A race condition in software caused the radiation does delivered to be 100 time too big. It occurred when an unanticipated order of keystrokes were typed very fast. Other poor design choices helped to hide the problem.
It is the same amount of chemical energy being transferred into you gas tank. Those familiar systems have been designed to be as safe as possible as long you don't smoke while you are filling up.
This style of electric charging station might bring back "full serve" as only thoroughly trained people would be near your car as it is charged.
Today, some people's jobs require that they step over live third rails 3 or 4 times a day. But they don't let the general public do that. I was trained to do this and thankfully have only done it 2 or 3 times (in the dark, in the rain, carrying a laptop). More employees get killed being hit by trains.
We are in close proximity to lots of energy all the time. Kinetic energy driving on the freeway or standing on the train platform. Chemical energy driving around town with 10 or 20 gallons of gas in the tank (think Pinto).
Of course they are going to have to engineer the whole distribution system for these kinds of safety issues.
But it is technically possible to provide a 2 MW electrical feed to a vehicle full of people. It happens every day.
A subway third rail system puts out between 1000 and 5000 Amps at either 600 or 750 Volts. These systems have their own substations. That is easily enough to charge a few cars at once at the 6 minute rate.
I imagine the charging stations for electric cars could be connected to a substation with similar sized conductors.
Transmission lines to the substations are on the order of 10000 Volts with transformer and rectifiers and breakers (the size of refrigerators).
But you would never have this kind of power at home.
I have read that every 20 or 25 years or so the IQ tests have to be re-calibrated to make them harder. This is because of the Flynn effect.
The average IQ scores rise 3 points per decade or 10 points per generation.
One explanation I have heard is that the tests measure how abstract your thinking is and each generation has more and more developed abstract thinking.
So this result should have been expected.
My poor mom is 71 and has dementia. When you loved ones get this, you lose them a little at a time instead of all at once. She used to read voraciously and carry on intellectual conversations. Now that is all gone. She taught me to think for myself.
That's some economy they've got going there. From what I have read, North Koreans that live in the north have access to the Chinese border. Some with savings cross the border, buy a large can of cooking oil, and resell small bags of oil for people to buy for special occasions. They wouldn't be able to do this if there was cooking oil in the local shops. To make sure that private savings would not become a threat to the regime's power, they devalued the currency.
On the subject of Libertarians, I was astounded to find that the Cato Institute was essentially founded by Charles and David Koch. They just happen to be in the fossil fuel business and drop tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks and institutes to pay for scientists and other seemingly independent writers to promote lower regulations and corporate taxes. It just so happens that those issues will personally increase their wealth substantially. Apparently $20 Billion is not enough.
They first tried the direct approach. David Koch ran as Vice President on the 1980 Libertarian ticket. They did very poorly in the election. Since then, they have changed their approach and spent enormous sums quietly influencing public opinion.
When I heard about this last month, it really changed my view of the range of political opinion in America. Perhaps the slow shift of public opinion to the right has been funded by people who stand to gain from it. It also explain why public figures on the right rarely warn about the dangers to our freedom from private interests. You only hear about that dangerous government.
Some time ago, I read a New Yorker article about IQ tests. I remember them interpreting the Flynn effect as the idea that over generations our thinking was becoming more and more abstract. This is not the same as being smarter, although as society becomes more dependent on technology, it is adaptive.
A consequence of the Flynn Effect is that they have to "re-norm" the IQ test to make 100 be the average.
The big difference in the scores are in the areas of "this thing is like that." People from some cultures may group things functionally (potato goes with knife because you use a knife to cut potatoes) score lower than people who group things taxonomically (animal, vegetable, mineral).
Another consequence of the Flynn Effect is that when a new, re-normed version of the IQ test comes out, more kids get labeled retarded.
Anyway, the article is an interesting read and may change the way you think of IQ tests.
If you think about it, someone who pays all their bills is more likely to hold on to the same phone number for decades. So if you get a new number, there is a higher probability that debt collectors will be calling it.
I have had my number for 6 or 7 years and I still get calls for the same two or three names. I screen ALL my calls so they are going to keep calling and they are not getting anywhere.
The sad thing is I pay all my bills and I still get calls from debt collectors -- looking for other people.
