PV systems on earth cost factors
on
Lunar Power
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· Score: 2
I have been looking into PV systems for my home. At current RETAIL market prices, you can get a KW of 120 VAC generation capability for about $10K. This means that for $ 1M you can create 100 such systems. For $1B you get 100,000 such systems. For the 135 Billion this would be 13.5 Million systems. The benefits of doing it this way are 1. No distribution system required ( and no distribution loss ) 2. Distributed control of the resource ( big country can not hold little country hostage for power ) 3. Can be built incrementally as funds are available and if the project gets scrapped halfway through, what you have built so far is 100% functional and on-line. This model is very crude, it does not show the benefits of mass standardization of the systems and mass quantity purchasing. In fact, for a project of this size, the project could build or purchase a PV manufacturing plant and significantly reduce the cost of the panels.
Actually, they are comparing the simulation with real world physical test results. When the simulation is tuned well enough to match the actual results of a test shot, then they will probably change the device parameters of the simulation code to model a differnt actual test and see if the results are still valid. At some point the simulation code will be deemed first order reliable and can then be used for testing new concepts for weapons designs. As an example of why this might be usefull, consider that there may have been advances in the chemical high explosives used in the systems as well as advances in the command/control and safety systems relative to what was designed into weapons made in the 1950s or 1960s or even later. If it were possible to re-use the nuclear components of old weapons in a new bomb design with modern insensitive high explosive and more reliable detonation/control, denial of use and other safety systems, how could we put such a new weapon design into the stockpile without testing ? Accurate computer simulation may provide enough confidence in such a re-design to allow its certification for stockpile use. The ability to re-use the old nuclear components would eliminate significant hazards of handling these dangerous and exotic nuclear materials in processes such as re-casting and machining. If you are interested in learning more about the physics and history of nuclear weapons, check out the NuclearWeapons Frequently Asked Questions.
Z
Re:Wanted: Biohacker Help
on
Biohackathon
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· Score: 2
I would like to talk to you more about your project.
High speed photography is a usefull tool for studying physical phenomena. If using a linux system lowers the cost and increases the availability of a usefull tool, that is a good thing. There are already lots of digital cameras which can take "ordinary" photographs, and there is increasing linux support for those also ( gphoto and gimp for example ). I think that any time an open source tool makes a genuine contribution to society, science or the advancement of ducks, it is a good thing. One concern however is that high speed cameras were initially developed in support of the development of nuclear weapons. Will this tool enhance the proliferation of such devices ?
Here are a few things that can make a room more livable
Put up a couple of 4 bulb ( 400W ) chandaliers and put them on a dimmer. You can have comfortable dim light for keyboarding etc. or bright light for fishing dammits out of whatyamacallits. I got two of these type of lights from Home Depot closeout in the lighting department for about $25 each.
There is high-capacity adjustable shelving that uses the rails that you screw to the walls and has movable brackets. This makes handy bookshelves above your work surface area.
I organized my room with corner work units in two corners ( seperated by the long wall of the room ) with matching tables between them along the walls and returns on the short side. The side of the room without the computer tables has a book case, a stereo rack and a horizontal filing cabinet with the fax machine and guitar amp on it. Guitars hang on the wall above the amp for easy access. In the center of the room is a dining table - a good place to lay out diagrams, photos or build boxen.
KVM switches for the two main work areas help cut down the clutter, a few other computers have their own monitors etc. Carpet on the floor may not be the best for dust control, but it is cozy for bare-footed living. Get a vacuum with a hepa filter on the exhaust.
If you are building the house and wiring the room for the purpose of being a computer room, think about putting the data outlets up at 36" or so off the floor, so you can wire stuff on the desk without crawling around to pull cables. Remember to pull several dedicated 20 Amp power circuits - figure out what you are going to run and make sure you have enough amps to support it all plus some. Do not let the electrician share the computer room power circuits with other bedrooms or the kitchen.
I have decided to power down stuff I am not using due to the combination of noise and the now high cost of power. $.25 per KWH at the high tier - and I had about 365 KWH of high tier last month! $ 300 electric bill and that is with a gas clothes dryer, water heater and cooktop. ( that is with 11 people in the house however )
If you have the money, consider building photovoltaic co-generation into your home. It might prove very wise over the long term.
Here is some advice based on what I did. Note that I was at the time a licensed communications wiring contractor, so the house is wired a litte more than perhaps is usefull, but here goes.
