In electronics class in high school (13 years ago, so there was still such a thing),..... (no surface mount in those days).
I think it depends who you hang with and what you do. In the microwave RF world, surface mount was already old, 13 years ago. I was building ham radio microwave transverters using SMD, oh probably 15 or 20 years ago. For a variety of reasons such as ground-lead inductance and impedance mismatches, I don't think anyone's ever used MMIC-technology ICs in old fashioned thru-hole construction, and those started coming out in the late 70s or maybe early 80s, so its gotta be older than that.
Surface mount is much easier than thru-hole, if you own the right gear (Hakko Inc and their competitors)
"Why does the court treat violent images and sexual images so differently?"
a possible answer is: violence tends to lower the demographic pressure, sex to increase it. With limited Earth resources, this is still "think of the children" but on a longer run. </sarcasm>
Clearly you've never read the bible. Endless killing of people of other religions is "OK" even encouraged by God. On the other hand, extreme societal control of what goes on in "private" bedrooms is mandatory.
older servers are fairly common as test platforms for new application versions.
This is the "shoot yourself in the foot" moment for Oracle. We MUST have test and dev servers running the exact same code and OS as the production servers. We can't afford to replace "everything" just because Oracle would like more money this quarter. Therefore, buh bye Oracle, would love to keep you around, but you MUST go now... Of all the ways I've seen to flush a company away, I guess this isn't the worst way to go.
let's have a story about how circuit boards are manufactured! sure this crowd either already knows the subject
PCB manufacturing was "news" in the 40s for proximity artillery shells.
I made my own PCBs by hand in the 80s, I made a nice capacitance meter that essentially used an 80s 8-bit micro as a very complicated stopwatch to determine the RC time constant, then it ran the calculations to convert the measured time into uF or pF as appropriate. It actually worked.
The modern-ish way to build non-PCB stuff at home now seems to be Manhattan-style construction, cutting little squares of PCB and soldering them into a substrate as terminal blocks. The modern way to make PCBs at home now a days seems to be download a windows only wanna-be cad program, upload the PCB to somewhere in China, magically a PCB arrives in the mail in a couple days.
Perhaps they're following the crypto software tradition of rather than using popular public SW with known and fixed bugs designed by pros, they'll implement their own system chock full of unknown and unfixed bugs designed by amateurs.
Dropbox is probably bigger and better engineered than anything the NHS could whip up using NIH (not invented here)
Therefore you know, with absolute certainty, the NHS implementation and privacy violations will be worse than anything that ever happened at dropbox. Thats why its relevant.
As an example of what happens when a reactor is attempted to be restarted from an iodine pit by someone not competent enough to do so - Chernobyl.
Tangentially related. They could have blown the plant up quite effectively without any Xe/I issues. Maybe it wouldn't have blown up that time, and the next test would have popped it just as well. The root cause was a design with a positive void coefficient, running low power, at a really low pressure for the temperature. Keep a RBMK pressurized and pumps running, and its pretty much safe. Without the Xe/I issues the power level would not have been quite as low and it would have been slightly more controllable.
To some extent its kind of like arguing if a propane torch or an acetylene torch is worse when cutting "empty" gas tanks open. The acetylene is theoretically "worse" but you'll end up just as dead anyway, so...
Since its analogy day here, it was kind of like when you pop a diet coke can open, and 5 seconds after it opens the foam blows out of it all over the desk. Not immediately after opening, but a few seconds after depressurizing.
Ok, yeah. But if it's really just a couple of hours of delay, aren't utilities by now at least that good at forecasting demand peaks? Isn't it the case that it takes a couple of days to shut down or spin up a coal-fired plant, and that they don't really have any useful range of output beyond on & off?
Sometimes loads are randomly shed and readded in a matter of minutes, think windy thunderstorm season.
Coal plants fail a different way.. the boiler will tear itself apart if it heats up (or cools down) too quickly. I think flooding one while it runs at full power would probably make it go boom.
Coal plants can't handle fast temperature changes... nukes can't handle fast wattage changes. The two are very closely related yet different concepts.
