If this was a chemical plant I would be asking to see the HAZOP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazop) reports.
HAZOP studies are serious mind numbing exercises of systematically identifying every possible operational hazard. Should a hazard occur a mitigation action needs to be implemented. The resulting mitigation actions then themselves need to be run through the HAZOP process.
It should be fairly obvious that this is a recursive process and that modern chemical plant designs favor simple, intrinsically safe methods that don't require a complicated control scheme or otherwise the design engineer is condemed till doomsday reviewing the safety of the plant.
Yes, the safety system kicking in is "a good thing".
Pulling data from another computer system for a safety related control system is not a bright idea (the weakest link problem).
Historically a safety control system in an Oil & Gas environment, all the inputs to the safety system are either hardwired or pulled from another safety system controller which has the appropriate level of redundancy (CPU boards and communication paths with communication watchdog timers).
Even transmitters in some circumstances can not be trusted hence the 2 out of 3 voting systems (take three transmitters measuring the same value and pick the middle of the three, if one of the transmitters fails high or low your choice will be the safe option).
Someone needs a serious think about where this plant is getting data for its safety shutdown system.
For instance: - Current research into Railguns (safer alternative to current naval cannons, far greater range, no need for tons of explosive material) - Boeing's current chemical laser research
Certainly geek stuff
Give a couple of years and the above *might* be available to your local street ganger...
From the article:
Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this. When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time.
From the article:
Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this.
When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time.
What is the cost of NOT having a backup?
ZombieEngineer
Re:If you only want to do pure research, maybe
on
Is Computer Science Dead?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't know if this was meant to be a flame bait but I'll bite.
I am an engineer by trade (making training simulators for chemical plant operators) and I have encountered more than my fair share of Computer Science graduates.
A lot of these people are focused on "how do I meet this product spec?" and not necessarily a solution fit for purpose. I routinely encounter situations where enumeration comparisons are done using strings and searches are implemented using a linear search (I kid you not, I once reduced a program run from 90 mins to 4 mins by replacing a single linear search with a binary search). Just because every 6 months there is a more powerful CPU on the market doesn't justify ever increasingly sloppy coding.
There are a few people who are focused on "how do I make this better?". For these people making a compiler that would recognise linear search and replace with a more appropriate technique automatically is there objective, before people jump up and down saying there is no way a compiler could determine this I will point out that there was a consulting company who 20 years ago had a FORTRAN compiler that would silently replace nested loops with equivalent BLAS matrix calculations (said consulting company was bought out by Intel several years ago). So what is the big deal? FORTRAN died several years ago... Well it is a bigger deal today with Dual Core processors where things like BLAS calculations are perfectly suited to parallel processor architecture.
Moving on to address some of your other comments: "Everyone still needs an IT department" If your IT department is stacked with CS people then someone isn't doing their job properly. I found IT support (did it for a University department while working on my post-grad) is highly dependent on the level of planing and implementation. A well planned system with appropriate lock-downs (era of Win 3.1, we mirrored the HDD of the local machine from the network server when people logged in) resulted in no viruses or other on-going issues (you had a network drive for personal storage but the desktops were a shared resource, you could install software, use it but the moment you logged off and back on again - Poof!). Prior to having a planned strategy, IT support consisted of firefighting & band-aid patching.
"There are a ton of companies who need very specialized internal applications, or their own "B2B" applications" Oh Please!!! Specalised applications are a pain in the neck to support, the real issue here is that who ever implemented them did not fully understand what the end user requirements were. There is a real art of extracting that sort of information out of people and it requires an inquiring mind, good communication and people skills. There are application houses that milk corporations of money due to scope changes because they couldn't get the original spec right (I am not going to enter into the argument of whose is to blame for a defective spec, there are valid arguments for both sides).
Computer Science graduates can go one of two directions:
Academic Research - Which has grown at a steady rate
Corportate Development - Which collapsed at the end of the dot-com boom.
There is still a need for "pure" computer science research for the next big improvement in the field of computing (where is the next "Google" going to appear?)
