Interesting wired article. People don't realize that you can safely handle the nuclear fuel rods with your bare hands, as seen on last week's 60 minutes. It doesn't surprise me that some coal-fired plants release more radioactive material. Although, even if they didn't nuclear power still releases much less pollution than the coal-fired equalent.
I'm sorry that your country is unable to build nuclear power plants, as they are very expensive. However, you have some of your facts wrong.
Aren't we threatening Iran because they are are planning to build on?...
The US doesn't want Iran to have nuclear materials because they might build bombs with the material.
Read some history - that isn't why plants haven't been constructed in the USA for years
The main reason nuclear power plants have not been built is because of mass hysteria from the accident at the poorly designed Three Mile Island plant. PBS did a wonderful one-hour special on this accident. You can see info at their website. Also, the accident at the poorly operated Chernobyl plant didn't help things. Nuclear power plants take much care to operate correctly, but are much more enviromentally friendly than coal, oil, and gas.
Construction was stopped during the days of Jimmy Carter...
The last constrution of a nuclear power plant in the US was completed in 1996. See US Dept. of Energy
It's funny how wind, waves and solar have to be cheaper than anything to be considered
Wind, waves, and solar are very expensive. Solar and wind power is more than $80/MWh compared with the average coal cost of $16/MWh (in US); this is not a good deal. A quick search on google for wind and solar costs will show you. Here is an example.
cheap by some unknown force of magic that defies reality...
I know because of experience in the energy business that nuclear power is usually cheaper than power generated from other fuels, but
this article has some good facts about that.
There was a big reason for there being a lot of nuclear power in Europe - it was known as the USSR
Yes, the USSR has many nuclear reactors (probably poorly maintained), but even without the USSR, there would be plenty more nuclear power plants in Europe than in the US. See
this Dept. of Energy article.
That article doesn't talk about any scientific, enviromental, or technical problems with nuclear power just political problems. Just because Bush likes nuclear power doesn't mean it's bad.
Also the artical is incorrect about natural gas as being cheap. The gas fueled units that the company for which I work cost about ten times as much as what nuclear power costs per MWh for a plant in a neighboring state. An example cost for a gas plant $70/MWh and coal plant is $15/MWh. I don't know how they consider that cheap. That's certainly not cheap of off-peak use. In fact, I don't know of any fuels currently used in large power plants that have a higher cost per MBTU than gas.
Entergy will sometimes sell some of their excess off-peak generation from AR Nuclear-One for as low as $7/MWh. Compare that to the average coal cost of about $15/MWh, natural gas of about $70/MWh, oil-2 $60/MWh, and less refined oil about $50/MWh. I don't understand why the US doesn't have more nuclear plants. I guess people fear what they don't understand. See this and this for more info.
European countries have more of a dependence on Nuclear power than the US, see power statistics.
Throughout the world, most people are uneducated about nuclear power and do not consider it green at all. In fact, nuclear power is much cleaner and cheaper than coal. Wind and hydro power are both less environmental friendly and more expensive. See
this government waste article for details. Also, you can't put wind, hydro, and tidal generator in as many places as nuclear. But, people fear what they don't understand making electric companies like the one I work for less likely build nuclear power plants because of the bad feelings people get about nuclear power.
The heater and/or air conditioner along with the water heater are by far the biggest users of electricity. The electric company that I work for has some residental load that in the late summer, average on-peak demand is about 600 MW and the spring average on-peak demand is about 275 MW. This demand increase is not because people watch more TV in the summer.
Yes, MFC is gross. For the past few years, I've been using Java/swing and C#, but for some apps they are too slow. I really like swing, but it has so much overhead and setting up the placement of GUI objects is a pain.
I went to the wxWidgets site, and it looks pretty sweet. I'll have to try it out sometime. Thanks for the link.
I guess it would be more correct to say ANNs are used to forecast numbers with some success. However, I think they are more widely used for classification. Despite the limited real-world applications of AI, it's going to take a while for AI to get out of control. I'm sure we'll all be dead before the possibility of events like in the Terminator movies becomes a legitimate consern.
I agree. Artifical intelligence is so far away from developing anything that is close to as smart as a retarded dog. Many AI programs can do exactly what they are programmed to do well, but not much else.
However, I use artifical neural networks for my job. They are good at predicting a few numbers if you give it the right input numbers for a predictible process. However, the training and network structure design for these neural networks is a lot of work. You can easily mess up the neural network simply by giving it too much input data to train with. Neural networks are also used with some success to classify data; however, if you've never designed and trained an ANN before, you will find that ANNs aren't as intelligent as you thought.
