Ummm... actually, I believe the plutonium production reactors are mostly shut down, these days. Something about not antagonizing the 3rd world countries who we also want to shut down their enrichment programs?
Yeah, it's better. Yeah, I wish we could have neighborhood nukes providing our electricity instead of coal fired slag pile makers, but there is something intrinsically lacking in our education system of the last 50 or so years where we can't even convince 1/2 the people that doing something to slow down global warming is a good idea.
So, mirrors it is. Hey, if mirrors can get funding, I'd rather fund a 2 billion dollar program to put mirrors up there than a 500 million dollar program to do the same thing with plutonium anyway (4x the jobs, 4x the spinoff benefits, 4x the fun.)
Don't know where you lived, but in West-Central coastal Florida, disco died, hard, in about 1979.
A lot of the 1970-1980 period was the early deployment of technologies (microchips, digital recording and communications, fiber optics, spandex) that would be put to better use in later decades...
That late 60's early 70's culture did have a lot of influence from the "blows my mind" kind of things that were being done at the time. Terraforming, space elevators, and high-speed interplanetary travel could bring that back.
I've never had an N+1 drive fail in a RAID setup. What I have had happen is the power supply to the whole array fail... then we can talk about redundant power supplies, but, really, the data needs to be mirrored offsite at a place where a serious (fire / flood / riot / meteor strike / whatever) event doesn't take down all copies of the data / service. This was sort of the founding principle of ARPANET, anyway.
Economics varies, people negotiate bad contracts all the time that lead to higher costs of whatever approach they have taken. Not surprising that something with the hype of "the cloud" can get people to sign bad deals. Also not surprising that some "bulletproof" hardware is excessively premiumed compared to the advantages it conveys.
In a "rich infrastructure" 100 cheap cars beats a single tank. In a desert with bad to non-existent roads and a costly supply chain, you'll want the tank. Assuming these "cloud" data centers have sufficient infrastructure and scale, they should be able to do it better and cheaper. Of course, it's always possible to mismanage anything, and this goes double for security concerns.
If you want / need control and you can't afford to point to a sub-contractor not living up to their contract terms when something goes wrong, then do it in-house. If in-house is a single site, or the multiple sites you do have can't afford around the clock technical maintenance presence, then, yeah, go for the "good stuff" and let the expensive machines help you in your (ultimately futile) pursuit of perfection. If your organization is numbered in the 10,000s or larger, and top management takes IT seriously, they should seriously be employing fault tolerant methodologies - whether you use cheap crap for equipment or not.
The N+1 failure days will happen, and multi-second fail-overs response times sound perfectly acceptable to me, unless you are in high-speed trading, in which case - a pox on you and your servers and may you lose Billions in your next equipment snafu. But, those days when you have the unacceptable failure (Fukushima Daiichi?) are the days when you step back and improve the design and methods. Generally speaking, there are bigger gains to be had with redundancy and distribution than there are with "more bulletproof" hardware slotted back into the same system design that just bit you.
Go, do, learn, do some more. We've been sitting on this rock, theorizing, for hundreds of years, and all it got us was a couple of lousy atomic bombs.
Getting out and actually going to the Moon got us more "useful for mankind" tech in 10 years than the equivalent amount of resources spent in "think tank" academic institutions did in the previous 100. Look at life in 1960 vs 1860. Then look at life in 1980 vs 1970. We need the academics, but they need to get out and stretch their legs "in the real universe" once in awhile, too.
I saw that bit - what I didn't see was hard data on where the ice actually is (because nobody knows), or any estimation of what the solar reflection into the crater will do to peak temperatures within the crater. With any luck at all, things won't be getting out of hand, better to try than not to try. But, if we are fortunate and the ice is deposited as thin frost on the cave entrances, we'll have to be careful to charge the rovers a good distance from the caves to avoid sublimating too much away (sublimation point of H2O in hard vacuum is 150K, or -123C / -190F). Even driving a "warm" rover into the cave might start the process...
Telco switches are ghost towns... big empty buildings out in the boonies that used to hold massive racks of relays with a little box in the middle that replaces all that, or tiny shacks built after the tech came up to speed that just holds the little box. They aren't manned, they are critical, and they need to have reliability due to their geographic dispersal.
Datacenters are, eponymously, centralized. Keep a staff of 4-5 guys on-hand at all-times, give them a PC gaming center to play epic COD on when things are going well (in other words, pay them dirt and they'll be happy), and when the system detects a fault, they need to be on it before it gets out of hand, or their 100%, 100% uptime bonus is toast (in other words, their base pay is minimum wage, but they can make double that if they can keep the equipment failures from getting out of hand, which with automatic monitoring, diagnostics and failovers, should be a cake-walk).