1. Put muliple locations in each room. I put to faceplates in each bedroom, typically near a corner and opposite each other ( diagaonally opposite corners ) a cable from the outlet can be run along either adjacent wall for convienience in locating phones or computers. In each outlet are two cat 5 data cables and 1 4pair telephone cable. In one of the two outlets is an RG6 CATV cable.
2. Home run telephone wires - I ran all the telephone cables directly from the outlet to a telephone junction box in the garage which was mounted directly above the one from the phone company. The phone company box faces outside, mine faces inside and there are some holes in the 2X4 seperating them for cables to run through. I mounte 4 type 66 punchblocks in the inside box and terminated all 32 cables there. All multiple jumpering etc. is done in that box.
I ran all the data wiring ( 48 cables ) to 4 dual gang boxes inside the master bedroom closet. Using ortronics IMO2 dual gang faceplates with 6 double port modules, I got 48 ports in the 4 outlets and its is not cludgy like a patchpanel on a swingout door would be- it has a finished look. I also got the electrician to put a utility outlet inside the closet close to the ports to power the switch and localtalk bridge.
3. Put a telephone outlet near your CATV outlets - if you want to use satellite tv or some other service which requires a telephone connection it will be very good to have.
4. Put data outlets in common rooms - the livingroom, dining room den etc. These areas could end up as common homework computer areas for the kids. I have a table in the living room and one in the dining room ( we eat in the kitchen ) with some older computers on them that the kids use for homework.
Note that the contractors installers may be very helpful if you offer a 6 pack or two of beer to help grease the skids. I got all kinds of built-in bookshelves, nooks and other cool customizations this way.
Another suggestion !! Put in the return line for a circulating hot-water system during construction. If you can not afford the pump now, you can add it later, but it is a pain to put the return line in.
Also consider insulating hot water lines and putting insulation inside the inner walls to give some soundproofing.
It is wonderful that a motivated person could actually learn high-quality usefull stuff ( I assume ), but will it count with any potential employers ? It is very difficult to break through the "paper culture" which exists to support the requirement of expen$ive educations. No matter how clever one might be - as demonstrated by actual past performance, there is always that suspicion of anyone undocumented as a fraud.
Too bad it wants 18Vdc at 3A. If it were lower voltage, it would be trivial to power it from a car. Might make a neat auto-mobile computer. Also, I wonder why they will not support 512K memory modules??
I remember when I had to walk 18 miles through the snow in flip-flops to flip the reset switch on my altair. you whippersnappers have it so easy with your candy-ass protected memory operating systems. Back in the day, we felt lucky to have a rom monitor that we did not have to toggle a tape bootloader in with the front panel. You want to use a keyboard and video display??? better plan on writing your own BIOS assembly language links. I worked my way through 1976-77 building Sol computers for the Computer Store of San Francisco. The owner would buy the kits for like $700, then pay me a few hundred to assemble the kit. He would then sell it for the assembled price of $1299, with more profit than buying the thing from proc tech assembled for like $1050. My own rig was an Altair 8800-A with an Imsai power supply on an external rack-mount panel attached by a big cable. I had a proc-tech 3P+S with a keyboard ( no case ) attached by a six foot ribbon cable. I also had an ASR33 tty on the serial port for a printer and paper tape reader/punch. I had a processor VDM-1 video display and a CUTS tape interface board for a casette recorder. I was most happy when I got a GPM module which had the SOLOS monitor in ROM, so I did not have to toggle the tape boot loader. I loved to play trek80 and target. Target was a very cool shootem down arcade style game that featured sound effects radiated from the computer to a nearby AM radio! ( actually TREK80 sounded pretty cool on the radio too ). My system eventually evolved into having 3 16K ( yes, K! ) dynabyte memory cards and the seminal North Star micro disk system. I also added a 24X 80 video card ( Also dynabyte I think ) because only wimps used 16X64 ! OVer the years I added a morrow M16 16 Megabyte hard disk and of course a Z80 processor. Godbout static memory boards replaced the dynabytes when the ceramic capacitors aged ( or absorbed moisture was the rumor I heard ) and the tuned transmission lines for the refresh signals became untuned and the boards quit working. I worked at various computer stores and got to play with stuff like Cromemco Z-2 computers, the cute little 5 slot S-100 system that looked like a toaster ( what was the name of that thing ??? seems like it started with a P ) as well as the IMSAIs both the big S-100 boxes and the VDP-80s. There was such diversity back then. Probably a dozen viable processor types - everything from the 8 bit up to 12 and 16 bit systems. Several manufactureers for each type of processor and each with their own operating system, or if you were lucky, CPM so you could actually buy commercial software. I had kept my Altair till about 1989, when I decided to give it away - I figured that I would not want to saddle my kids with such an esoteric and useless piece of junk./me dodges flying fruit Oh welll.. so much for foresight! not that my pile would have been worth much- it was too non-standard to be collectable except perhaps as a bad example.
