Where he isn't right is about OpenBSD - security is a by-product of fixing bugs.
One other thing impressed me about the OpenBSD mindset - that they port OpenBSD to several different architectures in order to improve the chances that they will catch some of the more subtle bugs. Case in point was the 33 year old bug in 'yacc' that was caught because of errors reported in the Sparc64 port.
I don't remember any "BR" intsructions for the 6600 - then again my exposure to the CDC 6600 instruction set was from an assembly language class I took just over 35 years ago (man, I'm getting old...). I still have my copy of Grishman handy, and while it had a section on branch instructions, the instructions were referred to as "jumps". I'm not that familiar with the 3000 series instruction set (the 3000's were silicon transistor remakes of the germanium transistor 1604), so there might have been branch instructions for the 3000.
Interesting - Rhodium is a fairly common fission product so it might be economical to mine it from the radwaste from nuclear weapons production - a lot of that has been sitting around for 50 years so the Rhodium should be largely non-radioactive.
What I remember of Kingsbury's article in Analog was that there was a tradeoff between specific impulse and thrust similar to the Vasimir (sp?) proposal for ion drive. After reading about the tests of the reactor built for Project Pluto (AKA Supersonic Low Altitude Missile), I'm inclined to beleive that DUMBO would work as Kingsbury wrote.
There probably would be some release of radioactive materials from a DUMBO launch (more activated stuctural material than fission products.
Are you kidding? You think that the product size actually matters? There is very little difference in shipping a container of refrigerators vs. a container of pens. It's a tiny fraction of fuel economy (a few percent) due to weight differences. The cost & distribution challenges come in breaking up the product at distribution centers, but that happens regardless of where the product is manufactured.
You're right in there is little difference in the cost between shipping a container of pens versus a container of refrigerators. The difference is that a container load of pens is worth more than a container load of refrigerators and the container of fridges would probably weigh less than the one filled with pens.
A 40' ISO container has a maximum loaded weight of about 35 short tons. Let's take a pessimistic estimate for RR fuel consumption of 350 ton-miles per gallon (the Florida East Coast averages in excess of 1,000 ton-miles per gallon due to the flat terrain). This gives us about 10 miles per gallon for the container, so 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel will get you 10,000 miles. BTW, at speeds above about 25 mph, trains are more efficient than ships.
About half the electric power generated in the US comes from burning coal, the amount of power from natural gas is similar to the contribution from nuclear.
The problem is that gun bombs are an obscene waste of an extremely rare material; Little Boy had about five times as much uranium as Fat Man did plutonium (~100 vs ~20Kg) but a significantly inferior yield (~15 vs ~20KT). It's estimated that maybe 1/10 of Little Boy's uranium had fissioned when it disassembled.
Lessee, 15kT yield requires about 0.75kg of 235U, so the Little Boy fissioned maybe 1% of the uranium in it. You're right in that a gun type bomb would be an ideal fit for a container - assuming that the bad guys could get their hands on the material. The other downside is the amount of 235U makes it much easier to detect.
This has been a concern of DHS for several years now, specifically DNDO. The DHS is working on several levels of protection, ranging from having a list of known shippers to developing technologies for passive and active screening for nukes. One fortunate happenstance is that plutonium, the most common material for making weapons, has a high spontaneous fission rate - while it is possible to shield the resulting high energy gamma's and neutrons, the shielding itself will stand out like a sore thumb.
P.S. I do enjoy your postings on comp.arch, along with the other regulars as Nick, Del, Eugene, etc.
If I recall correctly, the systme uses ~30GHz radiation for the scanning. Power levels are in line with a normal urban environment (I've read the safety report on the machine) - think people walking by with cell phones. Since the wavelength is about 1 cm, the image resolution isn't going to be much better than 1 cm - which is certainly adequate to determine gender.
Probably the most embarrassing thing that would be revealing some of the locations of body piercings.
Using INT 21H for making an OS call started with QDOS, which was written in early 1980. While that postdates the appearance of the 8086, I doubt if there were more than a few hundred 8086 systems in the wild at that time.
CP/M used a jump instruction to handle OS calls, QDOS/86-DOS/MS-DOS had the target of that jump be the INT 21H instruction. So the code would NOT work on CP/M.
There was a version of Macro assembler available for CP/M - which pre-dated the MS-DOS version.
I mentioned the 486 specifically because low cost 486 machines were available only a few months after the expensive models from the big boys - the first low cost clone of the 8088 came out several years after the PC.
The docs for the 8086 stated that the interrupts below 20H were reserved, so guess what IBM used for the BIOS. The 8086 documentation was emphatic about not using the non-maskable interrupt for the 8087, and guess what IBM used. OTOH, Tim Paterson did pay attention to the docs and started the interrupt usage at 20H, but he wasn't working for either IBM or Microsoft at the time.