Isn't this the point of the cloud: don't buy/build/maintain your own, rent from us and save because we do it cheaper and better than you ever could on your own?
I think by the time you reach a scale where you have 24/7/365.24 staffing adequate to handle the failures as they happen, you can take advantage of the higher failure rate / lower cost equipment. You don't need to be Google scale to do this.
One place where a fertile field in a nice climate has problems is with weeds, another is pests.
I can't help feeling that these small scale experiments are going to underestimate the problems of weeds and pests that will come if they scale up and start trying to feed major cities this way. The nuisance biologics may look different, but bad algae growing in the plumbing or on the light fixtures can be a real problem...
I like progressive damping curves - let it run free in the "sweet spot" then progressively increase the adjustment back to the middle as you get further from ideal.
Absolutely agree... I'm sure that in today's (cheap oil) economy, it will be impossible to compete with the "grow it cheap in the boonies and ship it all over the country" model that we've been living for 50 years, but the experiment is worth doing, investigating the possibilities thoroughly, and hopefully coming up with some viable niches such as the "ultra tasty" varieties, etc.
It's especially worth doing the experiments to develop the tech and have a solid grasp on when it will make economic sense to do this for bulk crops like corn - oil at $200/bbl, probably not, oil at $2K/bbl, definitely (if you can still afford to build the warehouse....)
Maybe today we could back off and turn the whole market wide open again.
Back in the early 1900s, there wasn't enough freedom of information for even the smartest people to make good choices for what to grow in the coming season. The boom and bust cycles did happen, spectacularly, along with other interesting "discoveries" like the Dust Bowl. The government controls were instated and they have been working to maintain stability of food supply for the country. Maybe there's enough freedom of information, scientific weather forecasting, knowledge of pests and disease, etc. to get rid of those controls, maybe not... I don't think many politicians are ready to rock the boat in the name of an ideology, so we're not likely to find out anytime soon if Libertarianism would work in the modern farming markets.
As a control systems engineer, I believe the market should be free to choose its direction, but not its rates of change.
If gasoline makers want to raise prices, they should be allowed to do that at their discretion, but, if they feel that they need to raise prices too quickly (more than 1% per day?) then there should be something in-place to penalize that - perhaps an increase in profits taxing for the coming 2 years? Prices need to rise 50% in 2 weeks, sure, go ahead and do that, but if you end up making an (accidental) increased profit as a result of your "over limit" price increase, you can pay back all of that profit increase and a penalty in taxes. Price gouging on cornerstone commodities isn't good for anyone but shareholders in the commodities sellers who are doing the gouging.
Same thing could apply in the farming markets, allow people to make choices, encourage them to invest and improve, but discourage rapid changes that could lead to a "farming crash." If people want to grow more corn this year, fine - sign up to grow corn. When corn growing is up by more than 10 or 20% (or whatever makes sense), put on some kind of damper to make other choices more attractive.
We all have "free will," the right to travel, assemble, etc., but if we all decide to go to Rhode Island on the same day, it's going to cause a problem or two. In the case of physical presence, the physical world has effective controls - limited rooms for rent, limited seats on flights, limited number of cars that can physically fit in the state, etc. People would back off and turn around before it got really bad like running out of food and water / sewage in the streets kind of bad. Unfortunately, economic games don't have this kind of feedback, so we get some pretty spectacular crashes, even with "good government meddling" to smooth out the worst of the shocks - especially with "bad government meddling" (i.e. 2005-2008 real estate market.)
> the same sort of clean-room gear people working in chip fabs wear.
Yeah, that's gotta be more efficient than overalls and a flannel shirt, riding a tractor in a field...
People who think we're running out of farmland need to go to Nebraska, any part really, but Western Nebraska in particular. Just look at Google Earth to see what I mean.
I think people believe that plants just grow themselves, and they do, but there are so many things that can and do need attention in any kind of farming, that's the true cost of the food: the services of the farmer and the people who manufacture and maintain the farming equipment.
Cognitive impairment, in this case, can be a state of mind. The "I never used those things and I have no desire to learn now" state, in particular.
You might also factor in the "Yes, I can type, but do you know what arthritic finger and wrist joints actually feel like (you insensitive little f-er!)" factor, along with failing vision, hearing, and a general lack of experience with the read-type-read mode of conversation.
