The human brain has a limited space for memory, so if you try to remeber too much you will end up forgetting other important stuff. That guy that memorized the 3000 long binary number probably can't remember his mother maiden's name now, or where he parked his car.
From what I read about the Chernobyl disaster it wasn't really the reactor design that was at fault but the dangerous experiments that were being carried out at the time.
"The disaster began with a routine operation for maintenance and fuel change that commenced a day before the accident. In addition to these procedures, the technical crew wanted to perform a test of the plant's steam turbines. Their goal was to determine if the turbines would continue to provide power for the plant's safety systems after their steam supply was cut off. While attempting to perform this test, they committed a series of errors that culminated in catastrophe. More than simple blunders, the errors stemmed from a reckless disregard for safety procedures. The errors compounded, and the disaster would likely not have occurred if any one error had been avoided.
The crew began by reducing the reactor's power so they could start their experiment. They also switched off the reactor's emergency core cooling system. This meant that in the event of a malfunction the reactor would become dangerously hot, which is exactly what subsequently happened. At 12:28 A.M. the crew made another serious error by putting the reactor's regulator at much too low a setting for the planned experiment. At this point, the reactor should have been shut down and the experiment abandoned, but the crew feared a reprimand for the incorrect regulator setting, so they decided to bring the reactor back up to power. To do this, they removed most of the graphite rods that moderated the fissioning of nuclear materials in the reactor core. By 1:00 A.M., the power output had reached 200 MW, still too low for the experiment. At this point, they switched on two extra pumps for the circulation of more cooling water in the core. This action made the reactor highly unstable, and water and steam levels began to oscillate uncontrollably. The crew then made another major mistake by blocking the automatic shut-down system. At 1:23, they started their experiment, and a few seconds later they switched off the safety apparatus that would have come into operation as soon as the turbines stopped.
In less than a minute, the crew chief realized that he had a serious problem, and he ordered the graphite rods to be reinserted in the core. The rods did not fall home, probably because the rods or the nuclear fuel had been distorted by the heat. The rods were then disconnected so that they could fall into the core, but by this time the situation was hopeless. The reactor's power surged from 7 percent to several hundred times its normal level. An explosion rocked the core, followed by another one 4 seconds later. These explosions blew the roof off of the reactor and caused the collapse of a refueling crane into the core, destroying what was left of the cooling system. A reaction of the steam with the fuel rods' zirconium cladding caused the formation of hydrogen, which then ignited, setting off 30 separate fires through the plant. The graphite in the core also ignited." http://www.fofweb.com/Subscription/Scie nce/Helicon.asp?SID=2&iPin=ffests0172
What really blew up Chernobyl was the dangerous experiment that they were carrying out at the time. Even though the design was unstable in principle it was very difficult to get it into that state. They actually had to de-acivate dozens of safeguards before they could run the reactor at very low power, and that was the point where it was unstable.
Puting nuclear batteries would make little difference to the lifespan of the project, because it's not determined by power alone. There is a possiblity that the electronics or mechanics will fail before the power runs out due to the extreem daily temperture change
Russion mission aborted because of "smell"
on
Meet the Nasalnaut
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was curious and googled. Here is what I found:
According to other Russian reports, at least three missions have been aborted for reasons that were in part psychological. In one case, the Soyuz 21 mission to the Salyut 5 space station in 1976, the crew was brought home early after the cosmonauts complained fiercely of an acrid odor in the space station's environmental control system. No cause was ever found, nor did other crews smell it; conceivably it was a hallucination. Coincidentally, the crew had not been getting along. In the case of the Soyuz T-14 mission to Salyut 7 in 1985, the crew was brought home after 65 days when Vladimir Vasyutin complained that he had a prostate infection and couldn't urinate. Later, doctors felt that the problem was partly psychological. Vasyutin had been getting behind in his work, and he was also under pressure because he had been passed over for a flight several times before. Alexander Laveikin was brought back early from the Soyuz TM-2 mission to Mir in 1987 because he complained of a cardiac irregularity. According to flight surgeons, there had been no sign of it before flight, nor could they find any sign of it in flight or afterwards. The cosmonaut had been under stress--he had made a couple of potentially serious errors. Later, he complained of the arrhythmia. He also had not been getting along with his partner, Yuri Romanenko.
A good deal of this information is undocumented and anecdotal; it makes for good stories, but not necessarily for great psychology. U.S. psychologists sometimes fault their Russian colleagues for being stronger on anecdotes than on verifiable experiments or statistics. "Rumor, rumor, rumor," one Western psychologist said to me recently, shaking his head, when I asked him about these tales.
Water alone isn't enough to create life. You need that water to exist for millions of years. So, the next task is to try to determine how long that water existed for.