I agree. It's pretty basic genetics that sexual reproduction offers a better ability for varience, so the species can adapt to environmental changes faster. If I remember correctly, the main reason most single-celled life and maybe simple insects reproduce asexually is because it's a simplier process and simple life usually has shorter lifespans so they can adapt quicker to environmental changes. You won't find much life that is more complex than a spider that does not reproduce sexual.
Yes, I was wrong about the funtion pointers. I never used them when had to write Ada code in college. I just figured it would be unlikely that they would exist. You'd think that code used to control things that blow up wouldn't have macros, memcopy-type functions, function pointers, and pointer arithimetic. But i guess function pointer aren't really unsafe, they just are unusual.
I also find it hard to believe that one could write an entire Linux, Windows, Unix, or Mac OS device driver for a complicated device in any other language but C/C++. You could write parts of it in some languages, but don't you need the to link to the os header files for the device driver interfaces? But, as everyone has pointed out already several times, I'm not an Ada expert. I've always had better things to do than learn a programming language that you won't help me get a job or be more productive with my current job.
Good point, the last company I worked for had the same problem with too many Windows servers. Another way you can save on hardware costs is to use Windows Terminal Server. It's actually a better user experience than you'd think if you haven't tried it yet. Also I would suggest not buying tons of firewall hardware, spyware filter software, and virus scanners for your exchange server. It's probably cheaper to put your exchange server behind a Linux box that does the scanning and forwards to the exchange server with open source tools.
Also,I would say it's better to cut costs in other departments. Often times a programmer can write software that does a large part of other peoples' jobs. When I started my last job, I was really surprised at the amount of work and data storage people will try and do with spreadsheets. Usually work that is much better suited by another program.
When the Windows 2000 source code was unoffically released I "heard" there were several places where the code comments contained obsenities. Also, many places that said something like "HACK: added...to fix stupid office toolbar, which keeps trying to..."
I believe that there were even some news stories that said the comments in Windows 2000 caused some embarsement for Microsoft. Really, was anyone offended? It can't take more than a few hours to go over and revise the very few code comments that they have anyways.
The real reason, is that Microsoft does not want people to know how their stuff works. They only want to appear as though they are giving us all the information we want. For example, getting information from MSDN is a nightmare compared with getting info from Sun. In an MSDN search, you are flooded with irrelevant information. How much source have they released to the public anyways? I don't think they will release any more of.NETs code. Not enough to be useful anyways.
Overall, seek time will be slightly decreased by increased density because it is more likely that sectors that the head is passing over will be the one it's looking for.
Also, usually the centers of the disks are written to first in order by sector so you won't have to seek as far on a higher density disk that has lots of free space than you would on a lower density disk that have the same files written to them. Also, seek time on tracks close the center of the disk is less than the seek time toward the edges of the disk, as obviously the heads don't have to wait as long for the disk to spin. If your seeking from one track near the center to another track near the center, you are waiting on the actuator to move the head more than the spinning disk. I think the actuators are pretty fast, so that shouldn't much of a wait. Also, you will get lower seek times if you disk is partitioned wisely, as you want your most used partitions to be first and therefore closer to the center.
The statement Ada does not have the memory management/system programming facilities like C/C++. is true as the memory management/system programming facilities in Ada are very different from that in C/C++. For example you don't have crazy things like function pointers and a lot of the generally unsafe features that C/C++ has to make system programming easier. Is it even possible to write a device driver in Ada?
I think the reason Ada didn't catch on is because it doesn't come with a good supporting API and although Ada is a very safe language it does require a lot of extra typing and does not have the memory management/system programming facilities like C/C++. Although, Ada did have a big influence on Oracle's PL/SQL, and it's used by the US DoD a lot.
I agree. I work for an electric company that will need new generation in about ten years or so. My company won't even consider building a nuclear plant, despite the fact that they are cleaner and cheaper to operate than coal plants, which also are very expensive to build. The engineers all know that Nuclear power is superior to coal for base load in terms of cost and environmental friendliness. The stigma attached to the word "nuclear" is just too much for people to deal with.
People don't realize the only type of plant that comes close to being as economical as nuclear power is coal power. When you consider that nuclear power is about $9 per MWh and coal is about $15 per MWh and nuclear power doesn't pollute the air like coal does, the public really needs to get educated about nuclear power. When most people think about nuclear power, they think "meltdown" or "radioactive", stuff you see on the Simpsons. I'm sure that coal power has killed more living things than nuclear power ever will. It would be great if new developments that reduce the chance of a meltdown will help people to realize the viablity of nuclear power.
