That would be a valid argument if the drugs used would be legal. I think a company can request their employees to abide by the law, even in their own time. IBM worker steals car! Microsoft employee kills wife! Companies don't want to be associated with such incidents.
There is another problem with drug use. If the user gets addicted and starts using more and more, the drug use might affect work performance. So a clear rule: "no drug use" is something that makes sense.
Employment is a contract. In most contracts both sides have options to request conditions the other side must obey to or they won't enter into the contract. If the employer wants in the contract: No drugs, you might be tested, then that's a take-it-or-leave-it issue for the employee. Similarly, if the employee wants to shift his work-hours a few hours towards the evening, because he likes to sleep late, he could have that put into the contract, and tell the employer: take it or leave it.
The Turkish airlines incident was meant as an example of a hardware error. First the plane had an hardware error that caused (one) altimeter to malfunction. Next the hardware behaved so unexpectedly that the pilots didn't have any time to react.
In the face of these hardware errors, the pilots behaved more or less as can be expected of them, and crashed the plane. On the other hand, had the captain flipped the correct switch before taking command, the plane wouldn't have crashed. So it is easy to blame "pilot error". And there are parties that have an economical interest in calling "pilot error".
In general, in my non-expert opinion, the Airbus has a problem with the pilots not being enough aware of weather or not the autopilot is on, or partly on (and if so, which part). I bet there is an indicator light somewhere. So if the pilots didn't see that, it's pilot error. No modifications neccesary. On the other hand lots of lives have been lost with the pilots confused about the state of the autopilot. Shouldn't those indications be a bit more prominent?
When a change-in-price happens, economy adjusts. Here in the Netherlands, our government decided to add about 12% to the price of gasoline, promising that this was temporary. (in 1991, never retracted).
This changed the percentage that average families would spend on gas. Some couldn't afford it, so they had to change their ways.
A slow and gradual adoption of the emissions-taxes will cause a similar change in the habits and budgets of families and factories. The end result is better for the global climate.
Now about your "damned anyway".... You're exagerating. Global temperature HAS already risen significantly. There is absolutely NO WAY we can change that with measures taken today. In that sense we're already damned. For sure.
On the other hand, the situation of this planet 100 years from now, does depend on our actions today.
My prediction is that 50 years from now the world will be a lot hotter than it is today with major shifts of sea level, and "where deserts are", and that this is unavoidable. Partly because of the emissions we've already done, and partly because a certain momentum in humanity is unavoidable: We simply can't do the perfect thing tomorrow. But then again, I'm not a climate expert.
But if we start doing somethings right today, we'll certainly be able to influence the severity of the situation 50 and 100 years from now.
Although I agree that giving computers some control about the plane is a good idea, there is a tendency to blame everything on pilot error. In theory it is possible to fly the plane to the destination, so if the pilots get the plane in trouble, it's always pilot error.
Say turkish airlines this february near schiphol, the Netherlands. Altimeter fails -> plane decides to do weird things -> pilots react too late. (actually pilot-in-training reacts on time, captain takes over, and doesn't expect the autopilot to engage again, and give the plane the wrong commands again!).
It starts with a failure in the plane, but the pilots end up screwing up. If you scream "pilot error", airbus, boeing and the airlines don't have to engage in expensive redesigns/fixes. Just a note to send to all the pilots that they shouldn't do whatever brought down the latest crash.
Exactly! The tax should be the value of the long term effect on global environment. But since the conversion rate to "equivalent of CO2" of several different greenhouse gasses are already known, it is easiest to start with (equivalent-)C02.
I didn't say it would solve our climatic change problem. IMHO it's already too late for that. (i.e. if we'd stop emitting CO2 now-ish altogether, we'd still be in trouble a couple of decades from now).
And you're right. Very difficult to implement in practise for the reasons you (and I) mentioned....
The problem is that these comparisons are difficult to do. The only way to accurately allow estimations of such climate-efficiency is to impose climate-taxes.
Make every company pay for their emissions into the environment. So the costs of producing electricity will go up because the electricity company has to pay for their CO2 emissions. Similarly the steel mill producing the steel for the hummer will charge higher prices because of the CO2 they produce, and to compensate for the higher electricity bill.
