Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Stable electricity supply by geothermal (not *renewable* but should last a few billion years) and low outside air temperatures so less use of refrigeration (but still likely to need *some*).
In fact it's data centre paradise except for the bandwidth to anywhere useful.
I's think Google and Facebook already have first dibs on some of that bandwidth.
Not forgetting Sierra Nevada and Xcor.
NASA had some some great facilities and some very bright people.
It still does.
And by acting as *advisors* to the companies that will build these vehicles the US will return to space *much* faster than NASA could build its own NASA only vehicles.
Consider the X33, "Spaceplane", SLI, Ares 1.
*All* were attempts to replace the Shuttle with a NASA specific, NASA *unique* solution.
All ate a *shed load* of money and kept some people employed (for a while) who would not have been (and some perhaps who should not have been).
Why shouldn't a more requirement driven for profit approach work?
NASA was "high tech" when *one* other nation on Earth could do what it does. Now the list includes India, China, Iraq (just about) and North Korea is getting closer. In fact *only* the UK of the G8 *abandoned* its ability to carry out space launch.
I think the days of a vehicle built *by* and *for* NASA's sole use is over and they should give up the monopoly on crewed spaceflight in the US (which is essentially what some parts of NASA has fought tooth and nail to preserve).
So have a few tears and crack a few bottles of the milk of amnesia.
Think of it as the end of the *beginning* of *reusable* crewed space flight.
Remember the Shuttle as the *start* of the art in RLV's, not the end.
"bailing out Greece,"
Err, no.
Other countries in the *Eurozone* are committed to baling out Greece.
The UK does not have the Euro as its currency.
It *is* committed to support arrangements to *all* other countries through the IMF.
The real issue with Greece is how much crap is circulating as "Credit default swaps" between UK and other banks. IE the laid off odds traded by the merchant gamblers of the City of London.
Sound familiar? This is *exactly* the pattern of nonsense that brought on the last world banking crisis but with a different source (Greek, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, hell let's just call it the *Southern* debt, that's been accumulating for *years*) instead of US banks dishing out mortgages to Otis Q Crackhead.
Same s**t, different bucket.
Perhaps this time when the gamblers say "Save us" HMG will have the b**ls to say "no".
Just a thought.
Well you might like to keep in mind (If you're concerned about the scenes in "Gaslands") that Shrubs little gift to the Oil & Gas industry was an *exception* from the Clean Air & Clean Water acts.
So *no* issues with contamination and they can pump anything they like down to fracture the rock and recover the oil/gas. IE any cheap nasty s**t they can find on the open market.
UK and European rules are a bit stricter on this.
It's something called cost per bit (or on this scale cost per MB).
It's also to do with how fast it drops once production volume ramps up.
And if components fail in the device (that's the drive/storage media *combined*) how will that affect your ability to recover the data.
People were talking about the end of hard drives with the arrival of this new (and *simple*) magnetic bubble memory technology.
That was the 1970's.
Ah, her new line is (effectively) she mis-spoke.
She was voicing a common *opinion* that some of her staff (although she's not sure who and for some reason didn't try to find out) *had* paid cops in the past.
Kind of like the view that all journos are incorrigible p***heads.
But in point of "fact" she had no actual *knowledge* of who (or if) any of them had done so.
That's the explanation. Weather anyone *believes* it is another matter. But I bet she'll stick to it.
Until evidence starts turning up. Like the report by a QC who finally reviewed the emails sent to London law firm. Turned out it was not 900+, it was 10. He was quite clear they showed law breaking and told the NI board as much.
"The space shuttle was a huge costly and dangerous mistake right from the beginning."
The idea was quite reasonable.
The implementation met criteria which had *nothing* to do with the technical requirements, specifically financial and political.
It was probably the best design that could keep *all* the stakeholders happy *most* of the time. That did *not* include US citizens, who were *never* stakeholders.
Learning some history might help you understand why things are as they are, and perhaps working out how to stop history repeating itself.
Atlas V <> earlier Atlas designs.
Crew Rating was looked at in the context of the other ULA launcher Delta IV by the Aerospace Corp during Orion.
They reckoned it would add about 1000Lb of weight but make *no* difference to the payload and require *no* structural stiffening (all loads *well* within the safe margin if you chose the right *version* of Delta). The big items were a 2nd hydraulic circuit for wiggling the engines about, dual redundant avionics (historically even launchers carrying *billion* dollar payloads have had *single* string control systems. CPU or inertial system goes off on one, sorry fill out your insurance claim and come back with more money) and an "Emergency Detection System" to tell the crew something's happened. What they *do* with this information is a payload design problem.
There is little reason to expect crew rating an Atlas V will be much different.
