My first argument is that using combustion as a method of generating energy would arguably be less efficient than using microwaves as a way to generate energy. The conversion efficiency of microwave back into usable electrical energy is very very high , at or above 90% [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna]. Compare the efficiency of microwave->electrical energy with the efficiency of combustion which rates supercritical steam plants at a ~50% efficiency.
My second argument is that it will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that fuel the global warming process and increase the dissipation of heat from the planet.
The proposed point of beaming in harnessed energy from space is to
1.) Allow a clever way to deliver energy to arbitrary locations without the need to build and maintain a massive infrastructure to deliver this energy.
2.) Provide a low emission way of generating this energy
3.)Arguably avoid having to combust a limited resource to generate said energy.
So while it is true that this system will add energy to the Earth assuming that the satellite is collecting energy that would otherwise be irradiated into space...this injection of energy will
1.)Have less overall emissions
2.)Be potentially easier to transport and re-route to areas which need it
3.)Decrease the amount of net heat generated (due to the increased efficiency of a Rectenna vs a power plant fueled by fossil fuels)
Energy dissipated as heat isn't the primary cause of global warming, it is the byproducts of energy production. The process of taking 10-15 megawatts and redirecting it towards the Earth isn't going to cause any sort of warming.
If you're talking about replacing all sources of energy using space-based-solar energy then I still don't see much of a problem in terms of introducing too much energy into the system. We are already taking fossil fuels and combusting them, this releases a lot of energy in the form of heat. I'm not sure how you would convert microwaves back into reusable energy (maybe we'd still have to rely on some sort of thermal engine) but the increase wouldn't be much more than the current method of energy production.
The source is considered clean due to relatively low emissions. There is no combusting of materials and as such we're not pumping a bunch of crap into the air - presumably contributing to global warming.
I'm not exactly sure how'd they do this either. Most RAMs these days have to be refreshed at a pretty high frequency.
on top of that, I'm fairly confident that you can't dump the contents of the entire physical RAM without having kernel level access to the machine. Even then, have fun trying to map application variables to your 2GB+ memory space.
According to a reliable source there is an art of sorts when it comes to making great coffee. There are three dominant terms when it comes to maximizing flavor (tastiness). These terms are even more important when it comes to espresso but they do apply for drip et al.
Freshness of the roasted bean:
There is little that you can do to determine how long ago the bean was picked. It is possible however, to approximate how long ago the bean was roasted. After the roasting process a bag of roasted coffee beans will continue releasing small amounts of CO2. Simply take a look at your bag of coffee, it should be puffy. If the bag is not puffy the beans are no longer releasing CO2, furthermore enough time has elapsed so that the pressure inside the bag has been relieved. This bag of coffee is no longer fresh.
Grinding technique of the bean:
This is more important for espressos but it may affect the quality of drip etc. There are two primary techniques for the grinding of the coffee, the two cylinder burr grinder and the conical bur grinder. Conical bur grinders are superior. The reason is as follows: cylinder burr grinders take in a bean and forcefully crush it, this causes a high amount of heat due to friction and can scorch the grounded coffee. Furthermore you do not have control of coffee grain size and coffee grain size can be wildly inconsistent.
Conical burr grinders work by allowing beans to fall within a small crevice, the conical burrs then chip away a small portion of the bean. Grains small enough fall through a small gap. This chipping away process flings a chipped bean up and away from the burrs, allowing the bean sufficient time to cool. Furthermore the gap size can be modified, this allows control of grain size. Grain size consistency is also superior. This is important mostly for espresso as your coffee mat density should be uniform. A uniform density allows the even distribution of water pressure across the surface, allowing the maximum extraction of flavor from the grain substrate.
Water temperature and pressure:
Again this is more important for espresso but it applies to drip as well. Water temperature will directly affect the fullness of the flavor, too cold and you'll be drinking water. Too hot and you'll burn the beans and extract contaminants (which taste like ass). Most drip coffee makers do not make the water hot enough to extract the full flavor.
Water pressure is much more important for espresso, discussion of water pressure for espresso is beyond the scope of this post.
Finally you need a good bean provider. If anyone is interested I do a small bit of roasting myself, most of the time I make a bit of a surplus and sell the bags to my friends (it just isn't worth it to roast a tiny amount of beans..far too time consuming) to recoup equipment costs.
