I could tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya..:) No, seriously, they certainly will want to find out the failure age. I.e. age say 10 years, simulate detonation, then age say 20 years and simulate again etc. until they find the age where the performance is not acceptable anymore. When that age is found, they certainly wanna know how to extend the life of the warhead. I.e. if we change component x at age y, how will that affect the weapon, what will it cost compared to other alternatives. Considering that this simulation apparently took about 6 months I think they have a couple of years of work cut out for themselves.
Regarding further weapons development, I think the line is quite blurred. Consider that the older the warheads get, the more components they have to replace. Probably they will take the chance to use somewhat improved components as they have a few decades of experience more than when the warheads were originally designed. Also at some point, "refurbishing" the warhead entails more or less dismantling it and remanufacturing it. What's the difference between that and producing a new one? Perhaps the serial number stays the same..:) So if you wanna be cynical, you can call it "designing new warheads using politically correct terminology".:-)
Anyway I think that if the US wants a nuclear arsenal, they better keep it in shape too, otherwise it's just an accident, or should I say catastrophe, waiting to happen. I prefer that they do it with computers instead of blowing up some atoll in the Pacific. Of course we would probably all be better off if all nuclear weapons in the entire world were dismantled, but I really don't think it will happen...:-(
I'd suggest you chose your words more carefully when you obviously don't know what you're talking about...
The stability of the components of the warhead are fairly well known. What is not known, and what this ASCI project intends to find out, is how the aging of the components affect the warhead as a whole. I.e. first simulate aging the components (i.e. change the isotope distribution, maybe chemical composition for the explosives for detonating the primary etc.) and then run the warhead detonation simulation and see if it goes boom or not.
Hey I remember once when I was playing the wolfenstein MP demo. I was a german equipped with a tommy gun. Ok so I was killed in the trenches by a bunch of inbound enemies. While waiting for respawning I saw that all others on my team were in the trenches, nobody in the basement. So when I respawn I rush as fast as possible to the war room. I arrive there at the same time as 6 enemies. I kill 1 guy as he is just entering the door into the war room. Then I just rush into the room and kill 3 of them at _point blank range_ (I came in through one door, they came in through the other). Then I reload and do a 180 deg turn just in time to blast the remaining 2 enemies who had gone the other way to ambush me (again at point blank).
I just thought OMFG!!! Having just killed 6 enemies in a few seconds, and saved our team from certain defeat. Man what a rush! And I'm by no means a good FPS player, I usually don't play much games. Wolfenstein MP demo was just convenient as it works on linux, and it's free.
You haven't heard a WTC joke yet? Well let me enlighten you.
Q: Which chain opened a store at the WTC site after Sep 11? A: The Body Shop.
As for the stuff you wrote, yes I think you have a point. On the other hand I strongly feel that society is way too politically correct, and it's getting worse all the time. So let's just agree to disagree, shall we?;-)
PS: The Body Shop: Chain which sells shampoos, facial cremes and all that kind of girly shit.
I mean, her music sux big time, but her contribution in teaching countless undergrads the basics of semiconductor physics should not be forgotten!! Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics
Yes, you are partly correct, in that digital projection equipment is currently much more expensive than the current analog stuff. But IIRC the deal with the digital theater is in fact cost cutting. The movie reels are actually quite expensive, and their quality degrades quite fast. Ever seen a movie which has been running for a while? All those "blips" on the screen etc... At some point movie theaters might actually have broadband links, so they could just download the movies from the studios they have bought it from. This could also make things like worldwide releases possible. Ok they are possible today but you need a huge number of reels for that, i.e. it's very expensive. But anyway the infrastructure for digital delivery of movies is not in place today, and as you said it's pretty stupid to shell out for digital projection equipment today, as moviegoers wont notice any quality difference anyway... But maybe in 5 years, if the movie industry is still around by then. Not that I would feel sorry for them if they were to crash and burn. It's not like they have produced anything of value to society..