However during Orion *that* would have made the need for Ares 1 redundant and the SRB makers would shut down mfg of big solid boosters *until* Ares V, with an estimated cost to re-start production of $6Bn for the Ares V strapons.
You might like to look at the end of the James Bond film Dr No.
The missile Dr No is trying to destroy is actually an *original* design Atlas carrying a Mercury capsule, with man in it.
NASA did the same with some "Re-purposed" Titan ICBM's in the Gemini program.
Modern designs of Atlas and Delta share only the *name* of previous versions and are *completely* capable of carrying humans.
The big issue is can you *throttle* the engines down to lower the acceleration at the *standard* payload mass or do you have a bigger payload (which has the same effect).
"Similar capabilities to a Falcon 9, but at twice the price."
And ULA know it.
While it was designed to be 50% the cost of the system it replaced (the Titan IV) that's still several times more expensive than anything that was not bankrolled by Uncle Sam would be allowed to use.
The funny emails from that reliability "Expert" were I suspect just the opening shots in this little spat.
""MyDefrag", free for personal or non-commercial use (I forget which) on Windows, is written by a guy who also expects to see benefits from putting most-accessed files in low-numbered sectors on the disc. "
Unlikely these days.
Since SCSI days hard drives map out dud sectors and replace them with undamaged parts of the disk.
AFAIK the good sectors will be from a block of sectors elsewhere on the disk.
So you *might* see an improvement if the sectors are where you *think* they are (given the simplest map is likely to be the real layout of the disk), but it's by no means as certain as it might have been decades ago.
The anorak was acquired when my drives crashed and I looked at copying them, learning *far* more about it than I've ever wanted to know.
I thought he's the man they refer to as the "Chief of Staff" at 10 Downing Street.
Should that not be a civil service post?
The fellow who said he did *not* want Cameron briefed about "alleged" phone hacking allegations at NoTW to ensure there was no suggestion that Dave had bent any police ears.
BTW It seems he also is a "former" employee of NI.
Funny how many of those people turn up. It seems 10 of the 40 person Met Police PR unit are ex NI staff.
And it seems *all* major UK political parties have one or two lurking about (although the BNP and UKIP seem don't seem to have any).
All at such "reasonable" salaries. You'd be a fool not to employ such experienced staff.
"Embedded" as it were with new masters.
Anyone recall Ex Guiness bigwig "Deadly" Ernest Saunders (the *only* man ever to recover from Altzheimers or rather Altzheimer *like* symptoms).
The Congressional testimony of the CEO of ITT in the wake of Nixon's leaving. A notoriously autocratic CEO with a reputation for micro management he could not remember this , was not sure about that, did not know etc.
Sound familiar?
Not of course that Rupert and Junior have been accused yet.
"Murdoch's "evil" crew hacked and denied it all until exposed - which, thankfully, they have been - "
NI's SOP has been to deny *everything* and only admit *anything* when 3rd party material appears in public that they *cannot* deny.
Otherwise they will continue to deny *everything* until the day (should it ever come) they are convicted, which they will no doubt play the "Public interest" card.
Be clear to these people words like honesty and conscience are *exactly* that.
Words. Nothing more.
As well as a Wilson chamber.
Wilson was inspired by the formation of dew droplets in nature.
It was *the* tool for particle physics for roughly 40 years.
BTW Particle physicists and high energy astronomers have been using high altitude balloon and sounding rocket instruments to measure high energy particles in the high atmospheres (80 Kft+) for at least a 100 years.
IIRC there are also ground based very wide field of view instruments that watch the night sky to detect particle triggered "scintillations" to gather statistics on high energy particles.
There is a *direct* record of high energy particle impacts on Earths atmosphere.
It's incomplete and does not cover the whole planet. Then again hanging global warming on *one* tree ring is not exactly "global" either.
In Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls2 there is an example of a many body problem studying the formation of galaxies. The researcher involved knocked the run time from 1 year on a big PDP down to 1 day (same PDP + numeric processor)
The trick is to *prove* that the approximation you used to get the problem small enough and fast enough *preserve* the validity of the simulation afterward.
I would expect physicists to use fewer fudge factors, document their work a hell of a lot better and quantify their error bands a lot better. I'd also expect them to be a lot more pro-active in finding ways to *eliminate* the fudge factors and quantify them in terms of stuff you can actually *measure*.
Conventional RFID systems rely on a narrow band *resonant* antenna tuned to the powering frequency which is nearby.
The implication is that this can absorb *any* signal of whatever power level in Ghz of bandwidth.
Systems wise it's the difference between a taxi radio system (private base station) and a cell phone.
From my very dim recollection of broadband antenna design in the 80s they may be using spirals rather than straight sections.
