minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip
Technically you can just swing by on a minimum energy Hohmann ellipse and come right back. If you want to stay awhile its either gonna cost more fuel or time until you can set up another minimum fuel ellipse to come back.
If you're willing to burn a tiny tiny little extra fuel, you pass beyond mars orbit... so you jump a lander craft off on the way out, and rejoin on the way back in. Basically you plan a Hohmann pretending that Mars is in a slightly bigger orbit. Its actually a hell of a lot more complicated than this.
You can model stuff like this with the "orbiter" orbital mechanics simulator from the early 00s (and still going), or you can run the numbers, or just go intuitively.
From memory fooling around with this, the increased fuel in the main machine, and increased fuel in the lander craft, means you are not going to hang around very long... but from memory a couple days was not too unrealistic in terms of increased delta-v?
1) "block a possible strike from Iranian nuclear tipped missiles" I'm going to take a wild guess that culturally they Might prefer using a Toyota pickup truck or a shipping container or a standard passenger jetliner as a delivery vehicle. In the US we've forgotten why we're fixated on missiles, its because the USSR couldn't realistically, say, drive a truck over here with a H-bomb, so it ends up being missile vs missile.
2) SM series is "standard missile". Its really hard to specify how much work went into ballistic missile defense vs plain ole blowing stuff up. So political types will charge it as either thousands to billions depending on which axe they have to grind. So.. that vim editor... how much money was spent on editing Python? Well, you could evaluate what percentage was used in the field for Perl vs Python. Or you could look at bugs filed. Or some BS about test suites. Fundamentally its just a pretty darn useful editor. Much as a SM is a pretty darn useful wide envelope missile. It is emphatically not a "ballistic defense only" weapon.
3) There's endless rumors and BS about how SM series can be hacked into hitting seaskimming cruise missiles, but fundamentally you're better off with fast acting projectile weapons. You don't get much warning...
I would assume "they" would put their bomb into the vehicle "we" (well, we as in we are merely a province or whatever of Israel, always acting exclusively with their interests in mind, according to our leaders) are least suited to defend against. I suppose with the possible exception of WWII era strategic bomber, I can't think of a less likely delivery vehicle than a ballistic missile. I would guess its almost infinitely more likely that an off the shelf Iranian submarine gets as close to the USS Enterprise as physically possible before the deadman switch is released, or a shipping container is delivered to the port of L.A. or whatever thats marked as Couscous but actually glows instead...
There ARE interesting things for Iran to do with ballistic missiles. Nuke is not one of them.
If we found a completely free source of electricity, that used a large building to produce, we wouldn't get rid of our oil demand.
Not really. Given enough cheap energy, synthetic fuel is pretty trivial.
The energy cost of ethanol distillation makes it a borderline negative source of energy... but if that energy is infinite and free, well then... Think about it... aluminum is essentially congealed electricity (look how its made). So you make aluminum greenhouses out of free electricity and dirt, then you string 24x7 ultra-high intensity lights using free electricity, the plants grow in water that was desalinated ocean water using free electricity, then you ferment the "stuff" and distill using free electricity... Given an infinite source of free electricity, pretty much, sea water comes in one pipe, and motor fuel ethanol comes out another pipe.
You could condense carbon dioxide out of the air and strip the carbon off, condense water out of the air to strip the hydrogen off, mix together in a somewhat complicated o-chem lab, and make synth-gas. Air goes in one pipe, gasoline comes out the other pipe.
Takes a heck of a lot of energy to pull that trick off, but it can be done.
Well technically it heats up the walls and any shielding. Unlike a torus / iter type thing, you don't wrap the reactor with liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets so thats not too big of a deal. To a crude first approximation you can heat a NIF device up until the vapor pressure starts screwing up the reaction and optics (I donno, dull red glow?)
In my lexicon almost =/= 20 years and I have to wonder why it was not achieved back in 1995 or 2000
because 20 years previous we hadn't signed on the dotted line to do it.
Its kind of like building a house. I can hire out to get one built in a year, anytime I want to start... but until I sign on the dotted line its going to perpetually be "a year away".
In quite a few school districts around the country "Middle School" (really in caps? it is not a proper name, you need to go back to middle school yourself) goes through 9th grade and high school doesn't start until the 10th grade. So yes, 14 and in middle school doesn't sound far fetched..