Hrm.. you mean wild cats, right? Of course, wild animals tend to die quite young, i.e. they get wounded and thus unable to catch some chow, or alternatively unable to escape from predators. Or simply when they get older, again, they get too weak to hunt / escape. Cruel perhaps but that's the way nature is. Compared to a domestical animal which gets food no matter in which shape it is, gets medical attention etc. To return to the age issue, my parents have a 14 year old cat which is free to roam around, and I know lots of people who have cats which are free to roam around, and barring any accidents, they tend to live like 15-20 years. Personally, I think that going outside is healthy for a cat, mentally as well as physically. Hunting is in their nature, after all. Keep in mind that animals in general are much more steered by instincts than humans, and preventing the animal from acting according to said instincts might well make it 'blow a fuse'. There was actually a recent article about this in new scientist, btw, if you're interrested..
IANAB (biologist), but I think the problem is that nobody understands exactly how the brain works.. Yes we know that there's these neurons sending electrical signals to each other, but I don't think there is any theory on how this ultimately gives rise to the cognitive processes in the brain. Not that I'm saying that supercomputers would be useless in brain research, this article mentions some IBM guy planning to simulate how the "electric storms" during an epileptic seisure propagate or something like that.
Well IBM is thinking in the same way. Their blue gene supercomputer will consist of 1 million processors. The plan apparently is to cram 32 simple cpu:s into one chip, 36 chips on a board, 4 boards in a tower, and totally a few hundred towers. Someone else posted the link already, but I found an article describing it so interresting I'll post it again, here you go.
Thanks, that was a very interresting article. It will be interresting to see how the blue gene project turns out... 1 petaflop... *drool*.. And I have to do with a puny 0.5 teraflop at work...:(
Yeah right... Think about an AF base: Lots of men and no (or very few) women out in the middle of friggin' nowhere. DivX;) ??? The obvious keyword is: Pr0n....;-)
No need to be a black hole. Boot camp just has to be modified to include chugging more big macs and beer than you ever thought possible. After boot camp every soldier has a massive beer belly doubling as a gravitional lens.
As a young Lt., I spent 6 months replaceing perfectly functional Solaris boxes that performed our web, smtp, DNS, SQL, and other basic network services with NT 4.0 boxes. A week after we recovered from Service Pack 2 - i strongly recommended that we slow our migration - and that it was costing us more time and money supporting Windows machines than the UNIX boxes which never needed any work or upkeep. Some had uptimes of 4 years until I pulled the plugs on them. (don't beat me - i was the lowest ranking puke in the house - and i did what i was told)
Man.. that work must have sucked majorly... Sounds like the typical case of the suits believing glossy MS brochures instead of their own techs and other people with actual experience. Or in this case, s/suits/guys-with-more-funny-looking-shiny-metal-t hingies-on-their-collars-than-you/g:)
There are more secure alternatives than sendmail. For example qmail and postfix. And sendmail has reportedly improved lately too. Personally I'd take any of them over exchange any day.
Come to think of it, if they can allocate money for a nuke program, they can certainly afford to get appropriate number crunching equipment which is solely in the hands of the weapon designers, not shared by half the academics in the country. You know, nuclear weapons research is usually classified something like "top secret"... I doubt they'd let outsiders access their stuff solely for security reasons.