If anyone is interested in these surplus bags you can shoot me an E-mail at
CoffeeEmeritus@gmail.com
Yes. All the electronics on a flight system have to be qualified, from what I gather this process is rather involved and rigorous. The reason for all these qualifications is that a system must be predictable (that's why flight code is never..ever...ever written in an OOish type language i.e Java,C#). Also flight-systems must account for environmental hazards such as exteme temperatures, lack of atmosphere and radiation.
Extreme temperatures is a pretty obvious one, the devices must be able to operate reliably in extreme cold or heat.
A lack of atmosphere means that all heat generated on the system must be dissipated passively i.e through the chasis of the system. So you don't exactly want a Pentium 4 up there.
Radiation is another big one, this is why (until recently) COTS (commerical off the shelf) chips can't be used. Because they haven't (or can't) be rad hardened. Radiation in space can cause upsets in the actual chips, as in a particle nails a transistor and causes a bit to flip. This can ultimately lead to the death of your chip, often times 'modern' flight systems deal with this by triplicating the system. Each chip comes to a result independently and then all three results are compared, then the best 2/3 results are considered correct and the third machine is reset back to a check-point.
The millions and millions of dollars spent into designing space system usually goes into trying to get these things to be fault tolerant and efficient. In fact I think that future flight systems will start depending more and more on reconfigurable computing(FPGAs mainly, but emergent FPOAs may be an option) to achieve performance/power goals.
And a lot of space systems do run a flavor of Linux, it's not Debian though.
Reminds me of Minority report, they've got the basic input functions of the system down pat.
So why don't they give these designers some head-mounted displays? Also I would assume that specifying designs in free-space would quickly become very tiresome. Great way to rapid proto-type the general feel of a product but in the end you're going to have to rely on more traditional methods for the fine details.
Space for one? Latency? Power consumption?
Having 40 dual cores trying to work on the same problem may mean tons of inter-CPU communication. I doubt you can fit 40 CPUs on the same motherboard so much of this communication would have to be done through some other medium. For the sake of conversation lets say you can communicate between CPUs via a PCI-backbone (or PCI-X or whatever you want). That's still a lot of metal to drive, then you've got to deal with bus saturation (Unless you figure out a way to do a cross-bar network..which isn't really feasible due to the limited number of I/O pins on a CPU die).
So a 40-dual core system would have
1.) Nasty latency due to signal propogation times
2.) Probably massive overhead as the CPUs will now have to use MPI to communicate information
3.) Horrible power efficiency in comparison to an 80 core system. The capacitence requirement of your PCI-bus is much higher since it has a lot more metal. This makes power consumption a rather large issue.
4.)Really different programming methodology.
To elaborate 4, now it's not really possible for a compiler to figure out what to do. I don't claim to be an expert in PCA but in a 40-dual core setup I expect that the parallelism of the system needs to be extracted by the programmer..rather than the compiler. With an 80 core single die system the drive for creating a parallizing compiler would be massive (and lucrative). This would benefit more than just the uP market, I think the reconfigurable computing world would benefit greatly from knowlege base a parallizing compiler would create...
but I digress.
Seems like (classical) microprocessor computing is quickly converging with reconfigurable computing. In the embedded systems world there has been a recent emergence of something OTHER than a re-hash of FPGAs. FPOAs seem to be the most prominent one and approach reconfigurable computing through a heterogenous array of ASICs which come in three flavors : Multiply accumulators, general purpose ALUs and speedy register files (which can be configured as a FIFO,RAM or sequental read random write memory block). Quite a departure from the relatively homogenous composition of an FPGA which is basically a bunch of SRAMs connected with each other and a ton of switches.
Pretty soon we should be seeing FPGAs acting as co-processors..oh wait..that's already possible (see XD1000 which has an Opteron and an Altera Stratix(?) communicating via hypertransport). Or maybe we'll start seeing micrprocessors acting as a periphereal to an FPGA..oh wait that's already happened with embedded powerPCs in Xilinx's Virtex 2 and Virtex 4's.
Sounds like you're describing the ultimate reconfigurable computer.
Something that can , on the fly, reconfigure itself and change its architecture to the needs of the user.
You're right, this would be great. Massively parallel and reconfigurable chips DO exist yet they are far from mature (http://www.mathstar.com./
If you're suggesting that the architecture should just magically morph from parallel to more parallel..I think you're asking a bit too much.
