Yeah, I knew you'd call me on the renewable part. I also think it could be argued that fissile material is really an energy-transfer medium since the enrichment process is highly energy-intensive.
You kind of get into the chicken-egg thing when asking "where does the energy come from to (re)process the fuel to 'burn' in the reactors?"
I think a lot of the problems with the alternatives, including electric vehicles all get back to energy density (obviously in that case it's a storage problem, not a generation one).
Nuclear, though technically non-renewable, is the only thing that I can think of that would meet the present and near-term energy demands while taking a shot at reducing carbon emissions. I guess you get into all those peripheral debates about trying to incent people to change their behavior, and they (we) don't want to give anything up.
I also like the aspect of nuclear that the pollution load is concentrated, and therefore can be actively managed. I feel like having millions of individual heat engines has the convenience of disbursing the pollution over an extremely large area, but then prevents management of it - hence the requirement for mandated emissions control devices on each vehicle. The centralization aspect of nuclear is enticing, but the cost is obviously the increase in incumbent risk if it's mismanaged.
Your point's well taken, though.
-1zd
"The way to wean people off fossil fuel is to present them with a better and/or easier and/or cheaper alternative. The way to bring those about is with incentives, not with mandates or subsidies. Since 1980 the USA government has pumped something like $50 billion into energy R&D, with nothing significant to show for it. Suppose it were to establish an X prize to pay, oh, $25 billion to the first organization demonstrating an alternative energy process that (1) is renewable, (2) has less end-to-end environmental impact than coal or petroleum, (3) is at least as end-to-end efficient as coal or petroleum, (4) yields end-user cost and performance comparable to gasoline in a typical mid-size automobile, and (5) is practical on a commercial scale. Would you bet that we wouldn't be retooling the nation for such a process by, say, 2020?"
Yeah, except TFA says the gains were achieved with modified BJT technology, which is not CMOS. In addition, the faster that you switch COMPLIMENTARY (that's the C) MOS structures, the larger the shoot-through current (this is the current that flows between the power supply rails as each transistor in the complimentary structure is temporarily partially conducting). In microprocessors and memory cells, these are responsible for huge transient current requirements, and get worse as the clock frequency is increased.
The reason that the development is significant is not from a microprocessor standpoint - it means that the front end amplifiers and mixers that have to run at the highest frequencies can be fabricated using more cost-effective manufacturing techniques. This is assuming that the article is correct in stating the development concerns BJT's. Hell knows why they showed a photo of a non-populated circuit board, but hey, it's the media. Guess you have dial your expectations lower.
The rub is the range of variation in the output (cost per unit) that can occur with relatively minimal changes in inputs (extra $1 per baseband processor, for instance) can severely hinder the analysis. I'm also suspicious because the estimate is reported to such a high degree of precision (down to the dollar) without any discussion of uncertainty. It implies a degree of accuracy that is not possible without proprietary information.
I would have expected, even with a very good estimate, to see a range "Q could reasonably be expected to be produced in the range of $140-160 using scale assumptions corresponding to other cellular devices" or something along those lines.
I checked out the website of the company in question, and they list an impressive number of large electronics mfr's - I'm left wondering if the mfr's participate in cost estimation efforts in the same manner as salary surveys where they are allowing their data to be aggregated anonymously to improve the accuracy of the estimates?
I'm always a little shocked when I see things like this.
It's quite difficult to gauge the true cost of a consumer device when you don't know: - Component purchase volumes and associated discounts - Overhead (R&D, administrative costs) - IP licensing - both for the finished good and associated components (patent fees, etc.) - Who manufactured certain key components (the LCD is mentioned) - Locus of manufacture (which country?) - Test and rework costs (what defect rates are expected of raw components and finished assemblies, what quality standard?)
Brushing aside petty criticism of my background, I'll attempt to address some of your comments since I find the discussion to be an interesting one.
"Why weren't those experts working within those teams or at the same level as those teams? See, this was a problem created by management in the first place."
An absence of management would have resulted in the proper experts being present on the team? This doesn't follow. You're also stating that the management was responsible for the failure because it didn't prevent the engineers from ignoring the experts. Then you go on to say later "It's inherently a self-management process, and requires no oversight other than that of peers.". This is inconsistent - if this were true than the intervention of management would not be required because the team would have known to follow the advice of the experts. Can't have it both ways.
"Reconciling the conflicting opinions of experts is almost child's play, you can practically set up a program to do it, with full cognizance of probabilities, degree of expertise of participants, etc etc."