Eventually throughout industry a new price-level will stabilize and in the train tickets and airline tickets their relative climate-efficiency will show through. People will feel the climate-inefficiency of the hummer (or the prius if you believe that report) in the amount they have to pay.
Oh, because taxing all citizens for the CO2 that their cars produce is not feasable, you add a tax on the fuels: The amount of CO2 per gallon of fuel is easy to calculate.
And... because this will shift prices significantly, it is not feasible to start these taxes all at once. So besides that the eventual rates should be known in advance, so that companies can change their investment patterns to for example build more CO2 efficient plants in the years that ramp up the cost of emitting CO2 into the environment.
There are some difficult problems: What is the CO2 equivalent price of radioactive wastes? This depends a lot on for example the cost of "suppose 100 years from now the storage facility generates a leak causing 100 square miles of our country to become inhabitable". The chances of that happening are small, difficult to estimate, but the resulting cost to the environment so enormous that they do make a contribution to the "global-environmental-cost" of using nuclear energy.
Another problem is that this doesn't make sense to do in just one country. This has to be done globally otherwise it is tremendously unfair for companies that are in a country that taxes its companies compared with those that are in a country that doesn't tax its companies. (You might be able to add those taxes at the border. So competition inside a country becomes fair. And the "other country" will see that the taxes that they could've charged end up being charged at the border, and flow into the foreign government, providing an incentive for them to implement the taxes....)
Storing lots of data on this system means I pay, on average about $0.10 per Gb, plus the cost of the reader, right? Lets see how much cheaper this is than just buying harddrives. 1.5Tb costs $100, so that comes to $0.066 per Gb... Ooops.... It's more expensive than harddrives.
Oops I made a small error in the example. Consumes 41A half the time, then produces 15A the other half. The current then comes to (41A+15A)/2 = 28A. The power comes to 1/2 * 41W + 1/2*-15W = 13W.
The normal formula for power is voltage times current. Now, for the sake of simplicity let us assume the voltage is 1V. This makes calculations for the currents easier.
The bulb consumes 13W, so you'd expect a current of 13A. However, the current ends up being 28A. You can think of it as if part of the time the CFL is acting as a generator. So instead of just consuming 13A, it consumes 42A half the time, and then produces 14A the other half. If you average 42 and 14, you get the 28A!
Now if the resistance of the conductors between the generator and the CFL are 0.001 ohm (round trip), the voltage loss will be 0.028V. Multiply this by the current and you have the power loss in the wires: 0.028V * 28A =.784W. If the current had only been 13A, the loss would've been 0.013V * 13A = 0.169W. As the electricity companies have to pay for the losses themselves, they like to ask you not to use devices that have such a low power factor. This costs them nothing.
The resistance of only 0.001 ohm is unrealistically low. Even for just a few feet of wiring. That is why we normally use a higher voltage.
The bad news: the utilities have to generate the equivalent of 28 watts
This is NOT true. The utilities have to TRANSPORT the equivalent of 28 watts. If they manage to hold on to 90% of what they transport, costs them just over a Watt of extra energy they need to produce.
You seem to be implying that in Europe we generally have symmetric service.
My nephew has had something like 100/100 for some 10 year now. But that's less than 1% (probably less than 0.01%, but I'm risk-averse and try to mention statements that end up being true even though the numbers may be a bit off).
As far as I can tell from this side of the big pond, the majority of europe is on ADSL or cable, with about a 8:1 download/upload ratio.
However..... Even if SMART checks out and the vendor-test program says the HD is ok, some drives might just be taking seconds to minutes to "recover" the right data.
If this is the case, your monitor programs would not show much disk activity, but the HD light will be continuously on during the stalls.
Excuse me? If everybody supports leap days, and time needs to be accurately kept across systems, then all systems should simply implement leap seconds.
It is not acceptable if some software implements the leap-day as the first day of a leap year. It is only acceptable as the last day of february.
So when a leap second comes about, everybody leaps a second at the same time, and no noise is introduced.