Slashdot Mirror
My first argument is that using combustion as a method of generating energy would arguably be less efficient than using microwaves as a way to generate energy. The conversion efficiency of microwave back into usable electrical energy is very very high , at or above 90% [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna]. Compare the efficiency of microwave->electrical energy with the efficiency of combustion which rates supercritical steam plants at a ~50% efficiency. My second argument is that it will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that fuel the global warming process and increase the dissipation of heat from the planet. The proposed point of beaming in harnessed energy from space is to 1.) Allow a clever way to deliver energy to arbitrary locations without the need to build and maintain a massive infrastructure to deliver this energy. 2.) Provide a low emission way of generating this energy 3.)Arguably avoid having to combust a limited resource to generate said energy. So while it is true that this system will add energy to the Earth assuming that the satellite is collecting energy that would otherwise be irradiated into space...this injection of energy will 1.)Have less overall emissions 2.)Be potentially easier to transport and re-route to areas which need it 3.)Decrease the amount of net heat generated (due to the increased efficiency of a Rectenna vs a power plant fueled by fossil fuels)
You're missing the point.
Energy dissipated as heat isn't the primary cause of global warming, it is the byproducts of energy production. The process of taking 10-15 megawatts and redirecting it towards the Earth isn't going to cause any sort of warming.
If you're talking about replacing all sources of energy using space-based-solar energy then I still don't see much of a problem in terms of introducing too much energy into the system. We are already taking fossil fuels and combusting them, this releases a lot of energy in the form of heat. I'm not sure how you would convert microwaves back into reusable energy (maybe we'd still have to rely on some sort of thermal engine) but the increase wouldn't be much more than the current method of energy production.
The source is considered clean due to relatively low emissions. There is no combusting of materials and as such we're not pumping a bunch of crap into the air - presumably contributing to global warming.
I'm not exactly sure how'd they do this either. Most RAMs these days have to be refreshed at a pretty high frequency. on top of that, I'm fairly confident that you can't dump the contents of the entire physical RAM without having kernel level access to the machine. Even then, have fun trying to map application variables to your 2GB+ memory space.
- Freshness of the roasted bean:
- Grinding technique of the bean:
- Water temperature and pressure:
Finally you need a good bean provider. If anyone is interested I do a small bit of roasting myself, most of the time I make a bit of a surplus and sell the bags to my friends (it just isn't worth it to roast a tiny amount of beans..far too time consuming) to recoup equipment costs.There is little that you can do to determine how long ago the bean was picked. It is possible however, to approximate how long ago the bean was roasted. After the roasting process a bag of roasted coffee beans will continue releasing small amounts of CO2. Simply take a look at your bag of coffee, it should be puffy. If the bag is not puffy the beans are no longer releasing CO2, furthermore enough time has elapsed so that the pressure inside the bag has been relieved. This bag of coffee is no longer fresh.
This is more important for espressos but it may affect the quality of drip etc. There are two primary techniques for the grinding of the coffee, the two cylinder burr grinder and the conical bur grinder. Conical bur grinders are superior. The reason is as follows: cylinder burr grinders take in a bean and forcefully crush it, this causes a high amount of heat due to friction and can scorch the grounded coffee. Furthermore you do not have control of coffee grain size and coffee grain size can be wildly inconsistent.
Conical burr grinders work by allowing beans to fall within a small crevice, the conical burrs then chip away a small portion of the bean. Grains small enough fall through a small gap. This chipping away process flings a chipped bean up and away from the burrs, allowing the bean sufficient time to cool. Furthermore the gap size can be modified, this allows control of grain size. Grain size consistency is also superior. This is important mostly for espresso as your coffee mat density should be uniform. A uniform density allows the even distribution of water pressure across the surface, allowing the maximum extraction of flavor from the grain substrate.
Again this is more important for espresso but it applies to drip as well. Water temperature will directly affect the fullness of the flavor, too cold and you'll be drinking water. Too hot and you'll burn the beans and extract contaminants (which taste like ass). Most drip coffee makers do not make the water hot enough to extract the full flavor.
Water pressure is much more important for espresso, discussion of water pressure for espresso is beyond the scope of this post.