Disk access speeds are not directly proportional to the RPM of a drive. If a larger capacity hard drive and a smaller capacity hard drive are phyically the same size and spin at the same speeds, the larger capacity drive will be faster. The sectors are just physically smaller. Therefore, disk access speeds are actually faster for larger capicity drives. If you do a benchmark you will find this to be true, as the physical size of the disks from 1998 to now are about the same.
Although if disk capacity is gained by adding platters (disks), you won't see a performance gain. The number of heads labeled on the hard drive is usually directly proportional to the number of platters. If you compare the number of heads on a disk made in 1998 and a disk made in 2005, probably the number of heads has not changed a lot. A benkmark is the best way to see that disk access speeds are always increasing.
I think you'll find this problem with a lot of banks. When it comes to security for transfering funds out of your account, banks have dropped the ball.
A ban on guns in the US would definately prevent deaths in the long term. However, it will not happen in our lifetimes. You also must remember that most of the population in the US lives in rural areas. So, many places have inadaquete police coverage, which makes people want to have guns.
As for video games, there are many factors in a child or teenager's life that may cause violent tendencies. I'm not aware of video games as being high on this list when you are looking at the scientific studies. People would be much better off directing their energies toward something that would help childern to live in a stable, happy, and healthy home, and not worry about video games and R rated movies so much. We should worry more about things like hard drugs, abusive guardians, smoking, and things that cause people to get arrested.
I've used swing for the last four years, and I haven't had any performance problems on newer machines. Sure it's a little slower, but that's really not a problem. However, I did find it easier to use C# and a C++ dll easier than using JNI. But, I could never find any good documentation on JNI. I would be nice if you could build exes on Windows that spawned the Sun Java VM kinda like C# does.
I tried reading volumns one and two when I was a CS graduate student, before I dropped out. I found them very difficult to understand by my simple mind. Knuth is a very brillent, and I suggest you don't even try to read his publications unless you have a strong background in mathematics and computer science and lots of time.
Software patents don't work because the people granting and enforcing software patents have little understanding of how software works and they lack the judgement necessary to determine when something is truely innovative and deserves a patent.
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Interesting wired article. People don't realize that you can safely handle the nuclear fuel rods with your bare hands, as seen on last week's 60 minutes. It doesn't surprise me that some coal-fired plants release more radioactive material. Although, even if they didn't nuclear power still releases much less pollution than the coal-fired equalent.
I'm sorry that your country is unable to build nuclear power plants, as they are very expensive. However, you have some of your facts wrong.
Aren't we threatening Iran because they are are planning to build on?...The US doesn't want Iran to have nuclear materials because they might build bombs with the material.
Read some history - that isn't why plants haven't been constructed in the USA for yearsThe main reason nuclear power plants have not been built is because of mass hysteria from the accident at the poorly designed Three Mile Island plant. PBS did a wonderful one-hour special on this accident. You can see info at their website. Also, the accident at the poorly operated Chernobyl plant didn't help things. Nuclear power plants take much care to operate correctly, but are much more enviromentally friendly than coal, oil, and gas.
Construction was stopped during the days of Jimmy Carter...The last constrution of a nuclear power plant in the US was completed in 1996. See US Dept. of Energy
It's funny how wind, waves and solar have to be cheaper than anything to be consideredWind, waves, and solar are very expensive. Solar and wind power is more than $80/MWh compared with the average coal cost of $16/MWh (in US); this is not a good deal. A quick search on google for wind and solar costs will show you. Here is an example.
cheap by some unknown force of magic that defies reality...I know because of experience in the energy business that nuclear power is usually cheaper than power generated from other fuels, but this article has some good facts about that.
There was a big reason for there being a lot of nuclear power in Europe - it was known as the USSRYes, the USSR has many nuclear reactors (probably poorly maintained), but even without the USSR, there would be plenty more nuclear power plants in Europe than in the US. See this Dept. of Energy article.
That article doesn't talk about any scientific, enviromental, or technical problems with nuclear power just political problems. Just because Bush likes nuclear power doesn't mean it's bad.
Also the artical is incorrect about natural gas as being cheap. The gas fueled units that the company for which I work cost about ten times as much as what nuclear power costs per MWh for a plant in a neighboring state. An example cost for a gas plant $70/MWh and coal plant is $15/MWh. I don't know how they consider that cheap. That's certainly not cheap of off-peak use. In fact, I don't know of any fuels currently used in large power plants that have a higher cost per MBTU than gas.
