'As soon as you realized that you weren't dead, you should have started paying the royalties...'
It's called "tithing". A 10% "voluntary" income tax payable to the (Christian - various denominations) church.
A large fraction of the population of Europe did it for centuries, and some people do it to this day.
Some non-Christian churches have a similar custom.
(I wonder how long it will take for patent holders to start claiming a divine right to royalties, by analogy with kings who claimed a divine right to rule as the next level below God in an "executive branch" responsible for temporal governance.)
The "oops, we fried you" phenomenon of the Sky Mirror is a well-known problem for people constructing solar collectors. They "work" when partially constructed - the amount of heat collected is proportional to the amount of reflective surface that is already installed. They also "work" when not pointed directly at the sun - the focus is just off-center and slightly diffuse. A common accident is to be constructing one outdoors and lean through the effective focus while reaching in to install another segment. Easy way to burn out your eyes, fry your face, and/or set your hair on fire.
But it works for sound, too.
Story is there was a building in the industrial park near one of O'hare Airport's runways. The front door was in the middle of the symmetrical building. More than one person died of a "heart attack" at a particular spot on the runway.
Somebody got to thinking and realized that the front of the building was a parabola, pointed at the runway, and the magic spot on the sidewalk was the focus of the parabola. If you happened to be standing there when a jet on takeoff went by with engines at full thrust, all of the kilowatts of sound that hit the front of the building would be focused on you for an appreciable fraction of a second. Very much like being at the center of a bomb.
The Cray I's cooling system had a void in it that just happened to be the size of a six-pack. The amount of time it took to shut it down, do a part replacement, bring it back up, and check it out, just happened to be the amount of time it took to bring a six-pack from room temperature to "AHHhhh..." temperature.
The engineers insist this was not deliberate.
The FE's really didn't care whether it was deliberate or not. But if it really WAS deliberate then it was very thoughtful of the engineers to build in such a moralle-booster for the field staff.
Did anyone else notice that this first "uncopyable" CD is Charlie Pride doing "A tribute to singer Jim Reves"?
"A tribute to" means an album where ALL the songs were previously done by the singer to whom the tribute is being paid.
In other words, EVERY SONG ON THE ALBUM is Johnny Pride COPYING a song done by Jim Reves.
Somehow this seems appropriate. B-)
But it's not a copyright violation. Johnny will have licenced all those songs from the current copyright holder.
So if Jim actually WROTE any of them and his estate or heirs still own the copyright, perhaps Johnny actually WILL pay some tribute to Jim, in the financial sense.
They can prevent you from being paid by a competitor, probably even as a consultant. I saw nothing preventing you from working on open source during the no compete clause time.
Does an open-source author derive financial benefit from the reputation increase? If so it's commercial work. Does the open source project software perform some function that a Microsoft application performs? If so it's competition.
Can Microsoft claim that the open source project's code exposes a Microsoft trade secret? They can sue the ex-employee into bankruptcy for exposing it. (And they can sue even if the employee DIDN'T actually expose a Microsoft trade secret. Their lawyers against his - and he probably gets to pay his lawyers even if he wins.)
Believe it or not, individual soldiers in the Army generally still don't have personal radios down past the squad leader level.
There's a reason for this. Most field tactical radios are bulky and heavy.
That's fixable.
One that's NOT fixable is that high-energy radio noise could knock out radio communications. The Army doesn't want their small unit coordination to be so dependent on radio (or any other single thing) that things go to pieces if it's denied.
... it is very common for companies... to get competitors products and reverse engineer them to see how they tick. How then is this different than leaving company A to work for company B?
Simple: It COSTS a lot of expensive engineering time to reverse-engineer a product. Sometimes it costs more than designing it in the first place. (I pitty anyone trying to reverse engineer the stuff I'm doing at my current job, or at several of the previous ones. B-) )
Hire an engineer who worked on it and you've got the bulk of it it in the time it takes for him to spin-up on your company's procedures (which a new employee would have to do anyhow).
First player explores the maze. Second player goes straight to the goal. Which company can sell the product for less? Which one out-competes and squeezes out the other?
A number of companies have tried to reduce consultants to employees and employees to serfs.
EDS was one. It hired people out of high-school, trained them in an "information tech boot camp", and charged them something like $5K (a couple decades ago) for that "training" if they left within six months. They paid them peanuts and no stock options, but picked up their medical expenses. Result: They'd be unemployable and at risk to life and limb if they left. Then EDS cut an exclusive - and finally merged with - GM, throwing thousands of contract programmers out of work there (unless they signed on with EDS, of course). Serfdom.
Ross Perot (EDS' founder) lobbied until the "safe harbor" provision of the tax code was changed, with the net result that if consultants (or their families) owned controlling interest in firm they worked through - even if it was incorporated - it would be treated as a front for direct employment. That combined with a tax court ruling treating their clients as "employers", making them liable for the consultants' income tax if the consultant screwed up on paying quarterlies. The result was that consultants HAD to be employees of corporations they didn't have significant control over to be employable in the auto industry. Near serfdom - you get to change farms and lords, but can't run your own show.
(I understand some of this has changes since then.)
Now we have Microsoft. If you are granted access to their internal code while working with their partners you have to sign a non-compete that takes you out of most of the software business for years afterward. If you work directly for them you get little or no experience with non-Microsoft software and if you leave they'll enforce non-competes - even terms you didn't agree to - to keep you from working anywhere in their space.
