Or how about the scenes in the strip joints? You could go up to the strippers and tip them, and they'd show you their boobs.
Yes, I remember that. I also used to live a five minute walk from a news ageants. It was easier just to buy a copy of FHM or Maxim when I wanted to look at boobs. The picture quality was better too.
May years ago there was a DOS game called Duke Nukem 3D, which was very similar to Doom in many ways.
One of the things I found very funny was that you could actually "use" the toilets in the game. If you walked up to one of the urinals and pressed the "use" button, Duke would do a wee wee and flush the toilet.
One day I was playing it over a direct modem connection with a friend. He shot me in the face with a rocket. I jumped up and backwards, breaking my chair in the process.
I don't have time to play games nowadays, and I don't have Windows, so my choice is severely limited anyway. Xbill is about my limit now.
So, The public is hysterical over its concern for nuclear accidents and waste-issues?...It is not hysteria pal. They are real risks. When these risks are included in the price, nuclear gets very expensive.?
The piblic is hysterical. You should hear the anit-nuclear propaganda and lies presented to the (scientifically-illiterate public) as "fact". People are scared of what they don't understand.
There are real risks, but through engineering, the risks can me minimised and sometimes entirely eliminated.
The public's main fear of nuclear power come from the three major accidents. In a nutshell:
The Windscale accident (1957?). Very poor reactor design combined with operator error lead to a core fire and the release of radioactive substances into the atmosphere which contaminated large parts of Britain (and elsewhere). No such reactor design was operated again after the accident. Wigner energy annealing banned under UK law.
Three Mile Island (1979?). Poor reactor design combined with operator error. Very small release of radioactive substances. Reactor design was subsequently improved along with operating procedure.
Chernobyl Reactor 4 (1986). Prompt criticality combined with steam explosion, resulting from bad reactor design combined with criminally negligent reactor operation. Significant loss of core inventory and 31 direct fatalities. Severe radioactive contamination. Unfortunately, former Soviet countries are still operating RBMK reactors because they need the electricity so desperately. We could have helped but we didn't (wicked Commies etc. etc.).
Only when the public is willing to be un-compensated for this risk -- nay, actually *PAY* (via taxes) to subsidize energy companies -- does nuclear become a 'viable' option.
That's the situation here in the UK where the government underwrites all nuclear liabilities. The public is still scared witless and highly suspicious of nuclear power. The poor state of science education here, coupled with ignorant media and political pressure groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earh are to blame. People don't understand radioactivity, nuclear reactions, or that different designs of nuclear reactors behave in completely different ways. To your average voter Radioactive==Bad.
Nuclear will once more be "economic" when climate change and fossil fuel supply and price problems make it so. In the mean time, due to political spinelessness, the expertise required to build and run the things is withering away.
Wind. Solar. They are the only economical choices. Even coal, gas and oil are more than Wind and Solar when their associated costs are correctly included.
Sorry, but the numbers just don't add up. You'll never get enough from wind and solar. Besides which, wind turbines are very dangerous to wildlife, they're noisy, ugly, and present a safety risk to humans too. Solar is just too feeble. You can work out the numbers yourself quite easily.
and always will be. I believe this is the gist of the common quote. I will suspect economic fusion power is possible when they are building the first generating plant on the public grid. I will believe it when they are operating in numbers.
Have a look at that link to JET. They're one more reactor away from a demonstration power production plant.
OOOOH, the bogeyman. Look, Bin Laden is a relatively insignificant figure. IF gas/oil supplies are disrupted, he is VERY, VERY, VERY far down on the list of people/countries/things that are likely to be the cause. Plain old incompetent people are likely to be the cause (see Chernobyl disaster).
Yes, he is the current bogeyman. Here in the UK is used to be the IRA. That was just an example. Now we are talking about politics. The war in Iraq has shown what can happen when you disrupt the supply to a mere 3% of the world's oil. In addition, a very substantial part of Europe's energy comes through two gas pipelines. So the US is at the mercy of tinpot dictators in the Middle East and tribal conflicts in Africa whilest Europe could be plunged into chaos if a leak springs in one of two gas pipelines, not to mention the environmental catastrophe that would result.
How many nuclear disastors would you like to risk living through?