Entergy will sometimes sell some of their excess off-peak generation from AR Nuclear-One for as low as $7/MWh. Compare that to the average coal cost of about $15/MWh, natural gas of about $70/MWh, oil-2 $60/MWh, and less refined oil about $50/MWh. I don't understand why the US doesn't have more nuclear plants. I guess people fear what they don't understand. See this and this for more info.
European countries have more of a dependence on Nuclear power than the US, see power statistics.
Throughout the world, most people are uneducated about nuclear power and do not consider it green at all. In fact, nuclear power is much cleaner and cheaper than coal. Wind and hydro power are both less environmental friendly and more expensive. See this government waste article for details. Also, you can't put wind, hydro, and tidal generator in as many places as nuclear. But, people fear what they don't understand making electric companies like the one I work for less likely build nuclear power plants because of the bad feelings people get about nuclear power.
The heater and/or air conditioner along with the water heater are by far the biggest users of electricity. The electric company that I work for has some residental load that in the late summer, average on-peak demand is about 600 MW and the spring average on-peak demand is about 275 MW. This demand increase is not because people watch more TV in the summer.
Yes, MFC is gross. For the past few years, I've been using Java/swing and C#, but for some apps they are too slow. I really like swing, but it has so much overhead and setting up the placement of GUI objects is a pain.
I went to the wxWidgets site, and it looks pretty sweet. I'll have to try it out sometime. Thanks for the link.
I guess it would be more correct to say ANNs are used to forecast numbers with some success. However, I think they are more widely used for classification. Despite the limited real-world applications of AI, it's going to take a while for AI to get out of control. I'm sure we'll all be dead before the possibility of events like in the Terminator movies becomes a legitimate consern.
I agree. Artifical intelligence is so far away from developing anything that is close to as smart as a retarded dog. Many AI programs can do exactly what they are programmed to do well, but not much else.
However, I use artifical neural networks for my job. They are good at predicting a few numbers if you give it the right input numbers for a predictible process. However, the training and network structure design for these neural networks is a lot of work. You can easily mess up the neural network simply by giving it too much input data to train with. Neural networks are also used with some success to classify data; however, if you've never designed and trained an ANN before, you will find that ANNs aren't as intelligent as you thought.
I agree. It's pretty basic genetics that sexual reproduction offers a better ability for varience, so the species can adapt to environmental changes faster. If I remember correctly, the main reason most single-celled life and maybe simple insects reproduce asexually is because it's a simplier process and simple life usually has shorter lifespans so they can adapt quicker to environmental changes. You won't find much life that is more complex than a spider that does not reproduce sexual.
Yes, I was wrong about the funtion pointers. I never used them when had to write Ada code in college. I just figured it would be unlikely that they would exist. You'd think that code used to control things that blow up wouldn't have macros, memcopy-type functions, function pointers, and pointer arithimetic. But i guess function pointer aren't really unsafe, they just are unusual.
I also find it hard to believe that one could write an entire Linux, Windows, Unix, or Mac OS device driver for a complicated device in any other language but C/C++. You could write parts of it in some languages, but don't you need the to link to the os header files for the device driver interfaces? But, as everyone has pointed out already several times, I'm not an Ada expert. I've always had better things to do than learn a programming language that you won't help me get a job or be more productive with my current job.
Yes, that does sound credible. I know some of the lower level graphics programming is a whole lot of math. It hurts just thinking about it.
Good point, the last company I worked for had the same problem with too many Windows servers. Another way you can save on hardware costs is to use Windows Terminal Server. It's actually a better user experience than you'd think if you haven't tried it yet. Also I would suggest not buying tons of firewall hardware, spyware filter software, and virus scanners for your exchange server. It's probably cheaper to put your exchange server behind a Linux box that does the scanning and forwards to the exchange server with open source tools.
Also,I would say it's better to cut costs in other departments. Often times a programmer can write software that does a large part of other peoples' jobs. When I started my last job, I was really surprised at the amount of work and data storage people will try and do with spreadsheets. Usually work that is much better suited by another program.
Too bad they don't have a graduate program. I'd like to get a Masters in Games. Although, how creditible does that sound?
When the Windows 2000 source code was unoffically released I "heard" there were several places where the code comments contained obsenities. Also, many places that said something like "HACK: added...to fix stupid office toolbar, which keeps trying to ..."
I believe that there were even some news stories that said the comments in Windows 2000 caused some embarsement for Microsoft. Really, was anyone offended? It can't take more than a few hours to go over and revise the very few code comments that they have anyways.