Been there, lived thru it. Eventually they built an additional high school and went to the 4-year high school program.
I would agree that the "9th graders" seem to fit in better with the HS crowd than the middle school crowd, but if there's too many kids to fit in the building...
I guess I was talking radio like "telecom and ham radio and linear amplifiers and such" not radio like "I bought a XM radio at best buy"
I've seen the MFJ plant in video tours... robotic smd pick-n-place and fully automated wave soldering machine right next to a dude hand wiring a kilowatt level vacuum tube amplifier from parts and wire. Robotic antenna mounting hole driller next to a guy wielding a screwdriver. Actually pretty clean and well lit compared to many non-electronic factories I've physically visited.
So going from 1.20/hr China workers to 8/hr illegal mexicans in the USA would boost the cost of a ipad less than $70. My gut level estimate in the last line of less than $100 was pretty good...
I hate to say it but complex adaptive systems as a discipline might be a good example of this - it seems like there might be some useful underlying generalizations about all things "complex," but useful new theories don't seem to be forthcoming.
That's because all the useful theories are old. Ask a EE about his "control system theory" assuming he's a real EE. Its all bode plots and PID controllers as far as the the eye can see. Fuzzy logic was a 80s fad that never went anywhere. There's some overlap with neural networks in that in extreme agony and wasted time you can train a NN to be a cruddy PID controller... but its better just to make a real PID controller.
my local coin dealer and jeweler will not accept random chunks of ferrous sulfide or whatever fools gold is. He's very accepting of govt minted gold/silver coinage.
None of that has anything to do with being a good or terrible currency.
A good currency is more or less constant quantity, hard to make more on demand. Doesn't tarnish or rot or otherwise disappear over time. Infinitely divisible (unlike, say, seashells or cows). High volumetric value density and high mass value density. Basically the opposite of beer.
Well yeah but someone in India or NYC could do that for me. I mean the physical branch offices themselves, like the little building by the interstate exit, or the small branch inside my local food store.
Wait - 20 years ago some corporate bod knew that Mr Smith of 23 Acacia Avenue bought hamburger buns? I think not.
Yes. 20 years ago is only 1992, not like the 60s or something. In 1990, 91, something like that our mid size grocery store in a mid size suburb of a mid size city got roughly 386 class machine (was it a 486?) in the managers office and it ran the dbms that read the upc from the scanner and told the register what to charge and its tax status. Also it kept a list of all loyalty cards who owed us money for bounced checks (at one point my job was keeping that list updated). We uploaded nightly at 1030 and woe to the assistant manager who couldn't "close out" before the upload began. Also we downloaded lists of bounced checks/loyalty cards from OTHER stores..
We made a big freaking deal about giving you coupons that reflected your previous purchases. Maybe, like 99% of the population, you just threw that out, but that doesn't mean we didn't print the coupons at the bottom of the register tape. You had a "check cashing/loyalty card", right? To at least some extent your coupons mailed to your door reflected your purchases... the presence or lack of baby formula and dog food tended to reflect your previous purchases... We didn't do individualized personalized coupon mailings, but we did classify them.
Now I donno if they stored all the data, or how long. Now a days you'd assume they keep it all forever. Back then I would assume they wiped whatever they thought appropriate when they needed space. At that time (err, 93 or so) I was using a 40 meg drive and a 386/40 with 5 megs ram to run SLS linux.. Can't store everything forever with that tech.
Didn't you notice that if you bought something with a CC and returned it with a receipt, we credited your card without asking to see it again? We had all that stored.
I suppose it depends on location, blah blah blah, but I was at a unnoteworthy little grocery store most nights while going to tech school in the day.
I suspect the "ad block effect" that I'm used to from years of firefox will exist on android very soon. "(shock amazement) Thats what the unfiltered internet looks like now? how can anyone use that? (insert more shock amazement)"
So far so good with this app called "adfree". Which was free. Any/. opinions on which blockers work better? Do I already have the best? All its doing (so far as I know) is the 1990s desktop era technique of putting certain hostnames in the/etc/hosts file, so at the ip addrs level its blocking entire hostnames.