I mostly agree to you, but I just have to be a little pedantic...:) Regarding the number of neutrons produced by fusion and fission reactions, yes a D-T fusion reaction produces only one neutron while a U or Pu fission produces between about 3, depending on energy. But take into account that a single fusion reaction produces only 17.6 MeV while a single fission produces about 200 MeV. Add to that the fact that a large fraction of the neutrons in a fission reaction are used for inducing further fissions in the material. Remember neutron bombs? Tactical nukes meant to kill the crews of sovient tank hordes, while hopefully leaving the rest of West Germany relatively intact. They had very minimal amount of fission material in them, about 95% of the energy produced was by fusion. The reason was to have a as high as possible neutron flux, and also to minimize fallout. Most strategic warheads deployed today have only about 50% fusion output. The reason is that the casings are made of enriched uranium, the reason being that the Ulam-Teller staged radiation implosion type bomb needs a casing made of high-Z material for refllecting x-rays produced by the primary. So by additionally making the casing of fissionable material (it wont fission by itself, only fission induced by the fusion neutrons) you get better bang-for-weight. And regarding detonating a fusion bomb without a fission primary, I read some rumors a while ago that the russians reportedly had some chemical explosive called "red mercury" capable of detonating a fusion bomb directly. As it IMHO sounds quite improbable, I'd guess it's just some rumor.
Hrm, it's not like mathematics is developed in a vacuum. Much of it has in fact been developed as a solution to a problem in, say, physics. Newton, for example, developed much of the early theory of differential calculus to express his ideas in classical mechanics. Fourier developed fourier analysis to study problems in, iirc, heat conduction. Etc. etc. Of course, there are also plenty of examples where a field of pure mathematics thought of as little use in the real world suddenly finds some interresting applications. For example group theory and abstract algebra in quantum mechanics. And about steam locomotives, as the previous poster claimed, no amount of theoretical mathematics is going to build you a locomotive. Steam locomotives were mainly developed with the simple knowledge that if you boil water you get pressurized steam. And a lot of good ol' engineering (i.e. trial and error, and using what worked previously). Add to this that the romans were unable to produce steel in sufficient quantity and quality (it takes a lot of steel to produce trains and a railroad network, you know!), they probably new little about lubrication of the mechanical parts (I think they used some kind of grease produced from animals to lubricate their wagons and other things. Clearly this is not enough for a locomotive). Etc. Even today, modeling something like a steam locomotive is a very non-trivial problem. Depending of course on what you want to know. Material properties? Check out solid state physics, definitely 20th century stuff. Steam dynamics? Navier-Stokes equations for fluid mechanics have been known for quite a while, but solving them for your locomotive entails solving a non-linear partial differential equation in a very complicated domain. If the previous statement doesn't raise the hairs on the back of your neck, attend some course entitled something like "advanced numerical methods for partial differential equations" to get some insight into the theory. And then get a supercomputer to actually solve the problem. In short: Waaay out of the league of the romans, theoretical mathematics of not. Of course you might argue that mathematics has allowed us all these kinds of stuff. Well, yes, but as I said in the first paragraph, mathematics is not developed in a vacuum.
[oldest programming language pissing match] You program in C for a living? Well, I recently landed a job involving fortran programming.:) [/] Conclusion: ZDNet author is a dimwit if he believes every programmer in the world does nothing but shopping carts. Or should I do shopping carts with "fortran.NET"? Bwahahaha...
Yes there seems to be no such thing as an open source J2EE weblog. One reason might of course be that open source developers in general seem to have quite a bland attitude towards everything Java. The high profile open source Java stuff seems to be mostly infrastructure stuff, like the Apache Jakarta project and JBOSS. One thing which might be a good start for a Java weblog is Jive, probably the highest performing forum software around (and yes, written in Java). Unfortunately they went commercial a while ago, but you can still download the older Jive 1.2.4, which is under an Apache license. So with some amount of work, you might be able to mangle it to something resembling a weblog. And there seems to be some kind of integration with Struts too, which of course would be a very cool thing to have. I'd really like to do something like this, but considering that I don't personally really have a need for a weblog and that I unfortunately seem to be perpetually busy with all kinds of things I don't think I'd be able to donate enough time to a project like this...:( I wish you good luck if you decide to give it a try.
Slashdot Mirror
Also check out R. It has, IMHO, somewhat more advanced graphing stuff than gnuplot.