Biology already have the means to make long chain parafins in the form of triglyerides.
Gasoline will be a bit harder as you don't want long chain parafins, you want branch chained C7 / C8s (seven and eight carbon hydrocarbons) as a straight chain C8 hase an octane number of zero (by definition) while the fully branched C7 has an octance number of 100 (again by definition). Getting octane numbers >90 is difficult without using aromatic compounds (benzene & toluene which have octane numbers in the 120 to 150s).
The original source for the octane 100 reference was from the cones of a particular pine tree.
So in theory there is a biological precendence but it could take 10 years to get there, once we do then the scale up will be very quick.
There are several different viewpoints that can be taken here:
US Federal Government view point (as expressed by the US State Department): - The internet was developed with US Government money (and therefore US Government property) - We allow foriegn interests access but as long as they play by our rules (eg: stay in your own domain) - We will allow anything that furthers our country's interest (eg: promotes trade with the US, preferable in US favour)
Now has the previous incumbent (ICANN) abided and/or promoted the above? Much as people loathe ICANN it has probably has stayed true to the above statements.
Other countries will probably want to dispute the first item (the rest will crumble) however you are going to have to butt heads with the a group of extremely stubborn (in their view patriotic) bureaucrats.
Even if ICANN was to be replaced / restructured / whatever, I have some serious doubts if its actions will change.
OK, so I missed a step in the second line.
Assuming constant density then volume is proportional to mass. Therefore R is proportional to the cube root of volume, and therefore R is proportional to cube root of mass. Using the previous derivation that g is proportional to density x R, then g is proportional to density x (mass)^(1/3).
Why is this important? This allows for a planet to have a fairly wide variation in mass but still have a "reasonable" gravity. Assuming +/- 20% window for gravity, this would translate to a -48% to +72% of planetary mass.
Go back to your high school physics, g is proportional to the mass and the inverse of the distance squared. Assuming a sphere, mass equals density x 4/3 x pi x R^3. Apply the inverse R^2 term and you end up with g proportional to density x R.
The planet might be 13 times the mass but if the density is the same as Earth then g is only 2.35 times that of Earth (cube root of 13).
Forgot to add the bit about magnetic bearings...
With the super magnets that are currently available it is possible to support the rotor wieght by magnetic repulsion. This has been on solar racers such that there is no physical contact (solid on solid) where a traditional bearing is used. This greatly reduces the friction and presumably some of the noise associated with rotating machinery.
The problem of using Maglev on the motors is that the torque that is generated. It isn't as simple as lifting the weight of several tonnes but also apply the rotational torque as well (normally this is less that the wieght of the motor for conventional drives but high power units with hydrogen gas cooling [best thermal conductivity] could increase this force to multiples of the static wieght).
Often mechanical guages are "pinned" (the needle rests on a pin) at the low reading otherwise they vibrate badly. Hence the needle doesn't travel between 0 and 1.
It appears that they mis-spelt Australia as Austria (acording to World Bank Australia is rank 13 while Austria is 21).
The fact that Australia is only a couple of percentage points behind given that it has a far lower population density AND has a monopolostic telecomunications carrier should be a worry. Most of Australia does not have access to cable television (only in upper middle class suburbs or better), hence most Aussies only have ADSL if Telstra has bothered to make it available.
One of their other tech products is super-capacitors for "portable electronic devices" which extends the life of the batteries (that digital camera of yours may very well have CSIRO tech inside it.).
This could allow retail level solar panels to eek out the equivalent to an additional 2 hours of peak sunlight over a 12 hour period. Initially this would appear to be a 10% improvement but in reality it is closer to a 30% improvement (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to integrate sin(x.pi/12) from 0 to 12 hours [flat panel on the ground with the sun passing directly overhead] to yield 6.28).
I should imagine the cost of the plastic is going to be far less than the processed silicon for solar cells.
If you are served with an Anton Piller order, you are being asked nicely to allow a solicitor for the plantiff to enter and remove documents relating to the order. If you refuse the order you will be held in contempt of court.
