Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.
While I don't agree with his supposition, He's not that far off the mark. In manufacturing, if the expected life is 1 year (with a warranty period of 90 days), and if a $10 part will last, literally forever while a $2 part will last for 1 year of continuous use... You choose the $2 part.
I don't know where you got $500/kg from... It's considerably more than that. I've got a piece of 99.99% pure indium wire in my desk drawer and a 36" piece cost me $300. It can't be but maybe 5 grams.
I'm all about solar power. Planning to put enough panels on my south-east facing roof to offset 100% of my power usage. You do realize that most of the radiation your talking about being filtered by the atmosphere is UV and that the reactor housing will block that, right? The X-ray radiation is intentionally reflected back to the fuel pellet to increase the reaction rate. The neutrons are to be absorbed in a lithium blanket wrapping the reactor (to create more tritium fuel). The gamma, what of it there is can be stopped with a little shielding -- and has to by law (100mRem/yr max). Just checking.
If people do what you suggest then there will undoubtedly be some who fall from the height. No sir. I don't want any 100 foot people killing poles in my back yard. Think of the children!
Yes, the big wind tunnels have to provide advance warning to the local utility when they're going to spin up or shut down the fans. You don't just switch on a load that big...
I have nuclear power in my back yard. There's probably 2-3 reactors at any one time, with occasionally as many as 8 reactors just 5 miles up the street and Google maps shows 13 reactors sitting 15 miles away (never can be certain of the exact numbers at either location). Of course those are Navy nuclear reactors at Norfolk Naval Base and at Newport News Shipbuilding... Oh, and we have 2 power reactors about 20 miles in the other direction.
750 MWe oil fired power plant in York County, Virginia owned by Dominion Virginia Power would beg to differ.
Although, it was built to be as efficient and "green" as possible -- it was designed to burn the heavy oil byproduct produced by the oil refinery on the adjacent property. Essentially the left over stuff after processing the crude to produce the lighter #2 fuel oil, diesel, gasoline, etc.
Good luck with trying to convince them to give you the electricity for free, considering how much they've had to spend over nine years of legal wrangling to get this far...
Yes, CMOS has come a long way. The cell phone cameras still use the "cheap crappy" CMOS sensors, though. Not the (expensive) good ones used in SLR cameras.
spacecraft will be the first solar sail-powered craft to enter deep space
Depends on your definition of "deep space". I understood that to mean outside the solar system. A quick googling shows two definitions: 1. interstellar 2. interplanetary and beyond. So definitely not clear. In any case, it's somewhat moot since there's never been any solar sail-powered craft, ever, that succeeded in deploying its sail. Even in Earth orbit.
Building the Ikaros alone probably accounts for the $16M. I think JAXA HIIA launch cost is probably on the order of $100M (U.S.) although that cost could be shared as they can launch multiple satellites at a time (bounded by space and weight constraints).
I still have a box of 5 1/4" disks in my desk drawer. Double density 360kB. We only retired that machine late last year and I kept a box of disks, basically, to show to my children.
As you've alluded to, you really can't run real-time on Windows. DOS was great for that and is still available (FreeDOS and DR-DOS), IF you can find necessary hardware drivers. Where you used to be able to use DOS as an acceptable platform, these days you're sort of forced to move to linux and tear it down to where it's safe for real-time, or move to a (designed for use as) real-time OS like QNX or VxWorks.
Still miss it on occasion though -- I learned to code on 6502, Z80 and 8086 machines.
Noooo. The old Sony I'm referring to has a real CCD (not a CMOS sensor) and the macro lens assembly rivals the quality of a good SLR lens. To get the same quality optics we have mounted on the old camera we'd have to spend close to a thousand dollars. My 6MP camera doesn't take as good a photo close-up, in macro mode, as this old Sony. We use this camera to take pictures of parts and PCB's for our manufacturing documentation.
We still have a number of test systems in our plant which are still running DOS software. These machines are typically legacy hardware. In some cases the software cannot run on Windows because of various incompatibilities; so, migrating to newer hardware requires a software re-write (which we are working on, slowly). Because of this dependancy on legacy software and legacy hardware we still have to use 3.5" floppies on occasion.
Hell, I still have a box of 2S/DD (360kB) 5 1/4" floppies in my desk -- we only retired that machine late last year.
Still have one of those. Sony with good macro lens. Takes excellent 640x480 images, which are perfect for embedding in documentation. No reason not to use it.
Why I remember when we had 320x200 in 2 colors (black and green), the "graphics engine" produced only text, and we LIKED it. Why, that was a huge improvement over the previous generation, the teletype. The young these days. Pampered and always complaining...
Slashdot Mirror
seed nothing. Pollen is all it takes for the patented gene to cross into your fields.
Pfff. I remeber when a 5 MB drive cost $3,000
but a large unknown is how to effectively extract water in an environment lacking gravity."
With a silly straw, Silly!
I don't recall working with CMS on an IBM being all that difficult.