It's very important that the investors always get their cut, or they won't let us have any toys.
Regardless if you're doin it for dollars or gaia worship or net positive EROEI calculations, there's no point building something that takes electricity if you're intentionally not going to feed it electricity. I'm not really sure what philosophical or religious outlook supports "building something really big that is really useless"
Why not run the plant at some kind of overproduction level? The overproduction could be used for water electrolysis, aluminum smelting or some other energy-intensive task that could be scaled back to meet peak power demands.
Water electrolysis could supply hydrogen which could be burned or turned to methane for longer term storage and used to also provide peak power.
Intermittent "valley" purchasers will not pay higher normal rates, to the point where it doesn't make economic sense to bother offering to them.
A large capital expenditure plant doesn't make any money to pay the stockholders when you cut off the power... if you pull the plug 25% of the time, they just lost 25% of their gross revenues and probably more than 25% of their profits... So that means electricity has to be, roughly, over a quarter of their expenses and has to practically be free, to interest them.
The other thing is, at least short term, aluminum refineries Really do not like power interruptions. Worst case scenario is the molten Al solidifies in the cells. Ooops. Not sure what they do then, jackhammer it out? Giant heating torches? Now copper electro-refineries ARE a good candidate, because nothing too awful happens if you pull the plug momentarily.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.
The term you don't know to google for is "xenon poisoning" or the "iodine pit"
Using the most non-technical terms I can, the "ashes" from the "fire" choke it from cranking up for a couple hours when you change the power level.
Naval reactors work around it by including massive extra reactivity, meaning you have to be really freaking careful when running them. The average Homer Simpson is probably... unprepared for their rather spirited performance. The other problem is, for the sake of argument, building a naval reactor 5 times bigger than it "needs" to be is affordable. Really, it is! But building a nuke 5 times bigger than "necessary" for a base load plant will make the brains of the bean counters in finance go prompt-critical.
Yep. Spend a billion Euro now, get a nice return on that from Germany and Italy, because they can't meet energy demands.
What happens when France becomes a majority Islamic country and the USA takes away their nukes? I'm not trying to troll here, its a serious concern that their capital expenditures seem to be colliding with their combination of demographics and the geopolitical environment.
The answer is: Train A. Distance from Manhattan to LA is 2800 miles by driving, which means the first train would reach Manhattan 16 hours before the first train rolled out of bed..
Clearly you haven't experienced the joy of Amtrak travel. Admittedly it is like paradise compared to aircraft travel, but only Amtrak can spend 10 hours puttering around greater Cleveland due to "repair work" at 5 MPH. The slowest I ever experienced was about 30 hours from downtown CHI to downtown NYC.
Is there anything that could potentially be solved by someone who enjoys dabbling in a bit of math, or do you need an advanced degree just to understand the problem?
The most obvious/. car analogy is any amateur can build a completely customized car, even a race car, given enough time and effort, even if the major car companies would be completely uninterested and are staffed exclusively with professionals who have advanced degrees.
I would think an amateur could be successful if focused on an extremely narrow little area for some years, perhaps cryptographic hashes, some peculiar tiny aspect of number theory, maybe a sticky computer science Knuth style analysis problem, strange geometry/topology problems...
The hard part with math (especially CS and especially CS crypto) is learning what not to do. Also crypto is an area where the greatest advances are made by destroying other peoples algorithms, not by building your own.
I sure hope that they do provide some interesting insights when it comes to how Fermat's theorem was solved
The last PBS "NOVA" show I ever watched was theoretically about that very topic. Unfortunately, it was 60 minutes about how messy his desk is, yet its such a nice house and yard, and he has a wife and kids, and he certainly is brave to try something difficult instead of sitting at home and watching Oprah reruns, and he has pet cats, and similar such daytime talk show garbage. I was literally sitting at the edge of my couch drinking an energy drink waiting for some "math" explanation of the FLT proof using computer graphics, maybe by The Man Himself, and then I get.... Roll the Credits!.. and later tonight, on Lawrence Welk... !