The real reason, is that Microsoft does not want people to know how their stuff works. They only want to appear as though they are giving us all the information we want. For example, getting information from MSDN is a nightmare compared with getting info from Sun. In an MSDN search, you are flooded with irrelevant information. How much source have they released to the public anyways? I don't think they will release any more of .NETs code. Not enough to be useful anyways.
Also, usually the centers of the disks are written to first in order by sector so you won't have to seek as far on a higher density disk that has lots of free space than you would on a lower density disk that have the same files written to them. Also, seek time on tracks close the center of the disk is less than the seek time toward the edges of the disk, as obviously the heads don't have to wait as long for the disk to spin. If your seeking from one track near the center to another track near the center, you are waiting on the actuator to move the head more than the spinning disk. I think the actuators are pretty fast, so that shouldn't much of a wait. Also, you will get lower seek times if you disk is partitioned wisely, as you want your most used partitions to be first and therefore closer to the center.
The statement Ada does not have the memory management/system programming facilities like C/C++. is true as the memory management/system programming facilities in Ada are very different from that in C/C++. For example you don't have crazy things like function pointers and a lot of the generally unsafe features that C/C++ has to make system programming easier. Is it even possible to write a device driver in Ada?
I think the reason Ada didn't catch on is because it doesn't come with a good supporting API and although Ada is a very safe language it does require a lot of extra typing and does not have the memory management/system programming facilities like C/C++. Although, Ada did have a big influence on Oracle's PL/SQL, and it's used by the US DoD a lot.
I agree. I work for an electric company that will need new generation in about ten years or so. My company won't even consider building a nuclear plant, despite the fact that they are cleaner and cheaper to operate than coal plants, which also are very expensive to build. The engineers all know that Nuclear power is superior to coal for base load in terms of cost and environmental friendliness. The stigma attached to the word "nuclear" is just too much for people to deal with.
People don't realize the only type of plant that comes close to being as economical as nuclear power is coal power. When you consider that nuclear power is about $9 per MWh and coal is about $15 per MWh and nuclear power doesn't pollute the air like coal does, the public really needs to get educated about nuclear power. When most people think about nuclear power, they think "meltdown" or "radioactive", stuff you see on the Simpsons. I'm sure that coal power has killed more living things than nuclear power ever will. It would be great if new developments that reduce the chance of a meltdown will help people to realize the viablity of nuclear power.
Disk access speeds are not directly proportional to the RPM of a drive. If a larger capacity hard drive and a smaller capacity hard drive are phyically the same size and spin at the same speeds, the larger capacity drive will be faster. The sectors are just physically smaller. Therefore, disk access speeds are actually faster for larger capicity drives. If you do a benchmark you will find this to be true, as the physical size of the disks from 1998 to now are about the same.
Although if disk capacity is gained by adding platters (disks), you won't see a performance gain. The number of heads labeled on the hard drive is usually directly proportional to the number of platters. If you compare the number of heads on a disk made in 1998 and a disk made in 2005, probably the number of heads has not changed a lot. A benkmark is the best way to see that disk access speeds are always increasing.
I think you'll find this problem with a lot of banks. When it comes to security for transfering funds out of your account, banks have dropped the ball.
A ban on guns in the US would definately prevent deaths in the long term. However, it will not happen in our lifetimes. You also must remember that most of the population in the US lives in rural areas. So, many places have inadaquete police coverage, which makes people want to have guns. As for video games, there are many factors in a child or teenager's life that may cause violent tendencies. I'm not aware of video games as being high on this list when you are looking at the scientific studies. People would be much better off directing their energies toward something that would help childern to live in a stable, happy, and healthy home, and not worry about video games and R rated movies so much. We should worry more about things like hard drugs, abusive guardians, smoking, and things that cause people to get arrested.
I've used swing for the last four years, and I haven't had any performance problems on newer machines. Sure it's a little slower, but that's really not a problem. However, I did find it easier to use C# and a C++ dll easier than using JNI. But, I could never find any good documentation on JNI. I would be nice if you could build exes on Windows that spawned the Sun Java VM kinda like C# does.
I tried reading volumns one and two when I was a CS graduate student, before I dropped out. I found them very difficult to understand by my simple mind. Knuth is a very brillent, and I suggest you don't even try to read his publications unless you have a strong background in mathematics and computer science and lots of time.
Software patents don't work because the people granting and enforcing software patents have little understanding of how software works and they lack the judgement necessary to determine when something is truely innovative and deserves a patent.