None. We need not have any "nuclear disasters" with modern technology and the lessons learned from Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Is one too many?
Chernobyl needn't have happened, despite the criminally poor reactor design. Human ignorance and arrogance ultimately caused that one.
It seems like the countries neighbouring the Ukraine think so.
Well, personally, I don't believe that they should be operating RBMK-type reactors after what they did to one of the units at Chernobyl, but the West was in a position to help with that and we did nothing.
A meltdown in California would contaminate Oregon, and Nevada, possibly more.
I live in England. Anyway, your PWRs are not quite as dangerous as RBMKs, and you learned some lessons from TMI. I'm not sure that you should be building any more PWRs though. We have better, intrinsically safe designs nowadays.
If you can guarantee there never being human error causing a Chernobyl style accident and there being a supply of adequately trained people to run them who will guarantee safety, then go for it.
You can guarantee there never being another Chernobyl-style accident by closing down all the RBMKs. As for the human error and training, that's all been engineered out and the training was dealt with in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident.
I'd love to go for it, but politics has all but killed it off here in the UK, and with your oil-baron, money-grabbing, short-sighted President in the USA, you don't have much hope either. Politicians have a lot to answer for, but that's a whole 'nother story...
And steel, which is consumed at incredible rates to replace heavily-irradiated reactor structures. About 300 tons per year for a 1000 Mw plant.
In a fusion plant, the induced radioactivity in the steel structures is so low that people can safely work inside the torus after only 2 to 3 years of shut down c.f. 100+ years for a conventional nuke plant.
And steel, which is consumed at incredible rates to replace heavily-irradiated reactor structures. About 300 tons per year for a 1000 Mw plant.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? I've never heard of this before. Who told you that?
Oh, that explains why the area around the Chernobyl plant is bustling with activity.
No it doesn't.
Chernobyl Reactor 4 (IIRC) underwent a prompt criticality which led to a steam explosion and "significant loss of core inventory" etc. Look it up. There are many good and accurate references (hint: not from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or any political activist people).
The issue is far too involved to explain in a simple post on slashdot. Needless to say, the contents of a running nuclear reactor being ejected in a violent explosion and stirring up the contents of a nuclear fuel cooling pond are two entirely different things.
How about if Bin Laden were to fly an airplane into a spent fuel storage pool and plunge an entire state into chaos, radiation, sickness and death?
That sort of accident would probably cover a few square miles of land with moderate contamination which wouldn't do anyone much harm in the short term and could be cleaned up.
In my time I've reviewed a few nuclear safety reviews for these sorts of things (here in the UK). There isn't really very much to worry about.
Why yes, I am a qualified nuclear engineer, but I left the industry due to the lack of development of new nuclear power plants.
You can recycle the plutonium produced by fission of uranium either to make MOX fuel or use it as fuel in a fast reactor.
The uranium will run out a lot less slowly than oil (in the US) or gas (in Europe) if this is taken into account.
Unfortunately, public anti-nuclear hysteria will prevent us from properly exploiting these resources until our backs are firmly against the wall. If Bin Laden were to disrupt the flow of gas from Siberia to Europe and plunge the continent into chaos, cold, darkness, sickness and death, maybe the politicians will do something about it. However, until their is a major disaster either involving economics (high oil prices) or logistics (Siberian gas supply) nothing will get done.
Meanwhile, we're still developing nuclear fusion which is coming along a lot better than most people think...No uranium (or oil or coal or gas) required.
Every time I get a new PeeCee or new RAM I test it with memtest86.
memtest86 is free and in beer and speech, and is operating system independent. You just write the binary on to a floppy disk and boot the machine off of it.
I've cured several machines of mysterious problems by identifying bad RAM with memtest86. It was always cheap, unbranded RAM that was the problem. I get all my RAM from Crucial nowadays and I never have a problem with it. (I am not affiliated with Crucial or memtest86).
I know you're joking, but Windows NT at least ran on the MIPS, PPC, and Alpha as well as x86.
I knew someone would bring that up.:-)
Portability went away with Windows NT 4.0. Prior to that, NT 3.51 had a Harware Abstraction Layer (HAL) which provided a nice interface between the device drivers and other hardware-dependent parts of the OS and the hardware-independent parts of the OS. Unfortunately, this was very slow on the systems of the day. For NT 4.0, M$ decided to break this to improve performance.