Note that such antennas would make good RD shields or primitive bug detectors, If you're in the middle of nowhere inside an enclosure with 2 layers of these things and the *inner* layer is picking up a power reading when all your laptops/PMP/whatever are switched off you're carrying something.
Seriously how many *thousands* of jobs have past UK government's offoshored with the usual promises
"Just as good at 1/x the cost"
"Security will not be compromised"
"Rollout schedules will be preserved"
If govt's insist they should provide these services they should recognise they are responsible for managing the *data* involved in the service as well. Not to some "Cloud" which is based in a a country the operators cannot even *name* (because they're not sure where it is).
There's been a lot of talk about "Shared services" at local govt level. Funny how that's just *not* quite good enough for Whitehall controlled departments is it not.
Incidentally when the tender for this sort of work is issued "Social" issues (like how much money will disappear from the local economy and how many workers will be *added* to the local welfare bill) *can* be factored into the process.
Thumbs up for the effort, but *boy* has it taken a *long* time to think this way.
"All your doing is a bit of graph theory and probability - badly. It's not going to catch anyone with brain enough to plot something major, and it's *not* going to magically tell you that X is a terrorist without an awful lot of ground work that you were doing anyway. And it will be outclassed by just tapping the ONE guy you know is already a terrorist and see who he's communicating with - which would probably be made easier by just slapping a bug on his residence."
Pretty much my view. You forgot to mention false positives, of which I anticipate there being one or two.
It is more the wet dream of assorted security service data fetishists who crave knowing *everything* about *everyone* all the time forever.
Their counterparts set up the ANPR network on even less pretext.
One of the developers kindly sent me his personal commentary of one of the few books written on it.
36KB of "Woven rope" ROM with 1KB of RAM implemented by ultrasonic delay lines triplicated and majority voted for reliability in a package weighing roughly 90lb. I also thought the electrochromic displays on the instruction panel were pretty cool, but they never caught on.
Increasing the instruction set size by deliberately causing a math overflow on a variable then *executing* it was my second actual encounter of the idea of self modifying code (the first was the Bell Labs Blit terminal). I'm not sure what other sacred cows of modern software development MIT slaughtered to get the job done.
It's processing speed was *literally* (at 32KIPS ) the same as a modern pocket calculator.
It's good enough to get the job done.
Which for hard core embedded system types (it fails, people die) is pretty much the key issue.
The 5 GPCs also communicate with 25 Multiplexer De Multiplexers (MDM). These each have 16 slots for I/O boards but it's not clear if they can pre filter the data so the GPC's only have to deal with "interesting" data. I've never found a reference which says how many of them are fully loaded either (these boxes are pretty heavy). Honeywell (who make them) do a range of ISS hardware with boxes holding 4,8,12 and 16 but I'll bet they don't fit.
The Shuttle was one of the first to use the 1553b LAN standard. The 25 links clock at just about 1mbs each. The later 1773b uses FO cable, could operate as a drop in or use a high speed mode of 20mbs each (it should be more lightning resistant which has been one of the reasons for launch scrubs).
The whole thing could be done in a single ASIC even given that MilSpec hardware is typically 1-2 generations behind commercial density *but* they live in fear of *unreported* changes in the mfg process (Gate array cell design or fab sequence changes in small but *critical* ways, rendering the new stuff more sensitive to latchup/single event upset etc) taking out the whole unit at a critical moment.
GPS's are programmed in a high level language called HAL/S, a language used nowhere else (a bit like the Shuttles aircon fluid but rather less toxic), which is a pity as it allows entry of sup-scripted and super-scripted variables on a standard terminal. More usefully it also had matrix and vector functions (handy if you do a lot of navigation, or computer graphics) and data types, along with real time scheduling functions. Quite nice for the early 1970s.
The software used to loaded in phases (depending on flight stage) from a reel to reel tape drive but this went solid state about 10-20 years ago.
Shuttle software development (done by what was IBM Federal Systems in Houston) was *the* model for the CMU Software Engineering Institute's CMM standard for how good software teams are. They also built the software for Skylab. They did not seem to use CASE and their key technique seemed to be the "Structured walkthrough." It is estimated they cost 10x the average cost of writing a line of code in the US. A lesson for all programmers perhaps?
"and production lines established for decades,"
Not really. But the instruction set is more or less a stock S/360 mainframe and AFAIK they use *standard* mil spec TTTL chips so you can repair it if you have such parts (eBay is NASA's friend as well).
The *real* cost is in all the certification tests to prove that it works in this environment. In terms of gate count you could probably put the whole thing on 1 ASIC (*including* the RAM even at mil spec gate densities).
Embedded designers usually work on the principle of fast enough to get the job done.
BTW These are the *upgraded* GPC's from the mid 90's with DRAM memory (replacing core store) and the whole thing ( CPU + *monster* I/O subsystem) in one box instead of two.
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