Killing the ignition also means killing power steering and power braking. There is a quite widespread belief that it can also engage the steering wheel lock, but AFAIK no one has been able to name a car where that happens so far. The next challenge is that in many modern cars the ignition switch is just a button which is handled in... software. You could throw the key out of the window and wait for the anti-theft device to kill the fuel supply, but that does not seem like something that most people would try.
In most cars you can put the gear box in neutral. The car will likely have a rev limiter (possibly in software, but it might still work). Worst case the engine breaks, but in almost all cases that would not be fatal to the people in the car.
However, in almost all cars, when not going down a steep hill, the brakes are actually more powerful than the acceleration. Just do not let off the brakes once you get the car slowed down and you think things are under control -- then the brakes overheat and you have a stuck accelerator combined with no brakes, and that has killed at least one driver already.
Even if their nuclear weapons actually worked somewhat decently when used in anger, and their rockets successfully delivered everything they have to the US, the damage would be far from destruction. Maybe they could do a Hiroshima, but it is doubtful. Whether their nukes are even small enough to fit on their rockets is far from certain.
What the North Korea CAN do is destroy Seoul, which would likely mean a death toll in the millions -- but at most tens of thousands of Americans would die.
Iran is even more laughable. They have not tested their nukes yet, and their rocket technology is behind that of North Korea. In a symmetric war, Iran would kill close to zero people in the US.
If the US and China went to war, the US would certainly be able to occupy China at the end. American casualties might go into the millions, but Chinese casualties would be much higher. The last (and only) time the US lost 1% of its population in a single war was the American Civil War. However, the USSR lost at least 10% of its population in World War II without collapsing, and the US would be able to do that.
I sincerely hope that my predictions will never have to be tested by reality.
You are unaware of what they are dealing with there. It is a testament to the dedication of the workers that these leaks do not happen more often. This is not a normal nicely-planned storage facility, it is a bunch of tanks put in way too quickly for proper planning. This cannot just be fixed, because building it properly is difficult when workers are limited by their maximum allowable radiation dose.
DDR3 and GDDR5 are contemporary standards. DDR3 is slightly older, but DDRx cycles last longer than GDDRx cycles, so they should both go obsolete at about the same time.
The spinning Earth would. It would be a highly eccentric orbit, but still.
I am trying to figure out what the combination of gaining additional mass from sucking in bits of the Earth and losing mass from Hawking radiation would do to the orbit. No luck so far.
This can be defeated by going old school and running the signal through an old VCR that doesn't have AGC.
It can be defeated by any modern AGC as well. If you manage to buy a video recorder today, it will specifically detect Macrovision and refuse to record. If you somehow disabled that detection, the AGC would have no problem handling the fake sync pulse.
The config language, if you mean the syntax of what used to be the service files, is actually nice. Most keywords are well chosen and you can do partial or complete overrides of them by adding a file in the appropriate place in/etc.
The dependency system is good too, and being able to launch daemons without the traditional double fork is brilliant. The only surprise I have hit so far is that network.target does not actually wait till the network is up -- network-online.target does that.
Indeed, journalctl is probably what I dislike the most about the current systemd stack. For one thing it is slow with full text search in large log files -- it is reasonably fast if you use the built-in column-specific search, but just running fgrep on it is not really feasible. In contrast, fgrep is ridiculously fast on modern systems as long as your log files stay below a few gigabytes in size. Also, the output of journalctl changes (mostly for the better) when you use it with pipes, which can be quite surprising.
The other major problem with systemd is how difficult it is to debug boot failures. It is quite annoying when an fstab which was correct with upstart results in silent boot failure with systemd.
The Amiga microkernel was fast because there was no memory protection. "Kernel" entry consisted of pushing a few registers to the stack and doing a jump. Context switches were similar.
Practically no one is willing to do without memory protection today, and it is likely that achieving Amiga-like context switch times while retaining some kind of memory protection would require significant hardware changes.
With the IOMMU, the userspace driver sending malicious commands to the device will not enable that driver to access memory that it should not access.
Without the IOMMU, the kernel needs to inspect every command sent to the device in order to check that the userspace driver is not malicious. This is not good for performance.
Depending on the device and the bus, there may be other ways to interfere with normal system operation, so an IOMMU is not necessarily a complete solution.
I never brush snow of the top of my car and for driving behind people who don't, wipers and maybe a tad more distance. Why should snow from the roof of another car be any different from the stuff that falls from the sky?
If the weather is really cold, there is no difference and I don't care if you brush your snow off or not. Particularly if there is more snow falling.