I used to install phone systems for a German company and there was built in software that recorded all sorts of statistics. However the average answer time of the switchboard operator wasn't recorded. I found out later the reason was because of the strong unions in Germany there is a law preventing this type of information being recorded.
"I agree that the news release seems pretty sensationalized, though. If you read carefully, you'll note that in the study they subjected the rats to a 60Hz field for 24 hours continuously, not a few minutes at a time:"
Of coarse, you right, nobody's going to shave for 24-hours (imagine the agony when you slap on the aftershave). However, you should disregard the importance of this research: he has proven even low level magnetic fields cause damage DNA, albet only with continous exposure. There could be many cases where people are exposed to magnetic fields that they are not even aware of. For instance, if you sleep with your bed against a wall, there could be electric cables running through that wall, so that's 8 hours every day exposed. What about high tension pylons next to your house, what is the range of the magnetic field required to do damage?
I agree with you completely. The point of my original post was that the Reuters artical was misleading it's readers. Most lay people would interpret "churn throught twice as much data" to mean "goes twice as fast". Millions of dollars are invested in chip companies based on what these Analysts say. Later on, when real world benchmarks on 64-bit apps appear, there will be some very disappointed people.
You don't churn throught twice as much a *useful* information as 99.9% of all integers only need 32 bits (or less), so really the higher order bits are being discarded and 32-bit processors already have 64-bit floats. The quote is misleading and suggests that the 64-bit processor is going twice as fast.
The press and the supposed "Analysts" seem to be badly informed about 64-bit processors. They think they go twice as fast as 32-bit processors
An example from Reuters:
"Analysts have said they expect a major announcement from Intel this week on 64-bit computing, a technology that lets computers churn through doubly large chunks of data than the current 32-bit computers."
64-bit does not double the memory bandwidth, it simple means a bigger address space + 64bit integers, (although the Opteron does have high bandwidth this is nothing to do with 64-bitness)
"The DLLs get large because Microsoft dictates that they must remain backwards compatible, so that an application coded for dllhell.dll version 1 will still work for dllhell.dll version 6 without recompiling. This is one thing Windows does have that Linux doesn't."
Actually, they release completely new dlls for a new version and leave the old dll untouched. You will see this if you look in your system32 directory, richedit20.dll, richedit30.dll, msxml2.dll, msxml3.dll, etc.
I had a problem with a faulty SIMM. I was getting flakey video errors when running Windows. I downloaded a diagnostic (DOS) program and it tested the memory for hours without finding a single problem. Yet when I changed the SIMM the problems when away. I remember similar results with motherboard errors. The only diagnostic program that I have found that actually do anything useful are the disk checking programs (i.e. scandisk).
It's known that bacteria can survive in a harsh evironment, for instance in the Rio Tinto, or in undersea vents, but that bacteria more than likely originated from somewhere else and then adapted itself to the harsh surroundings - in other words it already had a head start. It may be more difficult for a new life form to evolve from scratch in a harsh evironment.
"These "easy to find" bugs were probably fixed in the huge code audit that MS did as part of thier security initiative that happened AFTER the date of the leaked code." This is just speculation, besides, if they found a security hole in IE5 it would be their responsibiltiy to published the fact rather than leave IE5 users out there vunerable.
..how easy is it to figure out what the code does? Are there any useful comments in the code? Is there any documentation about how all the different modules fit together? Are there even any make files?
It didn't say that Blaster wasn't related to the blackout, just that Blaster didn't cause this particular bug in the GE software. I find it hard to believe that one single bug can cause the whole grid to go down. More likely it was a combination of factors, indeed later on in the artical it says: "FirstEnergy says its problems were some of many issues destabilizing power flow in the northeast that day, and that its role in the outage is overstated in the interim report."
Excellent artical. This explains why the internet is so successful, while WAP flopped. The phone companies really killed WAP. Firstly, they made it too expensive - 30c to view just one WAP site (at least that's what it is here in Spain). Then, they restricted access to only their own internal WAP sites and a select few external pay-per-view sites. The artical says the internet is so successfull becuase it's free and unrestricted and not controlled by anyone.
Amazing. This firm makes money from the fact that IIS is so insecure, that's why they went to so much effort to look for these security holes in the first place. It's a good incitive for customers to buy their products when they see all those security holes out their just waiting for exploitation.
Third party software *should* use the default Media Player and not hardcode to WMP. I don't think this isn't difficult to do. But some Microsoft shops won't even consider technology that isn't Microsoft. This is the same with IE. Many applications could easily use Mozilla for HTML rendering if they wanted to. Well anyways, the outcome will be that if the user really wants to use lame software then, he/she has to install WMP.
Slashdot Mirror
The human brain has a limited space for memory, so if you try to remeber too much you will end up forgetting other important stuff. That guy that memorized the 3000 long binary number probably can't remember his mother maiden's name now, or where he parked his car.