TFA doesn't get into the real reason that the x86 took off, that the BIOS for the IBM PC was cloned at least two or three times which allowed for much cheaper hardware (the original Compaq and IBM 486 machines were going for close to 10K$, where 486 whiteboxes were available a few months late for 2K$).
I haven't heard of any penalties or dissolutions either - may happen with corps too small to be of concern to the typical news media. Closest thing to dissolution for most corps is bankruptcy.
What may be the ultimate penalty is if dissolution leads to the revocation of the limited liability clause of virtually all corporations - institutional investors would be paying a lot more attention to management following the law if they knew they would be on the hook for knowing of illegal actions undertaken by management.
FWIW, one person who probably holds the most responsibility for the "Maximizing share price" BS is William Lerach.
One thing left out in TFA, was that the shareholders of corporations are given a huge subsidy in the form of their liability for the misdeeds of the corporation are limited to the value of the stock. The limitation on liability was granted so that the corporation would act in the Public Interest, Convenience or Necessity.
Another issue left out of TFA, was which stockholders interests are being represented by the board of directors? A stockholder who plans on holding the stock for the long term is going to have a very different idea of ideal corporate governance than a stockholder who wants to flip the shares as quickly as possible (e.g. Warren Buffett vs Carl Icahn).
If they detected significant amounts of tritium or Helium-3, then I'd might consider that they've achieved cold fusion. Since they've reported finding He-4, my gut reaction is that the results are nothing more than insufficient care in setting up their experiment.
All of this stuff in Solaris, for example, was sorted out in Solaris 2.7 which came out well over a decade ago.
Which reminds me of Alan Cox's trollish remark saying that Sun should drop work on Solaris and support Linux instead - might be easier to add the nice stuff from Linux to Solaris than to clean up the mess with the BKL. IIRC, Sun had been supporting SMP machines from before the time that Linus started on Linux. In addition, getting SMP support done right has been a much higher priority with the Solaris developers than the Linux developers.
The issue is that Google is publishing identifiable pictures of people without having secured a model release from the people in the picture. Really dumb on Google's part - I wouldn't be surprised if they get still hit with a bunch of lawsuits - what they are doing now is to head off having even more lawsuits filed against them.
"Blowups Happen" had quite a few predictions that ended up being reasonably close. One was that nuclear power plants would use a steam cycle. Another was being off by only a factor of two for the explosive yield of fissioning 2.5 tons of U235.
There were a few things he missed. The most important to the story line was delayed neutrons. Another was the use of computers for numerical analysis (he wrote about advances in calculus that would allow for analytical solutions of problems that are now done numerically). He way underestimated the amount of electric generation developed in the US ca 1970.
I wouldn't be surprised if major portions of the ATC code date back to the early 1960's - probably written in JOVIAL. IIRC, some of the terminal control area computers are basically modern implementations of 1960's Sperry Univac machine.
One of the reasons why it is so hard replacing the ATC code is that many of the people working on the ATC had been working on SAGE from a few years before that and those people are way past retirement age.
The Milwaukee Road had a demand metering and limiting system installed on the eastern half of the Rocky Mountain electrified railroad in 1916 specifically to limit demand on the utility. OTOH, if they weren't Montana Power's largest customer, they were probably one their 2 or 3 largest customers.
The primary benefit from a smart grid isn't so much saving energy as limiting peak demand - but it would help in making best use of intermittent generation (e.g. renewables such as solar and wind).
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Where he isn't right is about OpenBSD - security is a by-product of fixing bugs.
One other thing impressed me about the OpenBSD mindset - that they port OpenBSD to several different architectures in order to improve the chances that they will catch some of the more subtle bugs. Case in point was the 33 year old bug in 'yacc' that was caught because of errors reported in the Sparc64 port.
Plus, OBP kicks the ass of just about any PeeCee BIOS out there and the Sun keyboards are a nice alternative to the usual Windoze style keyboards.
I don't remember any "BR" intsructions for the 6600 - then again my exposure to the CDC 6600 instruction set was from an assembly language class I took just over 35 years ago (man, I'm getting old...). I still have my copy of Grishman handy, and while it had a section on branch instructions, the instructions were referred to as "jumps". I'm not that familiar with the 3000 series instruction set (the 3000's were silicon transistor remakes of the germanium transistor 1604), so there might have been branch instructions for the 3000.
At least he isn't being an anonymous coward.
i don't know if this scheme will work, but hands down, that is the most sexual innuendo i've heard in an energy generation scheme in a long time
You should have seen the write up in The Register (AKA Vulture Central) on this.
Interesting - Rhodium is a fairly common fission product so it might be economical to mine it from the radwaste from nuclear weapons production - a lot of that has been sitting around for 50 years so the Rhodium should be largely non-radioactive.