It's also worthy to note that, although MIPS and Alpha were 64-bit processors, NT was purely 32-bit on those platforms. There was no 64-bit NT until fairly recently.
itanium will kill the RISC server market. itanium was the first mass-market 64-bit processor. 64-bit is not required on the desktop. People are waiting for itanium before they move to 64-bit. itanium is the fastest processor in the world. itanium is the industry standard 64-bit architecture. itanium is an open standard. Other 64-bit processors are proprietary. Next year, itanium will be the biggest-selling 64-bit processor. Windows NT is more advanced than UNIX. Linux can't do everything Windows can. Windows NT will kill UNIX. Windows is faster than Linux. Next year, everyone will be running itanium servers running 64-bit Windows. Windows NT is portable.
Recent tokamak reactors have been operated for around a fraction of a second to a second.
When I visited JET back in 2001 they said they were achieving sustained reactions over several tens of seconds (~30) before the plasma became unstable.
Fission reactors are easier to manage but still 30 minutes of reaction is pretty substantial.
Well, my old powerstation used to manage several months of continuous fission reactions on each reactor, before thunderstorms or welding operations or rod-drops would cause the reactors to come off. In theory, a reactor could be run continuously for 2 years i.e. between statutory (legal) biennial outages. These were reactors designed in the late 1950s.
Reactor design is not simple, there are many things to think about, how to moderate, how to cool down, how not to overheat (this is critical because the claddings around the elements usually get weaker when heated and crack. Once cracked, you cannot stop contaminating the water used for the reactor).
Here in the UK most of our reactors are gas-cooled (using carbon dioxide). We have one commercial PWR in Suffolk (Sizewell B). The Magnoxes were positive-feedback systems and could, in theory, overheat, but in practice the passive safety systems prevented this. The AGRs avoid this problem (caused by plutonium resonance with the thermal neutrons and graphite moderator) by holding the graphite temperature steady, by providing the graphite with it's own cooling loop (actually the first stage of core cooling, the gas then gets passed over the fuel). In effect the cold gas coming in cools the moderator, picking up some heat (being pre-heated) and then cooling the fuel, up to about 650 degrees C IIRC.
This all relies on active feedback systems as it is a chaotic system (in conjunction with the boilers).
If an AGR looses forced cooling, it's quite dangerous, as there is a maximum period of time in which you must get the automatic system back up and running. Otherwise you risk ruining your boilers. The "superheat" part of the boilers must under no circumstances get wet or else they are knackered forever, and your powerstation is useless. (AGRs and the two concrete pressure vessel Magnoxes, Oldbury and Wylfa, have "once-through boilers" which are a unique British design developed specifically for nuclear reactors and used nowhere else in the world).
AGRs are better than PWRs in another respect and that is the reactor pressure vessel is too strong to ever develop a significant breach that would result in a depressurisation and catastrophic release of radioactive substances.
Unfortunately, Margaret Thatcher chose a PWR for Sizewell B to improve Anglo-American relations. PWRs do not have concrete pressure vessels and are more "dosey" that AGRs (and the two concrete Magnoxes). They od have a sealed containment building, whic saved the day at Three Mile Island, but this is not required in an AGR or PBMR since the pressure vessel is much stronger and the failure modes are different. AGRs can not melt their fuel even with no forced convection, as long as you keep water in the boilers.
Hi Turgid, I also work for BNFL Magnox, at Berkeley, but not in IT.
I wasn't in IT either, but I used to administer our section's UNIX workstations:-)
My department give a monthly prize for cost-saving suggestions. I suggested using OSS for the network servers (no point even thinking about it for the desktop here). I came second that month, beaten by a suggestion to drop free coffee at meetings. Not that OSS would have been adopted even if I had won (and we still get the coffee).
Ah, the good old Suggestion Scheme. I got a letter once telling me that my suggestion "wasn't good enough to deserve a prize" so I started submitting them anonymously since I had the "that crazy Linux lunatic" label.
But Supreme HQ (Risley) have now heard of this initiative and have ordered it to be taken down, because it goes against the company's IT policies, which are (1) all M$ platforms and office apps, (2) no in-house development, and (3) financial systems to use SAP.
