The simple fact is that most employers do not care about employees. They care about the bottom line.
Actually, the simple fact is that they MUST give priority to the bottom line, even if they DO care about the employees. In a competitive environment they lose ground if giving a benefit to the employees doesn't confer a compensating financial advantage to the company.
Thus some company management that would like to do better for the employees is stuck in a tragedy of the commons situation. The historic solution to the tragedy of the commons was social pressure in the original case. But in regions with high and diverse population social pressure doesn't work, and you need institutional mechanisms to "fix" this sort of situation - and to negotiate the fix.
Laws are one such mechanism. Another is industry-wide unionization / professional societies / guilds, which offer more individualized negotiaion.
The problem with unions today isn't that they've ran out of their usefulness. The problem is that they're still suffering from corruption of the past and mismanagement.
Two forms of corruption actually.
The first was criminal activity - both individual and organized-crime. Looting of union funds and operation of protection rackets directed against both workers and employers were the two main motivations.
The second (made possible once the union operation was divorced from membership control by the crooks) was involvement with political parties and causes at odds with the interest of the workers.
I don't know how it works in Canada - but in the US the unions are squarely in the Democratic Party's column regardless of the candidates' position on issues relevant to the union - to the point that unions are supporting the very illegal immigration that takes away their members' jobs (by undercutting costs).
The result has been the downfall of unions in every sector but government employees' unions, along with (Republican-supported) grass-roots attempts to pass laws requiring individualized member permission to use dues money for political campaigning.
The designation was not sought by the common carriers. It was thrust on them by legislation and common law. The fact that ISPs find it useful is an just lucky for them. In any event, they may not have the choice of whether they are or are not common carriers.
However, the requirement to carry all comers also confers a privilege - a lack of responsibility for refusing to carry some loads. (The responsibility is borne by the government because it forced them to accept the traffic.) An ISP may find that carrying the union's propaganda is less of a burden than being responsible for kiddie porn.
The union should file a suit against the ISP - not for refusing to carry its traffic, but for recovery for all the SPAM it and its members recieved through their connections, using the fact that the ISP refused to carry the union website traffic as proof that they are NOT a common carrier, and thus bear responsibility for content.
IMHO that will turn the ISP around in very short order.
If they don't turn it back on within a few hours of receiving notice of the suit, file another for damage to their kids' mental health due to viewing kiddie porn carried over the ISP's lines. B-)
Three little problems about them. 1) They cost more than devices they protect (and their protection is that they get fried instead of the protected devices - single-use.) 2) They won't protect against a really strong lightning. 3) They reduce connection quality to level where you're happy with 100Kbit throughput, and can forget 100Mbit.
I think you have these confused with something else. I'm not talking some plug-in telephone/power strip appliance from Fry's or Circuit City.
The ones I'm talking about are intended for use with commercial roof-tower mounted 802.11g antennas with electronics at the antenna fed by ethernet, and by non-802.11 radio links of similar electronics-up-pole configurations. They have to handle repeated surges and (in the 802.11g case) feed a 56 Mbps device that is expecting reliable 100 Mbps Ethernet. (If I understand it correctly, BASE-T Ethernet doesn't degrade baud rates gracefully. If a particular bit pattern fails it will keep failing, and packets will keep dropping. Screw up the cabling's transmission properties too much and it just dies.)
I haven't investigated the price - but would expect that these protectors must also be cheap enough, at least in quantity OEM sales, to be usable on subscriber devices without resulting in a major boost in price over an unprotected device.)
I wouldn't expect a cat-5 running between houses in a suburb to experience surges much more extensive than one running up a tower on top of a skyscraper in the middle of a city.
Unless, of course, your susurb happens to be hobby farms with houses separated by appreciable fractions of a mile, or located on the side of a mountain, in northern New Mexico, or otherwise in an excessively electrically-active area.
Of course NOTHING will survive a direct hit on the wiring. B-)
Why not just pair your cell phone with your laptop over bluetooth and use GPRS if you're satisfied with dialup speeds?
Because GPRS is not available in many areas where I want internet access - including my vacation/retirement house, which is what I bought the darned cellphone and service FOR in the first place.
(Heck: The network is trying to push everybody to switch from TDMA to GSM yet they STILL won't convert the only cell covering that site - and I can't switch carrieres because I'd just end up roaming on the same cell. I'm surprised I don't have to fall back to AMPS - which I'd gladly do if my phone was capable of it, since that WILL carry modem signals.)
IMHO GPRS won't be rolled out generally until somebody does a modem that makes a decent connection over GSM, TDMA, and CDMA CODECs and people start using their flat-rate voice connections for internet access.
Until then (and maybe even after), any cellphone-based internet service will be viewed as a "value-added service" (i.e. a revenue enhancer with another big pricetag attached) that it's only cost-effective to roll out in dense urban areas.
The following ARE available:
- Ethernet cabling (Cat 5 or better) intended to survive an outdoor environment.
- Lightning/surge arresters for where it transitions between indoor and outdoor.
Those provisions had a big role in the success of Silicon Valley. They're one of the reasons the venture capital community is based here, and why there are so many startups.
And why businesses STAY here, despite some of the OTHER assinine laws, the enormous tax rate, and continual efforts by other states to lure companies away. The EMPLOYEES stay here - or move here - due to exactly those two laws. If the businesses needs them, they have to stay as well.
Legislators in any other state that is trying to clone Silicon Valley, or otherwise set up their own high-tek or high-innovation mecca, should take note.
Until you clone those laws, you're hosed.
I strongly recommend cloning them verbatim. This lets you take maximum advantage of any precedent-setting litigation already done in California. (Though the precedent may not transfer the legal arguments will, easing the establishment of equivalent precedent in your own courts should it become necessary.)
FYI: PSI is a tale I spun in the '70s or so, when Large Scale Integration (LSI - eventually with a company named after it) and Very Large Scale Integration (VSLI) were industry buzzwords for ICs with a higher level of integration than a single-digit count of gates or flops to be externally interconnected.
