How do you go about sinking something into the ground, that gets up to 500+ degrees C, without melting the permafrost?
I'd think that you don't. Just melt it pre-emptively, install, and it'll stay melted for the life of the reactor, assuming the reaction keeps going. You'd basically have a layer of non-frozen dirt surrounding it. The key being that it would have to remain in a reasonably steady state despite changes in weather. If you bury it deep enough, even that may not be a concern.
The Alaska pipeline has chilled pylons on it because the part above ground might get as warm as 75 degrees, thereby warming the part below ground enough to melt the permafrost.
I'm guessing that the danger would be a chronic melting and re-freezing of the soil around pylon footings, due to the oil flowing though at different rates, or just different weather. So the simpler solution there would be to keep the pylons frozen, rather than try to keep the dirt they're sitting in un-frozen.
The only problem I can see with it (aside from public perception) is that it involves a shaft dug into permafrost. I'd be somewhat worried that a wet fall followed by a sudden cold spell could lead to the shaft getting crushed.
Two reasons why this may not be a problem:
1. The permafrost only goes so deep. It may be possible for the reactor to
lie below the permafrost layer. Even if not, it seems reasonable that you'd be able to get it below the level where a wet fall could melt it.
2. If the diameter of the shaft is not too large, then you're going to have the hole *increase* in size as the surrounding material expands. Think about it -- the expanding ice is pushing against itself in the tangential direction around the hole (as well as all other directions), causing the hole to expand along with the rest of it.
Wait, there's a third:
3. This thing is going to be generating its own heat; the waste heat has to go somewhere. It may well be enough to keep the earth around it permanently non-frozen
This thing sounds like a basic MHD generator. So impurites would proabbly help it.
Though I would think that blobby bits of organic matter would not. So yeah, probably won't need an RO filter, but would still need to get out the sub-mircon particles.
The energy would have to come from somewhere else, and since the idea is pretty new, I doubt that anyone knows in much detail how (or if) it will work out in practice.
Yeah -- the article mentions catching rainwater and getting electricity from that, but there's the little matter of the purity of the water. I'd imagine you'd need it to be pretty clean in order to not clog up all those little tubes. Hell,you might even need a reverse-osmosis filter. And then that takes quite a bit of pressure to work, which rainwater from the roof probably doesn't have. Not to mention the problem of whether cost of such filters exceeds the value of the electricity you actually get out of it.
I suppose you could either recharge a normal battery by pumping the handle your handy, portable water-generator for a few minutes, a bit like a baygen radio.
Or, you could store the water under pressure and let it out through the device to get the energy back out.
Just had one whacky idea: to power your laptop, you have a system of two water bladders shaped like seat cushions. You sit on one, and the water flows slowly to the other, generating power. Then switch cushions. Repeat.
Of course, if you have to keep switching every 2 minutes, that would be real pain in the...
Each elevator is designed with an aerodynamic body, pressurization and emergency braking systems, and the world's first triple-stage anti-overshooting system. The cost for each elevator is over $US 2 million.
Um, what is a "triple-stage anti-overshooting system"?
It's a highly sophisticated, interactive system of three dwarves standing on one another's shoulders to reach the brake lever.
(Previous designs employed Hobbits, but they took too many lunch breaks.)
I'm not sure how Apple is f*cking up your ability to enjoy your entertainment.
Perhaps I used too strong a word for it to apply to Apple. Though it certainly does apply elsewhere.
Take the MiniDisc format for example. We'd all have probably been using them 5 years ago instead of messing with CD-ROMs if Sony would have just made computer drives that could read the music disks, and not hobbled digital transfers between disks. But instead you have a near white elephant of a format that is dying a slow death. Probably would've had multi-GB disks that you could buy for $5 by now if there had been demand. And there would have been demand if there had been freedom.
Back to Apple...
1)You can listen to the songs you buy anywhere you want. Home PC? No prob. ipod? No prob. Burn them to a CD? Basically unrestricted.
2) You can listen on multiple computers -- either by sharing or by authorizing multiple computers.