If clocks slew at different rates, they need to be corrected for anyway. So either you run public NTP which will probably give you leap seconds as well, or you run NTP on your private network. This is an out-of-the-box solution, but you could also chose to implement anything again from scratch. Fine.
(I think you're worried about some systems applying it an hour early, and others an hour too late. The idea about leap seconds is that they happen, just like leap days, at a precise specified point in the calendar. Here in Holland we've been through the whole new years thing already by the time the leap second hits: We're at UTC+1. Here the leap second gets added just before 1:00 AM.
If you're worried about there being half a second or so jitter between applications of the leap second, then the problems are 100x less than what apparently exists now when some systems got accepted without support for leap seconds. )
The amount of energy in the device is comparable to the amount of gas you normally take along on a trip in a car. Would you like to be in your car while all the gas releases it's stored energy (burns) in 3-6 minutes? Think not. (apparently the device is capable of absorbing this amount of energy in such a short time, then it will also be able to release it in a similar short time. As noted below, it will heat up, and start uncontrolled reactions and then acutally blow up.)
Re: the current calculations, they are talking 3500V. So charging might be done at around 180A, which is not an absurd number. The voltage is however quite dangerous, and care should be taken to separate it from children's fingers. It's still 600kW charging power, so that's not a normal home outlet....
Everything that can store energy has the option of exploding. If the density of the energy is about that of a normal car battery, it's slighly difficult to get it to explode. Once you get to the energy density of a li-ion battery, you start getting a serious option of explosion. So much that apparently doing something slightly wrong makes the devices explode in the field without much provocation.
If this is to be (much) better than LI-ion, then it certainly has the option of explosion.
If there is some natural barrier that will hold the reaction elements apart, that barrier will break down given enough temperature. Then the chemical reactions will happen without electrical current being produced. In that case more heat will be generated, and the process will "run away" (go faster quickly). Booooom!
In batteries, this happens if you short the terminals. Because the voltage at the terminals becomes zero if you properly short the battery, a large current will flow, and no electrical energy will be delivered to the load (there is none). Lot s of energy will be released as heat in the internal resistance of the battery, and it will heat up. To the point that whatever barriers were present melt and the reaction runs away.
I play bridge. All 52 cards matter. 7 shuffles? Hell no!
On an average evening, 24 people shuffle a deck each. On average, the distributions of the cards is far from what you'd expect from a good (say by a computer) shuffle....
FYI, here in holland you just pay a guesstimate every month, and they give you a final bill every year.
They try to get a meter reading every year. They trust you to do it yourself. They send a guy over every once in a while (i.e. every 5 years or so) to keep you honest. All you can do is postpone the stuff for a while. If you move you either have to arrange for an official meter-taking, or you have to sign a common "agreed meter-positions" note with the next inhabitant.
Apparently they HAVE to check the readings every three years. In practise they don't.
So, here in the Netherlands, most meters are on the insides of houses, and accessible for home owners to put a camera in front.
The speed of an operating system is not benchmarked with a "video encoding test". Video encoding is a CPU intensive task, and all operating systems but the very worst (hmmmm. I've got a point there...) will be able to give say 95% plus of the CPU to a CPU intensive task.
Video encoding is a benchmark to compare different CPUs. Or possibly different compilers.
The "feel-speed" of an operating system is important. And this IS very difficult to benchmark.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to live in a country where using a bit of softdrugs is NOT considered a crime. Do you?
As far as I can tell in the USA, yes, smoking a bit of weed is considered just as bad as stealing a car or killing your wife.
That would be a valid argument if the drugs used would be legal. I think a company can request their employees to abide by the law, even in their own time. IBM worker steals car! Microsoft employee kills wife! Companies don't want to be associated with such incidents.
There is another problem with drug use. If the user gets addicted and starts using more and more, the drug use might affect work performance. So a clear rule: "no drug use" is something that makes sense.
Employment is a contract. In most contracts both sides have options to request conditions the other side must obey to or they won't enter into the contract. If the employer wants in the contract: No drugs, you might be tested, then that's a take-it-or-leave-it issue for the employee. Similarly, if the employee wants to shift his work-hours a few hours towards the evening, because he likes to sleep late, he could have that put into the contract, and tell the employer: take it or leave it.