PSI would involve:
- constructing a 3-D "chip"
- using ion beam epitaxy and doping to build it up in layers
- testing as you go using electron beams for power and signal injection and higher-voltage electron beams for "positive" voltage injection and as test prods (using secondary emission to pull more electrons than they insert and/or to read the voltage on the chip's internal nodes)
- turning up the beam current to vaporize (and later rebuild correctly) any defective component so the whole thing ends up flawless despite its large gate count. (100% yield!)
- using diamond for the semiconductor (mainly for its stability and heat conduction properties)
- running it in an inert atmosphere (so it can get up to red-hot without burning up or converting into graphite)
- building it as an approximate cube - up to, say, 6 feet on a side
- powering and cooling it on two opposing faces
- with water-cooled silver bus-bars the size of the faces
- connecting it by covering the other four faces with optic fibers for I/O (to interconnect with integrated light-emitting and sensing devices).
Of course the point of the yarn, in addition to potentially being possible, is the appearance of the resulting device:
An enormous supercomputer in the form of a 6-foot cube of diamond, glowing slightly red from operating heat, supported by water-cooled silver bus bars in an inert atmosphere within a glass bottle (ala a vacuum tube), with millions of optic fibers to provide it with sufficient I/O.
Just the sort of thing you'd find as a component in, say, one of the later Skylark spacecraft of E. E. (Doc) Smith's Golden-age SF stories.
allow viewers sitting to the right and left of a screen to watch different channels.
Sounds like they made the glassesless 3D laptop screen, noticed that from a distance it gave two separate 2D images, and decided to try marketing that, too.
So once a year you inspect and/or replace the brushes and squirt some grease into the bearings. If you're living off the grid you probably ave plenty of time on your hands. [...]
I didnt even mention the mismatch of rotational speeds, as used 8x 5hp gearboxes go for about $8 on ebay. And while you're pulling the alternator off a car, you can grab the serpentine belt too. A good DIY'er should be able to make a large cogged driving pulley out of plywood and popsicle sticks. Not terribly esthetic and might get iced up in a bad winter.
Why don't you build one up, join the board, and show 'em how it's done? B-)
Then come back periodically and give them a report on how long it lasts and how much trouble it isn't to maintain it.
I get your point about the wasted excitation power. How about you open up the alternator and replace the rotor winding with some good magnets? That also eliminates the need for the brushes and their replacement.
You'll find discussions on doing exactly that on the otherpower board. (www.fieldlines.com. It has a search feature or you can use google advanced search and restrict it to that site.)
Thanks for your comments, I didnt realize there was a magnetic path through the backing plate.
You're welcome.
A lot of thought and a number of design iterations went into this family of axial-flux designs. They're a very good match for the job.
But I wouldnt call a design "very well done" if it requires $700 of copper, where a car alternator is around 1/10th the size and uses maybe 1/10th the copper.
$700 worth of copper? What are you doing, mining your own? I doubt even the magnets cost that much.
A car alternator is optimized for a different job:
- keeping a battery charged and electrical systems alive when perhaps a hundred horsepower is available to bleed from - at 749 watts per horsepower so all you can eat is a drop in the bucket.
- Keeping a tight enough regulation on voltage to keep the battery from deteriorating unacceptable for several years, despite the wildly varying shaft speed.
- Alternators can be powered by a belt drive. So the shaft speed / crank speed ratio can be selected arbitrarily. Higher speeds -> faster flux movement -> smaller device for a given power.
- Running for 50,000 - 150,000 miles or so between replacements or refurbishments, which comes out to no more than 1000-3000 hours at highway speeds or no more than about 10,000 hours at a typical cycle.
This makes automotive alternators and similar designs a bad match for windpower service.
- They consume an enormous amount of excitation power - and the most at low speeds. You can't set the wind's "idle speed". You must take what you get. In a car this is no big deal - a tenth of a horse is a drop in the bucket. In the wind this is a very big deal - a tenth of a horse is 75 watts. Stealing power to excite the alternator raises your "cutin" speed, greatly reducing the time you can charge and the amount of charge you get.
- 1,000 - 10,000 hours between rebuilds (depending on weather conditions) corresponds to an alternator rebuild every 6 weeks to 16 months. Totally unacceptable for a mill.
- Mill shaft speeds are limited by the aerodynamics of the blades (in particular the "tip speed ratio" in combination with the blade radius). The bigger they are the slower they turn. The slower the alternator shaft turns, the less it generates - by a square law. But gearboxes and belt drives to raise the alternator shaft speed introduce design complexity, expense, losses, maintainence requirements, and points of failure. So you're better off running at shaft speed - and getting your power by stronger magnets, more wire, and bigger radii.
You could be slightly more efficient on copper with a radial-flux design, like a typical electric motor. But that gives you more weight on the tower and is much harder to construct.
- Small wind power designs can't afford excitation power overhead - and using permanent magnets eliminate it (at a significant up-front cost). Unlike an automotive alternator, you don't need to regulate the voltage by adjusting the excitation: You can regulate it by letting the load slow the prop (which isn't as inefficient as it sounds - in fact you MUST do this, to get current out of the genny). You further regulate it by designing the mill to furl (typically by turning away from the wind, sometimes by designing the blades so the airflow detaches) when the alternator is maxing out and would overheat. Final control is to add a "dump load" to deliberately waste power that would otherwise overcharge the batteries. So you don't NEED variable excitation to control the mill.
I'm all for wind power but IMHO this isnt an example of excellent engineeringl far from it. The good news is, it's not hard to do better than this.
Most of my comments have been on the axial-flux designs in general, rather than this particular instance. I see that this one has violated some of the rules of thumb that are well-known by the denizens of the board. (And the author admitted this.)
No mention of a wattmeter. [...] Plus it's really easy to be fooled when charging batteries-- [details omitted]
A true RMS-reading wattmeter is likely to show much less power.
You don't need a wattmeter when measuring charging power into batteries. You care about watthours of charging, not watthours generated.