How do you resolve conflicts in assessment of the probabilities and degrees of expertise - by vote? What if the expert in question is correct and the consensus from the other professional(s) is/are wrong? Who establishes the weighting? This is not child's play, for example as any individual who has served on a standards committee knows. This was attempted in various disciplines through the usage of expert systems. These efforts fail for all except mature technologies.
Be serious, we're talking about science and engineering experts, not cowboy coders.
I'm quite serious. An absence of an engineering process is equivalent to cowboy coding. A committee vote by cowboys does not constitute expertise. I don't really care if you find the fact offensive that engineers are simply technical laborers. You can hide behind a semantic distinction in stating that such engineers are not "professionals," but I would assert that none of the individuals discussed in the original article or that inhabit most organizations are "professionals" in a true sense (i.e. only answerable to peers) and that the majority of engineering practice is carried out by such non-professionals, making the distinction meaningless from a practical standpoint. Cowboys create most of our systems.
That's a straw man, it wasn't even suggested. Good science and engineering doesn't cost more than poor science and engineering.
Then explain to me why in virtually all countries and cultures, technical work is carried out within a hierarchical management structure with non-technical oversight? Surely, if a consensus-based approach with technical leaders making decisions was more likely to result in high(er) quality work at the same cost, this approach would displace other models due to its economic efficiency and predictability. This has not occurred in most engineering disciplines, and frankly this model only persists in disciplines where there are barriers to entry or manipulation of the market (e.g. an academic setting), or a very mature technological base (not true of space exploration).
Yes, it is about tradeoffs, but management always trades off too much and technical soundness suffers. A professional engineer knows when something is "good enough" for the job in hand, not just from experience but because it's largely objective, a matter of probability computations.
No even marginally competent manager disregards material information if it is provided with a sound basis. Yes, you can argue that the majority of managers are incompetent, but my counterargument is that the majority of engineers are as well, regardless of whether they are "professionals" or not. Most engineers have difficulty communicating assumptions, and rarely associate probabilities with potential outcomes and tradeoffs. Addressing the comments about the professional engineer's ability to i
I disagree categorically with the perception that leaving technical people unfettered by management or time pressure will result in better designs, products or concepts. After RTFA, one notes that one reason provided for the failure is that the teams disregarded expert input - a characteristic that I have witnessed time and again within groups of bright technical people. Call it an adjunct of NIH - not invented here.
Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing. For some development methodologies, this may be an efficient way to rapidly prototype a UI or system, but for the most part it generates sh*t for quality. But, it's fun.
Every technical person would love to work in a Xerox- or Bell Labs-style environment of pure research with a virtually unlimited budget. Very innovative ideas are bred from such environments, but they rarely produce market-ready concepts. I think you need to differentiate between science and engineering, and pure research vs. development. NASA is both a research and a development organization. Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints. Science is about uncovering new knowledge. Science in the absence of constraints is marvelous. Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster. Ask any contractor.
The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors). The only way humans can deal with such issues is through management and process. It sucks, but it's all we have.
But we manage complexity in other disciplines with layers of abstraction and structure. This enables (relatively) stupid people to utilize extraordinarily complex technologies in their lives. It is not necessary for me to understand semiconductor physics, branch prediction and out-of-order execution in order to type this message, yet I am using these technologies.
As I stated in my original message, the studies may well have been properly designed, but when aggregated, the results are not meaningful. Call it a failure of the people who reported on it, but as an end user of the information, it is not useful.
It is not possible for someone to interpret "Drink lots of coffee, but don't drink lots of coffee." This is not advice, it is a contradiction.
Ask someone who switched to margarine in the 60's what they think about that decision now, with emerging research related to trans-fatty acids. Should we switch back to butter?
When is the medical profession going to move beyond descriptive statistics to something more? In some respects, the medical profession appears to be at about the same level as the alchemists were prior to the evolution of chemistry. "If I mix this, then mix that, I get something. I don't know why."
The studies may each be meaningful and well-designed, but to an individual trying to make good decisions, the information is basically useless, since it appears contradictory and in many cases is arbitrary and non-intuitive. "You should eat 5, not 4, pieces of celery, but only after consuming 2.5 cups of coffee *UNLESS*, of course, you have gene XYZPDQ319, in which case you should drink only 1.5 cups of coffee before urinating at sundown."
...at least they're not going to drop out of NCAA D1 athletics. It's always nice to know that even in the face of staff and program cuts, they can still find money for college football. Guess they've identified the core interests of their consistuency.
- Superior picture quality and signal-to-noise vs. VHS - Widespread adoption by studios and professionals (Beta SP) - Convenient smaller-sized cassette - Mfr'd and licensed by Sony, a company known for their progressive stance regarding consumer rights.