From what I read about the Chernobyl disaster it wasn't really the reactor design that was at fault but the dangerous experiments that were being carried out at the time.
e nce/Helicon .asp?SID=2&iPin=ffests0172
"The disaster began with a routine operation for maintenance and fuel change that commenced a day before the accident. In addition to these procedures, the technical crew wanted to perform a test of the plant's steam turbines. Their goal was to determine if the turbines would continue to provide power for the plant's safety systems after their steam supply was cut off. While attempting to perform this test, they committed a series of errors that culminated in catastrophe. More than simple blunders, the errors stemmed from a reckless disregard for safety procedures. The errors compounded, and the disaster would likely not have occurred if any one error had been avoided.
The crew began by reducing the reactor's power so they could start their experiment. They also switched off the reactor's emergency core cooling system. This meant that in the event of a malfunction the reactor would become dangerously hot, which is exactly what subsequently happened. At 12:28 A.M. the crew made another serious error by putting the reactor's regulator at much too low a setting for the planned experiment. At this point, the reactor should have been shut down and the experiment abandoned, but the crew feared a reprimand for the incorrect regulator setting, so they decided to bring the reactor back up to power. To do this, they removed most of the graphite rods that moderated the fissioning of nuclear materials in the reactor core. By 1:00 A.M., the power output had reached 200 MW, still too low for the experiment. At this point, they switched on two extra pumps for the circulation of more cooling water in the core. This action made the reactor highly unstable, and water and steam levels began to oscillate uncontrollably. The crew then made another major mistake by blocking the automatic shut-down system. At 1:23, they started their experiment, and a few seconds later they switched off the safety apparatus that would have come into operation as soon as the turbines stopped.
In less than a minute, the crew chief realized that he had a serious problem, and he ordered the graphite rods to be reinserted in the core. The rods did not fall home, probably because the rods or the nuclear fuel had been distorted by the heat. The rods were then disconnected so that they could fall into the core, but by this time the situation was hopeless. The reactor's power surged from 7 percent to several hundred times its normal level. An explosion rocked the core, followed by another one 4 seconds later. These explosions blew the roof off of the reactor and caused the collapse of a refueling crane into the core, destroying what was left of the cooling system. A reaction of the steam with the fuel rods' zirconium cladding caused the formation of hydrogen, which then ignited, setting off 30 separate fires through the plant. The graphite in the core also ignited."
http://www.fofweb.com/Subscription/Sci
What really blew up Chernobyl was the dangerous experiment that they were carrying out at the time. Even though the design was unstable in principle it was very difficult to get it into that state. They actually had to de-acivate dozens of safeguards before they could run the reactor at very low power, and that was the point where it was unstable.
problem is between Dreamweaver GUI and chair
Puting nuclear batteries would make little difference to the lifespan of the project, because it's not determined by power alone. There is a possiblity that the electronics or mechanics will fail before the power runs out due to the extreem daily temperture change
I was curious and googled. Here is what I found:
J /l lda.html
According to other Russian reports, at least three missions have been aborted for reasons that were in part psychological. In one case, the Soyuz 21 mission to the Salyut 5 space station in 1976, the crew was brought home early after the cosmonauts complained fiercely of an acrid odor in the space station's environmental control system. No cause was ever found, nor did other crews smell it; conceivably it was a hallucination. Coincidentally, the crew had not been getting along. In the case of the Soyuz T-14 mission to Salyut 7 in 1985, the crew was brought home after 65 days when Vladimir Vasyutin complained that he had a prostate infection and couldn't urinate. Later, doctors felt that the problem was partly psychological. Vasyutin had been getting behind in his work, and he was also under pressure because he had been passed over for a flight several times before. Alexander Laveikin was brought back early from the Soyuz TM-2 mission to Mir in 1987 because he complained of a cardiac irregularity. According to flight surgeons, there had been no sign of it before flight, nor could they find any sign of it in flight or afterwards. The cosmonaut had been under stress--he had made a couple of potentially serious errors. Later, he complained of the arrhythmia. He also had not been getting along with his partner, Yuri Romanenko.
A good deal of this information is undocumented and anecdotal; it makes for good stories, but not necessarily for great psychology. U.S. psychologists sometimes fault their Russian colleagues for being stronger on anecdotes than on verifiable experiments or statistics. "Rumor, rumor, rumor," one Western psychologist said to me recently, shaking his head, when I asked him about these tales.
http://www.airspacemag.com/ASM/Mag/Index/1996/J
Water alone isn't enough to create life. You need that water to exist for millions of years. So, the next task is to try to determine how long that water existed for.