Who in their right mind, knowing this, will ever sign on with them?
I know there's a stereotype around here of Bill Gates as devil. But this makes it look like their employment papers grant them your soul.
What if a company decides to market PC's that feature Linux instead of that other 'life on the edge of a crash' OS?
Under this bill, if a "personal computer" incudes an operating system, the manufacturer would be required to provide fitering software.
According to that summary the bill would seem to apply to computers with pre-installed operating systems. In other words: To machines bundeled with the software.
Assuming that's the case it might provide an incentive to unbundle, selling machines WITHOUT pre-installed OSes, and sell the OS separately, as a way to evade the law.
If that happened, Linux users could get the machines sans MS, and not have to try for the essentially unobtainable refunds.
Of course, once Microsoft makes a "Texas Edition" the incentive is gone...
I don't think it was a revolution as much as the natural progression of evolution in human communications. Did people think they'd use a telephone til 2246?
Quite.
Television was supposed to usher in a utopia of universal education and look what that's become: Mind-numbing fluff, and the highest return-on-investment of any industry. It's not going away any time soon, is it?
The net was put together by people who have individual dreams of doing something neat. The hype about the net was put together primarily by people who were putting together hype rather than putting togehter the net. Yes they quoted some of the people working on it. So what? It's still a lot of hype.
And some of the people who put together parts of the net's applications were inspired by the hype. Again, so what? Some of the people who put together Motorola's Star Tak cellular phones were obviously inspired by Star Trek communicators. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be cellular phones - or even folding ones - without a "Star Trek Culture", or that the lack of Iridium service would mean "the Cellular Phone Revolution" was "Breaking Faith".
It's one thing to have faith in people who actually MADE you a promise, and have them willfully fail to execute on it. It's quite another to have faith in the promises of media hype-master hangers-on and blame the real workers when the bullshit you were doesn't match what actually materializes.
And if some investors are paniced because they believed the hype, bought into the scams, and something completely different from what they expected happened, again so what? Something damned profitable for all concerned is still materializing, and it will still change the world. There's no free lunch, and no guaranteed investment. You have to do your own due dilligence, sort out the companies that will really build something profitable and invest in THOSE if you want your money to grow, and to stay around once the storms have subsided.
The networked world will continue to be a thing and to grow in my opinion. The men who have invested their lives into it won't let it die without a fight from hell.
Hear hear. And as one of the people building it I can assure you we're still on the job and it will get better.
Ha! another Maggie and the Ferocious Beast afficionado!
Possibly not. It was also used (no doubt as a throwaway reference) in a storyline in Phil Foglio's _XXXenophile_ comic. (X rated, so most of the M&FB fans will have to wait a few years to view it.)
Phil throws in a lot of references to other works. It's nice to know where this one came from.
While I agree with most points you make, these numbers are not entirely realistic. A full tank of gasoline is about 2 MJ.
I think 2 megajoules is a LOT low for a tank of gas - unless it's a lawnmower. The "units" command says a horsepower-hour is about 2.7 megajoules (2,684,519.5), which compares well with the approximation of 1 HP = 750 watts. A tank of gas yeilds easily over a hundred horsepower-hours. Multiply your two minute fillup at 15 megawatt by 100 and you've got 1.5 billion watts for two minutes.
Multiply by another 4 if you're talking gasoline engines rather than electric cars with idealized 100% efficient batteries/motors and you're in the 6 gigawatt range for your 2-minute fillup gas pump hose. Which seams reasonable when you compare it to the fuel feed for a 1500 megawatt boiler.
Sounds impressive, but is exaggerated. A 1000 kg car, running at 50 MPH has a kinetic energy of about 250kJ. Divide by 1800 seconds, and you'll get 140 Watts. This isn't going to heat a four-bedroom house. You'll need something closer to 25 kW for that.
Oh?
%units
2112 units, 59 prefixes
You have: megagram miles miles / hour hour
You want: watt hours
* 0.055512434
/ 18.013982
You have:
%dc
50 50 * 0.055512434 * p
138.781085000
2 * p
277.562170000
I get about 278 watts. Still a bit low, though.
On the other hand, 25 kW is WAY too high. A space heater is about 1500 watts, so 25 kW is almost 17 of them. I don't know about you, but if I put 16 2/3 space heaters in a 4 bedroom house and jammed their thermostats so they ran at 100% duty cycle, by the end of a half hour I'd expect the house to be afire.
Let's call it a well-insulated one-bedroom house and ten minutes. That's about one large space heater running about 50% duty cycle.
I'm a little uneasy at flywheel storage. I've heard enough stories about what happens when early harddrives (heavy, quickly spinning cylinders) and ultracentrifuges "go" that I'm very apprehensious about them, especially when poorly maintained.
And that's one of the big design issues.
But it's not unique to flywheels. Imagine what happens when you get in an accident that shorts and/or spills the contents of batteries capable of delivering a megawatt for ten minutes.
At least one uperflywheel design (which is NOT disk-shaped) is intended to go to powder if they fracture. And the breaking of the bonds absorbs a lot of the energy. (A superflywheel at max is operating where the molecules throughout its structure are strained just short of the breaking point, so the stored energy approximates the heat of formation of the compound.)
But if it doesn't work it approximates a small bomb. (So you put it in a container that approximates armor.)