If anyone is interested in these surplus bags you can shoot me an E-mail at CoffeeEmeritus@gmail.com
Yes. All the electronics on a flight system have to be qualified, from what I gather this process is rather involved and rigorous. The reason for all these qualifications is that a system must be predictable (that's why flight code is never..ever...ever written in an OOish type language i.e Java,C#). Also flight-systems must account for environmental hazards such as exteme temperatures, lack of atmosphere and radiation. Extreme temperatures is a pretty obvious one, the devices must be able to operate reliably in extreme cold or heat. A lack of atmosphere means that all heat generated on the system must be dissipated passively i.e through the chasis of the system. So you don't exactly want a Pentium 4 up there. Radiation is another big one, this is why (until recently) COTS (commerical off the shelf) chips can't be used. Because they haven't (or can't) be rad hardened. Radiation in space can cause upsets in the actual chips, as in a particle nails a transistor and causes a bit to flip. This can ultimately lead to the death of your chip, often times 'modern' flight systems deal with this by triplicating the system. Each chip comes to a result independently and then all three results are compared, then the best 2/3 results are considered correct and the third machine is reset back to a check-point. The millions and millions of dollars spent into designing space system usually goes into trying to get these things to be fault tolerant and efficient. In fact I think that future flight systems will start depending more and more on reconfigurable computing(FPGAs mainly, but emergent FPOAs may be an option) to achieve performance/power goals. And a lot of space systems do run a flavor of Linux, it's not Debian though.
Reminds me of Minority report, they've got the basic input functions of the system down pat. So why don't they give these designers some head-mounted displays? Also I would assume that specifying designs in free-space would quickly become very tiresome. Great way to rapid proto-type the general feel of a product but in the end you're going to have to rely on more traditional methods for the fine details.
Space for one? Latency? Power consumption? Having 40 dual cores trying to work on the same problem may mean tons of inter-CPU communication. I doubt you can fit 40 CPUs on the same motherboard so much of this communication would have to be done through some other medium. For the sake of conversation lets say you can communicate between CPUs via a PCI-backbone (or PCI-X or whatever you want). That's still a lot of metal to drive, then you've got to deal with bus saturation (Unless you figure out a way to do a cross-bar network..which isn't really feasible due to the limited number of I/O pins on a CPU die). So a 40-dual core system would have 1.) Nasty latency due to signal propogation times 2.) Probably massive overhead as the CPUs will now have to use MPI to communicate information 3.) Horrible power efficiency in comparison to an 80 core system. The capacitence requirement of your PCI-bus is much higher since it has a lot more metal. This makes power consumption a rather large issue. 4.)Really different programming methodology. To elaborate 4, now it's not really possible for a compiler to figure out what to do. I don't claim to be an expert in PCA but in a 40-dual core setup I expect that the parallelism of the system needs to be extracted by the programmer..rather than the compiler. With an 80 core single die system the drive for creating a parallizing compiler would be massive (and lucrative). This would benefit more than just the uP market, I think the reconfigurable computing world would benefit greatly from knowlege base a parallizing compiler would create... but I digress.
Seems like (classical) microprocessor computing is quickly converging with reconfigurable computing. In the embedded systems world there has been a recent emergence of something OTHER than a re-hash of FPGAs. FPOAs seem to be the most prominent one and approach reconfigurable computing through a heterogenous array of ASICs which come in three flavors : Multiply accumulators, general purpose ALUs and speedy register files (which can be configured as a FIFO,RAM or sequental read random write memory block).
..oh wait that's already happened with embedded powerPCs in Xilinx's Virtex 2 and Virtex 4's.
Quite a departure from the relatively homogenous composition of an FPGA which is basically a bunch of SRAMs connected with each other and a ton of switches.
Pretty soon we should be seeing FPGAs acting as co-processors..oh wait..that's already possible (see XD1000 which has an Opteron and an Altera Stratix(?) communicating via hypertransport). Or maybe we'll start seeing micrprocessors acting as a periphereal to an FPGA
What should we call this incredibly tough transparent material made from dry ice (CO2)? I know , we should call it diamond!
They put the control group inside a Faraday cage.
Now imagine a beowulf cluster of those things!
Exactly! And Microsoft is a private company, they can choose to break compatability between any application and their OS if they so choose!
Sounds like you're describing the ultimate reconfigurable computer. Something that can , on the fly, reconfigure itself and change its architecture to the needs of the user. You're right, this would be great. Massively parallel and reconfigurable chips DO exist yet they are far from mature (http://www.mathstar.com./ If you're suggesting that the architecture should just magically morph from parallel to more parallel..I think you're asking a bit too much.
RGB lasers and photo paper is great. But what's the point when Snapfish downsamples your photos to the point of pixelation?