I can't believe that they're still being so pointy-haired about this sort of thing. We knew from the outset that their one-size-fits-all IT policy was doomed, and management still doesn't see this? It reminds me of the NT roll-out, when the young girl from IT approached my SPARC workstation with a DOS boot floppy and reached for the power switch becasue she "had to check if the machine was fast enough to run NT."
The fault is not the IT people, some of whom have privately told me they would be very happy to run OSS. It is the fault of the managers and directors above them. These set the policy, but their deepest knowledge of IT is their home PC bought from Dixons, pre-loaded with Windows and Works.
In other companies, the PHBs ask the Engineers to specify the technical stuff, and take the high-level decisions themselves.
That's just British state-controlled business for you. I used to work for BNFL Magnox Generation. They were just as resistant to change and just as backward looking. They did a complete company-wide roll-out to NT4 on all the servers and PCs just as Microsoft was withdrawing support for it. Despite my deputations and protestations and business cases for using UNIX, Linux, Open Source etc. I was ignored or given a patronising pat on the head and labelled a lunatic. Now I have a much better paid job outside of the Public Sector and I never have to touch a Winows box ever.
Rumour has it they're now considering alternatives to help get M$ to lower prices.
The British Public Sector goes out of its way to procure the most expensive, unreliable, unwieldy, complicated and unsuitable solutions to its problems. It's hard to explain. It's kind of a mind-set that it has. It's pointy-hairedness taken to the extreme.
I could go on, but I'm just making myself depressed. It's my tax money too...
Even the Tories, who have played the "liberty" card over Fox hunting often fail to do so in other areas.
People have short memories. I was 5 when the Tories came to power. They didn't get deposed until I had grown up, graduated from university and got my first proper career job.
Michael Howard (current Tory leader and in all probability, next UK Prime Minister) was their last Home Secretary. He was every bit as bad as David Blunkett, and used to spin about how we lived in a "modern, liberal democracy."
A liar and a hypocrite (and an Authoritarian), just like all the other politicians, Labour and Conservative (Tory) alike.
wxPython and Boa Constructor are all well and good, but how do they help C++ developers?
Perhaps Anjuta would be more use to them in conjuncion with gcc? Here are the features and here is the eye candy.
Products like C++ Builder are not only fancy IDEs and compilers, but they come with very rich class libraries. If someone has invested years of development time creating applications using these class libraries, thier discontinuation is a disaster if they are to continue to develop their application without rewriting it from scratch using different libraries, or in a whole new language environment.
Just get a good algorithms book. The "Algorithms" books by Robert Sedgewick are often used in undergraduate courses, but this one is more comprehensive and I've seen it on a Real Programmer's desk...
...until I tried the Pascal family of languages (Modula-2 actually). The strictness imposed by Pascal and its decendents really forces you to think carefully about what it is you're trying to code. Most of my early C programs worked by luck rather than design and would produce pages of warnings on compilation. After learning a bit of Modula-2, I became a much better C programmer (and programmer in general). Many years later I had to program in Turbo Pascal 7.0 (a predecessor of Delphi) and found it very pleasant (despite DOS and Windows). Pascal has come on a long way in 30 years and spawned Delphi, Modula-* and Oberon-*. They're well worth investigating.
Information may want to be free, but information content comes at a cost. Until someone finds a way of automatically generating software (some kind of self-organising system, Strong AI, whatever) there will always be some cost in creating that information.
This cost is also present in designing hardware.
What's different is the cost of reproduction.
Software is incredibly cheap to reproduce because it is merely a "signal", a pattern . Reproducing software costs no more that the cost of electricity.
Free (as in Freedom) Software is a good thing, but it not free as in cost. It's cost may be low and may be spread between many more workers than traditional software, but it still costs time and effort.
Hardware designs too could be done in the same way, but reproducing the hardware can not.
A company like IBM, on the other hand, which sells silicon but gives away information, can expect a long and prosperous future.
Unless IBM adds value to that information in some way compared to its competitors, it will end up as an also-ran like HP and Dell and all the clone box shifters.