They've done the same thing for the upcoming EU case: Microsoft recruits EU investigator loaded with competitors' secrets
I used to install phone systems for a German company and there was built in software that recorded all sorts of statistics. However the average answer time of the switchboard operator wasn't recorded. I found out later the reason was because of the strong unions in Germany there is a law preventing this type of information being recorded.
"I agree that the news release seems pretty sensationalized, though. If you read carefully, you'll note that in the study they subjected the rats to a 60Hz field for 24 hours continuously, not a few minutes at a time:"
Of coarse, you right, nobody's going to shave for 24-hours (imagine the agony when you slap on the aftershave).
However, you should disregard the importance of this research: he has proven even low level magnetic fields cause damage DNA, albet only with continous exposure. There could be many cases where people are exposed to magnetic fields that they are not even aware of. For instance, if you sleep with your bed against a wall, there could be electric cables running through that wall, so that's 8 hours every day exposed.
What about high tension pylons next to your house, what is the range of the magnetic field required to do damage?
Rob Enderle announces the death of TCP/IP
I agree with you completely.
The point of my original post was that the Reuters artical was misleading it's readers. Most lay people would interpret "churn throught twice as much data" to mean "goes twice as fast". Millions of dollars are invested in chip companies based on what these Analysts say. Later on, when real world benchmarks on 64-bit apps appear, there will be some very disappointed people.
You don't churn throught twice as much a *useful* information as 99.9% of all integers only need 32 bits (or less), so really the higher order bits are being discarded and 32-bit processors already have 64-bit floats. The quote is misleading and suggests that the 64-bit processor is going twice as fast.
An example from Reuters:
"Analysts have said they expect a major announcement from Intel this week on 64-bit computing, a technology that lets computers churn through doubly large chunks of data than the current 32-bit computers."
AMD turning the heat up
64-bit does not double the memory bandwidth, it simple means a bigger address space + 64bit integers, (although the Opteron does have high bandwidth this is nothing to do with 64-bitness)
"The DLLs get large because Microsoft dictates that they must remain backwards compatible, so that an application coded for dllhell.dll version 1 will still work for dllhell.dll version 6 without recompiling. This is one thing Windows does have that Linux doesn't."
Actually, they release completely new dlls for a new version and leave the old dll untouched. You will see this if you look in your system32 directory, richedit20.dll, richedit30.dll, msxml2.dll, msxml3.dll, etc.
I had a problem with a faulty SIMM. I was getting flakey video errors when running Windows. I downloaded a diagnostic (DOS) program and it tested the memory for hours without finding a single problem. Yet when I changed the SIMM the
problems when away. I remember similar results with motherboard errors. The only diagnostic program that I have found that actually do anything useful are the disk checking programs (i.e. scandisk).
It's known that bacteria can survive in a harsh evironment, for instance in the Rio Tinto, or in undersea vents, but that bacteria more than likely originated from somewhere else and then adapted itself to the harsh surroundings - in other words it already had a head start. It may be more difficult for a new life form to evolve from scratch in a harsh evironment.
"These "easy to find" bugs were probably fixed in the huge code audit that MS did as part of thier security initiative that happened AFTER the date of the leaked code."
This is just speculation, besides, if they found a security hole in IE5 it would be their responsibiltiy to published the fact rather than leave IE5 users out there vunerable.
..how easy is it to figure out what the code does?
Are there any useful comments in the code? Is there any documentation about how all the different modules fit together? Are there even any make files?
It didn't say that Blaster wasn't related to the blackout, just that Blaster didn't cause this particular bug in the GE software.
I find it hard to believe that one single bug can cause the whole grid to go down. More likely it was a combination of factors, indeed later on in the artical it says:
"FirstEnergy says its problems were some of many issues destabilizing power flow in the northeast that day, and that its role in the outage is overstated in the interim report."
That reminds me of a joke... ...arf, arf
How can you tell when you've passed an elelphant?
It's hard to put the toilet seat down again
Excellent artical. This explains why the internet is so successful, while WAP flopped.
The phone companies really killed WAP. Firstly, they made it too expensive - 30c to view just one WAP site (at least that's what it is here in Spain).
Then, they restricted access to only their own internal WAP sites and a select few external pay-per-view sites. The artical says the internet is so successfull becuase it's free and unrestricted and not controlled by anyone.
Amazing. This firm makes money from the fact that IIS is so insecure, that's why they went to so much effort to look for these security holes in the first place. It's a good incitive for customers to buy their products when they see all those security holes out their just waiting for exploitation.
Bollocks. I can play WMA files using Winamp and WMP isn't default
Third party software *should* use the default Media Player and not hardcode to WMP. I don't think this isn't difficult to do. But some Microsoft shops won't even consider technology that isn't Microsoft. This is the same with IE. Many applications could easily use Mozilla for HTML rendering if they wanted to.
Well anyways, the outcome will be that if the user really wants to use lame software then, he/she has to install WMP.