I work on communications and control systems for subway and light-rail.
A lot stuff is recorded in case there is an incident or accident that they want to investigate. Even phone calls to the control center and radio transmissions are recorded. CPUC and FRA regulators come by, especially during construction and early service, and poke around, ask questions, pull records and so on.
There is a regulatory retention period. If nothing happens for that period, the stuff gets deleted. But a lot of minor stuff gets investigated. Supervisors check reports of safety rule violations and such.
I think financial auditing is similar. The auditor wants to be able to randomly select some set of transactions during the audit, but is not going to look at the totality of records.
On another note, I do remember a story about a system admin who worked for the legislature. He was asked to destroy some backup tapes. Instead, he handed them over to the FBI.
In the case of IT, perhaps they should have whatever number of meetings it takes to come up with a written retention policy. That way, you are covered when you delete something according to written policy.
First we got the bomb, and that was good, 'Cause we love peace and motherhood. Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay, 'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way. Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve, 'Cause they're on our side (I believe). China got the bomb, but have no fears, They can't wipe us out for at least five years. Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they Were gonna get one any day. South Africa wants two, that's right: One for the black and one for the white. Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one too, Just to use on you know who. So Israel's getting tense. Wants one in self defense. "The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm, But just in case, we better get a bomb. Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go, And (who knows?) maybe Monaco. We'll try to stay serene and calm When Alabama gets the bomb. Who's next? Who's next? Who's next? Who's next?
If it is a life-safety issue, it shouldn't be on a computer at all, unless it is a safety rated device, like a safety rated PLC.
Physical or electro-mechanical interlocks are the order of the day. The therac didn't have a safety interlocking outside of the computer. The code had a race condition which killed people occasionally if the operator typed too fast.
If you have an automated saw, are you going to put a computer between the emergency stop button and the motor power circuit? I wouldn't, whether it used polling or interrupts.
And the emergency stop button should be normally closed so you discover the loose wire before you need to stop the saw.
If you use polling in you software, that's alright. But the operating system uses ISRs to gather the data from the device for you.
What's worse is when you have a hybrid. Those tell you second by second an estimate of your mileage.
I bought a used Honda Civic Hybrid and am averaging 40 MPG per tank. The trip odometer MPG gauge under reports the mileage about 1 MPG compared to the raw calculation done when you fill up.
I worked on equipment of that vintage. It is possible it has mtools installed on it to read and write FAT floppy disks.
You could create one big tar file, then use split to chop it into floppy sized pieces. Then the trick would be finding a 5 1/4 floppy drive and matching controller to plug into a modern machine.
I had the dubious pleasure of working with Trusted Xenix, which resembled SELinux today. It required a '286 or above because it depended on 286 protected mode and took up about 12 MB on the hard drive.
It may be no big deal to someone who has been working in embedded systems for a while, but it lowers the barrier of entry for the rest of us.
I am just starting to get into micro controllers. At work, I have worked on PIC18 and PIC24. For either of those two, you need an ICD 2 or ICD3 to get your code into them. That will set you back a good $200. Alternatively, you can find a board with a serial boot loader. Then there is the C compiler. The unrestricted one will set you back another $500.
By contrast, the Arduino board costs about $35. It can be programmed with a USB cable. The IDE environment can be downloaded free. Your grand total to play around with micro controllers, about $45.
Another difference is the Arduino programming environment hides lots of details like fuses and clock speeds and such. I found it quite difficult to get a PIC18 serial port working without getting out an oscilloscope to actually measure the baud rate coming out of the UART because careful reading of the data sheets and reviewing the CPU clock configuration didn't get me to 9600 baud.
After fighting the PIC all day for pay, when I get home and I just want to get my robot project working, it is nice to have the simple Arduino environment to interact with instead. Apart from kits for hobbyists, I am unaware of commercial applications for Arduinos. But there is more to life than work.
To get an idea of how much fun people have with Arduinos, do a youtube search for Arduino.
I started sketching with a fountain pen a while ago. There is a good one by Art Alternatives for about $20.
I got mine from Glenn Vilppu since I like to support his small business. He also teaches life drawing to animators. You have to scroll down to the less expensive ones.
But you can also find them online or sometimes in art supply stores.
I have not tried to take notes with a fountain pen as I graduated quite a long time ago.