The Turkish airlines incident was meant as an example of a hardware error. First the plane had an hardware error that caused (one) altimeter to malfunction. Next the hardware behaved so unexpectedly that the pilots didn't have any time to react.
In the face of these hardware errors, the pilots behaved more or less as can be expected of them, and crashed the plane. On the other hand, had the captain flipped the correct switch before taking command, the plane wouldn't have crashed. So it is easy to blame "pilot error". And there are parties that have an economical interest in calling "pilot error".
In general, in my non-expert opinion, the Airbus has a problem with the pilots not being enough aware of weather or not the autopilot is on, or partly on (and if so, which part). I bet there is an indicator light somewhere. So if the pilots didn't see that, it's pilot error. No modifications neccesary. On the other hand lots of lives have been lost with the pilots confused about the state of the autopilot. Shouldn't those indications be a bit more prominent?
When a change-in-price happens, economy adjusts. Here in the Netherlands, our government decided to add about 12% to the price of gasoline, promising that this was temporary. (in 1991, never retracted).
This changed the percentage that average families would spend on gas. Some couldn't afford it, so they had to change their ways.
A slow and gradual adoption of the emissions-taxes will cause a similar change in the habits and budgets of families and factories. The end result is better for the global climate.
Now about your "damned anyway".... You're exagerating. Global temperature HAS already risen significantly. There is absolutely NO WAY we can change that with measures taken today. In that sense we're already damned. For sure.
On the other hand, the situation of this planet 100 years from now, does depend on our actions today.
My prediction is that 50 years from now the world will be a lot hotter than it is today with major shifts of sea level, and "where deserts are", and that this is unavoidable. Partly because of the emissions we've already done, and partly because a certain momentum in humanity is unavoidable: We simply can't do the perfect thing tomorrow. But then again, I'm not a climate expert.
But if we start doing somethings right today, we'll certainly be able to influence the severity of the situation 50 and 100 years from now.
Although I agree that giving computers some control about the plane is a good idea, there is a tendency to blame everything on pilot error. In theory it is possible to fly the plane to the destination, so if the pilots get the plane in trouble, it's always pilot error.
Say turkish airlines this february near schiphol, the Netherlands. Altimeter fails -> plane decides to do weird things -> pilots react too late. (actually pilot-in-training reacts on time, captain takes over, and doesn't expect the autopilot to engage again, and give the plane the wrong commands again!).
It starts with a failure in the plane, but the pilots end up screwing up. If you scream "pilot error", airbus, boeing and the airlines don't have to engage in expensive redesigns/fixes. Just a note to send to all the pilots that they shouldn't do whatever brought down the latest crash.
Exactly! The tax should be the value of the long term effect on global environment. But since the conversion rate to "equivalent of CO2" of several different greenhouse gasses are already known, it is easiest to start with (equivalent-)C02.
I didn't say it would solve our climatic change problem. IMHO it's already too late for that. (i.e. if we'd stop emitting CO2 now-ish altogether, we'd still be in trouble a couple of decades from now).
And you're right. Very difficult to implement in practise for the reasons you (and I) mentioned....
The problem is that these comparisons are difficult to do. The only way to accurately allow estimations of such climate-efficiency is to impose climate-taxes.
Make every company pay for their emissions into the environment. So the costs of producing electricity will go up because the electricity company has to pay for their CO2 emissions. Similarly the steel mill producing the steel for the hummer will charge higher prices because of the CO2 they produce, and to compensate for the higher electricity bill.
Eventually throughout industry a new price-level will stabilize and in the train tickets and airline tickets their relative climate-efficiency will show through. People will feel the climate-inefficiency of the hummer (or the prius if you believe that report) in the amount they have to pay.
Oh, because taxing all citizens for the CO2 that their cars produce is not feasable, you add a tax on the fuels: The amount of CO2 per gallon of fuel is easy to calculate.