I could tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya.. :) No, seriously, they certainly will want to find out the failure age. I.e. age say 10 years, simulate detonation, then age say 20 years and simulate again etc. until they find the age where the performance is not acceptable anymore. When that age is found, they certainly wanna know how to extend the life of the warhead. I.e. if we change component x at age y, how will that affect the weapon, what will it cost compared to other alternatives. Considering that this simulation apparently took about 6 months I think they have a couple of years of work cut out for themselves.
:) So if you wanna be cynical, you can call it "designing new warheads using politically correct terminology". :-)
Regarding further weapons development, I think the line is quite blurred. Consider that the older the warheads get, the more components they have to replace. Probably they will take the chance to use somewhat improved components as they have a few decades of experience more than when the warheads were originally designed. Also at some point, "refurbishing" the warhead entails more or less dismantling it and remanufacturing it. What's the difference between that and producing a new one? Perhaps the serial number stays the same..
Anyway I think that if the US wants a nuclear arsenal, they better keep it in shape too, otherwise it's just an accident, or should I say catastrophe, waiting to happen. I prefer that they do it with computers instead of blowing up some atoll in the Pacific. Of course we would probably all be better off if all nuclear weapons in the entire world were dismantled, but I really don't think it will happen...:-(
I'd suggest you chose your words more carefully when you obviously don't know what you're talking about...
The stability of the components of the warhead are fairly well known. What is not known, and what this ASCI project intends to find out, is how the aging of the components affect the warhead as a whole. I.e. first simulate aging the components (i.e. change the isotope distribution, maybe chemical composition for the explosives for detonating the primary etc.) and then run the warhead detonation simulation and see if it goes boom or not.
Hey I remember once when I was playing the wolfenstein MP demo. I was a german equipped with a tommy gun. Ok so I was killed in the trenches by a bunch of inbound enemies. While waiting for respawning I saw that all others on my team were in the trenches, nobody in the basement. So when I respawn I rush as fast as possible to the war room. I arrive there at the same time as 6 enemies. I kill 1 guy as he is just entering the door into the war room. Then I just rush into the room and kill 3 of them at _point blank range_ (I came in through one door, they came in through the other). Then I reload and do a 180 deg turn just in time to blast the remaining 2 enemies who had gone the other way to ambush me (again at point blank).
I just thought OMFG!!! Having just killed 6 enemies in a few seconds, and saved our team from certain defeat. Man what a rush! And I'm by no means a good FPS player, I usually don't play much games. Wolfenstein MP demo was just convenient as it works on linux, and it's free.
You haven't heard a WTC joke yet? Well let me enlighten you.
;-)
Q: Which chain opened a store at the WTC site after Sep 11?
A: The Body Shop.
As for the stuff you wrote, yes I think you have a point. On the other hand I strongly feel that society is way too politically correct, and it's getting worse all the time. So let's just agree to disagree, shall we?
PS: The Body Shop: Chain which sells shampoos, facial cremes and all that kind of girly shit.
I mean, her music sux big time, but her contribution in teaching countless undergrads the basics of semiconductor physics should not be forgotten!!
Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics
Yes, you are partly correct, in that digital projection equipment is currently much more expensive than the current analog stuff. But IIRC the deal with the digital theater is in fact cost cutting. The movie reels are actually quite expensive, and their quality degrades quite fast. Ever seen a movie which has been running for a while? All those "blips" on the screen etc... At some point movie theaters might actually have broadband links, so they could just download the movies from the studios they have bought it from. This could also make things like worldwide releases possible. Ok they are possible today but you need a huge number of reels for that, i.e. it's very expensive.
But anyway the infrastructure for digital delivery of movies is not in place today, and as you said it's pretty stupid to shell out for digital projection equipment today, as moviegoers wont notice any quality difference anyway... But maybe in 5 years, if the movie industry is still around by then. Not that I would feel sorry for them if they were to crash and burn. It's not like they have produced anything of value to society..