In olden times, it was called retirement. Either your work now pays well enough now to save for it, or your employer sets up a pension. Employers decided they don't like spending money for pensions, so it is all up to us to carefully chose the investments that won't lose our life savings.
Musicians used to be able to create an income stream from royalties, if they had a big enough following. Real estate investors can collect rents. Small business owners can sell the business they've grown over the years.
Music may become something people only do because they love it and keep a day job to pay the bills.
Maybe the new paradigm is work 'till you drop and die in debt.
I started using Sun Workstations back when they had the Motorola based Sun-3's. Later, when they came out with Sparc based Sun-4's, I learned just how portable software written in C is. I used to take a buffer of data read in from the network or serial port, cast to a char*, bump along the buffer, then cast to an int* to get some piece of a network header. On Sparc architecture, you can't de-reference a pointer to an int if the address is not divisible by 4. So you have to do a byte copy into memory properly aligned for 4 byte data.
In those days, if you wanted spreadsheet software that ran on Unix, it cost about $1000. Most software for Unix workstations cost much more than the same sort of thing for Windows. The rationalization for this was a Unix machine could support way more users so they had to charge more.I used to think that Unix software vendors were responsible for the success of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
At least in California, a gun in a glove compartment is considered concealed and requires a permit.
No concealed weapon permit = not legal.
YMMV (in other states).
I think Therac-25 should have made the list.
A race condition in software caused the radiation does delivered to be 100 time too big. It occurred when an unanticipated order of keystrokes were typed very fast. Other poor design choices helped to hide the problem.
Here is a more detailed history.
I wonder why they don't use EISPACK?
That is for solving Eigen systems.
I remember in the early 1980's writing a program to check my linear algebra homework using Fortran and EISPACK.
This is why I love the fact that Bender likes to drink "Old Fortran" malt liquor.
I have to admit I don't know much about benchmarking but I remember using LINPACK and EISPACK on the VAX and later the Cray YMP.
It is the same amount of chemical energy being transferred into you gas tank. Those familiar systems have been designed to be as safe as possible as long you don't smoke while you are filling up.
This style of electric charging station might bring back "full serve" as only thoroughly trained people would be near your car as it is charged.
Today, some people's jobs require that they step over live third rails 3 or 4 times a day. But they don't let the general public do that. I was
trained to do this and thankfully have only done it 2 or 3 times (in the dark, in the rain, carrying a laptop). More employees get killed
being hit by trains.
We are in close proximity to lots of energy all the time. Kinetic energy driving on the freeway or standing on the train platform. Chemical energy driving around town with 10 or 20 gallons of gas in the tank (think Pinto).
Of course they are going to have to engineer the whole distribution system for these kinds of safety issues.
But it is technically possible to provide a 2 MW electrical feed to a vehicle full of people. It happens every day.
A subway third rail system puts out between 1000 and 5000 Amps at either 600 or 750 Volts. These systems have their own substations. That is easily enough to charge a few cars at once at the 6 minute rate.
I imagine the charging stations for electric cars could be connected to a substation with similar sized conductors.
Transmission lines to the substations are on the order of 10000 Volts with transformer and rectifiers and breakers (the size of refrigerators).
But you would never have this kind of power at home.
I have read that every 20 or 25 years or so the IQ tests have to be re-calibrated to make them harder. This is because of the Flynn effect.
The average IQ scores rise 3 points per decade or 10 points per generation.
One explanation I have heard is that the tests measure how abstract your thinking is and each generation has more and more developed abstract thinking.
So this result should have been expected.
My poor mom is 71 and has dementia. When you loved ones get this, you lose them a little at a time instead of all at once. She used to read voraciously and carry on intellectual conversations. Now that is all gone. She taught me to think for myself.
Why argue about about electric power? You can find North Korean famine graves on
Google Earth.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-uncovered-palaces-labour-camps-and-mass-graves-1711573.html
That's some economy they've got going there. From what I have read, North Koreans
that live in the north have access to the Chinese border. Some with savings cross the border,
buy a large can of cooking oil, and resell small bags of oil for people to buy for special
occasions. They wouldn't be able to do this if there was cooking oil in the local shops.