I fear, greatly, that this will be a museum about mathematicians not about math. Look, we have one of Newton's hair curlers! Over here, a life size diorama of Erdos. A statue of Pythagoras over here! A poster of the village Srinivasa Ramanujan grew up in! We are Smart because we spray painted a large Square Root sign on the Wall!
And then, sadly, on the walkway to the exit, a stream of bubbas telling each other how much they learned about math today. How horribly sad, and I hope none of my predictions come true, although I expect them to.
Installing solar plants is an admission we will never leave.
Why couldn't we let the Afghans use it after we're gone?
Our bases are mostly in good tactical locations, as opposed to good civilian locations. So that means we're supporting the home team on the inevitable civil war front. Maybe we want to, maybe we won't in the future.
Even worse, now we'll raise a generation of 3rd worlders who think "solar power = American Imperialism, American Imperialism = bad, therefore solar power = bad" which is exactly the wrong idea for improving their lifestyle.
Again its all political.
Re:Fuck that, I've created Upsilon!
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand your point.
That's because I'm too spaced out this early in the morning. Yeah, I guess I'm now converted to the Tau side, too.
I'm sure, this being slashdot, it will be pointed out they've been fixed already...
Yeah noscript works fine here today. I have no idea about password stealing automation systems or Garmin GPS stuff.
Not trolling, but I see no benefits of 5
Staggeringly faster javascript and much lower battery / fan use. Maybe their idea is people should be doin' all their stuff in JS instead of addons and extensions?
My secondary box at home used to screech the CPU fans at full blast while running JS based web games like the Lacuna Expanse... Since upgrading to 5.0 on Debian (care of mozilla.debian.net, etc), I don't think the fan has even started up, and its objectively about twice as fast at everything.
Re:Fuck that, I've created Upsilon!
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Tau makes more sense than Pi or your Upsilon.
Pi = c/d or Pi = c/2r -- Which means it's a ratio between the circumference and the diameter, but radians are based on the radius, so a full circle is 2Pi radians. Tau = c/r -- Which makes life a lot easier, because then the circle is Tau radians.
So what? Well, that means when graphing trigonometric functions becomes a whole lot easier: See
Tau makes it harder to teach. The stereotypical constructive geometric way to teach Pi is to use a string anchored at the center and a pencil at the other end to draw the circle using the geometric definition of what a circle is, and then figure the ratio of the string to the drawing. Tau... That's not obvious how to teach using constructive geometry and mathematical manipulatives.
Re:really scraping the bottom of the barrel
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Teach both sides.
The lack of a constant between Pi day and Tau day proves that constants did not evolve on their own. Unless you can find a constant between Pi and Tau in the Holy Book of Knuth, or in the text of the Apocrypha/Art of Electronics, I must conclude that an intelligent designer created both Pi day and Tau day instead of a mere theory of slashdot dupe article evolution. Unfortunately the intelligent designer was not intelligent enough to make either day interesting enough for me to care, so sorry.
It should be quite simple to construct something portable with at least a modicum of insulation.
No, it isn't quite simple. It is very easy to construct permanent structures that are well insulated. Portable? No.
Let me know if you ever find a highly insulated car, RV, tank, train passenger car...
Most insulation either does not tolerate vibration, water, impact, is toxic when on fire, is toxic or semi-toxic to transport and apply by untrained personnel, or the lifetime under combat conditions is so short that disposal becomes an environmental problem (so... we poured out a slab of canned instant foam in the desert... how long till it biodegrades? I'm guessing the earths crust will subduct into the mantle before it degrades completely...)
Slashdot Mirror
Or... They will get bought out by a patent troll.
Or their new competitor, whatever it will be, will have to buy them out or else get patent trolled.
That is the gameplan. Can't sell out once everyone leaves, but even if there are no subscribers, you still get to keep the "valuable" patents.
Its a sign that FB internally realizes they have peaked and are on the decline.
In electronics class in high school (13 years ago, so there was still such a thing), ..... (no surface mount in those days).