IBM does not give away all of its information. It does not give away its hardware designs. I'm not even sure that any of its non-UNIX/Linux OSs are "open" in terms of specs. let alone code. IBM has the world's largest patent portfolio, containing a vast number of softwate patents. IBM is not giving these away.
IBM will survive because it has tricks up its sleeve like every other company trying to make a buck.It will provide its own proprietary enhancements to the "free" information to distinguish itself from HP, Dell, Apple, Sun, etc. There will also be a degree of vendor lock-in as a result.
Everyone is doing this: RedHat, HP, IBM, SGI. You may not believe it, but each of these companies adds its own "secret sauce" to that which is Free. IBM with its Linux port to S/390, SGI with its scalabiltiy patches and HP with whatever looks like corporate suicide this week.
These companies are doing a really good job of using the Linux bandwagon as a marketting tool. The funny thing is, people here are drinking the Kool Aid.
Slashdot Mirror
She's not that bad. :-)
Yes, I remember that. I also used to live a five minute walk from a news ageants. It was easier just to buy a copy of FHM or Maxim when I wanted to look at boobs. The picture quality was better too.
One of the things I found very funny was that you could actually "use" the toilets in the game. If you walked up to one of the urinals and pressed the "use" button, Duke would do a wee wee and flush the toilet.
One day I was playing it over a direct modem connection with a friend. He shot me in the face with a rocket. I jumped up and backwards, breaking my chair in the process.
I don't have time to play games nowadays, and I don't have Windows, so my choice is severely limited anyway. Xbill is about my limit now.
The piblic is hysterical. You should hear the anit-nuclear propaganda and lies presented to the (scientifically-illiterate public) as "fact". People are scared of what they don't understand.
There are real risks, but through engineering, the risks can me minimised and sometimes entirely eliminated.
The public's main fear of nuclear power come from the three major accidents. In a nutshell:
The Windscale accident (1957?). Very poor reactor design combined with operator error lead to a core fire and the release of radioactive substances into the atmosphere which contaminated large parts of Britain (and elsewhere). No such reactor design was operated again after the accident. Wigner energy annealing banned under UK law.
Three Mile Island (1979?). Poor reactor design combined with operator error. Very small release of radioactive substances. Reactor design was subsequently improved along with operating procedure.
Chernobyl Reactor 4 (1986). Prompt criticality combined with steam explosion, resulting from bad reactor design combined with criminally negligent reactor operation. Significant loss of core inventory and 31 direct fatalities. Severe radioactive contamination. Unfortunately, former Soviet countries are still operating RBMK reactors because they need the electricity so desperately. We could have helped but we didn't (wicked Commies etc. etc.).
Only when the public is willing to be un-compensated for this risk -- nay, actually *PAY* (via taxes) to subsidize energy companies -- does nuclear become a 'viable' option.
That's the situation here in the UK where the government underwrites all nuclear liabilities. The public is still scared witless and highly suspicious of nuclear power. The poor state of science education here, coupled with ignorant media and political pressure groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earh are to blame. People don't understand radioactivity, nuclear reactions, or that different designs of nuclear reactors behave in completely different ways. To your average voter Radioactive==Bad.
Nuclear will once more be "economic" when climate change and fossil fuel supply and price problems make it so. In the mean time, due to political spinelessness, the expertise required to build and run the things is withering away.
Wind. Solar. They are the only economical choices. Even coal, gas and oil are more than Wind and Solar when their associated costs are correctly included.
Sorry, but the numbers just don't add up. You'll never get enough from wind and solar. Besides which, wind turbines are very dangerous to wildlife, they're noisy, ugly, and present a safety risk to humans too. Solar is just too feeble. You can work out the numbers yourself quite easily.
Have a look at that link to JET. They're one more reactor away from a demonstration power production plant.
OOOOH, the bogeyman. Look, Bin Laden is a relatively insignificant figure. IF gas/oil supplies are disrupted, he is VERY, VERY, VERY far down on the list of people/countries/things that are likely to be the cause. Plain old incompetent people are likely to be the cause (see Chernobyl disaster).