Batteries charge according to the integral of the current through them. So an average-reading ammeter (combined with a voltmeter ditto) does the job just fine.
Or just measure the state of charge of batteries of a known capacity over a known interval.
A large magnetic gap.
The gap is not THAT large, because the stator is thin. The use of extremely strong neodymium magnets compensates for the relatively large gap compared to a design with laminated pole pieces through the centers of the coils.
To keep the stator thin, the three phases are laid out in a single layer around the alternator, rather than being stacked three deep, and extra magnets are used instead. This requires twice as many magnets as a stacked design with pole pieces (or four times as many as with a return path through a laminated core). But see below for compensating advantages.
No closed magnetic path.
Wrong. The magnetic path is closed through the rotors.
Each rotor has alternate N and S poles, with the return path between the backside of them through the steel supporting disk. The N poles on one rotor face the S poles on the other. So the magnetic path is continuous - passing through TWO gaps and two disks.
The disks rotate together. Thus the magnetic field is never dragged throutg the disks. This lets you make the disks out of solid metal that is magnetically "hard" rather than laminations of material that is magnetically "soft", and eliminates eddy current losses in the return path.
While the lack of laminations in the center of the coils does increase the gap, it also elminates eddy current losses there as well. More importantly, it completely eliminates "cogging" without requiring any critical measurements or extremely accurate parts placement. Cogging could only be reduced, not eliminated, if cores were used in the coils.
Cogging is the tendency for the mill to "stick" at particular positions (where the gap is minimal) requiring extra force to break it free and start it turning. Eliminating or reducing it is important for windgenerators, because it sets a lower limit on the wind speed that is necessary to get the mill to start after a calm. If the mill doesn't start until wind speeds above the "cutin" for generation (where the peak voltage is higher than the battery voltage), you lose generation in light wind conditions - when you need it most.
This design can be built by hand without any fancy tools and is inherently cogging-free. So the only limit to its startup is bearing friction. It starts turning in the lightest breeze.
No design equations.
You only need equations if you're doing a first design and it must be right. Then you have to do lots of planning and modeling. And you'll usually find out, when you've built it, that you missed something - that the equations you used were too simple for the actual situation, and you need a correction "fudge" factor or a more complicated model.
But when you've done a bunch of similar devices, and established rules of thumb and rules of scaling, designing one more is trivial. Or if you intend to do a bunch and play with them until you get it right you can just start hacking, using qualitative rules of thumb, then tune until you've got it down.
Ever seen a carpenter do equations before cutting wood to build one more shed? You'll see architects do them - or use computer models - when designing a bridge or a skyscraper. But houses, pyramids, and cathedrals were built long before the invention of calculus, and even further before numerical solutions to the hard problems of material strength were even approx
On the other hand, if the school held a rally before the competition and a parade after, with the participants carried on students' shoulders as they held the trophy aloft, rather than giving it just a mention in a couple assemblies, the effect might be different. B-)
Did you get a trophy? Did it go in a glass trophy case in the hallway, or otherwise on display in at least as prominent a position as the trophies the sports teams bring in? When your success was mentioned in the assemblies, was there a faculty (or cheerleader) led round of applause and ten minutes of slogan chanting?
This sort of emphasis is a policy issue on the part of the school administration.
Yeah. I'd say that's the biggest issue. Putting kids in an environment where success means social punishment.
Not only that. They should be rewarded for academic achievement with acclaim - MORE acclaim than is dished out for sports achievement.
Are schools there to teach intellectual skills? Or sporting skils?
Why do schools spend millions on sports and zilch-all on quiz competitions? (Are there even intellectual competitions anymore beyond the spelling bee?)
Why do they hand out letter sweaters for sports players and nothing beyond report cards for students who actually study?
(And while we're at it - let's drop the "self esteem" bull and hand out rewards in proportion to performance. How are the kids to learn when they're rewarded for failing? Self esteem is SO much more solid when it's the result of real work leading to real success.)
How is this "inventing" a new way to print? Hasn't Epson been doing this for years in their printers?
Heck: The first inkjet printer I ever dealt with was back in the early '70s, when they had just been invented. It was a prototype with a spinning drum holding the paper, a carriage with the ultrasonic-driven spitters, and three bottles hooked to the carriage by flexible tubes.
Quite an advance at the time. B-)
Re:Firewalls offload the servers and save big bux.
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Tear Down the Firewall
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· Score: 1
So, are the services provided by those servers available to the general public?
Only for correctly-formed requests to the correct port in the correct protocol.
If they are, then things are already accessible from the network, and your firewall is a no-op (unless you're running additional things that shouldn't be there in the first place).
Not true. The front-end box(es) can do the following:
1) Block connection attempts to the wrong ports.
2) Proxy TCP connections through only after they hsve been connected. (The server doesn't even SEE SYN attacks.)
3) Deep-inspect the data headed toward the server, resetting the TCP connection (or for UDP, never forwarding it) if anything hostile is recognized.
4) Proxy and buffer the actual requests, making connection to the server after inspecting them (so that recognized hostile requests in TCP are also never seen by the server).
5) Load-balance among multiple servers (which can also be used to throttle-back excessive resource drains from hostile client sites.)
This way the actual servers only spend memory and crunch on the requests themselves, and only on requests that the firewalling box considers safe. With neither attempting to do the other's work, firewalls can be optimized to survive DoS attacks, servers to serve requests.
The ratio of boxes can be adjusted so you only buy enough server to handle the legitimate load and enough firewall to handle the WAN connection speed. Meanwhile, unlike the servers, the firewall machine(s)can protect a broad range of services and network functionality behind the firewall, continuing to make efficient use of their power as attack bandwith shifts among the targets.
Firewalls offload the servers and save big bux.
on
Tear Down the Firewall
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· Score: 4, Informative
[...] firewalls are of any use only if: [your server farm has one of this set of problems]
Beg to differ.
Firewalls unload the server from spending cycles on filtering rules and memory on surviving DDoS attacks, just to name two functions.