Well, these are still impediments. Annoyances that require you to put in needless extra work if you don't want to work strictly within their system. And of course there's the impediment that you must have an Apple computer (or now Windows), along with special software, in order to get access to it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't work with a regular browser.
What can't you do? Give music away to millions of people you don't know.
Uhh, I think you still can. You just described how to get around the barriers.
And that's my whole point: technical barriers don't solve the problem, just interfere with legit uses. The answer is a legal and cultural one.
Come on, if you want legit digital downloads, there's going to have to be some restrictions.
Isn't the threat of lawsuit enough?
I mean that seriously -- the whole lawsuit/accountability angle really is the proper way to go about it. F**king up everyone's ability to enjoy their digital entertainment, or even just placing stupid hurdles in the way, is *not*.
Precisely one of the reasons that the Athlon is such a strong performer is because the memory controller is embedded into the processer, greatly reducing memory access latency. They certainly didn't go to all that work for nothing! And putting more than one core on a chip is all about the same idea. It's a lot easier to hit high transmission rates when your "wires" are one or two millimeters long, not 3-7 inches long.
Hum... your argument makes sense if the two cores actually needed to communicate with each other, but, from my understanding, that's not going to happen much, as they'll typically be running separate threads. Perhaps an application in which the threads need to sync up quite often would benefit; I don't know what's typical.
But if the two cores aren't communicating so much, then it seems as if it'd have the opposite effect: they're contending with each other for bandwidth to L3 and/or main memory. Even if that were alleviated by doubling the pinout (along with a matching doubling for L3/main-mem access, if that's possible), you still have the fact that you can't fit as much cache on the chip as you otherwise could. i.e. from the perspective of each thread, it sees another core sitting there on the chip where it might otherwise see additional cache.
If one of those cores ends up idle due to a non-threaded program running... well, you've effectively got a big hole in the chip where you might othewise have some nice, low-latency cache.
Not sure what you're saying about server applications; you kinda contradict yourself, in terms of how compute-bound the applications are. This is of course application-specific; the customer would have to evaluate the tradeoffs of having an extra core vs. bigger on-chip cache. Which is why you wouldn't design the architecture to necessarily have multiple cores; it's an option you can add to give the customers choice.
In terms of multi-core for desktop applications -- well, again you have to ask if most people would get more out of a bigger cache vs. another core.
Which I guess points to the advantage of the "virtual multithreading" or whatever the term is for what Intel added onto the Pentium recently: you then can make the choice in software; halve the cache and get two threads running at once (though they may still contend for resources in the core) vs. getting a full-size cache.
Now, there are several options. They could come up with a new processer design, but that takes a tremendous amount of R&D. They could just put tons of cache on the chip, but that gives diminishing returns.
Or.... the Opterons already have very simply I/O mechanisms, namely, HyperTransport. Literally all they have to do is plop down two Opteron cores, connect the HyperTransport lines, and bam: Dual-core processer. I'm honestly surprised they're not doing it SOONER.
Plopping down multiple cores is one of the *last* things you do with an architecture; it's what you do when you've run out of other options.
Actually, take a closer look at the article:
... Opteron, in fact, is designed in a way that enables a second core to be added, Weber noted.
"We will have a multicore product," Weber said.
...
Kinda misleading for that to be in an article about K9, isn't it?
For new architectures, there's a surprisingly large amount you can do to sqeeze more instruction-level parallelism out of a single core (longer lookahead buffers, improved trace cache, etc.). You can use up *lots* of transistors with that stuff, and come out with a better performance enhancement than multiple cores will give you for your average program -- which is still typically not going to be multi-threaded.
Yes, designing new architectures is expensive, but then once you have a good processor design team put together, and they've given you a great processor -- what are you gonna do, lay them all off? You really want to bet your company's future on milking the current architecture forever?
I think that multicore is becoming a standard tool in the "what do we do to push this architecture farther?" arsenal for all new CPU's. You don't necessarily go with it right off the bat, if you have a truly advanced architecture to start with.
They would love to suddenly have their apps run on multiple platforms. Think about it, Windows XP is $150 and Office $400, which one brings in more money?
Which one is practically required to exist on every PC that Dell/Gateway/etc. sell? What percentage of these companies' customers will actually go on to purchase a $400 software suite?
