactor is lower. You do save on fuel storage, though.
There have been 4 nuclear-powered freighters so far. The Otto Hahn and NS Savannah proved to be more expensive to operate than their fossil-fueled counterparts, the Mutsu never carried any cargo, and only Sevmorput is still in (Russian) service.
Cost will still be an issue. Modern reactor designs can go without refueling for their entire lifetime, eliminating one huge problem/cost factor.
Also, a nuclear reactor requires more (and more qualified) manning than a diesel engine. Modern cargo ships are operated by maybe 2 dozen men for a 500,000 ton ship, in an effort to minimize cost.
Putting a naval reactor (with naval-grade fuel) in a civilian ship may pose a security risk (fuel getting stolen and used for a bomb).
Modern rail engines are not 2/3 of the locomotive's length. The linked engine is the largest of the MTU 4000 series. It's 3.6 m long, weighs 10 tons, displaces 90 litres and supplies 3000 kW. It's a four-stroke diesel.
A two-stroke diesel of the same output (the EMD 16-710) has twice the displacement (186 litres). This suggests that two-strokes aren't that space-efficient.
A few months ago I did an experiment: I left my watch at home for two weeks. Most of the day I have access to other time sources, so no problem there.
I did miss it when traveling (walking/biking), and when cooking dinner: I don't have a clock in the kitchen, so I had to walk into the living room to do time checks.
Also, it kept feeling weird not to wear a watch. It's a relief not to have the watch getting in the way all the time [1], but at the same time I felt I was missing something. I kept having to remind myself 'no, it didn't fall off, you just left it at home'. I went back to wearing it eventually.
1: when in the office, I always take off my watch because it's uncomfortable when resting my wrist on the desk.
You have no chance to survive, make your time.
Duh, there's always a bigger squid.
would anyone use a 1.5 kW bomb-proof blender in a home kitchen? I mean, the ability to disintegrate solid objects is fun, but most foodstuffs succumb well enough to a non-overkill appliance. I don't use a chainsaw to slice bread, either.
I use one, but then again, I frequent /. so am !'ordinary'.
I hate mobile phones. I've got one for emergencies but refuse to spend money on it, so the one I have was a gift, some horrible featureless Toshiba with a prepaid number (spent about $10 in calls over the last 2 years).
But I do want my address book, the ability to take notes, etc. I also want a satnav system for my car. Cue the PDA, which provides the best satnav platform yet.
All this spinning off, reabsorbing, licensing shit has done the company no good. Meantime we're stuck with an OS that has all the drawbacks of old Palm OS 3.5 (no multitasking) and less flexibility (e.g. no more hacks to add system-level functionality). Syncing sucks, etc.
Not that the competition is any better; after playing with a family member's WinCE device I am grateful for my decision to replace my Vx with a new Palm and not with the Microsoft monstrosity.
It's time to develop something new. A palmtop OS that provides the same sort of quantum leap that the first Macintosh did in the PC world. We need an OS that isn't merely bearable but insanely great. Palm has had some good ideas in the past. Their lightweight approach makes for responsive devices. Couple that with the application integration from the Newton, and some intelligent synchronisation, and we may have a winner. Stick in a phone module, and wipe the floor with the abysmal competition in that market as well.
No, it is controlled by a small subset of society, i.e. the decision makers of the (small number of) companies that control the market. Since their mandate is to increase shareholder value, their view of 'society' tends to be myopic.
I thought the spec required 500 mA available per port?
The USB2 ports on my Dell D600 and Mac Mini all supply about this much.
I'm sure there must be a lot more energy in that than in the wind in the same area.
Maybe that's part of the problem. Building a structure that can withstand tidal forces for 30+ years, including watertight compartments for the electrical parts, isn't cheap.
FTA: [his political umbrella group] The Other Russia
Considering that umbrellas were used at least once by the KGB in an assassination (poison dart gun hidden in an umbrella), I wonder what sort of 'umbrella group' we're talking about here.
That's no reason to change the way the window looks.
I was going to recommend Adobe FrameMaker, but that's for a different value of 'Enterprise Documentation'.
So would running a wget on some of those ads poison their statistics enough for them to give up?
Um, because the most important aspects of a mouse (how it fits your hand, and how it feels) are unquantifiable? I don't care about dpi or whatever, I want to be able to use it all day without getting RSI.
Given that the job posting talks about nothing more than 'enhancements' to Aqua, we seem to have basically no data to go by.
Apart from that, I do think it's time for Apple to revisit Aqua. Not for a pointless 'replace it with another theme to keep up with Aero' exercise, though. The OS X UI needs a more fundamental redesign, to improve the way we interact with our data. The Finder is one app in dire need of an update.
Sad thing is, mansonry conducts heat. While some regions might not consider this a problem, try living in a brick house when the temperature drops below 0 farenheight. It can't be fun, so the solution is to build a brick exterior and set up a wooden insulated studwall on the interior.
Yes, we use double walls. The exterior is brick. The interior can be another layer of brick, or some form of concrete, often lightweight porous concrete blocks. These blocks are large (30x50x8 cm) so you can build a wall much quicker (cheaper) than with brick.
Insulation (styrofoam plates or pellets, or glass wool) is put between the two walls.
The interior wall is often the loadbearing structure, strong enough to carry a concrete second floor. The interior and floors are put up first, then the insulation is applied and the exterior wall is put up. This way, the concrete floor isn't exposed to the elements, this improves the insulation.
In the ideal world, concrete and metal buildings are as inexpensive as wood. In the real world, this just isn't so.
Over here (.nl) wood has to be imported. Concrete is available from local sources. Also, factor in the lifetime cost of maintaining a wooden house in our (wet) climate. Brick stands up much better to the humidity than wood.
In a densely-populated country, having good sound isolation is important as well. A 30 cm thick brick and concrete wall offers much better sound isolation than a wooden structure.
Although slow, personal use of diesel is gaining ground.
In the US, yes. In Europe, 50% of cars sold have diesel engines.
Depends on now you define 'open source car', of course. Kit cars in various forms have been on the market for years. Parts are supplied either by the kit manufacturer or the buyer has to get them from a donor car. There's an instruction manual, but the owner is free to modify the car (and can do so far more easily than with a conventional car). Some countries (the UK for one) have special regulations that allow these cars on the road after a thorough inspection but without having to pass destructive tests. It's not quite design-by-committee, but I'd call it an open source approach.
I don't think anybody's expecting they can forego the cooling plant entirely. But the plant can be a bit smaller, and it won't need to run at 100% for most of the year, saving on wear and electricity.
Water cooling is nice, but you need a fairly deep pond/lake nearby to do it well.
If companies as large as Google, IBM, and Microsoft get together on this, pulling enough fibre to a new datacenter location might become affordable. If not, let the government lend a hand. Maybe there's too much at stake here to leave it to blind market forces.