Posts by John Smith 19 16004 posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Boring, repetitve work that needs to be done accurately?
Gosh. Sounds just the job for one of those new-fangled, what do you call em? Computers?
Seriously, what is it with some operations team, they cannot seem to grasp that repetious s**t is exactly what compuers do best.
WTF didn't they do a version with an 8bit data bus and a 16 bit address bus?
IE like EVERY 8 bit micro running at the time.
The transputer was microcoded (but still damm fast) and its instruction set designed to build up instructions from 4 bit parcels, to however many bits was needed.
The 16/8 would have been the conceptual equivalent of the Motorola 68008 used in the QL. IOW it would have raised a lot of awareness of this new (highly scalable) architecture. It might (dare I even suggest it?) have persuaded a few folk to try this new-fangled Occam thing, perhaps.
Guess we'll never know. RIP stack machines.
Or to give them their more accurate title automated man-in-the-middle attacks that front run legitate trades.
IOW an effective "tax" on actual stock trades which nearly all markets actively support by allowing multiple types of trade that can be repudiated.
I hadn't though there were enough of these vermin in the world to support that sort of high end hardware, but obviously there are, at the right priice of course
Guess which one Con-gress wanted?
Boeing charged more (and were given more) for this with their we're-THE-safe-pair-of-hands routine.
That BS fell apart on the first flight.
Basically bacause they had one set of actual thrusters (which being space grade are very expensive) and 2 translator boxes that converted "fire +ve roll thruster" in the software into a powerful enough drive signal to fire thruster 1 got mis-configured (because it appears no one was tracking the configuration data) into thruster anything-but-1.
IOW the hallmark of a large corporation that demanded top $ and ran a cheapskate development programme. :-(
Let's hope this time they actually take it seriously and do the job their engineers are capable of.
ARM dominates a large section of the embedded market for higher power processors, especially phones, routers and cable boxes, yet it makes no actual chips. It could be argued because it makes no chips.
Instead it delivers a well thought core instruction set (and its supporting documentation) with various option packages that customers can implement efficiently and find meets most of their needs. All well supported by an effective toolchain.
This set me thinking if this strategy might work if applied to the nuclear industry.
Could a reactor design be developed that could be licensed on a global scale to multiple countries with as much as possible being built locally (to standardised designs, allowing major parts to be stockpiled on a global basis)?
You might think this sounds impossible but there are precidents. The US Liberty Ships supplied 2710 ships each carrying 10200mt from 1941-45. This was done at 18 US shipyards. The engines were built y 18 mfgs. They were all interchanageable. So big things are also possible.
It's fairly obvious that there is a huge gap in the energy market IF it can meet certain criteria.
It needs to be cheap(ish) and quick(ish) to construct (like a liberty ship in fact) but it needs to go further.
It needs to be a complete solution. That means fuel and fuel assembly design, reactor and both reprocessing and refabrication. Burying used nuclear fuel in a hole in the ground for 2x longer than the entire history of civilisation sounds retarded and the result of the something-must-be-done school of policy idiocy. Because it is.
The goal is energy security. What you do when the sun don't shine, the wind don't blow (which in central Europe can last months) and the dams are empty (those are the ONLY renewable energy sources that actually deliver energy on a scale big enough to measure on a global energy map. the rest are basically a slightly thicker line between 2 wedges on the pie chart).
My instinct is no existing design (and none of the Gen IV) have the solution, but several of them have parts that could be adapted into a complete package. The problem is most of them are so bloody heavy :-(. The fuel in a PWR weighs 27 tonnes, but the vessel to hold it for Hinckly Point C weighs about 850 tonnes, mostly because it's 200mm thick and there are maybe 6-8 forges that can build one worldwide.
Not exactly the "build anywhere" kind of spec.
OTOH it does have zircaloy tubes that have a melting point of 1850c and uranium dioxide pellets that melt at 2500c. In fact if you dumped the water you could crank up the operating temperature quite a bit.
A huge slab of the existing cost BTW is the "finance" IE the interest charges on the £22Bn of borrowed cash to build this thing, and it doesn't start generating revenue till the whole things finished. I think we all know how well "Big bang" projects work at being on time and on budget.
Imagine if the 3260MW of HPC was split into 250MW chunks (large number of steam turbine mfgs at this size for coal and oild fired stations IF you can generate steam at matching conditions, as the AGR's did). If that first chunk took 4 years to build (as fossile fuel stations do) it would already be generating revenue. If the rest of the capacity rolled out at (for example) 6 month intervals (which is how long it's taken to lay the whole foundations, including the worlds longest continuos concrete pour of 5 days, longer than the Shard. I am soooo impressed. The whole conrete budget is 3 000 000 tonnes) most of the capcity would be online in the same timeframe EXCEPT a it would already be paying back those monster interest charges by the time the real Hinckly Point C starts its (no doubt) prolonged startup testing.