I think it depends who you hang with and what you do. In the microwave RF world, surface mount was already old, 13 years ago. I was building ham radio microwave transverters using SMD, oh probably 15 or 20 years ago. For a variety of reasons such as ground-lead inductance and impedance mismatches, I don't think anyone's ever used MMIC-technology ICs in old fashioned thru-hole construction, and those started coming out in the late 70s or maybe early 80s, so its gotta be older than that.
Surface mount is much easier than thru-hole, if you own the right gear (Hakko Inc and their competitors)
The bible is most definitely *not* written to be child-friendly, it has plenty of gruesome murders and torture, and a fair bit of sex.
We need to ban that book. Think Of The Children!
Ah, BTW, in regards to
"Why does the court treat violent images and sexual images so differently?"
a possible answer is: violence tends to lower the demographic pressure, sex to increase it. With limited Earth resources, this is still "think of the children" but on a longer run.
</sarcasm>
Clearly you've never read the bible. Endless killing of people of other religions is "OK" even encouraged by God. On the other hand, extreme societal control of what goes on in "private" bedrooms is mandatory.
older servers are fairly common as test platforms for new application versions.
This is the "shoot yourself in the foot" moment for Oracle. We MUST have test and dev servers running the exact same code and OS as the production servers. We can't afford to replace "everything" just because Oracle would like more money this quarter. Therefore, buh bye Oracle, would love to keep you around, but you MUST go now... Of all the ways I've seen to flush a company away, I guess this isn't the worst way to go.
let's have a story about how circuit boards are manufactured! sure this crowd either already knows the subject
PCB manufacturing was "news" in the 40s for proximity artillery shells.
I made my own PCBs by hand in the 80s, I made a nice capacitance meter that essentially used an 80s 8-bit micro as a very complicated stopwatch to determine the RC time constant, then it ran the calculations to convert the measured time into uF or pF as appropriate. It actually worked.
The modern-ish way to build non-PCB stuff at home now seems to be Manhattan-style construction, cutting little squares of PCB and soldering them into a substrate as terminal blocks. The modern way to make PCBs at home now a days seems to be download a windows only wanna-be cad program, upload the PCB to somewhere in China, magically a PCB arrives in the mail in a couple days.
and a picture of my hat (my hat is custom made and very distinguishable)
I LOL as I remember an oldie, but a goodie...
"I put on my robe and wizard hat"
http://bash.org/?104383
How is that at all relevant?
Perhaps they're following the crypto software tradition of rather than using popular public SW with known and fixed bugs designed by pros, they'll implement their own system chock full of unknown and unfixed bugs designed by amateurs.
Dropbox is probably bigger and better engineered than anything the NHS could whip up using NIH (not invented here)
Therefore you know, with absolute certainty, the NHS implementation and privacy violations will be worse than anything that ever happened at dropbox. Thats why its relevant.
As an example of what happens when a reactor is attempted to be restarted from an iodine pit by someone not competent enough to do so - Chernobyl.
Tangentially related. They could have blown the plant up quite effectively without any Xe/I issues. Maybe it wouldn't have blown up that time, and the next test would have popped it just as well. The root cause was a design with a positive void coefficient, running low power, at a really low pressure for the temperature. Keep a RBMK pressurized and pumps running, and its pretty much safe. Without the Xe/I issues the power level would not have been quite as low and it would have been slightly more controllable.
To some extent its kind of like arguing if a propane torch or an acetylene torch is worse when cutting "empty" gas tanks open. The acetylene is theoretically "worse" but you'll end up just as dead anyway, so ...
Since its analogy day here, it was kind of like when you pop a diet coke can open, and 5 seconds after it opens the foam blows out of it all over the desk. Not immediately after opening, but a few seconds after depressurizing.
Ok, yeah. But if it's really just a couple of hours of delay, aren't utilities by now at least that good at forecasting demand peaks? Isn't it the case that it takes a couple of days to shut down or spin up a coal-fired plant, and that they don't really have any useful range of output beyond on & off?
Sometimes loads are randomly shed and readded in a matter of minutes, think windy thunderstorm season.
Coal plants fail a different way.. the boiler will tear itself apart if it heats up (or cools down) too quickly. I think flooding one while it runs at full power would probably make it go boom.