VISA does not know how many candy bars you bought, retail corporate does. Even back in the very early 90s I know for a fact they did, as I was getting interested in IT and our food store did complete transaction uploads nightly. Its not as much data as you'd think, even at 2400 baud. We had to upload distinct sales data anyway, think about it, otherwise how would automated push-ordering work? There were cube dwellers at corporate who's entire lives revolved around how many hamburger buns were sold the saturday of labor day or whatever.
So you are correct that VISA does not sell transaction detail records, but that doesn't mean they're not sold, it means the detail record comes from the retailer. At least it did 20 years ago.
Also just yesterday I met a kid selling candy bars for his school fundraiser and wasn't able to help out there. It's almost like you have to give them card readers these days.
My daughter's girl scout troop theoretically only accepts personal checks for their cookies... making it a waste of time to rob one of the girls. Also makes it kind of obvious if a buyer rips the girls off by giving the wrong (low) amount of money. In practice rather than practice, if you insist on handing her cash, I trade my daughter one of my personal checks in exchange for cash, which I guess makes me a money launderer.
My guess is, that kid asking for cash, probably has to give the cash to his dad in exchange for dad's check...
Given the PITA that is cookie selling and distributing, and the small amount of money raised, I would have preferred to skip the whole thing and give money directly to her troop...
(Tangentially Related Note: I donno if its luck or hopefully morality, but since the boy scouts went whacko and became a wing of the neocons and all that, participation has dropped in my hometown from most boys to practically no one over the past 20 years. The girl scouts, who are not whackos, still pull in about 1/2 of the girls. just passing along a datapoint)
I was recently standing in line at a walgreens (its theoretically a pharmacy but most sale volume is convenience/beauty store items). Windy thunderstorm, power goes out. Manager walks thru line, if you have cash you stay in line and pay cashier who is using calculator and flashlight, if not, escorted to door. I had cash, bought my stuff.
Apparently a large enough fraction of the populace to be a "serious" problem, waits until their medication is gone, and that very hour the bottle is empty, they walk from their senior apartment to walgreens to refill. Must be the same idiots who run out of gas on the highway. Cops and social workers got involved, multiple taxis arrive to ferry old people to next closest walgreens with electrical power. Crisis rate was about 3 people (all coincidentally elderly) per hour of outage. Presumably younger people with cars drove themselves rather than involving social workers and cops etc etc? Made the news, at least locally.
I am just barely old enough to remember the kerchunk machines (thats why the numbers on your CC are embossed instead of just printed on...) also old enough to remember the crooks who would collect the used carbon papers for nefarious purposes. That tech is apparently gone, or at least corporate policy prevents its use. Probably because its hard to deal with credit vs debit cards offline... what do you do, call the bank on a cellphone? Thats not going to scale when half the city has a power fail at the same time.
I've also heard USA banks are the last system to use checks, or paper checks anyway. So... what does a bank office do, if it doesn't handle paper checks or coins? Is it more of a sales office for loans and such?
real gold or fools gold? You're better off collecting some govt issued silver and gold coins. A known commodity. China issued a pretty cool set of 1/10 ounce animal coins last decade ("year of the rat" etc) Back when the dollar was worth more and you could buy a 1/10th oz for something like $40 this was not a huge investment, since the dollar has tanked the same amount of gold costs over $150 now which is getting a little ridiculous. I suppose it depends where you live, but safe deposit boxes are usually pretty cheap.. enough gold to fill a "tiny" box means you're quite wealthy.
The TLDR version of the article is that load balancers can oscillate. Its spun into a cloudy-thing because thats trendy, but the basic argument is nothing new. Perhaps there's more "meat" in the original paper?
One common thread is that nothing is ever really "new" in computer science / IT. Clouds are just a rehash of ye olde mainframe outsourcing from decades ago. I worked at a place that was doing that in the early to mid 90s.
Slashdot Mirror
And as the shuttle shows, reusable hardware is the most expensive imaginable hardware. Much cheaper to design for recycling than reusing.
minimum stay 8 months until the planetary alignment is right for the return trip
Technically you can just swing by on a minimum energy Hohmann ellipse and come right back. If you want to stay awhile its either gonna cost more fuel or time until you can set up another minimum fuel ellipse to come back.