To make sure that private savings would not become a threat to the regime's power, they
devalued the currency.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_demick
If you are a subscriber, you can read the whole article. If you are not, you have to drive down to the library or skip the whole thing.
Fossil Fuels get their own share of subsidies.
On the subject of Libertarians, I was astounded to find that the Cato
Institute was essentially founded by Charles and David Koch. They just
happen to be in the fossil fuel business and drop tens or hundreds of millions
of dollars into think tanks and institutes to pay for scientists and other
seemingly independent writers to promote lower regulations and corporate taxes.
It just so happens that those issues will personally increase their wealth substantially.
Apparently $20 Billion is not enough.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
They first tried the direct approach. David Koch ran as Vice President on the 1980
Libertarian ticket. They did very poorly in the election. Since then, they have changed
their approach and spent enormous sums quietly influencing public opinion.
When I heard about this last month, it really changed my view of the range of political
opinion in America. Perhaps the slow shift of public opinion to the right has been
funded by people who stand to gain from it. It also explain why public figures on the
right rarely warn about the dangers to our freedom from private interests. You only
hear about that dangerous government.
Some time ago, I read a New Yorker article about IQ tests. I remember them interpreting the Flynn effect as
the idea that over generations our thinking was becoming more and more abstract. This is not the same
as being smarter, although as society becomes more dependent on technology, it is adaptive.
A consequence of the Flynn Effect is that they have to "re-norm" the IQ test to make 100 be the average.
The big difference in the scores are in the areas of "this thing is like that." People from some cultures may group
things functionally (potato goes with knife because you use a knife to cut potatoes) score lower than people who
group things taxonomically (animal, vegetable, mineral).
Another consequence of the Flynn Effect is that when a new, re-normed version of the IQ test comes out,
more kids get labeled retarded.
Anyway, the article is an interesting read and may change the way you think of IQ tests.
If you think about it, someone who pays all their bills is more likely to hold on to the same phone number for
decades. So if you get a new number, there is a higher probability that debt collectors will be calling it.
I have had my number for 6 or 7 years and I still get calls for the same two or three names. I screen ALL my calls
so they are going to keep calling and they are not getting anywhere.
The sad thing is I pay all my bills and I still get calls from debt collectors -- looking for other people.
I work on communications and control systems for subway and light-rail.
A lot stuff is recorded in case there is an incident or accident that they want to investigate. Even phone calls to the control center and radio transmissions are recorded. CPUC and FRA regulators come by, especially during construction and early service, and poke around, ask questions, pull records and so on.
There is a regulatory retention period. If nothing happens for that period, the stuff gets deleted. But a lot of minor stuff gets investigated. Supervisors check reports of safety rule violations and such.
I think financial auditing is similar. The auditor wants to be able to randomly select some
set of transactions during the audit, but is not going to look at the totality of records.
On another note, I do remember a story about a system admin who worked for the legislature.
He was asked to destroy some backup tapes. Instead, he handed them over to the FBI.
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-09-23/news/mn-2790_1_legislative-counsel
In the case of IT, perhaps they should have whatever number of meetings it takes to come up with a written retention policy. That way, you are covered when you delete something according to written policy.
An oldie but goodie from Tom Lehrer:
First we got the bomb, and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side (I believe).
China got the bomb, but have no fears,
They can't wipe us out for at least five years.
Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white.
Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense.
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb.
Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go,
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb.
Who's next?
Who's next?
Who's next?
Who's next?
If it is a life-safety issue, it shouldn't be on a computer at all, unless it is a safety rated device,
like a safety rated PLC.
Physical or electro-mechanical interlocks are the order of the day. The therac didn't have a safety interlocking
outside of the computer. The code had a race condition which killed people occasionally if the operator typed too fast.
If you have an automated saw, are you going to put a computer between the emergency stop button and the motor
power circuit? I wouldn't, whether it used polling or interrupts.
And the emergency stop button should be normally closed so you discover the loose wire before you need to stop
the saw.
If you use polling in you software, that's alright. But the operating system uses ISRs to gather the data
from the device for you.
What's worse is when you have a hybrid. Those tell you second by second an estimate of your mileage.
I bought a used Honda Civic Hybrid and am averaging 40 MPG per tank. The trip odometer MPG gauge under
reports the mileage about 1 MPG compared to the raw calculation done when you fill up.