If the servers must do their own filtering, and you have enough load that you need more than one to get everything done, offloading the filtering to a separate machine means that you need less servers. The gain is not linear, too: Keeping multiple servers synchronized (espeically those changing database state due to the transactions they serve) is an extra load, which becomes a lower fraction of the transaction cost when the server count is smaller.
Separating the functions also means that the machines can be specialized for their work - with, for instance, hardware accelleration for attack detection on the firewall - drastically cutting the box count. Putting all the eggs in a single basket means accelleartors get less usage, since they're used only for a fraction of the machines' load. Meanwhile you need more accellerators to put one on each machine - or you're stuck with using a GP machine to do the work, at much lower efficiency and a much higher box count.
Accellerators may only be available for appliance firewall solutions, not for upgrading a machine optimized for database handling or other server tasks.
If you have a license fee for the server software, having more servers means more licenses to buy. Another cost savings from specialization - this time a big one. If both the server and firewall software is licensed you have to have licenses for BOTH on ALL machines, rather than one or the other on each machine.
If you need content filtering against specific identified attacks, you need a service from a specialist organization, to track new attacks as they arise and upgrade the filtering functions. You don't want an outside house tweaking the machines which contain your own proprietary data.
Separate machines also means separate software. The firewall software can be written by people focusing JUST on secure and efficient firewalling, the server software by people focusing on efficient transaction service. Do a combined box and your firewalling functinality is just one of a bundle of functions being handled by a software team - in the server and/or the supporting system. (You only have to look at Microsoft to see the level of security produced by the latter approach.)
I could go on. But any one of the above points, by itself, shows an advantage for the separate firewall/server approach in a commercial scale, commercial grade, service. Combine them all (and others I haven't mentined) and the argument is compelling.
This doofus caused damage whether he meant to profit monetarily from it. Many of these folks do expect to profit in name recognition alone, but again damages, not profit is what the courts should be worried about.
I can't agree.
When someone is writing viruses for the fun of it or the notoriety, running them through the legal mill and giving them a small punishment (the first time) is quite likely to convince them that repeating is a bad idea. (If it doesn't, hit them harder the SECOND time.)
This is the electronic equivalent of non-gang graffiti. Yes it's costly to clean it up and causes problems meanwhile. But you don't throw a kid in jail for fifty years and fine him ever cent he'll ever make the first time he's caught defacing something (even something very big - or caused a traffic accident by confusing a driver).
When someone is writing viruses as part of a lucrative business plan there are two factors arguing for harsher punishment:
1) He's got a financial incentive to continue, so it takes a large punishment to tilt the balance and convince him to find another line of work.
2) He's planned this in detail and taken into account the harm his business model will cause to the people whose resources he appropriates - and chosen to go ahead and line his own pockets at severe cost to others.
Premeditation, conversion, continuing criminal enterprise. That IS organized crime. And it's exactly the pernicious, industrial-scale, large-net-loss-for-citizens activity that the draconian penalties were intended to stop.
The so-called Great Firewall of China is constantly being breached as citizens and the authorities play a cat and mouse game with the flow of information.
That's a race between weapons and armor. In such a race the weapons eventually always win.
I'm not Microsoft fan, but I also don't want to see them bankrupted by the court system.
Why not?
If they were being vindicated by the legal system, then they shouldn't be driven to bankruptcy (or inconvenienced at all) by its costs.
But if they have a consistent pattern of wrongdoing and profit from it, are consistently convicted for it, yet continue in the misbehavior because it's profitable despite the penalties, why not raise the penalties until they either stop the illegal behavior (because it beomes UNprofitable) or go bankrupt (and thus stop it by ceasing to exist)?
Judgements are supposed to do two things:
- Repair the damage to the injured party by giving him financial compensation.
- Penalize the injuring party, to deter future wrongdoing. You'll find that distinction in the judgements themselves, which are divided into "compensatory" and sometimes "puntative" damages.
Punishments are SUPPOSED to give enough pain or inconvenience to deter future misbehavior, make illegal acts unprofitable, and make repeat offenders unable to continue. They do this by escalating when repeated convictions show the pattern continues, until they become completely debilitating.
As for the stockholders suffering losses due to the officers' choice to break laws as corporate policy: The stockholders are the ones who pick the board and vote on major issues, and the board is who picks the officers and votes on day-to-day issues. So if the stockholders pick crooks (or crook-pickers) and then keep voting to retain them, it's APPROPRIATE for them to be hit in the wallet. It's an incentive on THEM to pick some non-crooks to clean house - or dump the stock on someone who will (or is willing to take the heat) before the crooks make it worthless.
As for the economy: It got along fine without Microsoft, and can do the same again if necessary. There have been plenty of other companies (and universities, and volunteer organizations) that made perfectly usable software in the past, and in the absense of the 268 Billion Dollar Gorilla I'm sure there would be again.
Many states now have "three strikes" laws to lock up violent (or "serious") repeat offenders and throw away the key. Perhaps we need something similar for corportations.
Please follow the thread back a couple steps. You'll see that I (and other posters) have been careful to include the possibility that neither of the top two viewpoints are anything approximating correct.
But the discussion was of a conflict between a bogus scare story and a dominant scientific paradigm. In such a situation you have a true dichotomy.
My point is that displaying the two most popular claims or positions, though it may give bogosity excessive weight, has a better chance of displaying a claim that is true or close to it than displaying just one - with the media picking which.
real science is boring. [...] To become a media billionaire, you need raw, bloody, conflict. Good vs. evil. Us vs. them.
You need some plausible face to present as 'the other side', even if s/he's blantently making things up and misrepresenting. Heck, better if he's making things up, and getting close to shouting too.
Right.
So "fair and balanced" is the best we're likely to get.
When the truth is boring and the bogosity exciting this lets the truth get a hearing - and adds the conflict of truth-teller vs. nutcase to the excitement of the nutcase's doomsday scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple fact is that most employers do not care about employees. They care about the bottom line.