Yes, he is the current bogeyman. Here in the UK is used to be the IRA. That was just an example. Now we are talking about politics. The war in Iraq has shown what can happen when you disrupt the supply to a mere 3% of the world's oil. In addition, a very substantial part of Europe's energy comes through two gas pipelines. So the US is at the mercy of tinpot dictators in the Middle East and tribal conflicts in Africa whilest Europe could be plunged into chaos if a leak springs in one of two gas pipelines, not to mention the environmental catastrophe that would result.
Lack of diversity is bad. Fossil fuels are bad.
None. We need not have any "nuclear disasters" with modern technology and the lessons learned from Windscale, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Is one too many?
Chernobyl needn't have happened, despite the criminally poor reactor design. Human ignorance and arrogance ultimately caused that one.
It seems like the countries neighbouring the Ukraine think so.
Well, personally, I don't believe that they should be operating RBMK-type reactors after what they did to one of the units at Chernobyl, but the West was in a position to help with that and we did nothing.
A meltdown in California would contaminate Oregon, and Nevada, possibly more.
I live in England. Anyway, your PWRs are not quite as dangerous as RBMKs, and you learned some lessons from TMI. I'm not sure that you should be building any more PWRs though. We have better, intrinsically safe designs nowadays.
If you can guarantee there never being human error causing a Chernobyl style accident and there being a supply of adequately trained people to run them who will guarantee safety, then go for it.
You can guarantee there never being another Chernobyl-style accident by closing down all the RBMKs. As for the human error and training, that's all been engineered out and the training was dealt with in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident.
I'd love to go for it, but politics has all but killed it off here in the UK, and with your oil-baron, money-grabbing, short-sighted President in the USA, you don't have much hope either. Politicians have a lot to answer for, but that's a whole 'nother story...
In a fusion plant, the induced radioactivity in the steel structures is so low that people can safely work inside the torus after only 2 to 3 years of shut down c.f. 100+ years for a conventional nuke plant.
And steel, which is consumed at incredible rates to replace heavily-irradiated reactor structures. About 300 tons per year for a 1000 Mw plant.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? I've never heard of this before. Who told you that?
No it doesn't.
Chernobyl Reactor 4 (IIRC) underwent a prompt criticality which led to a steam explosion and "significant loss of core inventory" etc. Look it up. There are many good and accurate references (hint: not from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or any political activist people).
The issue is far too involved to explain in a simple post on slashdot. Needless to say, the contents of a running nuclear reactor being ejected in a violent explosion and stirring up the contents of a nuclear fuel cooling pond are two entirely different things.
That sort of accident would probably cover a few square miles of land with moderate contamination which wouldn't do anyone much harm in the short term and could be cleaned up.
In my time I've reviewed a few nuclear safety reviews for these sorts of things (here in the UK). There isn't really very much to worry about.
Why yes, I am a qualified nuclear engineer, but I left the industry due to the lack of development of new nuclear power plants.
The uranium will run out a lot less slowly than oil (in the US) or gas (in Europe) if this is taken into account.
Unfortunately, public anti-nuclear hysteria will prevent us from properly exploiting these resources until our backs are firmly against the wall. If Bin Laden were to disrupt the flow of gas from Siberia to Europe and plunge the continent into chaos, cold, darkness, sickness and death, maybe the politicians will do something about it. However, until their is a major disaster either involving economics (high oil prices) or logistics (Siberian gas supply) nothing will get done.
Meanwhile, we're still developing nuclear fusion which is coming along a lot better than most people think...No uranium (or oil or coal or gas) required.
memtest86 is free and in beer and speech, and is operating system independent. You just write the binary on to a floppy disk and boot the machine off of it.
I've cured several machines of mysterious problems by identifying bad RAM with memtest86. It was always cheap, unbranded RAM that was the problem. I get all my RAM from Crucial nowadays and I never have a problem with it. (I am not affiliated with Crucial or memtest86).
But isn't saying that offensive to turkeys?
From that website "Gel, a freeware Java and JSP IDE that runs natively on Windows"
I have a loathing for Windows. Gel is no use to anyone but Windows people. Windows people use .NET anyway, so why would they care about Gel?
Was there indeed? I stand corrected. Some people really must be gluttons for punishment. I wonder if FX!32 ran all the viruses correctly?