You know, 70 years from now, they'll be sitting in old folks homes trying to get the codgers off their texting pads and talking to people in the room, for a change, and those old coots will be just as stubborn and self-injurious as old people today.
I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course. The nature of the business has been encouraging specialization, and since everyone is out to maximize profits, that leads to overproduction of last year's overpriced crops, which become next year's glut production which don't sell for enough to pay the loans, so you get a bunch of banks owning farms and equipment. It's not healthy, and the next generation of farmers that step up at auction to try their hand have never been any better than the previous at predicting and dealing with market swings.
It would be really cool if we could run "sim-Earth" with pure philosophies and see what happens. Life being what it is, if any single philosophy from today became widely adopted and "took over the world" without adapting itself, the world would quickly spin out of control. What makes the world we have work as well as it does is the opposing forces of a variety of philosophies, none of which are suited to operating in total control.
You know, a big part of the appeal of "indoor farming" is that there aren't (m)any bugs inside. But, if you start growing massive amounts of foliage inside the building, sooner or later you will also be dealing with insect infestation(s).
So, I'm all for grow local, but when there's sun shining right outside - this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me... unless you are a company that sells grow lights.
For anyone who has access to actual solar radiation, seems like hydroponic with a glass roof would be a better way to go - less carbon emissions (loading on the power grid), less equipment to manufacture, maintain and ultimately dispose of: how many pounds of electronics and plastics per pound of Basil grown? Sure, these systems could last for 20 years, but will they in real life, or will they be used like an annual gym membership?
James Webb and Hubble wouldn't have happened without some pretty heavy lift.
If you can be a Space Cowboy, you can do a lot of other things, if you're focused on shoestring science, that's all you're going to get.
We need both, scrapping the Cowboys because you can get 10x as many shoestrings for the same price is missing the point. Politically, you won't get 10 shoestrings in exchange for shutting down a Cowboy project, you'll be lucky to get 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Well - I prefer people who work at work, as opposed to people who sit around polishing their r....esume.
This, too:
http://www.medtronic.com/for-h...
Ummm... actually, I believe the plutonium production reactors are mostly shut down, these days. Something about not antagonizing the 3rd world countries who we also want to shut down their enrichment programs?
Yeah, it's better. Yeah, I wish we could have neighborhood nukes providing our electricity instead of coal fired slag pile makers, but there is something intrinsically lacking in our education system of the last 50 or so years where we can't even convince 1/2 the people that doing something to slow down global warming is a good idea.
So, mirrors it is. Hey, if mirrors can get funding, I'd rather fund a 2 billion dollar program to put mirrors up there than a 500 million dollar program to do the same thing with plutonium anyway (4x the jobs, 4x the spinoff benefits, 4x the fun.)
Don't know where you lived, but in West-Central coastal Florida, disco died, hard, in about 1979.
A lot of the 1970-1980 period was the early deployment of technologies (microchips, digital recording and communications, fiber optics, spandex) that would be put to better use in later decades...
That late 60's early 70's culture did have a lot of influence from the "blows my mind" kind of things that were being done at the time. Terraforming, space elevators, and high-speed interplanetary travel could bring that back.
I've never had an N+1 drive fail in a RAID setup. What I have had happen is the power supply to the whole array fail... then we can talk about redundant power supplies, but, really, the data needs to be mirrored offsite at a place where a serious (fire / flood / riot / meteor strike / whatever) event doesn't take down all copies of the data / service. This was sort of the founding principle of ARPANET, anyway.
Economics varies, people negotiate bad contracts all the time that lead to higher costs of whatever approach they have taken. Not surprising that something with the hype of "the cloud" can get people to sign bad deals. Also not surprising that some "bulletproof" hardware is excessively premiumed compared to the advantages it conveys.
In a "rich infrastructure" 100 cheap cars beats a single tank. In a desert with bad to non-existent roads and a costly supply chain, you'll want the tank. Assuming these "cloud" data centers have sufficient infrastructure and scale, they should be able to do it better and cheaper. Of course, it's always possible to mismanage anything, and this goes double for security concerns.
If you want / need control and you can't afford to point to a sub-contractor not living up to their contract terms when something goes wrong, then do it in-house. If in-house is a single site, or the multiple sites you do have can't afford around the clock technical maintenance presence, then, yeah, go for the "good stuff" and let the expensive machines help you in your (ultimately futile) pursuit of perfection. If your organization is numbered in the 10,000s or larger, and top management takes IT seriously, they should seriously be employing fault tolerant methodologies - whether you use cheap crap for equipment or not.
