I just wonder if, by the time they agree on this (if they do) the price of SSDs will have dropped enough so that they can be used instead? Storage-wise they are already there, and then some.
The point is to keep spinning platters cost-competitive with SSDs - a taller, smaller form factor would increase performance and reduce TCO... I'm thinking they're looking at something like lots of 1.8" platters stacked 4" high, they can spin faster, have faster seek times, and package multiple TB per unit, and I think the longer single bearing should be a more favorable geometry than the ultra-thin notebook compatible drives that have been developed for the last 10 years. It will be slower than SSD, but the power performance (which is the key to TCO) should remain competitive with SSDs for a long time to come. Also, presumably, if this takes off it would be datacenter focused, so longevity (again, TCO focus) should also be "baked into" the design in favor of lower retail price.
Yeah, I don't see anything worth worrying over here - so the guy worked hard and did something he thinks is good for a project that nobody else seems to care about anymore... Either he cares enough to get permission to publish, then goes to the trouble to share the update on someplace like SourceForge GitHub or whatever is in vogue by the time he works out the legal aspects, then goes to the trouble to promote the newly published "fixes," or... this is all a waste of brain cycles.
My advice: actually perform steps 1 and 2, then post a question to/. about how you did that and how should you go about publicizing the new site. For added traction: make up stories about how you did 1 and 2 poorly so that people jump all over that telling you how to do it better.
Yeah, I was born in 1969 - saw Neil land on a B/W TV on my grandmother's knee... like half of my Kindergarten class I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.
Maybe there are frontiers out there to conquer, maybe not... for my foreseeable future, the stratosphere is the limit, and it's pretty damn crowded, regulated, and frankly a pain in the ass to deal with (TSA, etc.)
The laser sail is already impractically large (ever try to collimate a laser beam for delivery at 10+ miles?) why not an impractically large braking sail? Better still, make them the same sail, the laser sail may have a larger outer portion, but the structural braking sail could already be deployed as a central portion of it - you'll just need to execute a 180 degree rotation just in time for atmo-braking... Make sure you don't catch Phobos or Demios while you're at it.
Any real space-flight ready reactor use ceramic highly enriched uranium fuel (negligible hazard until the reactor core turns on for the first time in space), fast neutron operation (moderator is heavy), and as few moving parts as possible. Something more like this.
Maybe it's not great for "launch failure" scenarios, but plutonium cores are nice and compact.
the solar system is planer so areas nearer the equator probably have a higher percentage chance,
True.
but that may be balanced by more cities being near the equator
False.
(there are almost no large cities between 60 degrees north and 90 degrees and in the southern hemisphere it's even more striking with no large cities between 45 degrees south and 90 degrees)
When the planet's surface is 60% water the meteors are going to hit water 60% of the time. As a practical point of view most of the planet is devoid of human life when you take into account the areas like Siberia, the deserts and all the water, that the odds of an meteor hitting a populated area is staggeringly unlikely.
Less and less staggering all the time... especially on the central Florida peninsula, NorthEast urban corridor, Western Europe, etc.
This isn't remotely equivalent to RFID chip implants.
Actually, they could make lots of places "scan optional" just request not to be scanned and they'll put you through the alternate security procedure...
When you choose to use your credit card, or license place, or other UID to pay for anything, however small (like a toll on a road), you're being tracked just as surely as if you had a serial number barcode-tattooed on your arm and got it scanned. Sure, the tattoo could be made invisible except under infra-red, doesn't mean it's not there, just like your CC#.
Me, personally, I have Google location tracking turned on and shared with my wife - as long as every security agency from Interpol down to the local Sheriff can track me via my cell phone if they feel the need, why not get some convenience out of it too. I think Google is being a good citizen, letting people know just how tracked they are, how thoroughly their personal e-mails are scanned and analyzed, etc.
So, no, my lifestyle and I have nothing to hide, and I don't make a habit of sealing my phone in a conductive bag and going cash only while driving around with a "borrowed" license plate... but, at least if I had a reason to, it's still an option. When the largest bill you can get is a $20, and a half dozen more tracking systems are in place, that option will be gone, for better and for worse.