I knew someone would bring that up. :-)
Portability went away with Windows NT 4.0. Prior to that, NT 3.51 had a Harware Abstraction Layer (HAL) which provided a nice interface between the device drivers and other hardware-dependent parts of the OS and the hardware-independent parts of the OS. Unfortunately, this was very slow on the systems of the day. For NT 4.0, M$ decided to break this to improve performance.
It's also worthy to note that, although MIPS and Alpha were 64-bit processors, NT was purely 32-bit on those platforms. There was no 64-bit NT until fairly recently.
itanium will kill the RISC server market.
itanium was the first mass-market 64-bit processor.
64-bit is not required on the desktop.
People are waiting for itanium before they move to 64-bit.
itanium is the fastest processor in the world.
itanium is the industry standard 64-bit architecture.
itanium is an open standard. Other 64-bit processors are proprietary.
Next year, itanium will be the biggest-selling 64-bit processor.
Windows NT is more advanced than UNIX.
Linux can't do everything Windows can.
Windows NT will kill UNIX.
Windows is faster than Linux.
Next year, everyone will be running itanium servers running 64-bit Windows.
Windows NT is portable.
When I visited JET back in 2001 they said they were achieving sustained reactions over several tens of seconds (~30) before the plasma became unstable.
Fission reactors are easier to manage but still 30 minutes of reaction is pretty substantial.
Well, my old powerstation used to manage several months of continuous fission reactions on each reactor, before thunderstorms or welding operations or rod-drops would cause the reactors to come off. In theory, a reactor could be run continuously for 2 years i.e. between statutory (legal) biennial outages. These were reactors designed in the late 1950s.
Reactor design is not simple, there are many things to think about, how to moderate, how to cool down, how not to overheat (this is critical because the claddings around the elements usually get weaker when heated and crack. Once cracked, you cannot stop contaminating the water used for the reactor).
Here in the UK most of our reactors are gas-cooled (using carbon dioxide). We have one commercial PWR in Suffolk (Sizewell B). The Magnoxes were positive-feedback systems and could, in theory, overheat, but in practice the passive safety systems prevented this. The AGRs avoid this problem (caused by plutonium resonance with the thermal neutrons and graphite moderator) by holding the graphite temperature steady, by providing the graphite with it's own cooling loop (actually the first stage of core cooling, the gas then gets passed over the fuel). In effect the cold gas coming in cools the moderator, picking up some heat (being pre-heated) and then cooling the fuel, up to about 650 degrees C IIRC.
This all relies on active feedback systems as it is a chaotic system (in conjunction with the boilers).
If an AGR looses forced cooling, it's quite dangerous, as there is a maximum period of time in which you must get the automatic system back up and running. Otherwise you risk ruining your boilers. The "superheat" part of the boilers must under no circumstances get wet or else they are knackered forever, and your powerstation is useless. (AGRs and the two concrete pressure vessel Magnoxes, Oldbury and Wylfa, have "once-through boilers" which are a unique British design developed specifically for nuclear reactors and used nowhere else in the world).
AGRs are better than PWRs in another respect and that is the reactor pressure vessel is too strong to ever develop a significant breach that would result in a depressurisation and catastrophic release of radioactive substances.
Unfortunately, Margaret Thatcher chose a PWR for Sizewell B to improve Anglo-American relations. PWRs do not have concrete pressure vessels and are more "dosey" that AGRs (and the two concrete Magnoxes). They od have a sealed containment building, whic saved the day at Three Mile Island, but this is not required in an AGR or PBMR since the pressure vessel is much stronger and the failure modes are different. AGRs can not melt their fuel even with no forced convection, as long as you keep water in the boilers.
I wasn't in IT either, but I used to administer our section's UNIX workstations :-)
My department give a monthly prize for cost-saving suggestions. I suggested using OSS for the network servers (no point even thinking about it for the desktop here). I came second that month, beaten by a suggestion to drop free coffee at meetings. Not that OSS would have been adopted even if I had won (and we still get the coffee).
Ah, the good old Suggestion Scheme. I got a letter once telling me that my suggestion "wasn't good enough to deserve a prize" so I started submitting them anonymously since I had the "that crazy Linux lunatic" label.
But Supreme HQ (Risley) have now heard of this initiative and have ordered it to be taken down, because it goes against the company's IT policies, which are (1) all M$ platforms and office apps, (2) no in-house development, and (3) financial systems to use SAP.