Actually, the simple fact is that they MUST give priority to the bottom line, even if they DO care about the employees. In a competitive environment they lose ground if giving a benefit to the employees doesn't confer a compensating financial advantage to the company.
Thus some company management that would like to do better for the employees is stuck in a tragedy of the commons situation. The historic solution to the tragedy of the commons was social pressure in the original case. But in regions with high and diverse population social pressure doesn't work, and you need institutional mechanisms to "fix" this sort of situation - and to negotiate the fix.
Laws are one such mechanism. Another is industry-wide unionization / professional societies / guilds, which offer more individualized negotiaion.
The problem with unions today isn't that they've ran out of their usefulness. The problem is that they're still suffering from corruption of the past and mismanagement.
Two forms of corruption actually.
The first was criminal activity - both individual and organized-crime. Looting of union funds and operation of protection rackets directed against both workers and employers were the two main motivations.
The second (made possible once the union operation was divorced from membership control by the crooks) was involvement with political parties and causes at odds with the interest of the workers.
I don't know how it works in Canada - but in the US the unions are squarely in the Democratic Party's column regardless of the candidates' position on issues relevant to the union - to the point that unions are supporting the very illegal immigration that takes away their members' jobs (by undercutting costs).
The result has been the downfall of unions in every sector but government employees' unions, along with (Republican-supported) grass-roots attempts to pass laws requiring individualized member permission to use dues money for political campaigning.
The designation was not sought by the common carriers. It was thrust on them by legislation and common law. The fact that ISPs find it useful is an just lucky for them. In any event, they may not have the choice of whether they are or are not common carriers.
However, the requirement to carry all comers also confers a privilege - a lack of responsibility for refusing to carry some loads. (The responsibility is borne by the government because it forced them to accept the traffic.) An ISP may find that carrying the union's propaganda is less of a burden than being responsible for kiddie porn.
The union should file a suit against the ISP - not for refusing to carry its traffic, but for recovery for all the SPAM it and its members recieved through their connections, using the fact that the ISP refused to carry the union website traffic as proof that they are NOT a common carrier, and thus bear responsibility for content.
IMHO that will turn the ISP around in very short order.
If they don't turn it back on within a few hours of receiving notice of the suit, file another for damage to their kids' mental health due to viewing kiddie porn carried over the ISP's lines. B-)
Three little problems about them. 1) They cost more than devices they protect (and their protection is that they get fried instead of the protected devices - single-use.)
2) They won't protect against a really strong lightning.
3) They reduce connection quality to level where you're happy with 100Kbit throughput, and can forget 100Mbit.
I think you have these confused with something else. I'm not talking some plug-in telephone/power strip appliance from Fry's or Circuit City.
The ones I'm talking about are intended for use with commercial roof-tower mounted 802.11g antennas with electronics at the antenna fed by ethernet, and by non-802.11 radio links of similar electronics-up-pole configurations. They have to handle repeated surges and (in the 802.11g case) feed a 56 Mbps device that is expecting reliable 100 Mbps Ethernet. (If I understand it correctly, BASE-T Ethernet doesn't degrade baud rates gracefully. If a particular bit pattern fails it will keep failing, and packets will keep dropping. Screw up the cabling's transmission properties too much and it just dies.)
I haven't investigated the price - but would expect that these protectors must also be cheap enough, at least in quantity OEM sales, to be usable on subscriber devices without resulting in a major boost in price over an unprotected device.)
I wouldn't expect a cat-5 running between houses in a suburb to experience surges much more extensive than one running up a tower on top of a skyscraper in the middle of a city.
Unless, of course, your susurb happens to be hobby farms with houses separated by appreciable fractions of a mile, or located on the side of a mountain, in northern New Mexico, or otherwise in an excessively electrically-active area.
Of course NOTHING will survive a direct hit on the wiring. B-)
Why not just pair your cell phone with your laptop over bluetooth and use GPRS if you're satisfied with dialup speeds?
Because GPRS is not available in many areas where I want internet access - including my vacation/retirement house, which is what I bought the darned cellphone and service FOR in the first place.
(Heck: The network is trying to push everybody to switch from TDMA to GSM yet they STILL won't convert the only cell covering that site - and I can't switch carrieres because I'd just end up roaming on the same cell. I'm surprised I don't have to fall back to AMPS - which I'd gladly do if my phone was capable of it, since that WILL carry modem signals.)
IMHO GPRS won't be rolled out generally until somebody does a modem that makes a decent connection over GSM, TDMA, and CDMA CODECs and people start using their flat-rate voice connections for internet access.
Until then (and maybe even after), any cellphone-based internet service will be viewed as a "value-added service" (i.e. a revenue enhancer with another big pricetag attached) that it's only cost-effective to roll out in dense urban areas.
The following ARE available:
- Ethernet cabling (Cat 5 or better) intended to survive an outdoor environment.
- Lightning/surge arresters for where it transitions between indoor and outdoor.
Those provisions had a big role in the success of Silicon Valley. They're one of the reasons the venture capital community is based here, and why there are so many startups.
And why businesses STAY here, despite some of the OTHER assinine laws, the enormous tax rate, and continual efforts by other states to lure companies away. The EMPLOYEES stay here - or move here - due to exactly those two laws. If the businesses needs them, they have to stay as well.
Legislators in any other state that is trying to clone Silicon Valley, or otherwise set up their own high-tek or high-innovation mecca, should take note.
Until you clone those laws, you're hosed.
I strongly recommend cloning them verbatim. This lets you take maximum advantage of any precedent-setting litigation already done in California. (Though the precedent may not transfer the legal arguments will, easing the establishment of equivalent precedent in your own courts should it become necessary.)
PSI is almost upon us.
FYI: PSI is a tale I spun in the '70s or so, when Large Scale Integration (LSI - eventually with a company named after it) and Very Large Scale Integration (VSLI) were industry buzzwords for ICs with a higher level of integration than a single-digit count of gates or flops to be externally interconnected.