And... because this will shift prices significantly, it is not feasible to start these taxes all at once. So besides that the eventual rates should be known in advance, so that companies can change their investment patterns to for example build more CO2 efficient plants in the years that ramp up the cost of emitting CO2 into the environment.
There are some difficult problems: What is the CO2 equivalent price of radioactive wastes? This depends a lot on for example the cost of "suppose 100 years from now the storage facility generates a leak causing 100 square miles of our country to become inhabitable". The chances of that happening are small, difficult to estimate, but the resulting cost to the environment so enormous that they do make a contribution to the "global-environmental-cost" of using nuclear energy.
Another problem is that this doesn't make sense to do in just one country. This has to be done globally otherwise it is tremendously unfair for companies that are in a country that taxes its companies compared with those that are in a country that doesn't tax its companies. (You might be able to add those taxes at the border. So competition inside a country becomes fair. And the "other country" will see that the taxes that they could've charged end up being charged at the border, and flow into the foreign government, providing an incentive for them to implement the taxes....)
Storing lots of data on this system means I pay, on average about $0.10 per Gb, plus the cost of the reader, right? Lets see how much cheaper this is than just buying harddrives. 1.5Tb costs $100, so that comes to $0.066 per Gb... Ooops.... It's more expensive than harddrives.
Let me predict: It won't sell....
Generally at least one of the involved pieces of equipment is one of those top-of-the-line ones like Cisco....
Oops I made a small error in the example. Consumes 41A half the time, then produces 15A the other half. The current then comes to (41A+15A)/2 = 28A. The power comes to 1/2 * 41W + 1/2*-15W = 13W.
Correct.
The normal formula for power is voltage times current. Now, for the sake of simplicity let us assume the voltage is 1V. This makes calculations for the currents easier.
The bulb consumes 13W, so you'd expect a current of 13A. However, the current ends up being 28A. You can think of it as if part of the time the CFL is acting as a generator. So instead of just consuming 13A, it consumes 42A half the time, and then produces 14A the other half. If you average 42 and 14, you get the 28A!
Now if the resistance of the conductors between the generator and the CFL are 0.001 ohm (round trip), the voltage loss will be 0.028V. Multiply this by the current and you have the power loss in the wires: 0.028V * 28A = .784W. If the current had only been 13A, the loss would've been 0.013V * 13A = 0.169W. As the electricity companies have to pay for the losses themselves, they like to ask you not to use devices that have such a low power factor. This costs them nothing.
The resistance of only 0.001 ohm is unrealistically low. Even for just a few feet of wiring. That is why we normally use a higher voltage.
Someone got the concept of power factor wrong.
The bad news: the utilities have to generate the equivalent of 28 watts
This is NOT true. The utilities have to TRANSPORT the equivalent of 28 watts. If they manage to hold on to 90% of what they transport, costs them just over a Watt of extra energy they need to produce.
You seem to be implying that in Europe we generally have symmetric service.
My nephew has had something like 100/100 for some 10 year now. But that's less than 1% (probably less than 0.01%, but I'm risk-averse and try to mention statements that end up being true even though the numbers may be a bit off).
As far as I can tell from this side of the big pond, the majority of europe is on ADSL or cable, with about a 8:1 download/upload ratio.
However..... Even if SMART checks out and the vendor-test program says the HD is ok, some drives might just be taking seconds to minutes to "recover" the right data.
If this is the case, your monitor programs would not show much disk activity, but the HD light will be continuously on during the stalls.
2.6.x has a slightly larger footprint. But as you're moving to a modern platform probably with quite enough RAM, I'd say that's not a problem.
I wouldn't do it for the features others are recommending: You have your embedded app, which already runs on 2.4, it will still run on 2.4.
However, you might encounter problems with support for peripherals on 2.4, so just going for 2.6 will be less painful.
I recommend staying with what you have, unless prodded, like now, and then doing a catchup to the most recent stuff.
Excuse me? If everybody supports leap days, and time needs to be accurately kept across systems, then all systems should simply implement leap seconds.
It is not acceptable if some software implements the leap-day as the first day of a leap year. It is only acceptable as the last day of february.