If you're willing to burn a tiny tiny little extra fuel, you pass beyond mars orbit ... so you jump a lander craft off on the way out, and rejoin on the way back in. Basically you plan a Hohmann pretending that Mars is in a slightly bigger orbit. Its actually a hell of a lot more complicated than this.
You can model stuff like this with the "orbiter" orbital mechanics simulator from the early 00s (and still going), or you can run the numbers, or just go intuitively.
From memory fooling around with this, the increased fuel in the main machine, and increased fuel in the lander craft, means you are not going to hang around very long... but from memory a couple days was not too unrealistic in terms of increased delta-v?
Two probs:
1) "block a possible strike from Iranian nuclear tipped missiles" I'm going to take a wild guess that culturally they Might prefer using a Toyota pickup truck or a shipping container or a standard passenger jetliner as a delivery vehicle. In the US we've forgotten why we're fixated on missiles, its because the USSR couldn't realistically, say, drive a truck over here with a H-bomb, so it ends up being missile vs missile.
2) SM series is "standard missile". Its really hard to specify how much work went into ballistic missile defense vs plain ole blowing stuff up. So political types will charge it as either thousands to billions depending on which axe they have to grind. So.. that vim editor... how much money was spent on editing Python? Well, you could evaluate what percentage was used in the field for Perl vs Python. Or you could look at bugs filed. Or some BS about test suites. Fundamentally its just a pretty darn useful editor. Much as a SM is a pretty darn useful wide envelope missile. It is emphatically not a "ballistic defense only" weapon.
3) There's endless rumors and BS about how SM series can be hacked into hitting seaskimming cruise missiles, but fundamentally you're better off with fast acting projectile weapons. You don't get much warning...
I would assume "they" would put their bomb into the vehicle "we" (well, we as in we are merely a province or whatever of Israel, always acting exclusively with their interests in mind, according to our leaders) are least suited to defend against. I suppose with the possible exception of WWII era strategic bomber, I can't think of a less likely delivery vehicle than a ballistic missile. I would guess its almost infinitely more likely that an off the shelf Iranian submarine gets as close to the USS Enterprise as physically possible before the deadman switch is released, or a shipping container is delivered to the port of L.A. or whatever thats marked as Couscous but actually glows instead...
There ARE interesting things for Iran to do with ballistic missiles. Nuke is not one of them.
Your 99% loss in the shot turns into heat. Low grade process heat to be sure, but it doesn't just "disappear".
If we found a completely free source of electricity, that used a large building to produce, we wouldn't get rid of our oil demand.
Not really. Given enough cheap energy, synthetic fuel is pretty trivial.
The energy cost of ethanol distillation makes it a borderline negative source of energy... but if that energy is infinite and free, well then... Think about it... aluminum is essentially congealed electricity (look how its made). So you make aluminum greenhouses out of free electricity and dirt, then you string 24x7 ultra-high intensity lights using free electricity, the plants grow in water that was desalinated ocean water using free electricity, then you ferment the "stuff" and distill using free electricity... Given an infinite source of free electricity, pretty much, sea water comes in one pipe, and motor fuel ethanol comes out another pipe.
You could condense carbon dioxide out of the air and strip the carbon off, condense water out of the air to strip the hydrogen off, mix together in a somewhat complicated o-chem lab, and make synth-gas. Air goes in one pipe, gasoline comes out the other pipe.
Takes a heck of a lot of energy to pull that trick off, but it can be done.
Well technically it heats up the walls and any shielding. Unlike a torus / iter type thing, you don't wrap the reactor with liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets so thats not too big of a deal. To a crude first approximation you can heat a NIF device up until the vapor pressure starts screwing up the reaction and optics (I donno, dull red glow?)
In my lexicon almost =/= 20 years and I have to wonder why it was not achieved back in 1995 or 2000
because 20 years previous we hadn't signed on the dotted line to do it.
Its kind of like building a house. I can hire out to get one built in a year, anytime I want to start ... but until I sign on the dotted line its going to perpetually be "a year away".
Or fight the war to see who's standing over the oil fields.
Imaginary Yale grad dialogue:
So we already selected that option, its really freaking expensive, but we're "winning" so why fool around with the alternatives?
For generations we've been dropping the median standard of living so when the oil runs out we'll remain in charge, so no problemo there.
Why do I/we need to do this to remain in power, again?