PSI would involve:
- constructing a 3-D "chip"
- using ion beam epitaxy and doping to build it up in layers
- testing as you go using electron beams for power and signal injection and higher-voltage electron beams for "positive" voltage injection and as test prods (using secondary emission to pull more electrons than they insert and/or to read the voltage on the chip's internal nodes)
- turning up the beam current to vaporize (and later rebuild correctly) any defective component so the whole thing ends up flawless despite its large gate count. (100% yield!)
- using diamond for the semiconductor (mainly for its stability and heat conduction properties)
- running it in an inert atmosphere (so it can get up to red-hot without burning up or converting into graphite)
- building it as an approximate cube - up to, say, 6 feet on a side
- powering and cooling it on two opposing faces
- with water-cooled silver bus-bars the size of the faces
- connecting it by covering the other four faces with optic fibers for I/O (to interconnect with integrated light-emitting and sensing devices).
Of course the point of the yarn, in addition to potentially being possible, is the appearance of the resulting device:
An enormous supercomputer in the form of a 6-foot cube of diamond, glowing slightly red from operating heat, supported by water-cooled silver bus bars in an inert atmosphere within a glass bottle (ala a vacuum tube), with millions of optic fibers to provide it with sufficient I/O.
Just the sort of thing you'd find as a component in, say, one of the later Skylark spacecraft of E. E. (Doc) Smith's Golden-age SF stories.
$700 worth of copper? What are you doing, mining your own?
Thats what the fine article said. $700
I looked for that but missed it. Holy cow!
allow viewers sitting to the right and left of a screen to watch different channels.
Sounds like they made the glassesless 3D laptop screen, noticed that from a distance it gave two separate 2D images, and decided to try marketing that, too.
So once a year you inspect and/or replace the brushes and squirt some grease into the bearings. If you're living off the grid you probably ave plenty of time on your hands. [...]
I didnt even mention the mismatch of rotational speeds, as used 8x 5hp gearboxes go for about $8 on ebay. And while you're pulling the alternator off a car, you can grab the serpentine belt too. A good DIY'er should be able to make a large cogged driving pulley out of plywood and popsicle sticks. Not terribly esthetic and might get iced up in a bad winter.
Why don't you build one up, join the board, and show 'em how it's done? B-)
Then come back periodically and give them a report on how long it lasts and how much trouble it isn't to maintain it.
I get your point about the wasted excitation power. How about you open up the alternator and replace the rotor winding with some good magnets? That also eliminates the need for the brushes and their replacement.
You'll find discussions on doing exactly that on the otherpower board. (www.fieldlines.com. It has a search feature or you can use google advanced search and restrict it to that site.)
Thanks for your comments, I didnt realize there was a magnetic path through the backing plate.
You're welcome.
A lot of thought and a number of design iterations went into this family of axial-flux designs. They're a very good match for the job.
But I wouldnt call a design "very well done" if it requires $700 of copper, where a car alternator is around 1/10th the size and uses maybe 1/10th the copper.
$700 worth of copper? What are you doing, mining your own? I doubt even the magnets cost that much.
A car alternator is optimized for a different job:
- keeping a battery charged and electrical systems alive when perhaps a hundred horsepower is available to bleed from - at 749 watts per horsepower so all you can eat is a drop in the bucket.
- Keeping a tight enough regulation on voltage to keep the battery from deteriorating unacceptable for several years, despite the wildly varying shaft speed.
- Alternators can be powered by a belt drive. So the shaft speed / crank speed ratio can be selected arbitrarily. Higher speeds -> faster flux movement -> smaller device for a given power.
- Running for 50,000 - 150,000 miles or so between replacements or refurbishments, which comes out to no more than 1000-3000 hours at highway speeds or no more than about 10,000 hours at a typical cycle.
This makes automotive alternators and similar designs a bad match for windpower service.
- They consume an enormous amount of excitation power - and the most at low speeds. You can't set the wind's "idle speed". You must take what you get. In a car this is no big deal - a tenth of a horse is a drop in the bucket. In the wind this is a very big deal - a tenth of a horse is 75 watts. Stealing power to excite the alternator raises your "cutin" speed, greatly reducing the time you can charge and the amount of charge you get.
- 1,000 - 10,000 hours between rebuilds (depending on weather conditions) corresponds to an alternator rebuild every 6 weeks to 16 months. Totally unacceptable for a mill.
- Mill shaft speeds are limited by the aerodynamics of the blades (in particular the "tip speed ratio" in combination with the blade radius). The bigger they are the slower they turn. The slower the alternator shaft turns, the less it generates - by a square law. But gearboxes and belt drives to raise the alternator shaft speed introduce design complexity, expense, losses, maintainence requirements, and points of failure. So you're better off running at shaft speed - and getting your power by stronger magnets, more wire, and bigger radii.
You could be slightly more efficient on copper with a radial-flux design, like a typical electric motor. But that gives you more weight on the tower and is much harder to construct.
- Small wind power designs can't afford excitation power overhead - and using permanent magnets eliminate it (at a significant up-front cost). Unlike an automotive alternator, you don't need to regulate the voltage by adjusting the excitation: You can regulate it by letting the load slow the prop (which isn't as inefficient as it sounds - in fact you MUST do this, to get current out of the genny). You further regulate it by designing the mill to furl (typically by turning away from the wind, sometimes by designing the blades so the airflow detaches) when the alternator is maxing out and would overheat. Final control is to add a "dump load" to deliberately waste power that would otherwise overcharge the batteries. So you don't NEED variable excitation to control the mill.
I'm all for wind power but IMHO this isnt an example of excellent engineeringl far from it. The good news is, it's not hard to do better than this.
Most of my comments have been on the axial-flux designs in general, rather than this particular instance. I see that this one has violated some of the rules of thumb that are well-known by the denizens of the board. (And the author admitted this.)
No mention of a wattmeter. [...] Plus it's really easy to be fooled when charging batteries-- [details omitted]
A true RMS-reading wattmeter is likely to show much less power.
You don't need a wattmeter when measuring charging power into batteries. You care about watthours of charging, not watthours generated.