The difference is that the bearer of the order needs to ask for permission to access, if there is no-one present then they can't enter.
Sounds like you want a mineral processing plant with a heavy media separation unit. Grind everything down to 100um (eg: 0.1 mm) and using a range of suitable liquids and slurries separate the material by density.
At this point you should have separated the raw material into metals, ceramics (including the glass from the fibreglass from the PCBs) and plastics. You need to process these individually as appropriately.
With the metals you end up with a metalic sludge, suitable application of various industrial chemicals (oxidise the mess to start with, start with ammonia disolved in water, this will rip out Ag, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni & Zn [gently heat liquor to drop out each metal in turn], next use conc H2SO4 to pull out the base metals into solution and use solvent extraction, finally a dash of NaCN for the precious metals left behind).
The process is well known but far too many steps for a low tonnage process (economical in the 1,000,000+ tonnes/annum for a single plant, that is a lot of computers).
As someone has already posted, where do you draw the line? Do PDAs count? Does a mobile phone count? Should the charge be by mass? Should the charge be tiered such that devices with low heavy metal content obtain a lower charge? (default to top tier if the device has not been certified by EPA for a lower price tier) What will the cost of compliance be?
Who will pay for the compliance cost? (this includes the cost of filling out the forms which could easily exceed $10 per machine)
The purpose from the article was to provide a temperature profile. Biological processes are a tad bit complicated with the desired product sometimes will only be produced under certain circumstances, from memory Penicilin is only formed by a certain fungus during the "death stage" of fermentation at a specific temperature. eg: all the culture is used up and the biomas starts to consume itself)
By controlling the temperature profile during fermentation it is possible to radically change the "taste" of the product. That is why the Australian / South African wine growers can churn out a reasonably good product cheaply (as opposed to the French) as they use large temperature controlled stainless steel vats with scorched oak chips rather than small wooden casks.
Slashdot Mirror
If this was a chemical plant I would be asking to see the HAZOP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazop) reports.
HAZOP studies are serious mind numbing exercises of systematically identifying every possible operational hazard. Should a hazard occur a mitigation action needs to be implemented. The resulting mitigation actions then themselves need to be run through the HAZOP process.
It should be fairly obvious that this is a recursive process and that modern chemical plant designs favor simple, intrinsically safe methods that don't require a complicated control scheme or otherwise the design engineer is condemed till doomsday reviewing the safety of the plant.
ZombieEngineer
Something is not right here...
Yes, the safety system kicking in is "a good thing".
Pulling data from another computer system for a safety related control system is not a bright idea (the weakest link problem).
Historically a safety control system in an Oil & Gas environment, all the inputs to the safety system are either hardwired or pulled from another safety system controller which has the appropriate level of redundancy (CPU boards and communication paths with communication watchdog timers).
Even transmitters in some circumstances can not be trusted hence the 2 out of 3 voting systems (take three transmitters measuring the same value and pick the middle of the three, if one of the transmitters fails high or low your choice will be the safe option).
Someone needs a serious think about where this plant is getting data for its safety shutdown system.
ZombieEngineer
For instance:
- Current research into Railguns (safer alternative to current naval cannons, far greater range, no need for tons of explosive material)
- Boeing's current chemical laser research
Certainly geek stuff
Give a couple of years and the above *might* be available to your local street ganger...
ZombieEngineer
Could someone please explain to a non-US resident why these two politicans are of interest to Geeks & Nerds.
Reading the article would suggest that the two in question are beyond what would be considered a normal retirement age.
ZombieEngineer
What is the cost of NOT having a backup?
ZombieEngineer
From the article: Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this. When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time. What is the cost of NOT having a backup? ZombieEngineer
I don't know if this was meant to be a flame bait but I'll bite.
I am an engineer by trade (making training simulators for chemical plant operators) and I have encountered more than my fair share of Computer Science graduates.