Coal plants can't handle fast temperature changes... nukes can't handle fast wattage changes. The two are very closely related yet different concepts.
It's very important that the investors always get their cut, or they won't let us have any toys.
Regardless if you're doin it for dollars or gaia worship or net positive EROEI calculations, there's no point building something that takes electricity if you're intentionally not going to feed it electricity. I'm not really sure what philosophical or religious outlook supports "building something really big that is really useless"
Why not run the plant at some kind of overproduction level? The overproduction could be used for water electrolysis, aluminum smelting or some other energy-intensive task that could be scaled back to meet peak power demands.
Water electrolysis could supply hydrogen which could be burned or turned to methane for longer term storage and used to also provide peak power.
Intermittent "valley" purchasers will not pay higher normal rates, to the point where it doesn't make economic sense to bother offering to them.
A large capital expenditure plant doesn't make any money to pay the stockholders when you cut off the power... if you pull the plug 25% of the time, they just lost 25% of their gross revenues and probably more than 25% of their profits... So that means electricity has to be, roughly, over a quarter of their expenses and has to practically be free, to interest them.
The other thing is, at least short term, aluminum refineries Really do not like power interruptions. Worst case scenario is the molten Al solidifies in the cells. Ooops. Not sure what they do then, jackhammer it out? Giant heating torches? Now copper electro-refineries ARE a good candidate, because nothing too awful happens if you pull the plug momentarily.
France will not be a majority Islamic nation anytime soon.
Depending on political leanings, and I suppose the age of the quoted estimate, the answer seems to be around 1/3 to 2/3 of a reactor lifetime...
Maybe not "soon" relative to fashion trends or something, but quite relevant to plant construction.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but why can nuclear power only supply base-load, instead of peak as well? I've certainly heard that solar and wind are unsuitable to supply base load, as they're not terrifically reliable, but never anything about nuclear being unable to scale to peak load.
The term you don't know to google for is "xenon poisoning" or the "iodine pit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit
Using the most non-technical terms I can, the "ashes" from the "fire" choke it from cranking up for a couple hours when you change the power level.
Naval reactors work around it by including massive extra reactivity, meaning you have to be really freaking careful when running them. The average Homer Simpson is probably ... unprepared for their rather spirited performance. The other problem is, for the sake of argument, building a naval reactor 5 times bigger than it "needs" to be is affordable. Really, it is! But building a nuke 5 times bigger than "necessary" for a base load plant will make the brains of the bean counters in finance go prompt-critical.
Yep. Spend a billion Euro now, get a nice return on that from Germany and Italy, because they can't meet energy demands.
What happens when France becomes a majority Islamic country and the USA takes away their nukes? I'm not trying to troll here, its a serious concern that their capital expenditures seem to be colliding with their combination of demographics and the geopolitical environment.
The answer is: Train A. Distance from Manhattan to LA is 2800 miles by driving, which means the first train would reach Manhattan 16 hours before the first train rolled out of bed..
Clearly you haven't experienced the joy of Amtrak travel. Admittedly it is like paradise compared to aircraft travel, but only Amtrak can spend 10 hours puttering around greater Cleveland due to "repair work" at 5 MPH. The slowest I ever experienced was about 30 hours from downtown CHI to downtown NYC.
Also Google his daughter Vi Hart
Let me guess, the other child is named Emacs? Man, if only my wife let me get away with something cool like that....
Is there anything that could potentially be solved by someone who enjoys dabbling in a bit of math, or do you need an advanced degree just to understand the problem?
The most obvious /. car analogy is any amateur can build a completely customized car, even a race car, given enough time and effort, even if the major car companies would be completely uninterested and are staffed exclusively with professionals who have advanced degrees.
I would think an amateur could be successful if focused on an extremely narrow little area for some years, perhaps cryptographic hashes, some peculiar tiny aspect of number theory, maybe a sticky computer science Knuth style analysis problem, strange geometry/topology problems...
The hard part with math (especially CS and especially CS crypto) is learning what not to do. Also crypto is an area where the greatest advances are made by destroying other peoples algorithms, not by building your own.