There probably would be some release of radioactive materials from a DUMBO launch (more activated stuctural material than fission products.
You're right in there is little difference in the cost between shipping a container of pens versus a container of refrigerators. The difference is that a container load of pens is worth more than a container load of refrigerators and the container of fridges would probably weigh less than the one filled with pens. A 40' ISO container has a maximum loaded weight of about 35 short tons. Let's take a pessimistic estimate for RR fuel consumption of 350 ton-miles per gallon (the Florida East Coast averages in excess of 1,000 ton-miles per gallon due to the flat terrain). This gives us about 10 miles per gallon for the container, so 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel will get you 10,000 miles. BTW, at speeds above about 25 mph, trains are more efficient than ships.
About half the electric power generated in the US comes from burning coal, the amount of power from natural gas is similar to the contribution from nuclear.
I thought CanadianRealist's post was pretty funny - though maybe a bit sexist as there are quite a few women astronomers out there.
Lessee, 15kT yield requires about 0.75kg of 235U, so the Little Boy fissioned maybe 1% of the uranium in it. You're right in that a gun type bomb would be an ideal fit for a container - assuming that the bad guys could get their hands on the material. The other downside is the amount of 235U makes it much easier to detect.
This has been a concern of DHS for several years now, specifically DNDO. The DHS is working on several levels of protection, ranging from having a list of known shippers to developing technologies for passive and active screening for nukes. One fortunate happenstance is that plutonium, the most common material for making weapons, has a high spontaneous fission rate - while it is possible to shield the resulting high energy gamma's and neutrons, the shielding itself will stand out like a sore thumb.
P.S. I do enjoy your postings on comp.arch, along with the other regulars as Nick, Del, Eugene, etc.
Probably the most embarrassing thing that would be revealing some of the locations of body piercings.
Using INT 21H for making an OS call started with QDOS, which was written in early 1980. While that postdates the appearance of the 8086, I doubt if there were more than a few hundred 8086 systems in the wild at that time.
There was a version of Macro assembler available for CP/M - which pre-dated the MS-DOS version.
Perhaps you meant 8088?
I mentioned the 486 specifically because low cost 486 machines were available only a few months after the expensive models from the big boys - the first low cost clone of the 8088 came out several years after the PC.
TFA doesn't get into the real reason that the x86 took off, that the BIOS for the IBM PC was cloned at least two or three times which allowed for much cheaper hardware (the original Compaq and IBM 486 machines were going for close to 10K$, where 486 whiteboxes were available a few months late for 2K$).
What may be the ultimate penalty is if dissolution leads to the revocation of the limited liability clause of virtually all corporations - institutional investors would be paying a lot more attention to management following the law if they knew they would be on the hook for knowing of illegal actions undertaken by management.
FWIW, one person who probably holds the most responsibility for the "Maximizing share price" BS is William Lerach.
Another issue left out of TFA, was which stockholders interests are being represented by the board of directors? A stockholder who plans on holding the stock for the long term is going to have a very different idea of ideal corporate governance than a stockholder who wants to flip the shares as quickly as possible (e.g. Warren Buffett vs Carl Icahn).
If they detected significant amounts of tritium or Helium-3, then I'd might consider that they've achieved cold fusion. Since they've reported finding He-4, my gut reaction is that the results are nothing more than insufficient care in setting up their experiment.
Which reminds me of Alan Cox's trollish remark saying that Sun should drop work on Solaris and support Linux instead - might be easier to add the nice stuff from Linux to Solaris than to clean up the mess with the BKL. IIRC, Sun had been supporting SMP machines from before the time that Linus started on Linux. In addition, getting SMP support done right has been a much higher priority with the Solaris developers than the Linux developers.
The issue is that Google is publishing identifiable pictures of people without having secured a model release from the people in the picture. Really dumb on Google's part - I wouldn't be surprised if they get still hit with a bunch of lawsuits - what they are doing now is to head off having even more lawsuits filed against them.
"Blowups Happen" had quite a few predictions that ended up being reasonably close. One was that nuclear power plants would use a steam cycle. Another was being off by only a factor of two for the explosive yield of fissioning 2.5 tons of U235.
There were a few things he missed. The most important to the story line was delayed neutrons. Another was the use of computers for numerical analysis (he wrote about advances in calculus that would allow for analytical solutions of problems that are now done numerically). He way underestimated the amount of electric generation developed in the US ca 1970.
One of the reasons why it is so hard replacing the ATC code is that many of the people working on the ATC had been working on SAGE from a few years before that and those people are way past retirement age.
The primary benefit from a smart grid isn't so much saving energy as limiting peak demand - but it would help in making best use of intermittent generation (e.g. renewables such as solar and wind).