I have ranges of addresses available. Only $1.00 ea. Beginning with 10.0.0.1 but they won't last, so act now!
Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.
While I don't agree with his supposition, He's not that far off the mark. In manufacturing, if the expected life is 1 year (with a warranty period of 90 days), and if a $10 part will last, literally forever while a $2 part will last for 1 year of continuous use... You choose the $2 part.
sure... a nuke a few miles off the coast of Louisiana wouldn't do any environmental harm... /sarcasm
I don't know where you got $500/kg from... It's considerably more than that. I've got a piece of 99.99% pure indium wire in my desk drawer and a 36" piece cost me $300. It can't be but maybe 5 grams.
I'm all about solar power. Planning to put enough panels on my south-east facing roof to offset 100% of my power usage. You do realize that most of the radiation your talking about being filtered by the atmosphere is UV and that the reactor housing will block that, right? The X-ray radiation is intentionally reflected back to the fuel pellet to increase the reaction rate. The neutrons are to be absorbed in a lithium blanket wrapping the reactor (to create more tritium fuel). The gamma, what of it there is can be stopped with a little shielding -- and has to by law (100mRem/yr max). Just checking.
If people do what you suggest then there will undoubtedly be some who fall from the height. No sir. I don't want any 100 foot people killing poles in my back yard. Think of the children!
Yes, the big wind tunnels have to provide advance warning to the local utility when they're going to spin up or shut down the fans. You don't just switch on a load that big...
I have nuclear power in my back yard. There's probably 2-3 reactors at any one time, with occasionally as many as 8 reactors just 5 miles up the street and Google maps shows 13 reactors sitting 15 miles away (never can be certain of the exact numbers at either location). Of course those are Navy nuclear reactors at Norfolk Naval Base and at Newport News Shipbuilding... Oh, and we have 2 power reactors about 20 miles in the other direction.
750 MWe oil fired power plant in York County, Virginia owned by Dominion Virginia Power would beg to differ.
Although, it was built to be as efficient and "green" as possible -- it was designed to burn the heavy oil byproduct produced by the oil refinery on the adjacent property. Essentially the left over stuff after processing the crude to produce the lighter #2 fuel oil, diesel, gasoline, etc.
Good luck with trying to convince them to give you the electricity for free, considering how much they've had to spend over nine years of legal wrangling to get this far...
Yes, CMOS has come a long way. The cell phone cameras still use the "cheap crappy" CMOS sensors, though. Not the (expensive) good ones used in SLR cameras.
spacecraft will be the first solar sail-powered craft to enter deep space
Depends on your definition of "deep space". I understood that to mean outside the solar system. A quick googling shows two definitions: 1. interstellar 2. interplanetary and beyond. So definitely not clear. In any case, it's somewhat moot since there's never been any solar sail-powered craft, ever, that succeeded in deploying its sail. Even in Earth orbit.
Building the Ikaros alone probably accounts for the $16M. I think JAXA HIIA launch cost is probably on the order of $100M (U.S.) although that cost could be shared as they can launch multiple satellites at a time (bounded by space and weight constraints).
I still have a box of 5 1/4" disks in my desk drawer. Double density 360kB. We only retired that machine late last year and I kept a box of disks, basically, to show to my children.
As you've alluded to, you really can't run real-time on Windows. DOS was great for that and is still available (FreeDOS and DR-DOS), IF you can find necessary hardware drivers. Where you used to be able to use DOS as an acceptable platform, these days you're sort of forced to move to linux and tear it down to where it's safe for real-time, or move to a (designed for use as) real-time OS like QNX or VxWorks.
Still miss it on occasion though -- I learned to code on 6502, Z80 and 8086 machines.
Noooo. The old Sony I'm referring to has a real CCD (not a CMOS sensor) and the macro lens assembly rivals the quality of a good SLR lens. To get the same quality optics we have mounted on the old camera we'd have to spend close to a thousand dollars. My 6MP camera doesn't take as good a photo close-up, in macro mode, as this old Sony. We use this camera to take pictures of parts and PCB's for our manufacturing documentation.
We still have a number of test systems in our plant which are still running DOS software. These machines are typically legacy hardware. In some cases the software cannot run on Windows because of various incompatibilities; so, migrating to newer hardware requires a software re-write (which we are working on, slowly). Because of this dependancy on legacy software and legacy hardware we still have to use 3.5" floppies on occasion.
Hell, I still have a box of 2S/DD (360kB) 5 1/4" floppies in my desk -- we only retired that machine late last year.
Still have one of those. Sony with good macro lens. Takes excellent 640x480 images, which are perfect for embedding in documentation. No reason not to use it.
Note: This is been known for at least 30 years.
Because there's a clear journalistic bias. A bias that sells papers.
Reality, of course, is American weapons are quite good at very deadly.
Why I remember when we had 320x200 in 2 colors (black and green), the "graphics engine" produced only text, and we LIKED it. Why, that was a huge improvement over the previous generation, the teletype. The young these days. Pampered and always complaining...