The upcoming senate hearings for confirmation of the new FBI director and regarding the apparent malfeasance of the FBI ( and incompetence ) should provide an opportunity for us to lobby our congresscritters to seek information on why Dimitri is being held without bail etc. This is a real-time example of the FBI not following constitutional guidelines in its daily operations.
I have both flat-panel LCDs and CRT monitors, and I have decided that I like the CRTs better, particularly for their color fidelity. The prospect of a flatish CRT monitor is interesting. I do have to admit that the desks with LCD monitors have much more usable space than the CRT equiped desks.
Tom, if you aim a boatload of big lasers at a bb size pellet of about anything, it gets DAMN hot ! The goal of the laser fusion program is to get the fuel compressed enough and hot enough to fuse!
Of the big 3 terrorist weapons, chemical, biological or nuclear, biological is the one that scares me the most. For a chemical attack, a fairly large ammount of material must be acquired and processed, and delivery to a significant portion of the population would be very difficult. The results would be terrible for the relatively few victims, but of marginal consequence for the nation. A nuclear attack would also be limited, unless a terrorist gained control of a significant portion of a nations nuclear forces. One bomb One city means that relativly few cities would be hit. A biological weapon??? you can brew it in a basement and for some pathogens, the victims can carry it around and infect quite a few other people before showing serious symptoms. If the proper venue for dispersal were chosen ( can you say Olympics?? Sure! ) you can affect a worldwide class of victims. There is much talk about the displaced Soviet nuclear engineers, and the threat that they pose for nuclear weapons. What about the similarly displaced Soviet bio-techs ? I read a novel with the premise of a Right-Wing militia type group using a former soviet biotechnician to brew up anthrax. It was a compelling read ( sorry I can't remember the name of it - I will look for it at home )
Bill will simply FUD his way out of the problem, pointing out that it was really those crazy linux hackers attacking the WhiteHouse, not his safe and secure bits !!!
I think gels are used for very small samples of DNA. About 500 base pairs is the limit for a gel. With 72 channels on the gel that is nowhere near the number of base pairs in a chromisome.
The faster better technique is electrostatically driven capliary tubes. They suck the sample through a microcapliary and shine a laser on it as it passes by. Generally the same 72 channels in parallel as the gel method - something about legacy analysis software as well as the plates that hold the samples and the robots which manipulate them. Kind of like the gauge of the railroad tracks used to carry space shuttle boosters being determined by the wheel spacing of the wheels on a roman chariot which was determined by the space required by two side by side horses.
we have the most advanced transportation system in the world having a major design parameter determined by the width of a roman horses ass.
This will be a great boon for storage device makers! Each genome will be terabytes of data.
To answer an earlier question, sequencing is reading the DNA and recording the base pairs in some fashon. Often this information ends up as an asci file. Because of the mechanical limits of the current sequencing technologies, chemicals called restriction enzymes are used to snip long strands of DNA at particular patterns of sequence. A sample of DNA is amplified using a technique called polymerase chain reaction ( PCR ) which gives many many copies of the precisely same sample. It is then split into multiple samples each "cut" with a different restriction enzyme each with a different "trigger sequence" so the different samples end up being cut in different places which means that the cut pieces of different samples overlap the cuts in other samples. Then all the samples are seperatly sequenced into files. The files can then be compared for overlaps and "assembled" into longer sequences until the sequence of the original sample ( which was too big for the machine ) is known. After the sequence is known, it can be converted from nucleic acid ( G A T C ) code to amino acid code ( google can probably find you the genetic code ) which is composed of 3 nucleic bases per amino acid. Because we really do not know where a given amino acid starts within the nucleic file, we often do a sliding frame translation, decoding the entire sequence for each possible starting point of amino acid translation. The proper translation is often indicated by having a minimal number of null translation frames. The decoded sequence can be compared to other previously decoded sequence which have been analyzed for function - these blocks end up being called genes. A gene from a mous which makes a particular protein is the same as that gene from a human, so by starting with simple organisims, many genes for specific proteins have been found which help decode the more complex organisims....