A lot of these people are focused on "how do I meet this product spec?" and not necessarily a solution fit for purpose. I routinely encounter situations where enumeration comparisons are done using strings and searches are implemented using a linear search (I kid you not, I once reduced a program run from 90 mins to 4 mins by replacing a single linear search with a binary search). Just because every 6 months there is a more powerful CPU on the market doesn't justify ever increasingly sloppy coding.
There are a few people who are focused on "how do I make this better?". For these people making a compiler that would recognise linear search and replace with a more appropriate technique automatically is there objective, before people jump up and down saying there is no way a compiler could determine this I will point out that there was a consulting company who 20 years ago had a FORTRAN compiler that would silently replace nested loops with equivalent BLAS matrix calculations (said consulting company was bought out by Intel several years ago). So what is the big deal? FORTRAN died several years ago... Well it is a bigger deal today with Dual Core processors where things like BLAS calculations are perfectly suited to parallel processor architecture.
Moving on to address some of your other comments: "Everyone still needs an IT department"
If your IT department is stacked with CS people then someone isn't doing their job properly. I found IT support (did it for a University department while working on my post-grad) is highly dependent on the level of planing and implementation. A well planned system with appropriate lock-downs (era of Win 3.1, we mirrored the HDD of the local machine from the network server when people logged in) resulted in no viruses or other on-going issues (you had a network drive for personal storage but the desktops were a shared resource, you could install software, use it but the moment you logged off and back on again - Poof!). Prior to having a planned strategy, IT support consisted of firefighting & band-aid patching.
"There are a ton of companies who need very specialized internal applications, or their own "B2B" applications"
Oh Please!!! Specalised applications are a pain in the neck to support, the real issue here is that who ever implemented them did not fully understand what the end user requirements were. There is a real art of extracting that sort of information out of people and it requires an inquiring mind, good communication and people skills. There are application houses that milk corporations of money due to scope changes because they couldn't get the original spec right (I am not going to enter into the argument of whose is to blame for a defective spec, there are valid arguments for both sides).
ZombieEngineer
Computer Science graduates can go one of two directions:
Academic Research - Which has grown at a steady rate
Corportate Development - Which collapsed at the end of the dot-com boom.
There is still a need for "pure" computer science research for the next big improvement in the field of computing (where is the next "Google" going to appear?)
ZombieEngineer
Biology already have the means to make long chain parafins in the form of triglyerides.
Gasoline will be a bit harder as you don't want long chain parafins, you want branch chained C7 / C8s (seven and eight carbon hydrocarbons) as a straight chain C8 hase an octane number of zero (by definition) while the fully branched C7 has an octance number of 100 (again by definition). Getting octane numbers >90 is difficult without using aromatic compounds (benzene & toluene which have octane numbers in the 120 to 150s).
The original source for the octane 100 reference was from the cones of a particular pine tree.
So in theory there is a biological precendence but it could take 10 years to get there, once we do then the scale up will be very quick.
ZombieEngineer
A 400 Amp service would be getting into the "small to medium business" catagory.
At which point your meter would be read monthly and you only have one choice of rate (peak/off peak).
I would give your suggestion only 28 days before the power company moves in and changes your plan.
ZombieEngineer
There are several different viewpoints that can be taken here:
US Federal Government view point (as expressed by the US State Department):
- The internet was developed with US Government money (and therefore US Government property)
- We allow foriegn interests access but as long as they play by our rules (eg: stay in your own domain)
- We will allow anything that furthers our country's interest (eg: promotes trade with the US, preferable in US favour)
Now has the previous incumbent (ICANN) abided and/or promoted the above?
Much as people loathe ICANN it has probably has stayed true to the above statements.
Other countries will probably want to dispute the first item (the rest will crumble) however you are going to have to butt heads with the a group of extremely stubborn (in their view patriotic) bureaucrats.
Even if ICANN was to be replaced / restructured / whatever, I have some serious doubts if its actions will change.
Zombie Engineer
OK, so I missed a step in the second line. Assuming constant density then volume is proportional to mass. Therefore R is proportional to the cube root of volume, and therefore R is proportional to cube root of mass. Using the previous derivation that g is proportional to density x R, then g is proportional to density x (mass)^(1/3). Why is this important? This allows for a planet to have a fairly wide variation in mass but still have a "reasonable" gravity. Assuming +/- 20% window for gravity, this would translate to a -48% to +72% of planetary mass.