However, if the weather is not really cold, the snow on top of the car becomes heavy and icy and falls off in large chunks. They are not particularly nice to hit, and it takes the wipers a while to get the windscreen clear, partially because some of it usually hits other parts of the car before making its way to the windscreen.
You said that the price problem is an economy of scale problem. It is not. It is a still-missing research problem.
Silicon-based solar cells did not suffer from the same problem. The materials for producing them are reasonably cheap, the major expense is buying the factory. That is a classical economy of scale problem. If someone had invested a whole bunch of money in building solar cell factories, the price would have collapsed. If some does the same with fuel cell factories, the factories will not be able to run at anywhere near full capacity, and prices will not change much.
Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, batteries and solar panels.
You may have heard it, but it is wrong. Batteries just need lithium, and lithium is not all that expensive and supply is not particularly constrained. You can get better results with exotic materials, but Tesla for one seems to do just fine with what is essentially a lot of boring laptop batteries. Platinum supply on the other hand...
Solar panels are mass produced and production is growing rapidly -- in 2012, 31GW were added. If they are critically dependent on rare materials, those rare materials must be awfully common.
Fuel cells will get the platinum problem solved as well, there is no doubt about that. Just not in time for mass production this year.
Yes the UK is pretty much fucked. I do not have any useful suggestions for the UK market except to build as many power lines out of the UK as possible -- and even that does not really help because doing so is too expensive.
The hydro power in Norway is sufficient to be reserve for pretty much the entire Northern European power grid, if only we could get the power distributed. See the Nordic Power System map and notice how Norway is split into small bits because transmission capacity inside Norway is insufficient.
If all your power is coming from renewable sources, how exactly do you get power at night?
Ideally, you have a bit of reservoir-based hydro power that you can tap for those times. You do not need very much if you have a diverse mixture of solar/wind/geothermal etc. and a good integration with a decent-size power grid.
The best way to store energy for long periods is to reduce load on hydro power plants with reservoirs. The amount of water coming into a reservoir in a given year cannot be changed, but if you can use it only for when load is high or wind/solar/nuclear production is low, you can make that water last a lot longer.
If you happen to be in Norway, the hydro power plants run low on water every winter waiting for the snow to melt, and wind power in the Nordic region is luckily strongest in winter. The challenge is getting the wind and the hydro power moved around without adding too many unsightly and unpopular power lines...
A lot of this talk about nuclear power plants or even coal powered power plants being inflexible is nonsense. They are run continuously because this is more energy efficient.
They are run continuously because nuclear fuel is approximately free, almost the entire cost is in building and maintaining the power plant. Running a nuclear power plant at half load is almost the same as telling a wind turbine to only provide half power in order to save wind.
Locomotives also have to be heavy, preferably a decent fraction of the weight of the entire train since iron-against-iron is lousy for traction and only the locomotive has power to the wheels. One of several reasons why passenger trains like to have powered carriages instead of locomotives. The weight of the diesel-electric transmission is therefore not a problem, it just means the locomotive has to carry slightly less ballast.
With a Prius-style parallel hybrid system you can use the main electric engine as the generator. If you go serial, you need to have a separate generator which is able to supply the largest sustained load that you design for.
Then, if the batteries have to be replaced every 5 years or sooner, there go all the savings and environmental friendliness.
If old batteries start breaking, there will be a lot of easily-accessible lithium available from recycled batteries. This should reduce battery prices.
So? You will be a late adopter of electric vehicles. People who drive 13 year old trucks are not the obvious customers for something which is new and expensive and still has teething pains. There are quite a lot of people who do not drive 13 year old trucks and never drive where there are no roads. If you are lucky, there are enough of those people who will switch to electric cars so that petrol remains affordable.
4 people in a regular petrol car driving at the speed limit (not on the Autobahn) is almost unbeatable when it comes to cost per distance as well as pollution. Most electric trains have trouble beating that. Electric cars are even better, of course.
The problem with cars is that they rarely transport 4 people in practice.
That is actually the perfect example. There is a fast-charge standard, but Tesla does not use it because they have a technically superior solution. Just like Apple does not use micro-USB because they have a technically superior solution.
The analogy breaks down when considering that Tesla would love if everyone changed to their solution and AFAIK they do not use patents or other means to prevent that. Apple on the other hand...
Slashdot Mirror
Killing the ignition also means killing power steering and power braking. There is a quite widespread belief that it can also engage the steering wheel lock, but AFAIK no one has been able to name a car where that happens so far. The next challenge is that in many modern cars the ignition switch is just a button which is handled in... software. You could throw the key out of the window and wait for the anti-theft device to kill the fuel supply, but that does not seem like something that most people would try.