One of the real benefits of on-line real estate shopping is the ability to get a sense of what kind of homes are available in an area of the country that you may be considering for career reasons. For example, I am currently evaluating San Diego, Western Pensylvania and New Hampshire. The quality, size and price of homes available in these areas is quite different. San Diego is about comparable to here in the San Francisco Bay area, more value for the money but generally within about 20% comparable. The East coast options however are very different and make such a move much more apealing than it originally seemed. For the price of a stucco tract home of about 3K sq ft here on the west coast, in thes particular areas you can have three to five acres with up to 5K sq ft.
Being able to "shop" on the net was much more effective than cold-calling realitors who immediately try to "lock you in" to being exclusively represented by them. Some realtors have embraced the net and put up very effective web sites requiring some level of registration but then letting you browse Multiple Listing Service database. The most effective use ( for the realtor ) of this had a middleware layer that prevented me from getting the actual address of the listings except through the realtor ( unless you saw the very tiny MLS ID number for the listing and used a different service to get the raw data ) That realtor then offered a database agent service which continuously sends new listings which meet my search criteria via Email. I get about 10 - 15 listings a week from the agent with no personal overhead by the realtor themselves.
I think that real estate is definitely one area that the internet has enhanced the power of a buyer to deal with what used to be a proprietary market.
I keep a tail-f of squids log running in a window of the house router system. That helps a little bit. Having the main kid computers in the living room is also good - 2 systems side by side help the kids watch each other - as well as help each other.
I do recall mention of an interesting hack on Slasdot. I believe it was running at networld/Interop or perhaps a linux world conference. Basically, it grabbed jpegs and gifs off the ethernet which were floating by as part of other peoples surfing and displayed them on a large display. I would love to run this at home, it would be very obvious if kids got into certain types of sites of concern. Does anyone recall this tidbit and have refrences ???
What scares me is the idea of Microsoft selling a Linux distribution. They would be selecting a particular subset of components and "blessing" it. They would take advantage of all the free work and effort of the development community and sell it for profit by enhancing it. Their corporate-desired products such as office and exchange server etc would probably be tailored to only run properly ( or only be supported on ) microsoft linux. All the corporate linux customers would probably want Microsoft Linux because of the " can't go wrong with IBM ^H^H^H Microsoft " mentality and that would take market away from struggling open source vendors who have actively been supporting open source development.
It might be nice if they made a gnome-office or KDE-office for sale, even at the $300-$400 kind of range that they sell for on windows platforms, but I don't see them doing that.
In a world where everyone (especially the gummnt ) did everything correctly and constitutionally, perhaps we would not need leaks, in the real world, they have probably helped prevent things from being even worse than they are with regards to bureaucratic excess and violations of laws and personal freedoms.
B-451 used to be the unclassified National Energy Research Computer Center. It has been the home to a lot of neat technology over the years. It started out with a CDC-7600 and a CDC-6400, then Cray 1 Serial # 6 was added. That machine had 500K 64bit words of memory and 16 CDC DD-14 disk drives ( 300 MB each ! ). Cray 1 Serial # 33 was added ( 1 Million words of memory ! ) and later an XMP which was a multiprocessor machine. The center was the home to Serial # 1 Cray 2, nicknamed bubbles. That machine was delivered on a Monday morning and was able to run the Livermore written operating system ( CTSS Cray TimeSharing System ) for a few minutes on Friday - till it crashed. The machine was in full production within a few weeks of delivery, quite an achievement for any first off supercomputer. The NERSC Engineering crew had built a hardware simulator of the cray 2 and given the OS / Compiler / Library guys months of time to work on debugging the system and supporting codes. The operating system was written in a variant of Fortran, and occupied about 2 - 3 percent of the CPU resources. NERSC was built as a Triad - A group of supercomputers, a large hierarchical file storage system tightly coupled to those sysems and a high speed ( for the day ) network connecting a nationwide user base to those resources. NERSC ( actually its predicessor, National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center NMFECC ) was believed to be the first ever attempt to provide supercomputer access to a geographically distributed user comunitiy. Later machines added to NERSC included Cray YMP-C90 and the Cray T-3D, a particularly interesting "bridge" machine which provided users with both the then standard Cray vector processor architecture as well as a torus connected array of 128 Alpha processor nodes. This gave a user the ability to start with a basically unmodified code which had run on a Cray computer and then analyize the section of code which took the most time in the run. The programmer could then work at converting that section to run in the torodial array, hopefully enhancing performance. The machine enabled programmers to learn the new parallel architecture with baby steps. NERSC got moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in 1995-1996, they are still on-line at http://www.nersc.gov .