So when a leap second comes about, everybody leaps a second at the same time, and no noise is introduced.
If clocks slew at different rates, they need to be corrected for anyway. So either you run public NTP which will probably give you leap seconds as well, or you run NTP on your private network. This is an out-of-the-box solution, but you could also chose to implement anything again from scratch. Fine.
(I think you're worried about some systems applying it an hour early, and others an hour too late. The idea about leap seconds is that they happen, just like leap days, at a precise specified point in the calendar. Here in Holland we've been through the whole new years thing already by the time the leap second hits: We're at UTC+1. Here the leap second gets added just before 1:00 AM.
If you're worried about there being half a second or so jitter between applications of the leap second, then the problems are 100x less than what apparently exists now when some systems got accepted without support for leap seconds. )
You mean that in a critical field-of-work a system that fails more often than "doesn't work on leap days" gets past the acceptance tests?
I now understand where the pressure to remove leap seconds comes from. From the idiots that can't specify systems that handle them correctly.
No, 1.5kW for one hour is exactly 1.5 kWh.
0.12383247 kW for one hour is exactly 0.12383247 kWh. The conversion factor here is exactly 1.0000
The amount of energy in the device is comparable to the amount of gas you normally take along on a trip in a car. Would you like to be in your car while all the gas releases it's stored energy (burns) in 3-6 minutes? Think not. (apparently the device is capable of absorbing this amount of energy in such a short time, then it will also be able to release it in a similar short time. As noted below, it will heat up, and start uncontrolled reactions and then acutally blow up.)
Re: the current calculations, they are talking 3500V. So charging might be done at around 180A, which is not an absurd number. The voltage is however quite dangerous, and care should be taken to separate it from children's fingers. It's still 600kW charging power, so that's not a normal home outlet....
You have a serious math problem.
1200 Joules/sec is around 1200Watt, not 1500.
1.5kW for an hour uses on or around 1.5 kWh. You can run 1.5kW for about 40 minutes on 1kWh or you can run 1kW for an hour on 1kWh.
Everything that can store energy has the option of exploding. If the density of the energy is about that of a normal car battery, it's slighly difficult to get it to explode. Once you get to the energy density of a li-ion battery, you start getting a serious option of explosion. So much that apparently doing something slightly wrong makes the devices explode in the field without much provocation.
If this is to be (much) better than LI-ion, then it certainly has the option of explosion.
If there is some natural barrier that will hold the reaction elements apart, that barrier will break down given enough temperature. Then the chemical reactions will happen without electrical current being produced. In that case more heat will be generated, and the process will "run away" (go faster quickly). Booooom!
In batteries, this happens if you short the terminals. Because the voltage at the terminals becomes zero if you properly short the battery, a large current will flow, and no electrical energy will be delivered to the load (there is none). Lot s of energy will be released as heat in the internal resistance of the battery, and it will heat up. To the point that whatever barriers were present melt and the reaction runs away.
I play bridge. All 52 cards matter. 7 shuffles? Hell no!
On an average evening, 24 people shuffle a deck each. On average, the distributions of the cards is far from what you'd expect from a good (say by a computer) shuffle....
FYI, here in holland you just pay a guesstimate every month, and they give you a final bill every year.
They try to get a meter reading every year. They trust you to do it yourself. They send a guy over every once in a while (i.e. every 5 years or so) to keep you honest. All you can do is postpone the stuff for a while. If you move you either have to arrange for an official meter-taking, or you have to sign a common "agreed meter-positions" note with the next inhabitant.
Apparently they HAVE to check the readings every three years. In practise they don't.
So, here in the Netherlands, most meters are on the insides of houses, and accessible for home owners to put a camera in front.
They are doing the wrong benchmarks. As usual.
The speed of an operating system is not benchmarked with a "video encoding test". Video encoding is a CPU intensive task, and all operating systems but the very worst (hmmmm. I've got a point there...) will be able to give say 95% plus of the CPU to a CPU intensive task.
Video encoding is a benchmark to compare different CPUs. Or possibly different compilers.
The "feel-speed" of an operating system is important. And this IS very difficult to benchmark.