It's not unavoidable, with $100 bills you can take a decent vacation and pay cash as you go... with $20s, not so much.
What irks me is that the $100 bill is already worth roughly what a $10 bill used to be in the 1960s... why do we need to make paper currency ever more worth-less? It's not as if there wasn't criminal activity in the previous 100 years when cash was worth far more than it is today.
We could make life much harder on criminals by requiring everybody to get an RFID implant and placing readers all over, too... do we really need to go there to "stay safe"?
They are attempting to have some principles regarding where they get funding - if they can't demonstrate their ability to function without Exxon funding, it calls into question whether or not Exxon has influence over their publications.
Who has more liberty to pursue their own ideas, someone funded by a thousand different donors with independent rationales, or someone funded by one or two organizations? Or will they also show their intellectual independence by dropping all their other funding sources?
If I have income from a thousand different sources, none can walk up to me at a social event and imply that their funding might be pulled if I publish unfavorable findings - at least they can't do that and hope to influence me: a 0.1% drop in funding isn't worth compromising integrity for. On the other hand, if I am 50% funded from two sources, the influence becomes quite real: a loss could end the program, put the mortgage in default, children living on the street, etc.
I shouldn't play with ACs feeding AC trolls, but I've personally watched the glacier in Andermatt Switzerland shrink since 1989... it's plenty dramatic.
GP is just riffing on a fantasy theme, and doing a nice satirical job (I hope.)
There are varying degrees of sophistication in readership... most good M.D.s won't look twice at research unless it's in a respected journal, by people with some credibility in the field, and they'll at least try to sniff the obvious sources for conflict of interest information. Good scientists in other fields are mostly the same. But, I worked for one medical device manufacturer who managed to get a collection of over a dozen studies done on their device, published in the most recognized journals, and with minimal fishy-ness to the authorship viz. This work funded in-part by a grant from the Corporation who you know has an axe to grind on this topic.... Lots and lots of M.D.s accepted that research at face value, and they sold lots of product with that confidence. Representatives from companies selling alternative technology had their own research and spin that put the product's efficacy numbers at about 10% of what the in-house sponsored research said, but their sources were equally fishy. Makes forming an informed opinion basically impossible.
Anyway, in the 1970s I would have considered lung cancer studies funded by RJReynolds to be suspect, similarly lead studies from paint and fuel companies back then - if you are a research scientist and your entire income is derived from grants given by a parties with clear vested interests in the outcome of your research you can never clear the conflict of interest - the best you can hope for is to publish your methods and your findings and maybe get validation from the community that is not wholly owned by a biased party. Meta-research that aggregates results from previously published studies needs to be especially sensitive to these issues, because they really do exist and they really do bias the findings.
NIH, NSF, DOE, and any other government grants are supposed to be neutral funding sources, not expected to bias the research, but if you're talking about a DOE grant to study the effects of radioisotope leakage from SRNF - then, the bias question re-arises: DOE has a huge investment in SRNF, they should fund studies of its safety, but they should also avoid "owning" the researchers by providing a majority of their livelihood - and they do this through the local universities which have a stronger vested interest in finding bad things that will affect their children and families. Government grants and programs actually have strong protections against conflict of interest, for instance: submissions to the FDA regarding safety and efficacy of a device must be backed by studies from dis-interested third parties, not equity shareholders in the company seeking approval of a new device. Can this system be gamed? Certainly: use friends, ex-colleagues, and others who appear to have greater "distance" from the issue than they actually do, and this happens a lot. Which is why "science" shouldn't be accepted at face value on first publication, it needs to be verified by enough disparate sources to effectively nullify these concerns of bias.
This is also why biased science is such a bad thing, if you have a multinational deep pockets entity funding research around the globe and effectively buying the published results they want, it takes a tremendous amount of untainted research to bring "consensus" around to the unbiased truth. Researchers are supposed to disclose their sources of funding to help reduce this problem, but they don't always do that. If the money is good enough, some will take a chance on disgracing their careers just for the big payday - maybe they won't get caught, but even if they do the money can be just too good for them to walk away from.