Slashdot Mirror
I have been looking into PV systems for my home. At current RETAIL market prices, you can get a KW of 120 VAC generation capability for about $10K. This means that for $ 1M you can create 100 such systems. For $1B you get 100,000 such systems. For the 135 Billion this would be 13.5 Million systems. The benefits of doing it this way are 1. No distribution system required ( and no distribution loss ) 2. Distributed control of the resource ( big country can not hold little country hostage for power ) 3. Can be built incrementally as funds are available and if the project gets scrapped halfway through, what you have built so far is 100% functional and on-line. This model is very crude, it does not show the benefits of mass standardization of the systems and mass quantity purchasing. In fact, for a project of this size, the project could build or purchase a PV manufacturing plant and significantly reduce the cost of the panels.
Z
Actually, they are comparing the simulation with real world physical test results. When the simulation is tuned well enough to match the actual results of a test shot, then they will probably change the device parameters of the simulation code to model a differnt actual test and see if the results are still valid. At some point the simulation code will be deemed first order reliable and can then be used for testing new concepts for weapons designs. As an example of why this might be usefull, consider that there may have been advances in the chemical high explosives used in the systems as well as advances in the command/control and safety systems relative to what was designed into weapons made in the 1950s or 1960s or even later. If it were possible to re-use the nuclear components of old weapons in a new bomb design with modern insensitive high explosive and more reliable detonation/control, denial of use and other safety systems, how could we put such a new weapon design into the stockpile without testing ? Accurate computer simulation may provide enough confidence in such a re-design to allow its certification for stockpile use. The ability to re-use the old nuclear components would eliminate significant hazards of handling these dangerous and exotic nuclear materials in processes such as re-casting and machining. If you are interested in learning more about the physics and history of nuclear weapons, check out the Nuclear Weapons Frequently Asked Questions.
Z
I would like to talk to you more about your project.
Zoot
High speed photography is a usefull tool for studying physical phenomena. If using a linux system lowers the cost and increases the availability of a usefull tool, that is a good thing. There are already lots of digital cameras which can take "ordinary" photographs, and there is increasing linux support for those also ( gphoto and gimp for example ). I think that any time an open source tool makes a genuine contribution to society, science or the advancement of ducks, it is a good thing. One concern however is that high speed cameras were initially developed in support of the development of nuclear weapons. Will this tool enhance the proliferation of such devices ?
Here are a few things that can make a room more livable
Put up a couple of 4 bulb ( 400W ) chandaliers and put them on a dimmer. You can have comfortable dim light for keyboarding etc. or bright light for fishing dammits out of whatyamacallits. I got two of these type of lights from Home Depot closeout in the lighting department for about $25 each.
There is high-capacity adjustable shelving that uses the rails that you screw to the walls and has movable brackets. This makes handy bookshelves above your work surface area.
I organized my room with corner work units in two corners ( seperated by the long wall of the room ) with matching tables between them along the walls and returns on the short side. The side of the room without the computer tables has a book case, a stereo rack and a horizontal filing cabinet with the fax machine and guitar amp on it. Guitars hang on the wall above the amp for easy access. In the center of the room is a dining table - a good place to lay out diagrams, photos or build boxen.
KVM switches for the two main work areas help cut down the clutter, a few other computers have their own monitors etc. Carpet on the floor may not be the best for dust control, but it is cozy for bare-footed living. Get a vacuum with a hepa filter on the exhaust.
If you are building the house and wiring the room for the purpose of being a computer room, think about putting the data outlets up at 36" or so off the floor, so you can wire stuff on the desk without crawling around to pull cables. Remember to pull several dedicated 20 Amp power circuits - figure out what you are going to run and make sure you have enough amps to support it all plus some. Do not let the electrician share the computer room power circuits with other bedrooms or the kitchen.
I have decided to power down stuff I am not using due to the combination of noise and the now high cost of power. $.25 per KWH at the high tier - and I had about 365 KWH of high tier last month! $ 300 electric bill and that is with a gas clothes dryer, water heater and cooktop. ( that is with 11 people in the house however )
If you have the money, consider building photovoltaic co-generation into your home. It might prove very wise over the long term.
I wired my own house a few years ago.
Here is some advice based on what I did. Note that I was at the time a licensed communications wiring contractor, so the house is wired a litte more than perhaps is usefull, but here goes.
1. Put muliple locations in each room. I put to faceplates in each bedroom, typically near a corner and opposite each other ( diagaonally opposite corners ) a cable from the outlet can be run along either adjacent wall for convienience in locating phones or computers. In each outlet are two cat 5 data cables and 1 4pair telephone cable. In one of the two outlets is an RG6 CATV cable.