In quite a few school districts around the country "Middle School" (really in caps? it is not a proper name, you need to go back to middle school yourself) goes through 9th grade and high school doesn't start until the 10th grade. So yes, 14 and in middle school doesn't sound far fetched..
Been there, lived thru it. Eventually they built an additional high school and went to the 4-year high school program.
I would agree that the "9th graders" seem to fit in better with the HS crowd than the middle school crowd, but if there's too many kids to fit in the building...
Basically correct. Its not limited to kids. Some play along, to encourage rebellion against that mindset.
I do not know of too many radio/audio manufacturers in the US, specifically none in MS
http://www.mfjenterprises.com/
I guess I was talking radio like "telecom and ham radio and linear amplifiers and such" not radio like "I bought a XM radio at best buy"
I've seen the MFJ plant in video tours... robotic smd pick-n-place and fully automated wave soldering machine right next to a dude hand wiring a kilowatt level vacuum tube amplifier from parts and wire. Robotic antenna mounting hole driller next to a guy wielding a screwdriver. Actually pretty clean and well lit compared to many non-electronic factories I've physically visited.
Hmm
which excludes $10.75 for manufacturing costs,
So going from 1.20/hr China workers to 8/hr illegal mexicans in the USA would boost the cost of a ipad less than $70. My gut level estimate in the last line of less than $100 was pretty good...
I hate to say it but complex adaptive systems as a discipline might be a good example of this - it seems like there might be some useful underlying generalizations about all things "complex," but useful new theories don't seem to be forthcoming.
That's because all the useful theories are old. Ask a EE about his "control system theory" assuming he's a real EE. Its all bode plots and PID controllers as far as the the eye can see. Fuzzy logic was a 80s fad that never went anywhere. There's some overlap with neural networks in that in extreme agony and wasted time you can train a NN to be a cruddy PID controller... but its better just to make a real PID controller.
my local coin dealer and jeweler will not accept random chunks of ferrous sulfide or whatever fools gold is.
He's very accepting of govt minted gold/silver coinage.
None of that has anything to do with being a good or terrible currency.
A good currency is more or less constant quantity, hard to make more on demand. Doesn't tarnish or rot or otherwise disappear over time. Infinitely divisible (unlike, say, seashells or cows). High volumetric value density and high mass value density. Basically the opposite of beer.
Well yeah but someone in India or NYC could do that for me. I mean the physical branch offices themselves, like the little building by the interstate exit, or the small branch inside my local food store.
Wait - 20 years ago some corporate bod knew that Mr Smith of 23 Acacia Avenue bought hamburger buns? I think not.
Yes. 20 years ago is only 1992, not like the 60s or something. In 1990, 91, something like that our mid size grocery store in a mid size suburb of a mid size city got roughly 386 class machine (was it a 486?) in the managers office and it ran the dbms that read the upc from the scanner and told the register what to charge and its tax status. Also it kept a list of all loyalty cards who owed us money for bounced checks (at one point my job was keeping that list updated). We uploaded nightly at 1030 and woe to the assistant manager who couldn't "close out" before the upload began. Also we downloaded lists of bounced checks/loyalty cards from OTHER stores..
We made a big freaking deal about giving you coupons that reflected your previous purchases. Maybe, like 99% of the population, you just threw that out, but that doesn't mean we didn't print the coupons at the bottom of the register tape. You had a "check cashing/loyalty card", right? To at least some extent your coupons mailed to your door reflected your purchases... the presence or lack of baby formula and dog food tended to reflect your previous purchases... We didn't do individualized personalized coupon mailings, but we did classify them.
Now I donno if they stored all the data, or how long. Now a days you'd assume they keep it all forever. Back then I would assume they wiped whatever they thought appropriate when they needed space. At that time (err, 93 or so) I was using a 40 meg drive and a 386/40 with 5 megs ram to run SLS linux.. Can't store everything forever with that tech.
Didn't you notice that if you bought something with a CC and returned it with a receipt, we credited your card without asking to see it again? We had all that stored.
I suppose it depends on location, blah blah blah, but I was at a unnoteworthy little grocery store most nights while going to tech school in the day.