MS has bet the farm on its hammerlock control of the OS. If it were really forced to compete based solely on its Office suite and other apps, it's profits would fall face-first in the mud, relative to where they are now. I don't see them doing that intentionally.
But you could just save $3299 and simply use some cellophane: link.
That's not really a "true" 3d solution: you still have to cross your eyes to get it to work. Really, it's no different from splitting the screen down the middle and showing one image on each side. Like this.
You don't think we'll be having bigger screens by then? That's one thing that's really holding you open source guys back. You don't dare to gamble on the capabilities of the future hardware.
How is it an advantage to make the software usable only with as-yet-nonexistent hardware?
Now, if memetics proves to be a viral idea, does that invalidate memetics or prove it? Quite a paradox, eh? I suppose it's entirely possible for memetics to be valid; it's just that it may not be valid for people to think about it!
Man, I'll be glad when these memetics-as-virus-paradox posts go out of fashion; I'm sick of hearing them!
Seems like a video encoder program could be smartened-up to recognize these blotches, and fill them in w/ scene data from adjacent frames.
I guess such a program would be illegal under the DMCA, which means
only the pirated copies would be free of them. So might we end up with a situation where the pirated copies of a film are of better quality than the orignial?
No matter how technically savvy you are, if your email address is picked up by a spammer you will receive spam
There's a nice, free service to help you avoid this: sneakemail.com. It lets you easily generate fake email addresses to give out when you need to; the email is re-routed back to your real account through sneakemail's server. If you start getting spammed through that fake email addr, just shut it off!
Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
The article had a very good point at the end: if you take a step back for a moment, the spam problem really isn't *so* bad, since it's the freedoms of the internet that we cherish so much that made it possible. i.e. in a sense, it's actually worth it. If you take care not to be foolish with giving out your email, etc. etc., your spam level should be low enough to be tolerable. Perhaps *eradicating* the spam is not necessary -- at least, not worth the pain that inevitably comes with government interventions.
Reading the article doesn't help much, except that it says
that Coors already did something like this, and it worked.
Obviously the authors don't know what they're talking about.
It must be something like there being an actual transmitter
in the winning can; it will use GPS to determine its location,
and broadcast that; the contest-runners then zero in on that
signal. But wait, why couldn't it just broadcast a "ping", and
they simply triangulate to find the can? What the hell would
it use GPS for?
Also, if the can is sitting within one of those 400-cubic-foot
end displays of coke cans in the supermarket, how is it even
going to hear a signal?
It still doesn't add up. Someone is being phenomenally stupid
here, either the article writers or the promotional geniuses
at Coke. And we know how smart *they* are... *cough*newcoke*cough*
I think it would apply to grade school even more than college, for the same reason as why governments should only use open-source software: if you're using public money to pay for information products, shouldn't that information also be in the public domain?
School systems shouldn't be slaves to the big publishing companies that base their books' content on marketablility (e.g. making sure not to offend anyone, and raising the P.C.-ness level to the point where the texts are completely devoid of interesting content). A state's school system should be able to put a lot less money into some bargain-basement publisher who *just* does the job of printing the damn things; the savings could then go into a small staff of content writers/editors to accomodate whatever specializations their local culture calls for. And to contibute the the work as a whole.
Yeah, I like this idea a LOT.
Btw, another reason why it would be more applicable to grade school is that college texts tend to be much more specialized. Just as the most successful open src. projects are for those "fundamental" programs like OS, brower, etc., the most successful open-src texts would be the ones covering the fundamentals of math, science, etc.
Perhaps even scarier, is if this meteorite had been as big as the Tunguska event, it would probably have been mistaken for a nuclear explosion.
I wish I could find a link, but I remember reading a report of some American general or other official worrying about just that -- after a sattelite picked up an airburst over the ocean not far from India. That event was only a few years ago, and it was of sufficient size that it could have been mistaken for a nuke if it was over land. (Probably not nearly as big as Tunguska, though).
Other posts here have said that India does have sufficient command structure to not give a knee-jerk reaction, but then again you never know. And what about
Pakistan?