You're right when you say that this just moves the polution. The difference is that those big power generation plants are _much_ more efficient then your typical car engine. The typical oil power plant is ~40% efficient - compared to ~25% for a car engine.
Those plants are heat engines. "Perfect" is closer to 35 if I recall correctly.
But if you're using it to generate hydrogen, and burning the hydrogen in the car, the car engine is STILL going to get about 25%. So (using your numbers) you're getting 25% of 40%, rather than 25% of 100%, of the energy from the fuel.
Oops! Now you're burning two and a half times as much fuel.
Now if you could take the power the plant makes and store it 100% efficiently, transport it to the car without loss, and use it in the car without loss, THEN you'd have a 40% efficient car instead of a 25%. And you'd have moved the pollution and reduced it somewhat. That's what they're TRYING for with the electric cars.
But forget about it. You make the car heavier with those batteries, so you need to move the batteries around, too. Net payload stays the same while gross vehicle mass goes up, and even with perfect motors, batteries, and transmission lines you end up with less efficiency.
Better would be to use a car with regenerative braking and flywheel storage. LOTS to be gained there.
But if you have regenerative braking and flywheel storage, you can use it in combination with a LITTLE internal combustion engine running at max-efficiency, and get rid of the major storage. Call it 200 horsepower-minutes of flywheel storage and a 25-horsepower engine running at closer to 30% efficiency than 25 and you'll get city mileage beating the country mileage of current vehicles, while country mileage also goes up, though not in proportion. You'll need a few other things to break 100 MPG, but it's no longer unattainable.
... someday they oughta be built into the car, with solar panels on the roof providing the energy to seperate the water by products back into hydrogen
You can forget the solar panels on the car. And Timothy can forget the ones on the roof, too. If you've got a few acres you might be able to swing it.
The reason is the sheer AMOUNT of energy involved in mechanical motion. One horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 KILOwatt. Your car needs about 18 of them just to push the air out of the way as you cruise, more than a hundred to start up from a stopsign without inducing road rage in the people behind you.
A 135 HP engine is putting out a tenth of a MEGAWATT. That's enough to power a thousand houses. The heat wasted in the brakes of a car stopping from 50 MPH, once, could heat a snowbound four-bedroom house for half an hour.
Insolation is about one kilowatt per square yard. At the mid-latitudes of the USA you have about 5 solar hours per day. Let's be generous and say the panels are 10% efficient. And let's say your car has 3 square yards of panel area, you park it in unobstructed sunlight, and you have no weather. 4/3 * 3 * 5 * 1/10 = 2 horsepower-hours per day.
But that's as electricity out of the panels, with perfect storage, perfect motors, and perfect regenerative braking. We were talking using it to make hydrogen and burning it in an engine. Divide by another factor of 5 (at least).
Ok, now you're down to 2/5 horsepower hour. Call it one horsepower for twelve minutes. Call it enough to cruise for about a minute and a half at highway speed, or maybe enough to accellerate from a standing start to highway speed - ONCE.
Not going to do much commuting that way.
Of course that's why people are talking hydrogen rather than batteries and electric charge. Pumping gas into a car is equivalent to "charging" it at a rate in the BILLIONS of watts. You're not going to pull an electric into a station and give it a quick charge. You'd be using the entire output of a fossil fuel or nuclear plant to charge ONE car. The magnetic fields around the cable would bend the sheet metal.
Ever wonder why electric cars are a BAD idea? Think about the power shortages in California. Then think about everybody commuting with electric cars. Figure a one-hour commute and perfect efficiency so you can approximate it as averaging maybe 24 horsepower. Figure charging them for 12 hours - 2 HP average. That's 1.5 times the power demand of the house, JUST to charge ONE very efficient car for ONE hour of commuting for ONE driver. For every two power plants we have now, build three more.
Now add in shopping. Stop-and-go. Call it another four power plants. Drive from silicon valley to San Francisco and back for a little entertainment - five more. Don't even THINK of a pleasant drive in the country, or going to visit grandma for the holidays.
They used a pigmented dope on the fabric. The pigments used were iron oxide and aluminum.
You may remember that pair of powders from your chemistry class. It's called "thermite".
It's really hard to ignite. (You have to get the oxide layer off a particle of aluminum and melt the particle. Think of the oxide layer as saphire, or corrundum.) But a spark can do it if the pgiment is spread sufficiently thin or if the spark is hot enough.
Once it's lit, it burns by the aluminum pulling the oxygen out of the iron oxide, leaving elemental iron and the difference in the heat of formation of iron and aluminum oxides. Iron oxide has a moderate heat of formation - you can burn steel wool if it's fine enough. But aluminum oxide has THE highest heat of formation of ANY compound. The difference is enough to leave the iron molten and glowing brilliant white.
They weld railroad tracks by putting a thermite crucible above the join and letting the resulting molten iron pour down into a form wrapped around the rail. It melts the ends of the rail and fuses the whole thing into a single piece.
You're using energy from your electrical system to electrolyze water into hygrogen and oxygen. The electricity replaces, at a minimum, the "heat of formation" energy of the water as it cracks it to its elements.
Then you inject the hydrogen into your intake manifold, where it burns with oxygen from the air, releasing the heat of formation - as heat.
The heat is converted to mechanical power by the engine, which turns the generator to make the hydrogen.
Perpetual motion? Hardly.