2. Home run telephone wires - I ran all the telephone cables directly from the outlet to a telephone junction box in the garage which was mounted directly above the one from the phone company. The phone company box faces outside, mine faces inside and there are some holes in the 2X4 seperating them for cables to run through. I mounte 4 type 66 punchblocks in the inside box and terminated all 32 cables there. All multiple jumpering etc. is done in that box.
I ran all the data wiring ( 48 cables ) to 4 dual gang boxes inside the master bedroom closet. Using ortronics IMO2 dual gang faceplates with 6 double port modules, I got 48 ports in the 4 outlets and its is not cludgy like a patchpanel on a swingout door would be- it has a finished look. I also got the electrician to put a utility outlet inside the closet close to the ports to power the switch and localtalk bridge.
3. Put a telephone outlet near your CATV outlets - if you want to use satellite tv or some other service which requires a telephone connection it will be very good to have.
4. Put data outlets in common rooms - the livingroom, dining room den etc. These areas could end up as common homework computer areas for the kids. I have a table in the living room and one in the dining room ( we eat in the kitchen ) with some older computers on them that the kids use for homework.
Note that the contractors installers may be very helpful if you offer a 6 pack or two of beer to help grease the skids. I got all kinds of built-in bookshelves, nooks and other cool customizations this way.
Another suggestion !! Put in the return line for a circulating hot-water system during construction. If you can not afford the pump now, you can add it later, but it is a pain to put the return line in.
Also consider insulating hot water lines and putting insulation inside the inner walls to give some soundproofing.
Good Luck
Zoot
It is wonderful that a motivated person could actually learn high-quality usefull stuff ( I assume ), but will it count with any potential employers ? It is very difficult to break through the "paper culture" which exists to support the requirement of expen$ive educations. No matter how clever one might be - as demonstrated by actual past performance, there is always that suspicion of anyone undocumented as a fraud.
Nuff Said
Too bad it wants 18Vdc at 3A. If it were lower voltage, it would be trivial to power it from a car. Might make a neat auto-mobile computer. Also, I wonder why they will not support 512K memory modules??
Z
I remember when I had to walk 18 miles through the snow in flip-flops to flip the reset switch on my altair. you whippersnappers have it so easy with your candy-ass protected memory operating systems. Back in the day, we felt lucky to have a rom monitor that we did not have to toggle a tape bootloader in with the front panel. You want to use a keyboard and video display??? better plan on writing your own BIOS assembly language links. I worked my way through 1976-77 building Sol computers for the Computer Store of San Francisco. The owner would buy the kits for like $700, then pay me a few hundred to assemble the kit. He would then sell it for the assembled price of $1299, with more profit than buying the thing from proc tech assembled for like $1050. My own rig was an Altair 8800-A with an Imsai power supply on an external rack-mount panel attached by a big cable. I had a proc-tech 3P+S with a keyboard ( no case ) attached by a six foot ribbon cable. I also had an ASR33 tty on the serial port for a printer and paper tape reader/punch. I had a processor VDM-1 video display and a CUTS tape interface board for a casette recorder. I was most happy when I got a GPM module which had the SOLOS monitor in ROM, so I did not have to toggle the tape boot loader. I loved to play trek80 and target. Target was a very cool shootem down arcade style game that featured sound effects radiated from the computer to a nearby AM radio! ( actually TREK80 sounded pretty cool on the radio too ). My system eventually evolved into having 3 16K ( yes, K! ) dynabyte memory cards and the seminal North Star micro disk system. I also added a 24X 80 video card ( Also dynabyte I think ) because only wimps used 16X64 ! OVer the years I added a morrow M16 16 Megabyte hard disk and of course a Z80 processor. Godbout static memory boards replaced the dynabytes when the ceramic capacitors aged ( or absorbed moisture was the rumor I heard ) and the tuned transmission lines for the refresh signals became untuned and the boards quit working. I worked at various computer stores and got to play with stuff like Cromemco Z-2 computers, the cute little 5 slot S-100 system that looked like a toaster ( what was the name of that thing ??? seems like it started with a P ) as well as the IMSAIs both the big S-100 boxes and the VDP-80s. There was such diversity back then. Probably a dozen viable processor types - everything from the 8 bit up to 12 and 16 bit systems. Several manufactureers for each type of processor and each with their own operating system, or if you were lucky, CPM so you could actually buy commercial software. I had kept my Altair till about 1989, when I decided to give it away - I figured that I would not want to saddle my kids with such an esoteric and useless piece of junk. /me dodges flying fruit Oh welll.. so much for foresight! not that my pile would have been worth much- it was too non-standard to be collectable except perhaps as a bad example.