Yeah, in 2009-ish I spent a couple of weeks camping outside "my future employer" doing stuff on my own laptop on the promise that I might get a paycheck, someday. Someday finally did come, and it was a good paying gig, off and on. Eventually too much off for my taste and I moved on to something with more "on time."
It's not like Exxon is trying to stifle the American Geophysical Union by sponsoring their event.
The geoscientists are really making themselves look bad by doing this.
They are attempting to have some principles regarding where they get funding - if they can't demonstrate their ability to function without Exxon funding, it calls into question whether or not Exxon has influence over their publications.
It's a political statement - since they have no problem calling out climate change as real, it's kind of ridiculous to say that Exxon is making them take a biased stand on that, but what other important issues (fracking, for instance) might be better investigated without corporate funding pressures?
Better to do good science with "clean" funding than questionable science with twice as much money.
Can they really get better performance per watt on general computing using a flexible substrate? Seems like whatever design they set up the flexible (FPGAish?) circuit to do, could be faster and lower power if it were put into a fixed silicon (or similar) implementation. Maybe if your workload devolves down to very simple needs for long periods of time, this might take advantage of that.
Makes me think: if they were flying somewhat larger drones (100lb range), this could be used to print whatever breaks on demand. Breaking parts is a pretty common thing in planes that land without pilots in them.
The point of print-on-demand is that they don't know what they want ahead of time.
Sadly, I think most of these design choices will be optimizing flight time vs capability, and if you bake the thing out of bespoke carbon fiber you'll probably get better flight time and capability than any option 3D printed with currently available materials.
Slashdot Mirror
Google$ - the economic case for making almost anything.
I just wonder if, by the time they agree on this (if they do) the price of SSDs will have dropped enough so that they can be used instead? Storage-wise they are already there, and then some.
The point is to keep spinning platters cost-competitive with SSDs - a taller, smaller form factor would increase performance and reduce TCO... I'm thinking they're looking at something like lots of 1.8" platters stacked 4" high, they can spin faster, have faster seek times, and package multiple TB per unit, and I think the longer single bearing should be a more favorable geometry than the ultra-thin notebook compatible drives that have been developed for the last 10 years. It will be slower than SSD, but the power performance (which is the key to TCO) should remain competitive with SSDs for a long time to come. Also, presumably, if this takes off it would be datacenter focused, so longevity (again, TCO focus) should also be "baked into" the design in favor of lower retail price.
Yeah, I don't see anything worth worrying over here - so the guy worked hard and did something he thinks is good for a project that nobody else seems to care about anymore... Either he cares enough to get permission to publish, then goes to the trouble to share the update on someplace like SourceForge GitHub or whatever is in vogue by the time he works out the legal aspects, then goes to the trouble to promote the newly published "fixes," or... this is all a waste of brain cycles.
My advice: actually perform steps 1 and 2, then post a question to /. about how you did that and how should you go about publicizing the new site. For added traction: make up stories about how you did 1 and 2 poorly so that people jump all over that telling you how to do it better.
Yep, I'd say Deepwater Horizon qualifies as at least a little worse than that.
Yeah, I was born in 1969 - saw Neil land on a B/W TV on my grandmother's knee... like half of my Kindergarten class I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.
Maybe there are frontiers out there to conquer, maybe not... for my foreseeable future, the stratosphere is the limit, and it's pretty damn crowded, regulated, and frankly a pain in the ass to deal with (TSA, etc.)
We think we're all so clever and classless and free. Ask John Lennon who the peasants are....
Freedom is relative, and there's relatively little of it to go around since we conquered the last frontiers.
Ah, so lots of heat - no potential for super-criticality - why, then, isn't this a good power source for a long trip?
Lots of heat is different from a reactor how?
So, no better than any other wireless power scheme...