A PERFECT heat engine only gets about a third of the energy out of the heat it uses. The other >2/3 goes to heat up a cold place. So you lose AT LEAST 2/3 of your energy each time through the cycle. And while automobile engines are pretty efficient they are optimized for portability, power-to-weight ratio, and a wide operating range. So they don't approach Carnot Cycle efficency all that closely. You need a big stationary power plant for that.
Electric generators are good - you'll probably only lose another 10% there. More for the fan belts.
Your electrolyzer won't be 100% efficient either. And that pump is pure loss.
The hydrogen might do something useful to the mixture. But more likely it will just confuse the engine control computer, which expects to be working with a mixture of gasoline and air, and lower the efficiency of the engine further. (But probably not as far as if you tried it on a pre-computer engine, which doesn't have feedback from an exhaust oxygen sensor to let it adjust the gasoline flow to compensate for the hydrogen.)
I suspect any mileage improvement to be an illusion. But there's one possibility for some improvement from this setup. The bubbler is probably putting some fine water droplets into the intake manifold. Water injection does help an otto-cycle engine, making a non-trivial improvement in both mileage and NOx emissions. The droplets boil and the steam helps transfer the energy into mechanical effort against the piston, while the boiling water cools the burn and reduces combustion of nitrogen.
It's not done in cars because it's an expensive extra complexity, leaves you with TWO consumable liquids to run out of, and tends to rot the metal. Compared to a computer controlled engine without water injection it's not enough of an improvement in performance to justify the costs.
So if everyone really knows what they're doing (cross fingers), go with Perl, because you cannot get that much expressiveness in any other language. If you think your development skills would benefit from additional structure, go with C++.
Generally good advice. But this is a special case.
The questioner already has working code, and wants to recode it in another language to speed it up and perhaps "iron" it into cleaner form for future enhancements.
In such a situation you can inherit much of the organization and concentrate on speed. Porting to a language that's enough different than the original to bring your attention to things as you port (rather than making a mechanical translation) but not so different that you have to totally reorganize or implement a LOT of of replacements for language builtins will probably give you the cleanest result. Or if you're already in the likely fastest target language, sit back and look over the existing organization to see what can be improved.
C/C++ tends to be the fastest in those enviornments where it's appropriate, and IF you can find the right stuff in the standard libraries/class libraries you probably won't have to implement a lot of replacements. Let's assume for the moment it would be a good choice. Since this is a port for speed, it would be a good time to come to a real understanding of the underpinnings of the language, so you can squeeze the most out of it.
But before you dig in, try instrumenting the existing system and find out where its bottlenecks are. You may find the real problem isn't the language, but some other aspect (like API delays or database time). If that's where your time consumption or latencies are, you'll have to fix or replace them to get your improvement anyhow. If the bottlenecks aren't inherent in the existing language (neither the language itself or its API requirements), you might find you can fix them and leave the bulk of the code just as it is.
It's a common misconception that Assembler is faster than C. Good compilers know how to group instructions together so that they execute faster on the given processor. It's quite hard to do by hand.
In fact it's research to that effect, a few years ago, that led to the development of RISC machines.
A good assembly programmer could still outdo a compiler when he really focussed. But the compilers knew MOST of the tricks, and applied them consistently everywhere. In competition with assembly programmers - even good ones - the program that had been through the compiler normally came out significantly ahead.
Given this, and the greater portability of things like Unix (which was mostly in C with some minimal assembly where needed), assembly code was mostly dropped except where it was unavoidable (like OS routines to get the stack arranged after an interrupt so you could get back into C).
But given that the compiler was generating essentially all the code anyhow, it made sense to design computers with simplified ("reduced") instruction sets, rather than extended ("complex") sets of feature-prone instructions. Sometimes it would take several RISC instructions to do the work of a CISC instruction. But the compiler could generate it, so it was no skin off the programmer's nose.
With the compiler to do the work, a RISC computer could be very simple internally. This meant it could be very small. That meant the parts could be close together, so it could run faster with a given technology, and that it could be moved to a faster technology sooner, when the production yeild for a BIG chip was still too low but the yeild on a SMALL one was adequate.
The extra instruction fetches were a problem. But instruction cacheing kept the inner loops in the machine, so there was still a big net gain.
Why is this moderated troll? This isn't someone trolling, this is a VALID point.
Because moderators are not employees of Slashdot. Moderators are selected pseudo-randomly, to moderate a few items, from registered users with some history and some positive "karma".
They're SUPPOSED to moderate on the basis of the quality of the post but NOT on the basis of whether it agrees with their opinions. But some yeild to the temtation to moderate down postings with which they have an ideological disagreement.
There's some feedback: Any registered user is encouraged to "meta-moderate". Click the link at the top of your page and you will be presented with ten moderations, which you can grade as agree/disagree/neutral. Do it daily for a couple weeks and you might get to meta-moderate the guy whose moderation you didn't like.
Karma is essentailly (mods up) - (mods down + metamods disagree). If enough people ding a turkey moderator his karma will drop until he doesn't get to moderate any more.
It's not perfect. For starters it doesn't undo the bogus moderation. But at least it's something. (And it can be very satisfying. B-) )
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the old saying: You are what you eat.
Ah! So THAT explains the mental abilities of those new-age vegitarians.
'As soon as you realized that you weren't dead, you should have started paying the royalties...'
It's called "tithing". A 10% "voluntary" income tax payable to the (Christian - various denominations) church.
A large fraction of the population of Europe did it for centuries, and some people do it to this day.