In most cars you can put the gear box in neutral. The car will likely have a rev limiter (possibly in software, but it might still work). Worst case the engine breaks, but in almost all cases that would not be fatal to the people in the car.
However, in almost all cars, when not going down a steep hill, the brakes are actually more powerful than the acceleration. Just do not let off the brakes once you get the car slowed down and you think things are under control -- then the brakes overheat and you have a stuck accelerator combined with no brakes, and that has killed at least one driver already.
North Korea destroy the US? With what exactly?
Even if their nuclear weapons actually worked somewhat decently when used in anger, and their rockets successfully delivered everything they have to the US, the damage would be far from destruction. Maybe they could do a Hiroshima, but it is doubtful. Whether their nukes are even small enough to fit on their rockets is far from certain.
What the North Korea CAN do is destroy Seoul, which would likely mean a death toll in the millions -- but at most tens of thousands of Americans would die.
Iran is even more laughable. They have not tested their nukes yet, and their rocket technology is behind that of North Korea. In a symmetric war, Iran would kill close to zero people in the US.
If the US and China went to war, the US would certainly be able to occupy China at the end. American casualties might go into the millions, but Chinese casualties would be much higher. The last (and only) time the US lost 1% of its population in a single war was the American Civil War. However, the USSR lost at least 10% of its population in World War II without collapsing, and the US would be able to do that.
I sincerely hope that my predictions will never have to be tested by reality.
You are unaware of what they are dealing with there. It is a testament to the dedication of the workers that these leaks do not happen more often. This is not a normal nicely-planned storage facility, it is a bunch of tanks put in way too quickly for proper planning. This cannot just be fixed, because building it properly is difficult when workers are limited by their maximum allowable radiation dose.
DDR3 and GDDR5 are contemporary standards. DDR3 is slightly older, but DDRx cycles last longer than GDDRx cycles, so they should both go obsolete at about the same time.
The spinning Earth would. It would be a highly eccentric orbit, but still.
I am trying to figure out what the combination of gaining additional mass from sucking in bits of the Earth and losing mass from Hawking radiation would do to the orbit. No luck so far.
This can be defeated by going old school and running the signal through an old VCR that doesn't have AGC.
It can be defeated by any modern AGC as well. If you manage to buy a video recorder today, it will specifically detect Macrovision and refuse to record. If you somehow disabled that detection, the AGC would have no problem handling the fake sync pulse.
If you had read the article, you would have known that they went from 118 mm2 to 148mm2, i.e. a 25% increase in area.
If Slashdot entered the 21st century, it would be able to render superscript.
The config language, if you mean the syntax of what used to be the service files, is actually nice. Most keywords are well chosen and you can do partial or complete overrides of them by adding a file in the appropriate place in /etc.
The dependency system is good too, and being able to launch daemons without the traditional double fork is brilliant. The only surprise I have hit so far is that network.target does not actually wait till the network is up -- network-online.target does that.
If only those were the only changes...
Indeed, journalctl is probably what I dislike the most about the current systemd stack. For one thing it is slow with full text search in large log files -- it is reasonably fast if you use the built-in column-specific search, but just running fgrep on it is not really feasible. In contrast, fgrep is ridiculously fast on modern systems as long as your log files stay below a few gigabytes in size. Also, the output of journalctl changes (mostly for the better) when you use it with pipes, which can be quite surprising.
The other major problem with systemd is how difficult it is to debug boot failures. It is quite annoying when an fstab which was correct with upstart results in silent boot failure with systemd.
The Amiga microkernel was fast because there was no memory protection. "Kernel" entry consisted of pushing a few registers to the stack and doing a jump. Context switches were similar.
Practically no one is willing to do without memory protection today, and it is likely that achieving Amiga-like context switch times while retaining some kind of memory protection would require significant hardware changes.
With the IOMMU, the userspace driver sending malicious commands to the device will not enable that driver to access memory that it should not access.
Without the IOMMU, the kernel needs to inspect every command sent to the device in order to check that the userspace driver is not malicious. This is not good for performance.
Depending on the device and the bus, there may be other ways to interfere with normal system operation, so an IOMMU is not necessarily a complete solution.
I never brush snow of the top of my car and for driving behind people who don't, wipers and maybe a tad more distance. Why should snow from the roof of another car be any different from the stuff that falls from the sky?
If the weather is really cold, there is no difference and I don't care if you brush your snow off or not. Particularly if there is more snow falling.