The laser sail is already impractically large (ever try to collimate a laser beam for delivery at 10+ miles?) why not an impractically large braking sail? Better still, make them the same sail, the laser sail may have a larger outer portion, but the structural braking sail could already be deployed as a central portion of it - you'll just need to execute a 180 degree rotation just in time for atmo-braking... Make sure you don't catch Phobos or Demios while you're at it.
Any real space-flight ready reactor use ceramic highly enriched uranium fuel (negligible hazard until the reactor core turns on for the first time in space), fast neutron operation (moderator is heavy), and as few moving parts as possible. Something more like this.
Maybe it's not great for "launch failure" scenarios, but plutonium cores are nice and compact.
the solar system is planer so areas nearer the equator probably have a higher percentage chance,
True.
but that may be balanced by more cities being near the equator
False.
(there are almost no large cities between 60 degrees north and 90 degrees and in the southern hemisphere it's even more striking with no large cities between 45 degrees south and 90 degrees)
True - for a final score of 66.7%.
When the planet's surface is 60% water the meteors are going to hit water 60% of the time. As a practical point of view most of the planet is devoid of human life when you take into account the areas like Siberia, the deserts and all the water, that the odds of an meteor hitting a populated area is staggeringly unlikely.
Less and less staggering all the time... especially on the central Florida peninsula, NorthEast urban corridor, Western Europe, etc.
This isn't remotely equivalent to RFID chip implants.
Actually, they could make lots of places "scan optional" just request not to be scanned and they'll put you through the alternate security procedure...
When you choose to use your credit card, or license place, or other UID to pay for anything, however small (like a toll on a road), you're being tracked just as surely as if you had a serial number barcode-tattooed on your arm and got it scanned. Sure, the tattoo could be made invisible except under infra-red, doesn't mean it's not there, just like your CC#.
Me, personally, I have Google location tracking turned on and shared with my wife - as long as every security agency from Interpol down to the local Sheriff can track me via my cell phone if they feel the need, why not get some convenience out of it too. I think Google is being a good citizen, letting people know just how tracked they are, how thoroughly their personal e-mails are scanned and analyzed, etc.
So, no, my lifestyle and I have nothing to hide, and I don't make a habit of sealing my phone in a conductive bag and going cash only while driving around with a "borrowed" license plate... but, at least if I had a reason to, it's still an option. When the largest bill you can get is a $20, and a half dozen more tracking systems are in place, that option will be gone, for better and for worse.
It's not unavoidable, with $100 bills you can take a decent vacation and pay cash as you go... with $20s, not so much.
What irks me is that the $100 bill is already worth roughly what a $10 bill used to be in the 1960s... why do we need to make paper currency ever more worth-less? It's not as if there wasn't criminal activity in the previous 100 years when cash was worth far more than it is today.
We could make life much harder on criminals by requiring everybody to get an RFID implant and placing readers all over, too... do we really need to go there to "stay safe"?
They are attempting to have some principles regarding where they get funding - if they can't demonstrate their ability to function without Exxon funding, it calls into question whether or not Exxon has influence over their publications.
Who has more liberty to pursue their own ideas, someone funded by a thousand different donors with independent rationales, or someone funded by one or two organizations? Or will they also show their intellectual independence by dropping all their other funding sources?
If I have income from a thousand different sources, none can walk up to me at a social event and imply that their funding might be pulled if I publish unfavorable findings - at least they can't do that and hope to influence me: a 0.1% drop in funding isn't worth compromising integrity for. On the other hand, if I am 50% funded from two sources, the influence becomes quite real: a loss could end the program, put the mortgage in default, children living on the street, etc.
I shouldn't play with ACs feeding AC trolls, but I've personally watched the glacier in Andermatt Switzerland shrink since 1989... it's plenty dramatic.
GP is just riffing on a fantasy theme, and doing a nice satirical job (I hope.)