Z
The upcoming senate hearings for confirmation of the new FBI director and regarding the apparent malfeasance of the FBI ( and incompetence ) should provide an opportunity for us to lobby our congresscritters to seek information on why Dimitri is being held without bail etc. This is a real-time example of the FBI not following constitutional guidelines in its daily operations.
Z
I have both flat-panel LCDs and CRT monitors, and I have decided that I like the CRTs better, particularly for their color fidelity. The prospect of a flatish CRT monitor is interesting. I do have to admit that the desks with LCD monitors have much more usable space than the CRT equiped desks.
Z
Tom, if you aim a boatload of big lasers at a bb size pellet of about anything, it gets DAMN hot ! The goal of the laser fusion program is to get the fuel compressed enough and hot enough to fuse!
Actually I think this premise is in the book "vector".
Of the big 3 terrorist weapons, chemical, biological or nuclear, biological is the one that scares me the most. For a chemical attack, a fairly large ammount of material must be acquired and processed, and delivery to a significant portion of the population would be very difficult. The results would be terrible for the relatively few victims, but of marginal consequence for the nation. A nuclear attack would also be limited, unless a terrorist gained control of a significant portion of a nations nuclear forces. One bomb One city means that relativly few cities would be hit. A biological weapon??? you can brew it in a basement and for some pathogens, the victims can carry it around and infect quite a few other people before showing serious symptoms. If the proper venue for dispersal were chosen ( can you say Olympics?? Sure! ) you can affect a worldwide class of victims. There is much talk about the displaced Soviet nuclear engineers, and the threat that they pose for nuclear weapons. What about the similarly displaced Soviet bio-techs ? I read a novel with the premise of a Right-Wing militia type group using a former soviet biotechnician to brew up anthrax. It was a compelling read ( sorry I can't remember the name of it - I will look for it at home )
meanwhile - hold your breath.
Z
Bill will simply FUD his way out of the problem, pointing out that it was really those crazy linux hackers attacking the WhiteHouse, not his safe and secure bits !!!
Z
Modern nuclear explosives use electronic neutron generators. They do not wear out.
do a search for mc4380
You might also want to check out the nuclear weapons databook by hansen & friends.
If you don't like it, lump it mr PHB!
I think gels are used for very small samples of DNA. About 500 base pairs is the limit for a gel. With 72 channels on the gel that is nowhere near the number of base pairs in a chromisome.
The faster better technique is electrostatically driven capliary tubes. They suck the sample through a microcapliary and shine a laser on it as it passes by. Generally the same 72 channels in parallel as the gel method - something about legacy analysis software as well as the plates that hold the samples and the robots which manipulate them. Kind of like the gauge of the railroad tracks used to carry space shuttle boosters being determined by the wheel spacing of the wheels on a roman chariot which was determined by the space required by two side by side horses.
we have the most advanced transportation system in the world having a major design parameter determined by the width of a roman horses ass.
Z
This will be a great boon for storage device makers! Each genome will be terabytes of data.
To answer an earlier question, sequencing is reading the DNA and recording the base pairs in some fashon. Often this information ends up as an asci file. Because of the mechanical limits of the current sequencing technologies, chemicals called restriction enzymes are used to snip long strands of DNA at particular patterns of sequence. A sample of DNA is amplified using a technique called polymerase chain reaction ( PCR ) which gives many many copies of the precisely same sample. It is then split into multiple samples each "cut" with a different restriction enzyme each with a different "trigger sequence" so the different samples end up being cut in different places which means that the cut pieces of different samples overlap the cuts in other samples. Then all the samples are seperatly sequenced into files. The files can then be compared for overlaps and "assembled" into longer sequences until the sequence of the original sample ( which was too big for the machine ) is known. After the sequence is known, it can be converted from nucleic acid ( G A T C ) code to amino acid code ( google can probably find you the genetic code ) which is composed of 3 nucleic bases per amino acid. Because we really do not know where a given amino acid starts within the nucleic file, we often do a sliding frame translation, decoding the entire sequence for each possible starting point of amino acid translation. The proper translation is often indicated by having a minimal number of null translation frames. The decoded sequence can be compared to other previously decoded sequence which have been analyzed for function - these blocks end up being called genes. A gene from a mous which makes a particular protein is the same as that gene from a human, so by starting with simple organisims, many genes for specific proteins have been found which help decode the more complex organisims....
hmmmmm sorry for the drif folks...