If they haven't already, I think it would be a good idea for U.S. intelligence to set up a quick-notification system with the govt's of both Pakistan and India. So that if an airburst happened near one of the two countries, both govt's would know quickly that it didn't have the signatures of a nuke.
Some of the 5% could be organizations that only had MS expertise in-house, and were attempting to convert to Linux, only to find that it turned out more expensive for them because they were forcing their Linux servers to act like windows. See here.
Oh, and...
Or perhaps it came with a hardware upgrade and they got it packaged. So they just replaced the linux system with the win2003.
I believe I read a quote from just such a PHB while reading some of the Win 2003 rollout coverage. It was a guy who was saying something like, "yeah, we're replacing 10 of our old linux servers with only 3 new Windows 2003 servers. What a cost savings!"
The linux machines were probably Pentium-1's or something. Ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the gov't still found *some* way to spend $500 each on them.
I think that applies *anytime* someone is calling your pockets "deep".
That could be a problem. You'll need to find at least one normal person to manage the reactor!
I'd think that you don't. Just melt it pre-emptively, install, and it'll stay melted for the life of the reactor, assuming the reaction keeps going. You'd basically have a layer of non-frozen dirt surrounding it. The key being that it would have to remain in a reasonably steady state despite changes in weather. If you bury it deep enough, even that may not be a concern.
The Alaska pipeline has chilled pylons on it because the part above ground might get as warm as 75 degrees, thereby warming the part below ground enough to melt the permafrost.
I'm guessing that the danger would be a chronic melting and re-freezing of the soil around pylon footings, due to the oil flowing though at different rates, or just different weather. So the simpler solution there would be to keep the pylons frozen, rather than try to keep the dirt they're sitting in un-frozen.
Two reasons why this may not be a problem:
1. The permafrost only goes so deep. It may be possible for the reactor to lie below the permafrost layer. Even if not, it seems reasonable that you'd be able to get it below the level where a wet fall could melt it.
2. If the diameter of the shaft is not too large, then you're going to have the hole *increase* in size as the surrounding material expands. Think about it -- the expanding ice is pushing against itself in the tangential direction around the hole (as well as all other directions), causing the hole to expand along with the rest of it.
Wait, there's a third:
3. This thing is going to be generating its own heat; the waste heat has to go somewhere. It may well be enough to keep the earth around it permanently non-frozen
.
Though I would think that blobby bits of organic matter would not. So yeah, probably won't need an RO filter, but would still need to get out the sub-mircon particles.
Yeah -- the article mentions catching rainwater and getting electricity from that, but there's the little matter of the purity of the water. I'd imagine you'd need it to be pretty clean in order to not clog up all those little tubes. Hell,you might even need a reverse-osmosis filter. And then that takes quite a bit of pressure to work, which rainwater from the roof probably doesn't have. Not to mention the problem of whether cost of such filters exceeds the value of the electricity you actually get out of it.
I suppose you could either recharge a normal battery by pumping the handle your handy, portable water-generator for a few minutes, a bit like a baygen radio.
Or, you could store the water under pressure and let it out through the device to get the energy back out.
Just had one whacky idea: to power your laptop, you have a system of two water bladders shaped like seat cushions. You sit on one, and the water flows slowly to the other, generating power. Then switch cushions. Repeat.
Of course, if you have to keep switching every 2 minutes, that would be real pain in the ...
It's a highly sophisticated, interactive system of three dwarves standing on one another's shoulders to reach the brake lever.
(Previous designs employed Hobbits, but they took too many lunch breaks.)
Perhaps I used too strong a word for it to apply to Apple. Though it certainly does apply elsewhere.
Take the MiniDisc format for example. We'd all have probably been using them 5 years ago instead of messing with CD-ROMs if Sony would have just made computer drives that could read the music disks, and not hobbled digital transfers between disks. But instead you have a near white elephant of a format that is dying a slow death. Probably would've had multi-GB disks that you could buy for $5 by now if there had been demand. And there would have been demand if there had been freedom.
Back to Apple...
1)You can listen to the songs you buy anywhere you want. Home PC? No prob. ipod? No prob. Burn them to a CD? Basically unrestricted.