The human race faces (to coin a phrase) a "Climate emergency" (the planet does not. It could not give a f**k if the human race collectively disappeared tomorrow).
I beleive that better is possible. A lot better. The question is how?
And you do have to wonder, did they do so in spite of the guy leaving to join Apple, or because of it?
IDK. Tesla's stock price is complete BS. The fantasy it's an IT company, not a car mfg, persists so I guess people will continue to make money off the back of it. Buy, buy buy, bye bye is not a stock tip but perhaps a sensible strategy?
Because they don't want to?
Because they haven't got a pot to p**s in?
In the UK the banking industry has persistently cut branches (in places they don't make enough profit) while telling the relevant HoC that relaxing rules on credit unions (that have tighter joining rules than banks) are a Bad Thing.
The best thing that could happen is to treat banks like any other business. They f**k up, they go bankrupt. I'm sick and tired of their "But we're speeeeeeeecial" schtick.
Companies that lead the field were top notch at using anything that improved their existing product.
What they didn't see coming was the inferior competitor that served a market they ignored.
That got better at serving that market.
And then started coming for their market instead. Or put another way.
"Do not look down on the snake, for who is to say one day it might yet become a dragon?" *
* RIP Burt.
or the Irish? "
I would. But I suspect the HO has a similar attitude to the MoD to such systems.
That "What we do is sooooo special no OTS system (even one built for the task and used by [i]several[/i] other countries) could [i]possibly[/i] do what we need it to."
I sometimes suspect this is because the senior nappy put in charge of getting the new system has no actual idea [i]what[/i] the current system does (starting with what other systemes it has to talk to for it to work at all) and hopes the con-sultants and con-tractors will just "make it so" to coin a phrase.
No.
Because a lot of the fools who voted for this bu***hit believed what they thought was promised on the side of the bus (It was only a "what if," so not a total lie. Cummins is quite bright like that).
Let's see the govt actually deliver on it.
So far they've delivers about 6 weeks of EU payments.
Where's the other 46 "Boris"?
They did.
As anyone who has seen the film "Enigma" will know it was called "Shark" (Sharq?) and had an extra rotor because they felt 5 didn't make the challenge hard enough.
I don't know if the British ever saw one until after WWII. IOW it was entirely broken by analyzing its product.
And that's the key word here.
Government.
Not a private company. Not Trumps next neigbour.
Government.
Trumps government (such as it still is) has never stopped him spouting whatever load of s**t his brain come up with.
Was Big Telco's b**ch before he was appointed to the Commission
Was Big Telco's b**ch when at the Commission
Will be Big Telco's b**ch when he becomes a lobbyist / "media commentator" / mouth-for-hire when he leaves.
Perhaps he can take the Head of the Justice Dept and the GSA with him as well?
An argument that could be made of all the reasons the quitters had.
So 17 million fools prioritized an industry of 12 000 people (fishing) over over the car industry (38 000 people) which generates an income 1/2 that of the f**king game shooting industry? It's less than the profit of Tesco.
How stupid would people be to do that?
Dumb enough to vote Leave obviously.
Oh really, Mr (or Ms) AC?
I didn't think it would be long before quitters would want to step away from being associated with being a quitter.
You demonstrate my view quite well.
You can't "Take Back Control" (as you chanted with the frenzy of a brainwashed cultist) if you never lost control in the first place.
You've been conned. Get over it.
So true.
One the most impressive small projects I ever saw was done out of the U of Edinburgh English Language Research Unit in the late 60's. It used a deliberately limited dictionary of functional words and a small group of verbs. The grammar was quite simple and the parse built what looked like a trie with all paths in parallel until most of them had been terminated. It ran on the KDF9 with 96KB of core.
The point was it could cope with any sentence. Unrecognized words were simply listed as o/c for open class. Naturally it went nowhere in the UK.
Yes I can definitely believe that. :-( .
The thing is humans produce new nouns, adjectives and verbs daily, just as old ones fall into disuse (who has used "fax" in a sentence this week who's not involved with the legal profession?)
Any true NLU system has to cope with 2 problems. Understanding what it is being told and adding to that understanding over time.
Because humans can do both. I think the second may be trickier.
Wow.
And the MIT Automated Assistant project (from the late 70's and early 80's) gets re-born
Yet again.
These people really do have zero history of their supposed "science," that's more than about 5YO. It's like dealing with a goldfish with a PhD.
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