There are varying degrees of sophistication in readership... most good M.D.s won't look twice at research unless it's in a respected journal, by people with some credibility in the field, and they'll at least try to sniff the obvious sources for conflict of interest information. Good scientists in other fields are mostly the same. But, I worked for one medical device manufacturer who managed to get a collection of over a dozen studies done on their device, published in the most recognized journals, and with minimal fishy-ness to the authorship viz. This work funded in-part by a grant from the Corporation who you know has an axe to grind on this topic.... Lots and lots of M.D.s accepted that research at face value, and they sold lots of product with that confidence. Representatives from companies selling alternative technology had their own research and spin that put the product's efficacy numbers at about 10% of what the in-house sponsored research said, but their sources were equally fishy. Makes forming an informed opinion basically impossible.
Hit much of a nerve?
Anyway, in the 1970s I would have considered lung cancer studies funded by RJReynolds to be suspect, similarly lead studies from paint and fuel companies back then - if you are a research scientist and your entire income is derived from grants given by a parties with clear vested interests in the outcome of your research you can never clear the conflict of interest - the best you can hope for is to publish your methods and your findings and maybe get validation from the community that is not wholly owned by a biased party. Meta-research that aggregates results from previously published studies needs to be especially sensitive to these issues, because they really do exist and they really do bias the findings.
NIH, NSF, DOE, and any other government grants are supposed to be neutral funding sources, not expected to bias the research, but if you're talking about a DOE grant to study the effects of radioisotope leakage from SRNF - then, the bias question re-arises: DOE has a huge investment in SRNF, they should fund studies of its safety, but they should also avoid "owning" the researchers by providing a majority of their livelihood - and they do this through the local universities which have a stronger vested interest in finding bad things that will affect their children and families. Government grants and programs actually have strong protections against conflict of interest, for instance: submissions to the FDA regarding safety and efficacy of a device must be backed by studies from dis-interested third parties, not equity shareholders in the company seeking approval of a new device. Can this system be gamed? Certainly: use friends, ex-colleagues, and others who appear to have greater "distance" from the issue than they actually do, and this happens a lot. Which is why "science" shouldn't be accepted at face value on first publication, it needs to be verified by enough disparate sources to effectively nullify these concerns of bias.
This is also why biased science is such a bad thing, if you have a multinational deep pockets entity funding research around the globe and effectively buying the published results they want, it takes a tremendous amount of untainted research to bring "consensus" around to the unbiased truth. Researchers are supposed to disclose their sources of funding to help reduce this problem, but they don't always do that. If the money is good enough, some will take a chance on disgracing their careers just for the big payday - maybe they won't get caught, but even if they do the money can be just too good for them to walk away from.
Yeah, in 2009-ish I spent a couple of weeks camping outside "my future employer" doing stuff on my own laptop on the promise that I might get a paycheck, someday. Someday finally did come, and it was a good paying gig, off and on. Eventually too much off for my taste and I moved on to something with more "on time."
It's not like Exxon is trying to stifle the American Geophysical Union by sponsoring their event.
The geoscientists are really making themselves look bad by doing this.
They are attempting to have some principles regarding where they get funding - if they can't demonstrate their ability to function without Exxon funding, it calls into question whether or not Exxon has influence over their publications.
It's a political statement - since they have no problem calling out climate change as real, it's kind of ridiculous to say that Exxon is making them take a biased stand on that, but what other important issues (fracking, for instance) might be better investigated without corporate funding pressures?
Better to do good science with "clean" funding than questionable science with twice as much money.
Can they really get better performance per watt on general computing using a flexible substrate? Seems like whatever design they set up the flexible (FPGAish?) circuit to do, could be faster and lower power if it were put into a fixed silicon (or similar) implementation. Maybe if your workload devolves down to very simple needs for long periods of time, this might take advantage of that.
Makes me think: if they were flying somewhat larger drones (100lb range), this could be used to print whatever breaks on demand. Breaking parts is a pretty common thing in planes that land without pilots in them.
No, it has to mine bitcoins while it's "in the cloud."
The point of print-on-demand is that they don't know what they want ahead of time.
Sadly, I think most of these design choices will be optimizing flight time vs capability, and if you bake the thing out of bespoke carbon fiber you'll probably get better flight time and capability than any option 3D printed with currently available materials.