2) You can listen on multiple computers -- either by sharing or by authorizing multiple computers.
Well, these are still impediments. Annoyances that require you to put in needless extra work if you don't want to work strictly within their system. And of course there's the impediment that you must have an Apple computer (or now Windows), along with special software, in order to get access to it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't work with a regular browser.
What can't you do? Give music away to millions of people you don't know.
Uhh, I think you still can. You just described how to get around the barriers.
And that's my whole point: technical barriers don't solve the problem, just interfere with legit uses. The answer is a legal and cultural one.
Isn't the threat of lawsuit enough?
I mean that seriously -- the whole lawsuit/accountability angle really is the proper way to go about it. F**king up everyone's ability to enjoy their digital entertainment, or even just placing stupid hurdles in the way, is *not*.
Hum... your argument makes sense if the two cores actually needed to communicate with each other, but, from my understanding, that's not going to happen much, as they'll typically be running separate threads. Perhaps an application in which the threads need to sync up quite often would benefit; I don't know what's typical.
But if the two cores aren't communicating so much, then it seems as if it'd have the opposite effect: they're contending with each other for bandwidth to L3 and/or main memory. Even if that were alleviated by doubling the pinout (along with a matching doubling for L3/main-mem access, if that's possible), you still have the fact that you can't fit as much cache on the chip as you otherwise could. i.e. from the perspective of each thread, it sees another core sitting there on the chip where it might otherwise see additional cache.
If one of those cores ends up idle due to a non-threaded program running... well, you've effectively got a big hole in the chip where you might othewise have some nice, low-latency cache.
Not sure what you're saying about server applications; you kinda contradict yourself, in terms of how compute-bound the applications are. This is of course application-specific; the customer would have to evaluate the tradeoffs of having an extra core vs. bigger on-chip cache. Which is why you wouldn't design the architecture to necessarily have multiple cores; it's an option you can add to give the customers choice.
In terms of multi-core for desktop applications -- well, again you have to ask if most people would get more out of a bigger cache vs. another core.
Which I guess points to the advantage of the "virtual multithreading" or whatever the term is for what Intel added onto the Pentium recently: you then can make the choice in software; halve the cache and get two threads running at once (though they may still contend for resources in the core) vs. getting a full-size cache.
Ok, I've rambled enough for the moment. :)
Now, there are several options. They could come up with a new processer design, but that takes a tremendous amount of R&D. They could just put tons of cache on the chip, but that gives diminishing returns.
Or.... the Opterons already have very simply I/O mechanisms, namely, HyperTransport. Literally all they have to do is plop down two Opteron cores, connect the HyperTransport lines, and bam: Dual-core processer. I'm honestly surprised they're not doing it SOONER.
Plopping down multiple cores is one of the *last* things you do with an architecture; it's what you do when you've run out of other options.
Actually, take a closer look at the article:
Kinda misleading for that to be in an article about K9, isn't it?For new architectures, there's a surprisingly large amount you can do to sqeeze more instruction-level parallelism out of a single core (longer lookahead buffers, improved trace cache, etc.). You can use up *lots* of transistors with that stuff, and come out with a better performance enhancement than multiple cores will give you for your average program -- which is still typically not going to be multi-threaded.
Yes, designing new architectures is expensive, but then once you have a good processor design team put together, and they've given you a great processor -- what are you gonna do, lay them all off? You really want to bet your company's future on milking the current architecture forever?
I think that multicore is becoming a standard tool in the "what do we do to push this architecture farther?" arsenal for all new CPU's. You don't necessarily go with it right off the bat, if you have a truly advanced architecture to start with.
Which one is practically required to exist on every PC that Dell/Gateway/etc. sell? What percentage of these companies' customers will actually go on to purchase a $400 software suite?
MS has bet the farm on its hammerlock control of the OS. If it were really forced to compete based solely on its Office suite and other apps, it's profits would fall face-first in the mud, relative to where they are now. I don't see them doing that intentionally.
Me, I keep thinking "Pinhead Boss".