Go back to your high school physics, g is proportional to the mass and the inverse of the distance squared. Assuming a sphere, mass equals density x 4/3 x pi x R^3. Apply the inverse R^2 term and you end up with g proportional to density x R.
The planet might be 13 times the mass but if the density is the same as Earth then g is only 2.35 times that of Earth (cube root of 13).
ZombieEngineer
Forgot to add the bit about magnetic bearings... With the super magnets that are currently available it is possible to support the rotor wieght by magnetic repulsion. This has been on solar racers such that there is no physical contact (solid on solid) where a traditional bearing is used. This greatly reduces the friction and presumably some of the noise associated with rotating machinery.
The problem of using Maglev on the motors is that the torque that is generated. It isn't as simple as lifting the weight of several tonnes but also apply the rotational torque as well (normally this is less that the wieght of the motor for conventional drives but high power units with hydrogen gas cooling [best thermal conductivity] could increase this force to multiples of the static wieght).
Often mechanical guages are "pinned" (the needle rests on a pin) at the low reading otherwise they vibrate badly. Hence the needle doesn't travel between 0 and 1.
Da ZombieEngineer
The fact that Australia is only a couple of percentage points behind given that it has a far lower population density AND has a monopolostic telecomunications carrier should be a worry. Most of Australia does not have access to cable television (only in upper middle class suburbs or better), hence most Aussies only have ADSL if Telstra has bothered to make it available.
Da ZombieEngineer
One of their other tech products is super-capacitors for "portable electronic devices" which extends the life of the batteries (that digital camera of yours may very well have CSIRO tech inside it.).
This could allow retail level solar panels to eek out the equivalent to an additional 2 hours of peak sunlight over a 12 hour period. Initially this would appear to be a 10% improvement but in reality it is closer to a 30% improvement (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to integrate sin(x.pi/12) from 0 to 12 hours [flat panel on the ground with the sun passing directly overhead] to yield 6.28).
I should imagine the cost of the plastic is going to be far less than the processed silicon for solar cells.
da ZombieEngineer
If you are served with an Anton Piller order, you are being asked nicely to allow a solicitor for the plantiff to enter and remove documents relating to the order. If you refuse the order you will be held in contempt of court.
The difference is that the bearer of the order needs to ask for permission to access, if there is no-one present then they can't enter.
ZombieEngineer (IANAL)
At this point you should have separated the raw material into metals, ceramics (including the glass from the fibreglass from the PCBs) and plastics. You need to process these individually as appropriately.
With the metals you end up with a metalic sludge, suitable application of various industrial chemicals (oxidise the mess to start with, start with ammonia disolved in water, this will rip out Ag, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni & Zn [gently heat liquor to drop out each metal in turn], next use conc H2SO4 to pull out the base metals into solution and use solvent extraction, finally a dash of NaCN for the precious metals left behind).
The process is well known but far too many steps for a low tonnage process (economical in the 1,000,000+ tonnes/annum for a single plant, that is a lot of computers).
ZombieEngineer
As someone has already posted, where do you draw the line?
Do PDAs count?
Does a mobile phone count?
Should the charge be by mass?
Should the charge be tiered such that devices with low heavy metal content obtain a lower charge? (default to top tier if the device has not been certified by EPA for a lower price tier)
What will the cost of compliance be?
Who will pay for the compliance cost? (this includes the cost of filling out the forms which could easily exceed $10 per machine)
Just a few ideas for others to ponder on...
ZombieEngineer
By controlling the temperature profile during fermentation it is possible to radically change the "taste" of the product. That is why the Australian / South African wine growers can churn out a reasonably good product cheaply (as opposed to the French) as they use large temperature controlled stainless steel vats with scorched oak chips rather than small wooden casks.
Zombie Engineer
Zombie Engineer