However, if the weather is not really cold, the snow on top of the car becomes heavy and icy and falls off in large chunks. They are not particularly nice to hit, and it takes the wipers a while to get the windscreen clear, partially because some of it usually hits other parts of the car before making its way to the windscreen.
You said that the price problem is an economy of scale problem. It is not. It is a still-missing research problem.
Silicon-based solar cells did not suffer from the same problem. The materials for producing them are reasonably cheap, the major expense is buying the factory. That is a classical economy of scale problem. If someone had invested a whole bunch of money in building solar cell factories, the price would have collapsed. If some does the same with fuel cell factories, the factories will not be able to run at anywhere near full capacity, and prices will not change much.
Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, batteries and solar panels.
You may have heard it, but it is wrong. Batteries just need lithium, and lithium is not all that expensive and supply is not particularly constrained. You can get better results with exotic materials, but Tesla for one seems to do just fine with what is essentially a lot of boring laptop batteries. Platinum supply on the other hand...
Solar panels are mass produced and production is growing rapidly -- in 2012, 31GW were added. If they are critically dependent on rare materials, those rare materials must be awfully common.
Fuel cells will get the platinum problem solved as well, there is no doubt about that. Just not in time for mass production this year.
Yes the UK is pretty much fucked. I do not have any useful suggestions for the UK market except to build as many power lines out of the UK as possible -- and even that does not really help because doing so is too expensive.
The hydro power in Norway is sufficient to be reserve for pretty much the entire Northern European power grid, if only we could get the power distributed. See the Nordic Power System map and notice how Norway is split into small bits because transmission capacity inside Norway is insufficient.
Irrelevant. The cars work great. The only problem is price, but that is only an economy of scale problem.
Fuel-cell based cars suffer from reverse economy of scale at the moment: They use too many rare materials, so prices go UP if you try to produce more.
Last year 35 GW (a reactor's worth) went in
Most nuclear reactors are no larger than 1GW. Even multiple-reactor power stations rarely exceed 5GW.
If all your power is coming from renewable sources, how exactly do you get power at night?
Ideally, you have a bit of reservoir-based hydro power that you can tap for those times. You do not need very much if you have a diverse mixture of solar/wind/geothermal etc. and a good integration with a decent-size power grid.
The best way to store energy for long periods is to reduce load on hydro power plants with reservoirs. The amount of water coming into a reservoir in a given year cannot be changed, but if you can use it only for when load is high or wind/solar/nuclear production is low, you can make that water last a lot longer.
If you happen to be in Norway, the hydro power plants run low on water every winter waiting for the snow to melt, and wind power in the Nordic region is luckily strongest in winter. The challenge is getting the wind and the hydro power moved around without adding too many unsightly and unpopular power lines...
A lot of this talk about nuclear power plants or even coal powered power plants being inflexible is nonsense. They are run continuously because this is more energy efficient.
They are run continuously because nuclear fuel is approximately free, almost the entire cost is in building and maintaining the power plant. Running a nuclear power plant at half load is almost the same as telling a wind turbine to only provide half power in order to save wind.
Locomotives also have to be heavy, preferably a decent fraction of the weight of the entire train since iron-against-iron is lousy for traction and only the locomotive has power to the wheels. One of several reasons why passenger trains like to have powered carriages instead of locomotives. The weight of the diesel-electric transmission is therefore not a problem, it just means the locomotive has to carry slightly less ballast.
With a Prius-style parallel hybrid system you can use the main electric engine as the generator. If you go serial, you need to have a separate generator which is able to supply the largest sustained load that you design for.
Then, if the batteries have to be replaced every 5 years or sooner, there go all the savings and environmental friendliness.
If old batteries start breaking, there will be a lot of easily-accessible lithium available from recycled batteries. This should reduce battery prices.
So? You will be a late adopter of electric vehicles. People who drive 13 year old trucks are not the obvious customers for something which is new and expensive and still has teething pains. There are quite a lot of people who do not drive 13 year old trucks and never drive where there are no roads. If you are lucky, there are enough of those people who will switch to electric cars so that petrol remains affordable.
4 people in a regular petrol car driving at the speed limit (not on the Autobahn) is almost unbeatable when it comes to cost per distance as well as pollution. Most electric trains have trouble beating that. Electric cars are even better, of course.
The problem with cars is that they rarely transport 4 people in practice.
That is actually the perfect example. There is a fast-charge standard, but Tesla does not use it because they have a technically superior solution. Just like Apple does not use micro-USB because they have a technically superior solution.
The analogy breaks down when considering that Tesla would love if everyone changed to their solution and AFAIK they do not use patents or other means to prevent that. Apple on the other hand...