Maybe I missed it in TFA, but I didn't see references to inflation or time-value of money. Another poster remarked that gas prices are unlikely to remain constant, but there's also the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar next year.
If you pay significantly more up-front for Hybrid, you don't just have to save the extra $$$'s you spent initially, but you have to make up for the depreciation of the dollar over the same period.
It's an economic issue rather than a political one. You get more of what you subsidize (either privately through compensation or through governmental intervention).
20 step process to economic competitiveness: 1-20. Pay scientists and engineers like you pay doctors and lawyers.
Why is it that these arrests always seem to be made in Europe? Is it because the legal climate is different, or is the incidence of criminal extortion over the internet higher there? Is Europe the locus of the crime? I always thought Eastern Europe (e.g. Russia, baltic states) and the east were worse. Is it that they don't enforce in those places so you never hear about it?
Many of these efforts have been underway for years as the cellular providers have developed infrastructure to prepare for E911 positioning requirements. Various schemes have been proposed including usage of terrestrial radio sources such as TV, radio and wireless networking. The more practical approaches use TDOA (time-difference of arrival, similar to triangulation, only using ranging info instead), or brute-force with GPS receivers.
Minnesota could be described the same way (high taxes and crappy weather).
The folks that inhabit the legislature and state offices seem to regard business development as a nuisance. It doesn't shock me a bit that they'd attempt to adopt programs to tax sales transactions on the internet. All you have to do is take a stroll through our capitol, St. Paul to get the score.
There's virtually no private enterprise there, but there are plentiful state and county offices.
I do agree with you, if one can't afford what they want, they can at least plan their careers and spending to enable those pursuits later.
In relation to quitting law after a couple decades - that sounds more like just wanting to opt out of the whole "escalating zero point" thing.
Re:Its a matter of perspective
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, and it always helps if you've had 18 years of six-figure lawyer income to subsidize your cooking.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I knew you'd call me on the renewable part. I also think it could be argued that fissile material is really an energy-transfer medium since the enrichment process is highly energy-intensive. You kind of get into the chicken-egg thing when asking "where does the energy come from to (re)process the fuel to 'burn' in the reactors?" I think a lot of the problems with the alternatives, including electric vehicles all get back to energy density (obviously in that case it's a storage problem, not a generation one). Nuclear, though technically non-renewable, is the only thing that I can think of that would meet the present and near-term energy demands while taking a shot at reducing carbon emissions. I guess you get into all those peripheral debates about trying to incent people to change their behavior, and they (we) don't want to give anything up. I also like the aspect of nuclear that the pollution load is concentrated, and therefore can be actively managed. I feel like having millions of individual heat engines has the convenience of disbursing the pollution over an extremely large area, but then prevents management of it - hence the requirement for mandated emissions control devices on each vehicle. The centralization aspect of nuclear is enticing, but the cost is obviously the increase in incumbent risk if it's mismanaged. Your point's well taken, though. -1zd
"The way to wean people off fossil fuel is to present them with a better and/or easier and/or cheaper alternative. The way to bring those about is with incentives, not with mandates or subsidies. Since 1980 the USA government has pumped something like $50 billion into energy R&D, with nothing significant to show for it. Suppose it were to establish an X prize to pay, oh, $25 billion to the first organization demonstrating an alternative energy process that (1) is renewable, (2) has less end-to-end environmental impact than coal or petroleum, (3) is at least as end-to-end efficient as coal or petroleum, (4) yields end-user cost and performance comparable to gasoline in a typical mid-size automobile, and (5) is practical on a commercial scale. Would you bet that we wouldn't be retooling the nation for such a process by, say, 2020?"
It's called nuclear fission. Money please.
Yeah, except TFA says the gains were achieved with modified BJT technology, which is not CMOS. In addition, the faster that you switch COMPLIMENTARY (that's the C) MOS structures, the larger the shoot-through current (this is the current that flows between the power supply rails as each transistor in the complimentary structure is temporarily partially conducting). In microprocessors and memory cells, these are responsible for huge transient current requirements, and get worse as the clock frequency is increased.
The reason that the development is significant is not from a microprocessor standpoint - it means that the front end amplifiers and mixers that have to run at the highest frequencies can be fabricated using more cost-effective manufacturing techniques. This is assuming that the article is correct in stating the development concerns BJT's. Hell knows why they showed a photo of a non-populated circuit board, but hey, it's the media. Guess you have dial your expectations lower.