Hrm.. you mean wild cats, right? Of course, wild animals tend to die quite young, i.e. they get wounded and thus unable to catch some chow, or alternatively unable to escape from predators. Or simply when they get older, again, they get too weak to hunt / escape. Cruel perhaps but that's the way nature is. Compared to a domestical animal which gets food no matter in which shape it is, gets medical attention etc. To return to the age issue, my parents have a 14 year old cat which is free to roam around, and I know lots of people who have cats which are free to roam around, and barring any accidents, they tend to live like 15-20 years. Personally, I think that going outside is healthy for a cat, mentally as well as physically. Hunting is in their nature, after all. Keep in mind that animals in general are much more steered by instincts than humans, and preventing the animal from acting according to said instincts might well make it 'blow a fuse'. There was actually a recent article about this in new scientist, btw, if you're interrested..
IANAB (biologist), but I think the problem is that nobody understands exactly how the brain works.. Yes we know that there's these neurons sending electrical signals to each other, but I don't think there is any theory on how this ultimately gives rise to the cognitive processes in the brain. Not that I'm saying that supercomputers would be useless in brain research, this article mentions some IBM guy planning to simulate how the "electric storms" during an epileptic seisure propagate or something like that.
Well IBM is thinking in the same way. Their blue gene supercomputer will consist of 1 million processors. The plan apparently is to cram 32 simple cpu:s into one chip, 36 chips on a board, 4 boards in a tower, and totally a few hundred towers. Someone else posted the link already, but I found an article describing it so interresting I'll post it again, here you go.
Thanks, that was a very interresting article. It will be interresting to see how the blue gene project turns out... 1 petaflop... *drool*.. And I have to do with a puny 0.5 teraflop at work... :(
RMS
Root Mean Square ???
Yeah right... Think about an AF base: Lots of men and no (or very few) women out in the middle of friggin' nowhere. DivX ;) ??? The obvious keyword is: Pr0n.... ;-)
No need to be a black hole. Boot camp just has to be modified to include chugging more big macs and beer than you ever thought possible. After boot camp every soldier has a massive beer belly doubling as a gravitional lens.
As a young Lt., I spent 6 months replaceing perfectly functional Solaris boxes that performed our web, smtp, DNS, SQL, and other basic network services with NT 4.0 boxes. A week after we recovered from Service Pack 2 - i strongly recommended that we slow our migration - and that it was costing us more time and money supporting Windows machines than the UNIX boxes which never needed any work or upkeep. Some had uptimes of 4 years until I pulled the plugs on them. (don't beat me - i was the lowest ranking puke in the house - and i did what i was told)
Man.. that work must have sucked majorly... Sounds like the typical case of the suits believing glossy MS brochures instead of their own techs and other people with actual experience. Or in this case, s/suits/guys-with-more-funny-looking-shiny-metal-
There are more secure alternatives than sendmail. For example qmail and postfix. And sendmail has reportedly improved lately too. Personally I'd take any of them over exchange any day.
Come to think of it, if they can allocate money for a nuke program, they can certainly afford to get appropriate number crunching equipment which is solely in the hands of the weapon designers, not shared by half the academics in the country. You know, nuclear weapons research is usually classified something like "top secret"... I doubt they'd let outsiders access their stuff solely for security reasons.
I mostly agree to you, but I just have to be a little pedantic...:)
Regarding the number of neutrons produced by fusion and fission reactions, yes a D-T fusion reaction produces only one neutron while a U or Pu fission produces between about 3, depending on energy. But take into account that a single fusion reaction produces only 17.6 MeV while a single fission produces about 200 MeV. Add to that the fact that a large fraction of the neutrons in a fission reaction are used for inducing further fissions in the material. Remember neutron bombs? Tactical nukes meant to kill the crews of sovient tank hordes, while hopefully leaving the rest of West Germany relatively intact. They had very minimal amount of fission material in them, about 95% of the energy produced was by fusion. The reason was to have a as high as possible neutron flux, and also to minimize fallout. Most strategic warheads deployed today have only about 50% fusion output. The reason is that the casings are made of enriched uranium, the reason being that the Ulam-Teller staged radiation implosion type bomb needs a casing made of high-Z material for refllecting x-rays produced by the primary. So by additionally making the casing of fissionable material (it wont fission by itself, only fission induced by the fusion neutrons) you get better bang-for-weight.