The N+1 failure days will happen, and multi-second fail-overs response times sound perfectly acceptable to me, unless you are in high-speed trading, in which case - a pox on you and your servers and may you lose Billions in your next equipment snafu. But, those days when you have the unacceptable failure (Fukushima Daiichi?) are the days when you step back and improve the design and methods. Generally speaking, there are bigger gains to be had with redundancy and distribution than there are with "more bulletproof" hardware slotted back into the same system design that just bit you.
Go, do, learn, do some more. We've been sitting on this rock, theorizing, for hundreds of years, and all it got us was a couple of lousy atomic bombs.
Getting out and actually going to the Moon got us more "useful for mankind" tech in 10 years than the equivalent amount of resources spent in "think tank" academic institutions did in the previous 100. Look at life in 1960 vs 1860. Then look at life in 1980 vs 1970. We need the academics, but they need to get out and stretch their legs "in the real universe" once in awhile, too.
It actually is both. Perception is all there is.
My take was that the pollution "moved" the rain to fall faster, on harder ground (mountainsides).
I saw that bit - what I didn't see was hard data on where the ice actually is (because nobody knows), or any estimation of what the solar reflection into the crater will do to peak temperatures within the crater. With any luck at all, things won't be getting out of hand, better to try than not to try. But, if we are fortunate and the ice is deposited as thin frost on the cave entrances, we'll have to be careful to charge the rovers a good distance from the caves to avoid sublimating too much away (sublimation point of H2O in hard vacuum is 150K, or -123C / -190F). Even driving a "warm" rover into the cave might start the process...
Telco switches are ghost towns... big empty buildings out in the boonies that used to hold massive racks of relays with a little box in the middle that replaces all that, or tiny shacks built after the tech came up to speed that just holds the little box. They aren't manned, they are critical, and they need to have reliability due to their geographic dispersal.
Datacenters are, eponymously, centralized. Keep a staff of 4-5 guys on-hand at all-times, give them a PC gaming center to play epic COD on when things are going well (in other words, pay them dirt and they'll be happy), and when the system detects a fault, they need to be on it before it gets out of hand, or their 100%, 100% uptime bonus is toast (in other words, their base pay is minimum wage, but they can make double that if they can keep the equipment failures from getting out of hand, which with automatic monitoring, diagnostics and failovers, should be a cake-walk).
Isn't this the point of the cloud: don't buy/build/maintain your own, rent from us and save because we do it cheaper and better than you ever could on your own?
I think by the time you reach a scale where you have 24/7/365.24 staffing adequate to handle the failures as they happen, you can take advantage of the higher failure rate / lower cost equipment. You don't need to be Google scale to do this.
Just hope they don't end up vaporizing away all the (currently solid) H2O before we can capture it.
Hot lithium-ion and magnesium. Brilliant!
One place where a fertile field in a nice climate has problems is with weeds, another is pests.
I can't help feeling that these small scale experiments are going to underestimate the problems of weeds and pests that will come if they scale up and start trying to feed major cities this way. The nuisance biologics may look different, but bad algae growing in the plumbing or on the light fixtures can be a real problem...
I like progressive damping curves - let it run free in the "sweet spot" then progressively increase the adjustment back to the middle as you get further from ideal.
A lot of Western Nebraska grows without irrigation - just relying on rainfall. Yields are lower per acre, but land is cheeeeeeep.
> we should do the economic experiment
Absolutely agree... I'm sure that in today's (cheap oil) economy, it will be impossible to compete with the "grow it cheap in the boonies and ship it all over the country" model that we've been living for 50 years, but the experiment is worth doing, investigating the possibilities thoroughly, and hopefully coming up with some viable niches such as the "ultra tasty" varieties, etc.
It's especially worth doing the experiments to develop the tech and have a solid grasp on when it will make economic sense to do this for bulk crops like corn - oil at $200/bbl, probably not, oil at $2K/bbl, definitely (if you can still afford to build the warehouse....)
Maybe today we could back off and turn the whole market wide open again.
Back in the early 1900s, there wasn't enough freedom of information for even the smartest people to make good choices for what to grow in the coming season. The boom and bust cycles did happen, spectacularly, along with other interesting "discoveries" like the Dust Bowl. The government controls were instated and they have been working to maintain stability of food supply for the country. Maybe there's enough freedom of information, scientific weather forecasting, knowledge of pests and disease, etc. to get rid of those controls, maybe not... I don't think many politicians are ready to rock the boat in the name of an ideology, so we're not likely to find out anytime soon if Libertarianism would work in the modern farming markets.