Z
One of the real benefits of on-line real estate shopping is the ability to get a sense of what kind of homes are available in an area of the country that you may be considering for career reasons. For example, I am currently evaluating San Diego, Western Pensylvania and New Hampshire. The quality, size and price of homes available in these areas is quite different. San Diego is about comparable to here in the San Francisco Bay area, more value for the money but generally within about 20% comparable. The East coast options however are very different and make such a move much more apealing than it originally seemed. For the price of a stucco tract home of about 3K sq ft here on the west coast, in thes particular areas you can have three to five acres with up to 5K sq ft.
Being able to "shop" on the net was much more effective than cold-calling realitors who immediately try to "lock you in" to being exclusively represented by them. Some realtors have embraced the net and put up very effective web sites requiring some level of registration but then letting you browse Multiple Listing Service database. The most effective use ( for the realtor ) of this had a middleware layer that prevented me from getting the actual address of the listings except through the realtor ( unless you saw the very tiny MLS ID number for the listing and used a different service to get the raw data ) That realtor then offered a database agent service which continuously sends new listings which meet my search criteria via Email. I get about 10 - 15 listings a week from the agent with no personal overhead by the realtor themselves.
I think that real estate is definitely one area that the internet has enhanced the power of a buyer to deal with what used to be a proprietary market.
I keep a tail-f of squids log running in a window of the house router system. That helps a little bit. Having the main kid computers in the living room is also good - 2 systems side by side help the kids watch each other - as well as help each other.
I do recall mention of an interesting hack on Slasdot. I believe it was running at networld/Interop or perhaps a linux world conference. Basically, it grabbed jpegs and gifs off the ethernet which were floating by as part of other peoples surfing and displayed them on a large display. I would love to run this at home, it would be very obvious if kids got into certain types of sites of concern. Does anyone recall this tidbit and have refrences ???
What scares me is the idea of Microsoft selling a Linux distribution. They would be selecting a particular subset of components and "blessing" it. They would take advantage of all the free work and effort of the development community and sell it for profit by enhancing it. Their corporate-desired products such as office and exchange server etc would probably be tailored to only run properly ( or only be supported on ) microsoft linux. All the corporate linux customers would probably want Microsoft Linux because of the " can't go wrong with IBM ^H^H^H Microsoft " mentality and that would take market away from struggling open source vendors who have actively been supporting open source development.
It might be nice if they made a gnome-office or KDE-office for sale, even at the $300-$400 kind of range that they sell for on windows platforms, but I don't see them doing that.
Z
In a world where everyone (especially the gummnt ) did everything correctly and constitutionally, perhaps we would not need leaks, in the real world, they have probably helped prevent things from being even worse than they are with regards to bureaucratic excess and violations of laws and personal freedoms.
B-451 used to be the unclassified National Energy Research Computer Center. It has been the home to a lot of neat technology over the years. It started out with a CDC-7600 and a CDC-6400, then Cray 1 Serial # 6 was added. That machine had 500K 64bit words of memory and 16 CDC DD-14 disk drives ( 300 MB each ! ). Cray 1 Serial # 33 was added ( 1 Million words of memory ! ) and later an XMP which was a multiprocessor machine. The center was the home to Serial # 1 Cray 2, nicknamed bubbles. That machine was delivered on a Monday morning and was able to run the Livermore written operating system ( CTSS Cray TimeSharing System ) for a few minutes on Friday - till it crashed. The machine was in full production within a few weeks of delivery, quite an achievement for any first off supercomputer. The NERSC Engineering crew had built a hardware simulator of the cray 2 and given the OS / Compiler / Library guys months of time to work on debugging the system and supporting codes. The operating system was written in a variant of Fortran, and occupied about 2 - 3 percent of the CPU resources. NERSC was built as a Triad - A group of supercomputers, a large hierarchical file storage system tightly coupled to those sysems and a high speed ( for the day ) network connecting a nationwide user base to those resources. NERSC ( actually its predicessor, National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center NMFECC ) was believed to be the first ever attempt to provide supercomputer access to a geographically distributed user comunitiy. Later machines added to NERSC included Cray YMP-C90 and the Cray T-3D, a particularly interesting "bridge" machine which provided users with both the then standard Cray vector processor architecture as well as a torus connected array of 128 Alpha processor nodes. This gave a user the ability to start with a basically unmodified code which had run on a Cray computer and then analyize the section of code which took the most time in the run. The programmer could then work at converting that section to run in the torodial array, hopefully enhancing performance. The machine enabled programmers to learn the new parallel architecture with baby steps. NERSC got moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in 1995-1996, they are still on-line at http://www.nersc.gov .
Zoot