And regarding detonating a fusion bomb without a fission primary, I read some rumors a while ago that the russians reportedly had some chemical explosive called "red mercury" capable of detonating a fusion bomb directly. As it IMHO sounds quite improbable, I'd guess it's just some rumor.
I haven't read the book, but for something with a perhaps more practical approach, check out the Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO.
Hrm, it's not like mathematics is developed in a vacuum. Much of it has in fact been developed as a solution to a problem in, say, physics. Newton, for example, developed much of the early theory of differential calculus to express his ideas in classical mechanics. Fourier developed fourier analysis to study problems in, iirc, heat conduction. Etc. etc. Of course, there are also plenty of examples where a field of pure mathematics thought of as little use in the real world suddenly finds some interresting applications. For example group theory and abstract algebra in quantum mechanics.
And about steam locomotives, as the previous poster claimed, no amount of theoretical mathematics is going to build you a locomotive. Steam locomotives were mainly developed with the simple knowledge that if you boil water you get pressurized steam. And a lot of good ol' engineering (i.e. trial and error, and using what worked previously). Add to this that the romans were unable to produce steel in sufficient quantity and quality (it takes a lot of steel to produce trains and a railroad network, you know!), they probably new little about lubrication of the mechanical parts (I think they used some kind of grease produced from animals to lubricate their wagons and other things. Clearly this is not enough for a locomotive). Etc. Even today, modeling something like a steam locomotive is a very non-trivial problem. Depending of course on what you want to know. Material properties? Check out solid state physics, definitely 20th century stuff. Steam dynamics? Navier-Stokes equations for fluid mechanics have been known for quite a while, but solving them for your locomotive entails solving a non-linear partial differential equation in a very complicated domain. If the previous statement doesn't raise the hairs on the back of your neck, attend some course entitled something like "advanced numerical methods for partial differential equations" to get some insight into the theory. And then get a supercomputer to actually solve the problem. In short: Waaay out of the league of the romans, theoretical mathematics of not.
Of course you might argue that mathematics has allowed us all these kinds of stuff. Well, yes, but as I said in the first paragraph, mathematics is not developed in a vacuum.
[oldest programming language pissing match] :)
You program in C for a living? Well, I recently landed a job involving fortran programming.
[/]
Conclusion: ZDNet author is a dimwit if he believes every programmer in the world does nothing but shopping carts.
Or should I do shopping carts with "fortran.NET"? Bwahahaha...
Yup, I agree. I learned Java in school too. My upcoming new job involves fortran programming. Go figure... :)
Well, I'm happy to have filtered out everything doubleclick related with the help of junkbuster for the last few years.
Yes there seems to be no such thing as an open source J2EE weblog. One reason might of course be that open source developers in general seem to have quite a bland attitude towards everything Java. The high profile open source Java stuff seems to be mostly infrastructure stuff, like the Apache Jakarta project and JBOSS. One thing which might be a good start for a Java weblog is Jive, probably the highest performing forum software around (and yes, written in Java). Unfortunately they went commercial a while ago, but you can still download the older Jive 1.2.4, which is under an Apache license. So with some amount of work, you might be able to mangle it to something resembling a weblog. And there seems to be some kind of integration with Struts too, which of course would be a very cool thing to have. I'd really like to do something like this, but considering that I don't personally really have a need for a weblog and that I unfortunately seem to be perpetually busy with all kinds of things I don't think I'd be able to donate enough time to a project like this...:( I wish you good luck if you decide to give it a try.
Also debian users can save a copy with 'apt-get source bnetd'. At least in testing and unstable, I don't know about stable.