I sure hope that they do provide some interesting insights when it comes to how Fermat's theorem was solved
The last PBS "NOVA" show I ever watched was theoretically about that very topic. Unfortunately, it was 60 minutes about how messy his desk is, yet its such a nice house and yard, and he has a wife and kids, and he certainly is brave to try something difficult instead of sitting at home and watching Oprah reruns, and he has pet cats, and similar such daytime talk show garbage. I was literally sitting at the edge of my couch drinking an energy drink waiting for some "math" explanation of the FLT proof using computer graphics, maybe by The Man Himself, and then I get .... Roll the Credits! .. and later tonight, on Lawrence Welk ... !
I fear, greatly, that this will be a museum about mathematicians not about math. Look, we have one of Newton's hair curlers! Over here, a life size diorama of Erdos. A statue of Pythagoras over here! A poster of the village Srinivasa Ramanujan grew up in! We are Smart because we spray painted a large Square Root sign on the Wall!
And then, sadly, on the walkway to the exit, a stream of bubbas telling each other how much they learned about math today. How horribly sad, and I hope none of my predictions come true, although I expect them to.
Why couldn't we let the Afghans use it after we're gone?
Our bases are mostly in good tactical locations, as opposed to good civilian locations. So that means we're supporting the home team on the inevitable civil war front. Maybe we want to, maybe we won't in the future.
Even worse, now we'll raise a generation of 3rd worlders who think "solar power = American Imperialism, American Imperialism = bad, therefore solar power = bad" which is exactly the wrong idea for improving their lifestyle.
Again its all political.
I don't understand your point.
That's because I'm too spaced out this early in the morning. Yeah, I guess I'm now converted to the Tau side, too.
I'm sure, this being slashdot, it will be pointed out they've been fixed already...
Yeah noscript works fine here today. I have no idea about password stealing automation systems or Garmin GPS stuff.
Not trolling, but I see no benefits of 5
Staggeringly faster javascript and much lower battery / fan use. Maybe their idea is people should be doin' all their stuff in JS instead of addons and extensions?
My secondary box at home used to screech the CPU fans at full blast while running JS based web games like the Lacuna Expanse... Since upgrading to 5.0 on Debian (care of mozilla.debian.net, etc), I don't think the fan has even started up, and its objectively about twice as fast at everything.
Actually, Tau makes more sense than Pi or your Upsilon.
Pi = c/d or Pi = c/2r -- Which means it's a ratio between the circumference and the diameter, but radians are based on the radius, so a full circle is 2Pi radians.
Tau = c/r -- Which makes life a lot easier, because then the circle is Tau radians.
So what? Well, that means when graphing trigonometric functions becomes a whole lot easier:
See
Tau makes it harder to teach. The stereotypical constructive geometric way to teach Pi is to use a string anchored at the center and a pencil at the other end to draw the circle using the geometric definition of what a circle is, and then figure the ratio of the string to the drawing. Tau... That's not obvious how to teach using constructive geometry and mathematical manipulatives.
Teach both sides.
The lack of a constant between Pi day and Tau day proves that constants did not evolve on their own. Unless you can find a constant between Pi and Tau in the Holy Book of Knuth, or in the text of the Apocrypha/Art of Electronics, I must conclude that an intelligent designer created both Pi day and Tau day instead of a mere theory of slashdot dupe article evolution. Unfortunately the intelligent designer was not intelligent enough to make either day interesting enough for me to care, so sorry.
It should be quite simple to construct something portable with at least a modicum of insulation.
No, it isn't quite simple. It is very easy to construct permanent structures that are well insulated. Portable? No.
Let me know if you ever find a highly insulated car, RV, tank, train passenger car...
Most insulation either does not tolerate vibration, water, impact, is toxic when on fire, is toxic or semi-toxic to transport and apply by untrained personnel, or the lifetime under combat conditions is so short that disposal becomes an environmental problem (so... we poured out a slab of canned instant foam in the desert... how long till it biodegrades? I'm guessing the earths crust will subduct into the mantle before it degrades completely...)