That's not really a "true" 3d solution: you still have to cross your eyes to get it to work. Really, it's no different from splitting the screen down the middle and showing one image on each side. Like this.
How is it an advantage to make the software usable only with as-yet-nonexistent hardware?
It would also need a much smaller die size; the tremendous amount of cache it has on-board pushes the price up way past the desktop range.
Man, I'll be glad when these memetics-as-virus-paradox posts go out of fashion; I'm sick of hearing them!
I guess such a program would be illegal under the DMCA, which means only the pirated copies would be free of them. So might we end up with a situation where the pirated copies of a film are of better quality than the orignial?
There's a nice, free service to help you avoid this: sneakemail.com. It lets you easily generate fake email addresses to give out when you need to; the email is re-routed back to your real account through sneakemail's server. If you start getting spammed through that fake email addr, just shut it off!
Just don't think that you will be able to eradicate spam without governmental help.
The article had a very good point at the end: if you take a step back for a moment, the spam problem really isn't *so* bad, since it's the freedoms of the internet that we cherish so much that made it possible. i.e. in a sense, it's actually worth it. If you take care not to be foolish with giving out your email, etc. etc., your spam level should be low enough to be tolerable. Perhaps *eradicating* the spam is not necessary -- at least, not worth the pain that inevitably comes with government interventions.
No. They hide their addresses.
DDOS the companies that are using the spammers to advertise. They can't hide their IP addr's, or else the spam would do them no good.
Of course, DDOS'ing is still illegal...
Obviously the authors don't know what they're talking about.
It must be something like there being an actual transmitter in the winning can; it will use GPS to determine its location, and broadcast that; the contest-runners then zero in on that signal. But wait, why couldn't it just broadcast a "ping", and they simply triangulate to find the can? What the hell would it use GPS for?
Also, if the can is sitting within one of those 400-cubic-foot end displays of coke cans in the supermarket, how is it even going to hear a signal?
It still doesn't add up. Someone is being phenomenally stupid here, either the article writers or the promotional geniuses at Coke. And we know how smart *they* are... *cough*newcoke*cough*
I think it would apply to grade school even more than college, for the same reason as why governments should only use open-source software: if you're using public money to pay for information products, shouldn't that information also be in the public domain?
School systems shouldn't be slaves to the big publishing companies that base their books' content on marketablility (e.g. making sure not to offend anyone, and raising the P.C.-ness level to the point where the texts are completely devoid of interesting content). A state's school system should be able to put a lot less money into some bargain-basement publisher who *just* does the job of printing the damn things; the savings could then go into a small staff of content writers/editors to accomodate whatever specializations their local culture calls for. And to contibute the the work as a whole.
Yeah, I like this idea a LOT.
Btw, another reason why it would be more applicable to grade school is that college texts tend to be much more specialized. Just as the most successful open src. projects are for those "fundamental" programs like OS, brower, etc., the most successful open-src texts would be the ones covering the fundamentals of math, science, etc.
I wish I could find a link, but I remember reading a report of some American general or other official worrying about just that -- after a sattelite picked up an airburst over the ocean not far from India. That event was only a few years ago, and it was of sufficient size that it could have been mistaken for a nuke if it was over land. (Probably not nearly as big as Tunguska, though).
Other posts here have said that India does have sufficient command structure to not give a knee-jerk reaction, but then again you never know. And what about Pakistan?
If they haven't already, I think it would be a good idea for U.S. intelligence to set up a quick-notification system with the govt's of both Pakistan and India. So that if an airburst happened near one of the two countries, both govt's would know quickly that it didn't have the signatures of a nuke.
Some of the 5% could be organizations that only had MS expertise in-house, and were attempting to convert to Linux, only to find that it turned out more expensive for them because they were forcing their Linux servers to act like windows. See here.
Oh, and...
Or perhaps it came with a hardware upgrade and they got it packaged. So they just replaced the linux system with the win2003.
I believe I read a quote from just such a PHB while reading some of the Win 2003 rollout coverage. It was a guy who was saying something like, "yeah, we're replacing 10 of our old linux servers with only 3 new Windows 2003 servers. What a cost savings!"
The linux machines were probably Pentium-1's or something. Ugh.