As a control systems engineer, I believe the market should be free to choose its direction, but not its rates of change.
If gasoline makers want to raise prices, they should be allowed to do that at their discretion, but, if they feel that they need to raise prices too quickly (more than 1% per day?) then there should be something in-place to penalize that - perhaps an increase in profits taxing for the coming 2 years? Prices need to rise 50% in 2 weeks, sure, go ahead and do that, but if you end up making an (accidental) increased profit as a result of your "over limit" price increase, you can pay back all of that profit increase and a penalty in taxes. Price gouging on cornerstone commodities isn't good for anyone but shareholders in the commodities sellers who are doing the gouging.
Same thing could apply in the farming markets, allow people to make choices, encourage them to invest and improve, but discourage rapid changes that could lead to a "farming crash." If people want to grow more corn this year, fine - sign up to grow corn. When corn growing is up by more than 10 or 20% (or whatever makes sense), put on some kind of damper to make other choices more attractive.
We all have "free will," the right to travel, assemble, etc., but if we all decide to go to Rhode Island on the same day, it's going to cause a problem or two. In the case of physical presence, the physical world has effective controls - limited rooms for rent, limited seats on flights, limited number of cars that can physically fit in the state, etc. People would back off and turn around before it got really bad like running out of food and water / sewage in the streets kind of bad. Unfortunately, economic games don't have this kind of feedback, so we get some pretty spectacular crashes, even with "good government meddling" to smooth out the worst of the shocks - especially with "bad government meddling" (i.e. 2005-2008 real estate market.)
> the same sort of clean-room gear people working in chip fabs wear.
Yeah, that's gotta be more efficient than overalls and a flannel shirt, riding a tractor in a field...
People who think we're running out of farmland need to go to Nebraska, any part really, but Western Nebraska in particular. Just look at Google Earth to see what I mean.
I think people believe that plants just grow themselves, and they do, but there are so many things that can and do need attention in any kind of farming, that's the true cost of the food: the services of the farmer and the people who manufacture and maintain the farming equipment.
Cognitive impairment, in this case, can be a state of mind. The "I never used those things and I have no desire to learn now" state, in particular.
You might also factor in the "Yes, I can type, but do you know what arthritic finger and wrist joints actually feel like (you insensitive little f-er!)" factor, along with failing vision, hearing, and a general lack of experience with the read-type-read mode of conversation.
You know, 70 years from now, they'll be sitting in old folks homes trying to get the codgers off their texting pads and talking to people in the room, for a change, and those old coots will be just as stubborn and self-injurious as old people today.
I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course. The nature of the business has been encouraging specialization, and since everyone is out to maximize profits, that leads to overproduction of last year's overpriced crops, which become next year's glut production which don't sell for enough to pay the loans, so you get a bunch of banks owning farms and equipment. It's not healthy, and the next generation of farmers that step up at auction to try their hand have never been any better than the previous at predicting and dealing with market swings.
It would be really cool if we could run "sim-Earth" with pure philosophies and see what happens. Life being what it is, if any single philosophy from today became widely adopted and "took over the world" without adapting itself, the world would quickly spin out of control. What makes the world we have work as well as it does is the opposing forces of a variety of philosophies, none of which are suited to operating in total control.
You know, a big part of the appeal of "indoor farming" is that there aren't (m)any bugs inside. But, if you start growing massive amounts of foliage inside the building, sooner or later you will also be dealing with insect infestation(s).
So, I'm all for grow local, but when there's sun shining right outside - this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me... unless you are a company that sells grow lights.
For anyone who has access to actual solar radiation, seems like hydroponic with a glass roof would be a better way to go - less carbon emissions (loading on the power grid), less equipment to manufacture, maintain and ultimately dispose of: how many pounds of electronics and plastics per pound of Basil grown? Sure, these systems could last for 20 years, but will they in real life, or will they be used like an annual gym membership?
James Webb and Hubble wouldn't have happened without some pretty heavy lift.
If you can be a Space Cowboy, you can do a lot of other things, if you're focused on shoestring science, that's all you're going to get.
We need both, scrapping the Cowboys because you can get 10x as many shoestrings for the same price is missing the point. Politically, you won't get 10 shoestrings in exchange for shutting down a Cowboy project, you'll be lucky to get 2.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...