The rub is the range of variation in the output (cost per unit) that can occur with relatively minimal changes in inputs (extra $1 per baseband processor, for instance) can severely hinder the analysis. I'm also suspicious because the estimate is reported to such a high degree of precision (down to the dollar) without any discussion of uncertainty. It implies a degree of accuracy that is not possible without proprietary information. I would have expected, even with a very good estimate, to see a range "Q could reasonably be expected to be produced in the range of $140-160 using scale assumptions corresponding to other cellular devices" or something along those lines. I checked out the website of the company in question, and they list an impressive number of large electronics mfr's - I'm left wondering if the mfr's participate in cost estimation efforts in the same manner as salary surveys where they are allowing their data to be aggregated anonymously to improve the accuracy of the estimates?
I'm always a little shocked when I see things like this.
It's quite difficult to gauge the true cost of a consumer device when you don't know:
- Component purchase volumes and associated discounts
- Overhead (R&D, administrative costs)
- IP licensing - both for the finished good and associated components (patent fees, etc.)
- Who manufactured certain key components (the LCD is mentioned)
- Locus of manufacture (which country?)
- Test and rework costs (what defect rates are expected of raw components and finished assemblies, what quality standard?)
Thank you for your exceptionally thoughtful reply - I have profited from this discussion and I think we share largely the same position. -1zd
Brushing aside petty criticism of my background, I'll attempt to address some of your comments since I find the discussion to be an interesting one.
"Why weren't those experts working within those teams or at the same level as those teams? See, this was a problem created by management in the first place."
An absence of management would have resulted in the proper experts being present on the team? This doesn't follow. You're also stating that the management was responsible for the failure because it didn't prevent the engineers from ignoring the experts. Then you go on to say later "It's inherently a self-management process, and requires no oversight other than that of peers.". This is inconsistent - if this were true than the intervention of management would not be required because the team would have known to follow the advice of the experts. Can't have it both ways.
"Reconciling the conflicting opinions of experts is almost child's play, you can practically set up a program to do it, with full cognizance of probabilities, degree of expertise of participants, etc etc."
How do you resolve conflicts in assessment of the probabilities and degrees of expertise - by vote? What if the expert in question is correct and the consensus from the other professional(s) is/are wrong? Who establishes the weighting? This is not child's play, for example as any individual who has served on a standards committee knows. This was attempted in various disciplines through the usage of expert systems. These efforts fail for all except mature technologies.
Be serious, we're talking about science and engineering experts, not cowboy coders.
I'm quite serious. An absence of an engineering process is equivalent to cowboy coding. A committee vote by cowboys does not constitute expertise. I don't really care if you find the fact offensive that engineers are simply technical laborers. You can hide behind a semantic distinction in stating that such engineers are not "professionals," but I would assert that none of the individuals discussed in the original article or that inhabit most organizations are "professionals" in a true sense (i.e. only answerable to peers) and that the majority of engineering practice is carried out by such non-professionals, making the distinction meaningless from a practical standpoint. Cowboys create most of our systems.
That's a straw man, it wasn't even suggested. Good science and engineering doesn't cost more than poor science and engineering.
Then explain to me why in virtually all countries and cultures, technical work is carried out within a hierarchical management structure with non-technical oversight? Surely, if a consensus-based approach with technical leaders making decisions was more likely to result in high(er) quality work at the same cost, this approach would displace other models due to its economic efficiency and predictability. This has not occurred in most engineering disciplines, and frankly this model only persists in disciplines where there are barriers to entry or manipulation of the market (e.g. an academic setting), or a very mature technological base (not true of space exploration).
Yes, it is about tradeoffs, but management always trades off too much and technical soundness suffers. A professional engineer knows when something is "good enough" for the job in hand, not just from experience but because it's largely objective, a matter of probability computations.
No even marginally competent manager disregards material information if it is provided with a sound basis. Yes, you can argue that the majority of managers are incompetent, but my counterargument is that the majority of engineers are as well, regardless of whether they are "professionals" or not. Most engineers have difficulty communicating assumptions, and rarely associate probabilities with potential outcomes and tradeoffs. Addressing the comments about the professional engineer's ability to i
I disagree categorically with the perception that leaving technical people unfettered by management or time pressure will result in better designs, products or concepts. After RTFA, one notes that one reason provided for the failure is that the teams disregarded expert input - a characteristic that I have witnessed time and again within groups of bright technical people. Call it an adjunct of NIH - not invented here.
Another example is the cowboy coder, writing without specifications or testing. For some development methodologies, this may be an efficient way to rapidly prototype a UI or system, but for the most part it generates sh*t for quality. But, it's fun.