Some non-Christian churches have a similar custom.
(I wonder how long it will take for patent holders to start claiming a divine right to royalties, by analogy with kings who claimed a divine right to rule as the next level below God in an "executive branch" responsible for temporal governance.)
The front door was in the middle of the symmetrical building. More than one person died of a "heart attack" at a particular spot on the runway.
Oops. I meant "at a particular spot on the walkway to the building's door.
The "oops, we fried you" phenomenon of the Sky Mirror is a well-known problem for people constructing solar collectors. They "work" when partially constructed - the amount of heat collected is proportional to the amount of reflective surface that is already installed. They also "work" when not pointed directly at the sun - the focus is just off-center and slightly diffuse. A common accident is to be constructing one outdoors and lean through the effective focus while reaching in to install another segment. Easy way to burn out your eyes, fry your face, and/or set your hair on fire.
But it works for sound, too.
Story is there was a building in the industrial park near one of O'hare Airport's runways. The front door was in the middle of the symmetrical building. More than one person died of a "heart attack" at a particular spot on the runway.
Somebody got to thinking and realized that the front of the building was a parabola, pointed at the runway, and the magic spot on the sidewalk was the focus of the parabola. If you happened to be standing there when a jet on takeoff went by with engines at full thrust, all of the kilowatts of sound that hit the front of the building would be focused on you for an appreciable fraction of a second. Very much like being at the center of a bomb.
Oops!
The Cray I's cooling system had a void in it that just happened to be the size of a six-pack. The amount of time it took to shut it down, do a part replacement, bring it back up, and check it out, just happened to be the amount of time it took to bring a six-pack from room temperature to "AHHhhh..." temperature.
The engineers insist this was not deliberate.
The FE's really didn't care whether it was deliberate or not. But if it really WAS deliberate then it was very thoughtful of the engineers to build in such a moralle-booster for the field staff.
Did anyone else notice that this first "uncopyable" CD is Charlie Pride doing "A tribute to singer Jim Reves"?
"A tribute to" means an album where ALL the songs were previously done by the singer to whom the tribute is being paid.
In other words, EVERY SONG ON THE ALBUM is Johnny Pride COPYING a song done by Jim Reves.
Somehow this seems appropriate. B-)
But it's not a copyright violation. Johnny will have licenced all those songs from the current copyright holder.
So if Jim actually WROTE any of them and his estate or heirs still own the copyright, perhaps Johnny actually WILL pay some tribute to Jim, in the financial sense.
They can prevent you from being paid by a competitor, probably even as a consultant. I saw nothing preventing you from working on open source during the no compete clause time.
Does an open-source author derive financial benefit from the reputation increase? If so it's commercial work. Does the open source project software perform some function that a Microsoft application performs? If so it's competition.
Can Microsoft claim that the open source project's code exposes a Microsoft trade secret? They can sue the ex-employee into bankruptcy for exposing it. (And they can sue even if the employee DIDN'T actually expose a Microsoft trade secret. Their lawyers against his - and he probably gets to pay his lawyers even if he wins.)
Believe it or not, individual soldiers in the Army generally still don't have personal radios down past the squad leader level.
There's a reason for this. Most field tactical radios are bulky and heavy.
That's fixable.
One that's NOT fixable is that high-energy radio noise could knock out radio communications. The Army doesn't want their small unit coordination to be so dependent on radio (or any other single thing) that things go to pieces if it's denied.
... it is very common for companies ... to get competitors products and reverse engineer them to see how they tick. How then is this different than leaving company A to work for company B?
Simple: It COSTS a lot of expensive engineering time to reverse-engineer a product. Sometimes it costs more than designing it in the first place. (I pitty anyone trying to reverse engineer the stuff I'm doing at my current job, or at several of the previous ones. B-) )
Hire an engineer who worked on it and you've got the bulk of it it in the time it takes for him to spin-up on your company's procedures (which a new employee would have to do anyhow).
First player explores the maze. Second player goes straight to the goal. Which company can sell the product for less? Which one out-competes and squeezes out the other?
A number of companies have tried to reduce consultants to employees and employees to serfs.
EDS was one. It hired people out of high-school, trained them in an "information tech boot camp", and charged them something like $5K (a couple decades ago) for that "training" if they left within six months. They paid them peanuts and no stock options, but picked up their medical expenses. Result: They'd be unemployable and at risk to life and limb if they left. Then EDS cut an exclusive - and finally merged with - GM, throwing thousands of contract programmers out of work there (unless they signed on with EDS, of course). Serfdom.
Ross Perot (EDS' founder) lobbied until the "safe harbor" provision of the tax code was changed, with the net result that if consultants (or their families) owned controlling interest in firm they worked through - even if it was incorporated - it would be treated as a front for direct employment. That combined with a tax court ruling treating their clients as "employers", making them liable for the consultants' income tax if the consultant screwed up on paying quarterlies. The result was that consultants HAD to be employees of corporations they didn't have significant control over to be employable in the auto industry. Near serfdom - you get to change farms and lords, but can't run your own show.
(I understand some of this has changes since then.)
Now we have Microsoft. If you are granted access to their internal code while working with their partners you have to sign a non-compete that takes you out of most of the software business for years afterward. If you work directly for them you get little or no experience with non-Microsoft software and if you leave they'll enforce non-competes - even terms you didn't agree to - to keep you from working anywhere in their space.