Batteries charge according to the integral of the current through them. So an average-reading ammeter (combined with a voltmeter ditto) does the job just fine.
Or just measure the state of charge of batteries of a known capacity over a known interval.
A large magnetic gap.
The gap is not THAT large, because the stator is thin. The use of extremely strong neodymium magnets compensates for the relatively large gap compared to a design with laminated pole pieces through the centers of the coils.
To keep the stator thin, the three phases are laid out in a single layer around the alternator, rather than being stacked three deep, and extra magnets are used instead. This requires twice as many magnets as a stacked design with pole pieces (or four times as many as with a return path through a laminated core). But see below for compensating advantages.
No closed magnetic path.
Wrong. The magnetic path is closed through the rotors.
Each rotor has alternate N and S poles, with the return path between the backside of them through the steel supporting disk. The N poles on one rotor face the S poles on the other. So the magnetic path is continuous - passing through TWO gaps and two disks.
The disks rotate together. Thus the magnetic field is never dragged throutg the disks. This lets you make the disks out of solid metal that is magnetically "hard" rather than laminations of material that is magnetically "soft", and eliminates eddy current losses in the return path.
While the lack of laminations in the center of the coils does increase the gap, it also elminates eddy current losses there as well. More importantly, it completely eliminates "cogging" without requiring any critical measurements or extremely accurate parts placement. Cogging could only be reduced, not eliminated, if cores were used in the coils.
Cogging is the tendency for the mill to "stick" at particular positions (where the gap is minimal) requiring extra force to break it free and start it turning. Eliminating or reducing it is important for windgenerators, because it sets a lower limit on the wind speed that is necessary to get the mill to start after a calm. If the mill doesn't start until wind speeds above the "cutin" for generation (where the peak voltage is higher than the battery voltage), you lose generation in light wind conditions - when you need it most.
This design can be built by hand without any fancy tools and is inherently cogging-free. So the only limit to its startup is bearing friction. It starts turning in the lightest breeze.
No design equations.
You only need equations if you're doing a first design and it must be right. Then you have to do lots of planning and modeling. And you'll usually find out, when you've built it, that you missed something - that the equations you used were too simple for the actual situation, and you need a correction "fudge" factor or a more complicated model.
But when you've done a bunch of similar devices, and established rules of thumb and rules of scaling, designing one more is trivial. Or if you intend to do a bunch and play with them until you get it right you can just start hacking, using qualitative rules of thumb, then tune until you've got it down.
Ever seen a carpenter do equations before cutting wood to build one more shed? You'll see architects do them - or use computer models - when designing a bridge or a skyscraper. But houses, pyramids, and cathedrals were built long before the invention of calculus, and even further before numerical solutions to the hard problems of material strength were even approx
slashdot effect in... er... effect.
Sure is.
I was trying to get on over lunch to do a bit of posting and it just wouldn't serve. Guess I'll have to put it off 'til tomorrow.
I see what you're saying.
On the other hand, if the school held a rally before the competition and a parade after, with the participants carried on students' shoulders as they held the trophy aloft, rather than giving it just a mention in a couple assemblies, the effect might be different. B-)
Did you get a trophy? Did it go in a glass trophy case in the hallway, or otherwise on display in at least as prominent a position as the trophies the sports teams bring in? When your success was mentioned in the assemblies, was there a faculty (or cheerleader) led round of applause and ten minutes of slogan chanting?
This sort of emphasis is a policy issue on the part of the school administration.
Yeah. I'd say that's the biggest issue. Putting kids in an environment where success means social punishment.
Not only that. They should be rewarded for academic achievement with acclaim - MORE acclaim than is dished out for sports achievement.
Are schools there to teach intellectual skills? Or sporting skils?
Why do schools spend millions on sports and zilch-all on quiz competitions? (Are there even intellectual competitions anymore beyond the spelling bee?)
Why do they hand out letter sweaters for sports players and nothing beyond report cards for students who actually study?
(And while we're at it - let's drop the "self esteem" bull and hand out rewards in proportion to performance. How are the kids to learn when they're rewarded for failing? Self esteem is SO much more solid when it's the result of real work leading to real success.)
How is this "inventing" a new way to print? Hasn't Epson been doing this for years in their printers?
Heck: The first inkjet printer I ever dealt with was back in the early '70s, when they had just been invented. It was a prototype with a spinning drum holding the paper, a carriage with the ultrasonic-driven spitters, and three bottles hooked to the carriage by flexible tubes.
Quite an advance at the time. B-)
So, are the services provided by those servers available to the general public?
Only for correctly-formed requests to the correct port in the correct protocol.
If they are, then things are already accessible from the network, and your firewall is a no-op (unless you're running additional things that shouldn't be there in the first place).
Not true. The front-end box(es) can do the following:
1) Block connection attempts to the wrong ports.
2) Proxy TCP connections through only after they hsve been connected. (The server doesn't even SEE SYN attacks.)
3) Deep-inspect the data headed toward the server, resetting the TCP connection (or for UDP, never forwarding it) if anything hostile is recognized.
4) Proxy and buffer the actual requests, making connection to the server after inspecting them (so that recognized hostile requests in TCP are also never seen by the server).
5) Load-balance among multiple servers (which can also be used to throttle-back excessive resource drains from hostile client sites.)
This way the actual servers only spend memory and crunch on the requests themselves, and only on requests that the firewalling box considers safe. With neither attempting to do the other's work, firewalls can be optimized to survive DoS attacks, servers to serve requests.
The ratio of boxes can be adjusted so you only buy enough server to handle the legitimate load and enough firewall to handle the WAN connection speed. Meanwhile, unlike the servers, the firewall machine(s)can protect a broad range of services and network functionality behind the firewall, continuing to make efficient use of their power as attack bandwith shifts among the targets.
[...] firewalls are of any use only if: [your server farm has one of this set of problems]
Beg to differ.
Firewalls unload the server from spending cycles on filtering rules and memory on surviving DDoS attacks, just to name two functions.