I can't believe that they're still being so pointy-haired about this sort of thing. We knew from the outset that their one-size-fits-all IT policy was doomed, and management still doesn't see this? It reminds me of the NT roll-out, when the young girl from IT approached my SPARC workstation with a DOS boot floppy and reached for the power switch becasue she "had to check if the machine was fast enough to run NT."
The fault is not the IT people, some of whom have privately told me they would be very happy to run OSS. It is the fault of the managers and directors above them. These set the policy, but their deepest knowledge of IT is their home PC bought from Dixons, pre-loaded with Windows and Works.
In other companies, the PHBs ask the Engineers to specify the technical stuff, and take the high-level decisions themselves.
Rumour has it they're now considering alternatives to help get M$ to lower prices.
The British Public Sector goes out of its way to procure the most expensive, unreliable, unwieldy, complicated and unsuitable solutions to its problems. It's hard to explain. It's kind of a mind-set that it has. It's pointy-hairedness taken to the extreme.
I could go on, but I'm just making myself depressed. It's my tax money too...
People have short memories. I was 5 when the Tories came to power. They didn't get deposed until I had grown up, graduated from university and got my first proper career job.
Michael Howard (current Tory leader and in all probability, next UK Prime Minister) was their last Home Secretary. He was every bit as bad as David Blunkett, and used to spin about how we lived in a "modern, liberal democracy."
A liar and a hypocrite (and an Authoritarian), just like all the other politicians, Labour and Conservative (Tory) alike.
Perhaps Anjuta would be more use to them in conjuncion with gcc? Here are the features and here is the eye candy.
Products like C++ Builder are not only fancy IDEs and compilers, but they come with very rich class libraries. If someone has invested years of development time creating applications using these class libraries, thier discontinuation is a disaster if they are to continue to develop their application without rewriting it from scratch using different libraries, or in a whole new language environment.
Just get a good algorithms book. The "Algorithms" books by Robert Sedgewick are often used in undergraduate courses, but this one is more comprehensive and I've seen it on a Real Programmer's desk...
...until I tried the Pascal family of languages (Modula-2 actually). The strictness imposed by Pascal and its decendents really forces you to think carefully about what it is you're trying to code. Most of my early C programs worked by luck rather than design and would produce pages of warnings on compilation. After learning a bit of Modula-2, I became a much better C programmer (and programmer in general). Many years later I had to program in Turbo Pascal 7.0 (a predecessor of Delphi) and found it very pleasant (despite DOS and Windows). Pascal has come on a long way in 30 years and spawned Delphi, Modula-* and Oberon-*. They're well worth investigating.
This cost is also present in designing hardware.
What's different is the cost of reproduction.
Software is incredibly cheap to reproduce because it is merely a "signal", a pattern . Reproducing software costs no more that the cost of electricity.
Free (as in Freedom) Software is a good thing, but it not free as in cost. It's cost may be low and may be spread between many more workers than traditional software, but it still costs time and effort.
Hardware designs too could be done in the same way, but reproducing the hardware can not.
A company like IBM, on the other hand, which sells silicon but gives away information, can expect a long and prosperous future.
Unless IBM adds value to that information in some way compared to its competitors, it will end up as an also-ran like HP and Dell and all the clone box shifters.
IBM does not give away all of its information. It does not give away its hardware designs. I'm not even sure that any of its non-UNIX/Linux OSs are "open" in terms of specs. let alone code. IBM has the world's largest patent portfolio, containing a vast number of softwate patents. IBM is not giving these away.
IBM will survive because it has tricks up its sleeve like every other company trying to make a buck.It will provide its own proprietary enhancements to the "free" information to distinguish itself from HP, Dell, Apple, Sun, etc. There will also be a degree of vendor lock-in as a result.
Everyone is doing this: RedHat, HP, IBM, SGI. You may not believe it, but each of these companies adds its own "secret sauce" to that which is Free. IBM with its Linux port to S/390, SGI with its scalabiltiy patches and HP with whatever looks like corporate suicide this week.
These companies are doing a really good job of using the Linux bandwagon as a marketting tool. The funny thing is, people here are drinking the Kool Aid.
I like the cut of your jib, young man.