Who in their right mind, knowing this, will ever sign on with them?
I know there's a stereotype around here of Bill Gates as devil. But this makes it look like their employment papers grant them your soul.
What if a company decides to market PC's that feature Linux instead of that other 'life on the edge of a crash' OS?
Under this bill, if a "personal computer" incudes an operating system, the manufacturer would be required to provide fitering software.
According to that summary the bill would seem to apply to computers with pre-installed operating systems. In other words: To machines bundeled with the software.
Assuming that's the case it might provide an incentive to unbundle, selling machines WITHOUT pre-installed OSes, and sell the OS separately, as a way to evade the law.
If that happened, Linux users could get the machines sans MS, and not have to try for the essentially unobtainable refunds.
Of course, once Microsoft makes a "Texas Edition" the incentive is gone...
I don't think it was a revolution as much as the natural progression of evolution in human communications. Did people think they'd use a telephone til 2246?
Quite.
Television was supposed to usher in a utopia of universal education and look what that's become: Mind-numbing fluff, and the highest return-on-investment of any industry. It's not going away any time soon, is it?
The net was put together by people who have individual dreams of doing something neat. The hype about the net was put together primarily by people who were putting together hype rather than putting togehter the net. Yes they quoted some of the people working on it. So what? It's still a lot of hype.
And some of the people who put together parts of the net's applications were inspired by the hype. Again, so what? Some of the people who put together Motorola's Star Tak cellular phones were obviously inspired by Star Trek communicators. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be cellular phones - or even folding ones - without a "Star Trek Culture", or that the lack of Iridium service would mean "the Cellular Phone Revolution" was "Breaking Faith".
It's one thing to have faith in people who actually MADE you a promise, and have them willfully fail to execute on it. It's quite another to have faith in the promises of media hype-master hangers-on and blame the real workers when the bullshit you were doesn't match what actually materializes.
And if some investors are paniced because they believed the hype, bought into the scams, and something completely different from what they expected happened, again so what? Something damned profitable for all concerned is still materializing, and it will still change the world. There's no free lunch, and no guaranteed investment. You have to do your own due dilligence, sort out the companies that will really build something profitable and invest in THOSE if you want your money to grow, and to stay around once the storms have subsided.
The networked world will continue to be a thing and to grow in my opinion. The men who have invested their lives into it won't let it die without a fight from hell.
Hear hear. And as one of the people building it I can assure you we're still on the job and it will get better.
Ha! another Maggie and the Ferocious Beast afficionado!
Possibly not. It was also used (no doubt as a throwaway reference) in a storyline in Phil Foglio's _XXXenophile_ comic. (X rated, so most of the M&FB fans will have to wait a few years to view it.)
Phil throws in a lot of references to other works. It's nice to know where this one came from.
While I agree with most points you make, these numbers are not entirely realistic. A full tank of gasoline is about 2 MJ.
I think 2 megajoules is a LOT low for a tank of gas - unless it's a lawnmower. The "units" command says a horsepower-hour is about 2.7 megajoules (2,684,519.5), which compares well with the approximation of 1 HP = 750 watts. A tank of gas yeilds easily over a hundred horsepower-hours. Multiply your two minute fillup at 15 megawatt by 100 and you've got 1.5 billion watts for two minutes.
Multiply by another 4 if you're talking gasoline engines rather than electric cars with idealized 100% efficient batteries/motors and you're in the 6 gigawatt range for your 2-minute fillup gas pump hose. Which seams reasonable when you compare it to the fuel feed for a 1500 megawatt boiler.
Sounds impressive, but is exaggerated. A 1000 kg car, running at 50 MPH has a kinetic energy of about 250kJ. Divide by 1800 seconds, and you'll get 140 Watts. This isn't going to heat a four-bedroom house. You'll need something closer to 25 kW for that.
Oh?
%units
2112 units, 59 prefixes
You have: megagram miles miles / hour hour
You want: watt hours
* 0.055512434
/ 18.013982
You have:
%dc
50 50 * 0.055512434 * p
138.781085000
2 * p
277.562170000
I get about 278 watts. Still a bit low, though.
On the other hand, 25 kW is WAY too high. A space heater is about 1500 watts, so 25 kW is almost 17 of them. I don't know about you, but if I put 16 2/3 space heaters in a 4 bedroom house and jammed their thermostats so they ran at 100% duty cycle, by the end of a half hour I'd expect the house to be afire.
Let's call it a well-insulated one-bedroom house and ten minutes. That's about one large space heater running about 50% duty cycle.
Imagine what happens when you get in an accident that shorts and/or spills the contents of batteries capable of delivering a megawatt for ten minutes.
Oops. Make that a tenth of a megawatt for ten minutes.
I'm a little uneasy at flywheel storage. I've heard enough stories about what happens when early harddrives (heavy, quickly spinning cylinders) and ultracentrifuges "go" that I'm very apprehensious about them, especially when poorly maintained.
And that's one of the big design issues.
But it's not unique to flywheels. Imagine what happens when you get in an accident that shorts and/or spills the contents of batteries capable of delivering a megawatt for ten minutes.
At least one uperflywheel design (which is NOT disk-shaped) is intended to go to powder if they fracture. And the breaking of the bonds absorbs a lot of the energy. (A superflywheel at max is operating where the molecules throughout its structure are strained just short of the breaking point, so the stored energy approximates the heat of formation of the compound.)