I have heard the Prius over reports mileage.
My name is Ken and I'm a nerd.
I worked on equipment of that vintage. It is possible it has mtools installed on it to read and write FAT
floppy disks.
You could create one big tar file, then use split to chop it into floppy sized pieces. Then the trick would be
finding a 5 1/4 floppy drive and matching controller to plug into a modern machine.
I had the dubious pleasure of working with Trusted Xenix, which resembled SELinux today. It required a '286 or above
because it depended on 286 protected mode and took up about 12 MB on the hard drive.
It may be no big deal to someone who has been working in embedded systems for a while, but it lowers
the barrier of entry for the rest of us.
I am just starting to get into micro controllers. At work, I have worked on PIC18 and PIC24.
For either of those two, you need an ICD 2 or ICD3 to get your code into them. That will set you
back a good $200. Alternatively, you can find a board with a serial boot loader. Then there
is the C compiler. The unrestricted one will set you back another $500.
By contrast, the Arduino board costs about $35. It can be programmed with a USB cable. The IDE
environment can be downloaded free. Your grand total to play around with micro controllers, about $45.
Another difference is the Arduino programming environment hides lots of details like fuses and clock
speeds and such. I found it quite difficult to get a PIC18 serial port working without getting out
an oscilloscope to actually measure the baud rate coming out of the UART because careful reading
of the data sheets and reviewing the CPU clock configuration didn't get me to 9600 baud.
After fighting the PIC all day for pay, when I get home and I just want to get my robot project working,
it is nice to have the simple Arduino environment to interact with instead. Apart from kits for hobbyists,
I am unaware of commercial applications for Arduinos. But there is more to life than work.
To get an idea of how much fun people have with Arduinos, do a youtube search for Arduino.
Ah, but if you do that you may not be able to find a replacement manager of the same caliber.
I started sketching with a fountain pen a while ago. There is a good one by Art Alternatives for about $20.
I got mine from Glenn Vilppu since I like to support his small business. He also teaches life drawing to animators. You have to scroll down to the less expensive ones.
But you can also find them online or sometimes in art supply stores.
I have not tried to take notes with a fountain pen as I graduated quite a long time ago.
These people seem to disagree with you. To get on this list, 75% or
more has to go to program services.
http://www.charitywatch.org/hottopics/Haiti.html
Just don't tell that to Bomb #20.
Actually, she is running for the U. S. Senate against Barbara Boxer.
Maybe I'll send Senator Boxer a campaign contribution with a note:
"I was laid off by Carly."
You know, you can give money to campaigns out of state. So there are
a good 15,000 potential donors right there.
I bet the deadman switch did not depend on software or firmware of any kind.
Unless the processor is safety rated, safety should be ensured via hard-wired
electronics.
In olden times, it was called retirement. Either your work now pays well
enough now to save for it, or your employer sets up a pension. Employers
decided they don't like spending money for pensions, so it is all up to us
to carefully chose the investments that won't lose our life savings.
Musicians used to be able to create an income stream from royalties, if they
had a big enough following. Real estate investors can collect rents.
Small business owners can sell the business they've grown over the years.
Music may become something people only do because they love it and keep a day
job to pay the bills.
Maybe the new paradigm is work 'till you drop and die in debt.
I started using Sun Workstations back when they had the Motorola based Sun-3's. Later,
when they came out with Sparc based Sun-4's, I learned just how portable software written
in C is. I used to take a buffer of data read in from the network or serial port, cast to a char*,
bump along the buffer, then cast to an int* to get some piece of a network header.
On Sparc architecture, you can't de-reference a pointer to an int if the address is not divisible
by 4. So you have to do a byte copy into memory properly aligned for 4 byte data.
In those days, if you wanted spreadsheet software that ran on Unix, it cost about $1000. Most
software for Unix workstations cost much more than the same sort of thing for Windows. The
rationalization for this was a Unix machine could support way more users so they had to charge more.I used to think that Unix software vendors were responsible for the success of Windows.
If you were a juror, you would be expressly told by the judge NOT to do your own research.
There is nothing wrong with looking stuff up after the trial is over.
Can you imagine a jury room with 12 people all saying "Well according to MY research . . ."