I suspect the "ad block effect" that I'm used to from years of firefox will exist on android very soon. "(shock amazement) Thats what the unfiltered internet looks like now? how can anyone use that? (insert more shock amazement)"
Don't like it? Don't use it.
So far so good with this app called "adfree". Which was free. Any /. opinions on which blockers work better? Do I already have the best? /etc/hosts file, so at the ip addrs level its blocking entire hostnames.
All its doing (so far as I know) is the 1990s desktop era technique of putting certain hostnames in the
VISA does not know how many candy bars you bought, retail corporate does. Even back in the very early 90s I know for a fact they did, as I was getting interested in IT and our food store did complete transaction uploads nightly. Its not as much data as you'd think, even at 2400 baud. We had to upload distinct sales data anyway, think about it, otherwise how would automated push-ordering work? There were cube dwellers at corporate who's entire lives revolved around how many hamburger buns were sold the saturday of labor day or whatever.
So you are correct that VISA does not sell transaction detail records, but that doesn't mean they're not sold, it means the detail record comes from the retailer. At least it did 20 years ago.
Also just yesterday I met a kid selling candy bars for his school fundraiser and wasn't able to help out there. It's almost like you have to give them card readers these days.
My daughter's girl scout troop theoretically only accepts personal checks for their cookies... making it a waste of time to rob one of the girls. Also makes it kind of obvious if a buyer rips the girls off by giving the wrong (low) amount of money. In practice rather than practice, if you insist on handing her cash, I trade my daughter one of my personal checks in exchange for cash, which I guess makes me a money launderer.
My guess is, that kid asking for cash, probably has to give the cash to his dad in exchange for dad's check...
Given the PITA that is cookie selling and distributing, and the small amount of money raised, I would have preferred to skip the whole thing and give money directly to her troop...
(Tangentially Related Note: I donno if its luck or hopefully morality, but since the boy scouts went whacko and became a wing of the neocons and all that, participation has dropped in my hometown from most boys to practically no one over the past 20 years. The girl scouts, who are not whackos, still pull in about 1/2 of the girls. just passing along a datapoint)
I was recently standing in line at a walgreens (its theoretically a pharmacy but most sale volume is convenience/beauty store items). Windy thunderstorm, power goes out.
Manager walks thru line, if you have cash you stay in line and pay cashier who is using calculator and flashlight, if not, escorted to door.
I had cash, bought my stuff.
Apparently a large enough fraction of the populace to be a "serious" problem, waits until their medication is gone, and that very hour the bottle is empty, they walk from their senior apartment to walgreens to refill. Must be the same idiots who run out of gas on the highway. Cops and social workers got involved, multiple taxis arrive to ferry old people to next closest walgreens with electrical power. Crisis rate was about 3 people (all coincidentally elderly) per hour of outage. Presumably younger people with cars drove themselves rather than involving social workers and cops etc etc? Made the news, at least locally.
I am just barely old enough to remember the kerchunk machines (thats why the numbers on your CC are embossed instead of just printed on...) also old enough to remember the crooks who would collect the used carbon papers for nefarious purposes. That tech is apparently gone, or at least corporate policy prevents its use. Probably because its hard to deal with credit vs debit cards offline... what do you do, call the bank on a cellphone? Thats not going to scale when half the city has a power fail at the same time.
I've also heard USA banks are the last system to use checks, or paper checks anyway.
So... what does a bank office do, if it doesn't handle paper checks or coins? Is it more of a sales office for loans and such?
real gold or fools gold? You're better off collecting some govt issued silver and gold coins. A known commodity.
China issued a pretty cool set of 1/10 ounce animal coins last decade ("year of the rat" etc)
Back when the dollar was worth more and you could buy a 1/10th oz for something like $40 this was not a huge investment, since the dollar has tanked the same amount of gold costs over $150 now which is getting a little ridiculous.
I suppose it depends where you live, but safe deposit boxes are usually pretty cheap.. enough gold to fill a "tiny" box means you're quite wealthy.
The TLDR version of the article is that load balancers can oscillate.
Its spun into a cloudy-thing because thats trendy, but the basic argument is nothing new.
Perhaps there's more "meat" in the original paper?
One common thread is that nothing is ever really "new" in computer science / IT. Clouds are just a rehash of ye olde mainframe outsourcing from decades ago. I worked at a place that was doing that in the early to mid 90s.