But if it doesn't work it approximates a small bomb. (So you put it in a container that approximates armor.)
I live near many different railroad lines and have never seen this done (or a fused rail).
Most railroads don't use welded rail. It's tough to do an expansion joint with no joints. B-)
You're right when you say that this just moves the polution. The difference is that those big power generation plants are _much_ more efficient then your typical car engine. The typical oil power plant is ~40% efficient - compared to ~25% for a car engine.
Those plants are heat engines. "Perfect" is closer to 35 if I recall correctly.
But if you're using it to generate hydrogen, and burning the hydrogen in the car, the car engine is STILL going to get about 25%. So (using your numbers) you're getting 25% of 40%, rather than 25% of 100%, of the energy from the fuel.
Oops! Now you're burning two and a half times as much fuel.
Now if you could take the power the plant makes and store it 100% efficiently, transport it to the car without loss, and use it in the car without loss, THEN you'd have a 40% efficient car instead of a 25%. And you'd have moved the pollution and reduced it somewhat. That's what they're TRYING for with the electric cars.
But forget about it. You make the car heavier with those batteries, so you need to move the batteries around, too. Net payload stays the same while gross vehicle mass goes up, and even with perfect motors, batteries, and transmission lines you end up with less efficiency.
Better would be to use a car with regenerative braking and flywheel storage. LOTS to be gained there.
But if you have regenerative braking and flywheel storage, you can use it in combination with a LITTLE internal combustion engine running at max-efficiency, and get rid of the major storage. Call it 200 horsepower-minutes of flywheel storage and a 25-horsepower engine running at closer to 30% efficiency than 25 and you'll get city mileage beating the country mileage of current vehicles, while country mileage also goes up, though not in proportion. You'll need a few other things to break 100 MPG, but it's no longer unattainable.
... someday they oughta be built into the car, with solar panels on the roof providing the energy to seperate the water by products back into hydrogen
You can forget the solar panels on the car. And Timothy can forget the ones on the roof, too. If you've got a few acres you might be able to swing it.
The reason is the sheer AMOUNT of energy involved in mechanical motion. One horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 KILOwatt. Your car needs about 18 of them just to push the air out of the way as you cruise, more than a hundred to start up from a stopsign without inducing road rage in the people behind you.
A 135 HP engine is putting out a tenth of a MEGAWATT. That's enough to power a thousand houses. The heat wasted in the brakes of a car stopping from 50 MPH, once, could heat a snowbound four-bedroom house for half an hour.
Insolation is about one kilowatt per square yard. At the mid-latitudes of the USA you have about 5 solar hours per day. Let's be generous and say the panels are 10% efficient. And let's say your car has 3 square yards of panel area, you park it in unobstructed sunlight, and you have no weather. 4/3 * 3 * 5 * 1/10 = 2 horsepower-hours per day.
But that's as electricity out of the panels, with perfect storage, perfect motors, and perfect regenerative braking. We were talking using it to make hydrogen and burning it in an engine. Divide by another factor of 5 (at least).
Ok, now you're down to 2/5 horsepower hour. Call it one horsepower for twelve minutes. Call it enough to cruise for about a minute and a half at highway speed, or maybe enough to accellerate from a standing start to highway speed - ONCE.
Not going to do much commuting that way.
Of course that's why people are talking hydrogen rather than batteries and electric charge. Pumping gas into a car is equivalent to "charging" it at a rate in the BILLIONS of watts. You're not going to pull an electric into a station and give it a quick charge. You'd be using the entire output of a fossil fuel or nuclear plant to charge ONE car. The magnetic fields around the cable would bend the sheet metal.
Ever wonder why electric cars are a BAD idea? Think about the power shortages in California. Then think about everybody commuting with electric cars. Figure a one-hour commute and perfect efficiency so you can approximate it as averaging maybe 24 horsepower. Figure charging them for 12 hours - 2 HP average. That's 1.5 times the power demand of the house, JUST to charge ONE very efficient car for ONE hour of commuting for ONE driver. For every two power plants we have now, build three more.
Now add in shopping. Stop-and-go. Call it another four power plants. Drive from silicon valley to San Francisco and back for a little entertainment - five more. Don't even THINK of a pleasant drive in the country, or going to visit grandma for the holidays.
They used a pigmented dope on the fabric. The pigments used were iron oxide and aluminum.
You may remember that pair of powders from your chemistry class. It's called "thermite".
It's really hard to ignite. (You have to get the oxide layer off a particle of aluminum and melt the particle. Think of the oxide layer as saphire, or corrundum.) But a spark can do it if the pgiment is spread sufficiently thin or if the spark is hot enough.
Once it's lit, it burns by the aluminum pulling the oxygen out of the iron oxide, leaving elemental iron and the difference in the heat of formation of iron and aluminum oxides. Iron oxide has a moderate heat of formation - you can burn steel wool if it's fine enough. But aluminum oxide has THE highest heat of formation of ANY compound. The difference is enough to leave the iron molten and glowing brilliant white.
They weld railroad tracks by putting a thermite crucible above the join and letting the resulting molten iron pour down into a form wrapped around the rail. It melts the ends of the rail and fuses the whole thing into a single piece.
Let's see...
You're using energy from your electrical system to electrolyze water into hygrogen and oxygen. The electricity replaces, at a minimum, the "heat of formation" energy of the water as it cracks it to its elements.