Every technical person would love to work in a Xerox- or Bell Labs-style environment of pure research with a virtually unlimited budget. Very innovative ideas are bred from such environments, but they rarely produce market-ready concepts. I think you need to differentiate between science and engineering, and pure research vs. development. NASA is both a research and a development organization. Engineering is all about trade-offs between time, budgetary and technical constraints. Science is about uncovering new knowledge. Science in the absence of constraints is marvelous. Engineering in the absence of constraints and experience is a disaster. Ask any contractor.
The mission failed due to poor engineering and a lack of oversight (no process to detect and correct technical errors). The only way humans can deal with such issues is through management and process. It sucks, but it's all we have.
Yes, it's fscking obvious.
But we manage complexity in other disciplines with layers of abstraction and structure. This enables (relatively) stupid people to utilize extraordinarily complex technologies in their lives. It is not necessary for me to understand semiconductor physics, branch prediction and out-of-order execution in order to type this message, yet I am using these technologies.
As I stated in my original message, the studies may well have been properly designed, but when aggregated, the results are not meaningful. Call it a failure of the people who reported on it, but as an end user of the information, it is not useful.
It is not possible for someone to interpret "Drink lots of coffee, but don't drink lots of coffee." This is not advice, it is a contradiction.
Ask someone who switched to margarine in the 60's what they think about that decision now, with emerging research related to trans-fatty acids. Should we switch back to butter?
When is the medical profession going to move beyond descriptive statistics to something more? In some respects, the medical profession appears to be at about the same level as the alchemists were prior to the evolution of chemistry. "If I mix this, then mix that, I get something. I don't know why."
The studies may each be meaningful and well-designed, but to an individual trying to make good decisions, the information is basically useless, since it appears contradictory and in many cases is arbitrary and non-intuitive. "You should eat 5, not 4, pieces of celery, but only after consuming 2.5 cups of coffee *UNLESS*, of course, you have gene XYZPDQ319, in which case you should drink only 1.5 cups of coffee before urinating at sundown."
Simple, newegg and a dept. charge card. Problem solved.
Adapt or die - and it's easier to ask forgiveness...
---
tjc
IBM 1360 Photostore
...at least they're not going to drop out of NCAA D1 athletics. It's always nice to know that even in the face of staff and program cuts, they can still find money for college football. Guess they've identified the core interests of their consistuency.
- Superior picture quality and signal-to-noise vs. VHS
- Widespread adoption by studios and professionals (Beta SP)
- Convenient smaller-sized cassette
- Mfr'd and licensed by Sony, a company known for their progressive stance regarding consumer rights.
Maybe I missed it in TFA, but I didn't see references to inflation or time-value of money. Another poster remarked that gas prices are unlikely to remain constant, but there's also the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar next year.
If you pay significantly more up-front for Hybrid, you don't just have to save the extra $$$'s you spent initially, but you have to make up for the depreciation of the dollar over the same period.
---
tjc
Link to interesting .pdf regarding zinc filamentation in datacenters. Another fun issue for raised floors and/or old datacenters.
Oh, nonsense. You act as if the Skylab is falling...
It's an economic issue rather than a political one. You get more of what you subsidize (either privately through compensation or through governmental intervention).
20 step process to economic competitiveness:
1-20. Pay scientists and engineers like you pay doctors and lawyers.
Why is it that these arrests always seem to be made in Europe? Is it because the legal climate is different, or is the incidence of criminal extortion over the internet higher there? Is Europe the locus of the crime? I always thought Eastern Europe (e.g. Russia, baltic states) and the east were worse. Is it that they don't enforce in those places so you never hear about it?
---
tjc
Many of these efforts have been underway for years as the cellular providers have developed infrastructure to prepare for E911 positioning requirements. Various schemes have been proposed including usage of terrestrial radio sources such as TV, radio and wireless networking. The more practical approaches use TDOA (time-difference of arrival, similar to triangulation, only using ranging info instead), or brute-force with GPS receivers.
Minnesota could be described the same way (high taxes and crappy weather).
The folks that inhabit the legislature and state offices seem to regard business development as a nuisance. It doesn't shock me a bit that they'd attempt to adopt programs to tax sales transactions on the internet. All you have to do is take a stroll through our capitol, St. Paul to get the score.
There's virtually no private enterprise there, but there are plentiful state and county offices.
Somebody has to pay for it.
I do agree with you, if one can't afford what they want, they can at least plan their careers and spending to enable those pursuits later. In relation to quitting law after a couple decades - that sounds more like just wanting to opt out of the whole "escalating zero point" thing.
Yeah, and it always helps if you've had 18 years of six-figure lawyer income to subsidize your cooking.
"Sorry, the image of Tau Ceti that you have requested is not available because it may contain Chinese State Secrets. Please remain where you are."
...the terrorists have already won.