If the servers must do their own filtering, and you have enough load that you need more than one to get everything done, offloading the filtering to a separate machine means that you need less servers. The gain is not linear, too: Keeping multiple servers synchronized (espeically those changing database state due to the transactions they serve) is an extra load, which becomes a lower fraction of the transaction cost when the server count is smaller.
Separating the functions also means that the machines can be specialized for their work - with, for instance, hardware accelleration for attack detection on the firewall - drastically cutting the box count. Putting all the eggs in a single basket means accelleartors get less usage, since they're used only for a fraction of the machines' load. Meanwhile you need more accellerators to put one on each machine - or you're stuck with using a GP machine to do the work, at much lower efficiency and a much higher box count.
Accellerators may only be available for appliance firewall solutions, not for upgrading a machine optimized for database handling or other server tasks.
If you have a license fee for the server software, having more servers means more licenses to buy. Another cost savings from specialization - this time a big one. If both the server and firewall software is licensed you have to have licenses for BOTH on ALL machines, rather than one or the other on each machine.
If you need content filtering against specific identified attacks, you need a service from a specialist organization, to track new attacks as they arise and upgrade the filtering functions. You don't want an outside house tweaking the machines which contain your own proprietary data.
Separate machines also means separate software. The firewall software can be written by people focusing JUST on secure and efficient firewalling, the server software by people focusing on efficient transaction service. Do a combined box and your firewalling functinality is just one of a bundle of functions being handled by a software team - in the server and/or the supporting system. (You only have to look at Microsoft to see the level of security produced by the latter approach.)
I could go on. But any one of the above points, by itself, shows an advantage for the separate firewall/server approach in a commercial scale, commercial grade, service. Combine them all (and others I haven't mentined) and the argument is compelling.
This doofus caused damage whether he meant to profit monetarily from it. Many of these folks do expect to profit in name recognition alone, but again damages, not profit is what the courts should be worried about.
I can't agree.
When someone is writing viruses for the fun of it or the notoriety, running them through the legal mill and giving them a small punishment (the first time) is quite likely to convince them that repeating is a bad idea. (If it doesn't, hit them harder the SECOND time.)
This is the electronic equivalent of non-gang graffiti. Yes it's costly to clean it up and causes problems meanwhile. But you don't throw a kid in jail for fifty years and fine him ever cent he'll ever make the first time he's caught defacing something (even something very big - or caused a traffic accident by confusing a driver).
When someone is writing viruses as part of a lucrative business plan there are two factors arguing for harsher punishment:
1) He's got a financial incentive to continue, so it takes a large punishment to tilt the balance and convince him to find another line of work.
2) He's planned this in detail and taken into account the harm his business model will cause to the people whose resources he appropriates - and chosen to go ahead and line his own pockets at severe cost to others.
Premeditation, conversion, continuing criminal enterprise. That IS organized crime. And it's exactly the pernicious, industrial-scale, large-net-loss-for-citizens activity that the draconian penalties were intended to stop.
The so-called Great Firewall of China is constantly being breached as citizens and the authorities play a cat and mouse game with the flow of information.
That's a race between weapons and armor. In such a race the weapons eventually always win.
I'm not Microsoft fan, but I also don't want to see them bankrupted by the court system.
Why not?
If they were being vindicated by the legal system, then they shouldn't be driven to bankruptcy (or inconvenienced at all) by its costs.
But if they have a consistent pattern of wrongdoing and profit from it, are consistently convicted for it, yet continue in the misbehavior because it's profitable despite the penalties, why not raise the penalties until they either stop the illegal behavior (because it beomes UNprofitable) or go bankrupt (and thus stop it by ceasing to exist)?
Judgements are supposed to do two things:
- Repair the damage to the injured party by giving him financial compensation.
- Penalize the injuring party, to deter future wrongdoing.
You'll find that distinction in the judgements themselves, which are divided into "compensatory" and sometimes "puntative" damages.
Punishments are SUPPOSED to give enough pain or inconvenience to deter future misbehavior, make illegal acts unprofitable, and make repeat offenders unable to continue. They do this by escalating when repeated convictions show the pattern continues, until they become completely debilitating.
As for the stockholders suffering losses due to the officers' choice to break laws as corporate policy: The stockholders are the ones who pick the board and vote on major issues, and the board is who picks the officers and votes on day-to-day issues. So if the stockholders pick crooks (or crook-pickers) and then keep voting to retain them, it's APPROPRIATE for them to be hit in the wallet. It's an incentive on THEM to pick some non-crooks to clean house - or dump the stock on someone who will (or is willing to take the heat) before the crooks make it worthless.
As for the economy: It got along fine without Microsoft, and can do the same again if necessary. There have been plenty of other companies (and universities, and volunteer organizations) that made perfectly usable software in the past, and in the absense of the 268 Billion Dollar Gorilla I'm sure there would be again.
Many states now have "three strikes" laws to lock up violent (or "serious") repeat offenders and throw away the key. Perhaps we need something similar for corportations.
Very well done.
(My eyes leaked a bit of saline solution by the end.)
Please follow the thread back a couple steps. You'll see that I (and other posters) have been careful to include the possibility that neither of the top two viewpoints are anything approximating correct.
But the discussion was of a conflict between a bogus scare story and a dominant scientific paradigm. In such a situation you have a true dichotomy.
My point is that displaying the two most popular claims or positions, though it may give bogosity excessive weight, has a better chance of displaying a claim that is true or close to it than displaying just one - with the media picking which.
real science is boring. [...] To become a media billionaire, you need raw, bloody, conflict. Good vs. evil. Us vs. them.
You need some plausible face to present as 'the other side', even if s/he's blantently making things up and misrepresenting. Heck, better if he's making things up, and getting close to shouting too.
Right.
So "fair and balanced" is the best we're likely to get.
When the truth is boring and the bogosity exciting this lets the truth get a hearing - and adds the conflict of truth-teller vs. nutcase to the excitement of the nutcase's doomsday scenario.