Then you inject the hydrogen into your intake manifold, where it burns with oxygen from the air, releasing the heat of formation - as heat.
The heat is converted to mechanical power by the engine, which turns the generator to make the hydrogen.
Perpetual motion? Hardly.
A PERFECT heat engine only gets about a third of the energy out of the heat it uses. The other >2/3 goes to heat up a cold place. So you lose AT LEAST 2/3 of your energy each time through the cycle. And while automobile engines are pretty efficient they are optimized for portability, power-to-weight ratio, and a wide operating range. So they don't approach Carnot Cycle efficency all that closely. You need a big stationary power plant for that.
Electric generators are good - you'll probably only lose another 10% there. More for the fan belts.
Your electrolyzer won't be 100% efficient either. And that pump is pure loss.
The hydrogen might do something useful to the mixture. But more likely it will just confuse the engine control computer, which expects to be working with a mixture of gasoline and air, and lower the efficiency of the engine further. (But probably not as far as if you tried it on a pre-computer engine, which doesn't have feedback from an exhaust oxygen sensor to let it adjust the gasoline flow to compensate for the hydrogen.)
I suspect any mileage improvement to be an illusion. But there's one possibility for some improvement from this setup. The bubbler is probably putting some fine water droplets into the intake manifold. Water injection does help an otto-cycle engine, making a non-trivial improvement in both mileage and NOx emissions. The droplets boil and the steam helps transfer the energy into mechanical effort against the piston, while the boiling water cools the burn and reduces combustion of nitrogen.
It's not done in cars because it's an expensive extra complexity, leaves you with TWO consumable liquids to run out of, and tends to rot the metal. Compared to a computer controlled engine without water injection it's not enough of an improvement in performance to justify the costs.
So if everyone really knows what they're doing (cross fingers), go with Perl, because you cannot get that much expressiveness in any other language. If you think your development skills would benefit from additional structure, go with C++.
Generally good advice. But this is a special case.
The questioner already has working code, and wants to recode it in another language to speed it up and perhaps "iron" it into cleaner form for future enhancements.
In such a situation you can inherit much of the organization and concentrate on speed. Porting to a language that's enough different than the original to bring your attention to things as you port (rather than making a mechanical translation) but not so different that you have to totally reorganize or implement a LOT of of replacements for language builtins will probably give you the cleanest result. Or if you're already in the likely fastest target language, sit back and look over the existing organization to see what can be improved.
C/C++ tends to be the fastest in those enviornments where it's appropriate, and IF you can find the right stuff in the standard libraries/class libraries you probably won't have to implement a lot of replacements. Let's assume for the moment it would be a good choice. Since this is a port for speed, it would be a good time to come to a real understanding of the underpinnings of the language, so you can squeeze the most out of it.
But before you dig in, try instrumenting the existing system and find out where its bottlenecks are. You may find the real problem isn't the language, but some other aspect (like API delays or database time). If that's where your time consumption or latencies are, you'll have to fix or replace them to get your improvement anyhow. If the bottlenecks aren't inherent in the existing language (neither the language itself or its API requirements), you might find you can fix them and leave the bulk of the code just as it is.
It's a common misconception that Assembler is faster than C. Good compilers know how to group instructions together so that they execute faster on the given processor. It's quite hard to do by hand.
In fact it's research to that effect, a few years ago, that led to the development of RISC machines.
A good assembly programmer could still outdo a compiler when he really focussed. But the compilers knew MOST of the tricks, and applied them consistently everywhere. In competition with assembly programmers - even good ones - the program that had been through the compiler normally came out significantly ahead.
Given this, and the greater portability of things like Unix (which was mostly in C with some minimal assembly where needed), assembly code was mostly dropped except where it was unavoidable (like OS routines to get the stack arranged after an interrupt so you could get back into C).
But given that the compiler was generating essentially all the code anyhow, it made sense to design computers with simplified ("reduced") instruction sets, rather than extended ("complex") sets of feature-prone instructions. Sometimes it would take several RISC instructions to do the work of a CISC instruction. But the compiler could generate it, so it was no skin off the programmer's nose.
With the compiler to do the work, a RISC computer could be very simple internally. This meant it could be very small. That meant the parts could be close together, so it could run faster with a given technology, and that it could be moved to a faster technology sooner, when the production yeild for a BIG chip was still too low but the yeild on a SMALL one was adequate.
The extra instruction fetches were a problem. But instruction cacheing kept the inner loops in the machine, so there was still a big net gain.
Why is this moderated troll? This isn't someone trolling, this is a VALID point.
Because moderators are not employees of Slashdot. Moderators are selected pseudo-randomly, to moderate a few items, from registered users with some history and some positive "karma".
They're SUPPOSED to moderate on the basis of the quality of the post but NOT on the basis of whether it agrees with their opinions. But some yeild to the temtation to moderate down postings with which they have an ideological disagreement.
There's some feedback: Any registered user is encouraged to "meta-moderate". Click the link at the top of your page and you will be presented with ten moderations, which you can grade as agree/disagree/neutral. Do it daily for a couple weeks and you might get to meta-moderate the guy whose moderation you didn't like.
Karma is essentailly (mods up) - (mods down + metamods disagree). If enough people ding a turkey moderator his karma will drop until he doesn't get to moderate any more.
It's not perfect. For starters it doesn't undo the bogus moderation. But at least it's something. (And it can be very satisfying. B-) )