Good news?
Lots of cheap(er) shiny shiny on the way?
243 posts • joined 16 Apr 2021
My car was hit from the side and declared a "total loss". The insurance is paying out 9% more than I paid for it 2 years ago.
Not a good time to need a replacement though, as second hand are hard to find and expensive, whilst new have a 9+ month lead time.
But it's the whole signal path that needs to be considered, and this is reducing noise significantly where the signal is already very low. A significant boost in signal to noise ratio will result, making it easier to detect the signal, even in the presence of other, external noise sources.
Like him or hate him Elon Musk's tweet is compelling.
The reason there is a difference is down to the use of different development methodologies. NASA use design with modelling and simulation with the aim of producing a product that works "first time" (after some extended integration testing). SpaceX design a feature, build and test (without the long, drawn out modelling and simulation phase) - with the expectation that there will be failures leading to design iteration.
SpaceX used this for Falcon and doing the same for Starship (none of the test plans for the flights to date where required to land in one piece).
NASA's method should give a reliable, fully-functional vehicle on first launch, but the contract structure that's been used does not give any really priority to this being "on time" or "on budget"; SpaceX are working to a fixed price.
Each SLS launch is going to come in at something like $7.8B (vehicle and amortised project costs), and there are only enough parts for 5 (I think). Each flight dumps four engines in the sea that could easily have been reused something like 16 times.
Starship costs are not yet publicly available, but Elon has mentioned $2M per launch; even if they is off by two orders of magnitude, it will still make SLS a very expensive launch vehicle.
Russia has also announced that it will not be supplying any more engines (which get used for military flights, among other things) to the US. Support for those they already have has also been withdrawn.
Work was already under way to replace them (someone pointed out that it probably wasn't a good idea to have the defence of your country dependent on a hostile nation - duh! Really?), but the program is running late...
Updated to add:
Provided it means there will always be enough power for the UPS to do its main job.
Octopus Energy in the UK have already teamed up with Tesla to provide a VPP (Tesla Energy Plan), with consumers getting charged a much lower rate for electricity for joining the program, so it looks as if everything is in place to make this happen.
The problem with the AGRs is that the graphite core has reached end-of-life in four reactors (2 closed, 2 closing this year), with the others getting closer. There is no practicable way to replace the graphite. The reactors have all run well beyond their design life as it is.
There was a proposal to build a Thorium reactor at Wylfa (an old Magnox site) and use it to extend the life of the generators and transformers, but it was not possible to get funding.
That's in the "legacy ponds" that are related to the early days of the nuclear weapons program; all that was important then was recovery of plutonium.
Things are much better when you look at current spent fuel processing and reactor decommissioning. BBC 4's "Britain’s Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield" gave some great coverage of this.
I just gave it a try under MacOS with a large ODT document. Whilst it managed to render the main content, it completely messed up the formatting:
1) Page numbering (in a table within the footer to control the position) was not shown.
2) Page headings (is a table within the header so they are displayed rotated within the margins) was missing.
3) The correct font was used, but the wrong face.
4) Character and page styles seem to be ignored completely.
Mind you, from memory this is what Word does when it imports the same document, so the "compatibility with Word" seems to be there ;-)
The pdf export is also inferior to that with LibreOffice (no TOC generation, ...).
A pity, as the user interface looks reasonable (on a quick play).
The problem with C and C++ (possibly to a lesser extent when well implemented), is there is virtually no runtime error checking. This means it is very easy to run off the ends of something like a C style array, as these are accessed (at the machine level) using a pointer (possibly with an offset).
I have for years thought it would be beneficial if the CPU had registers dedicated for pointers, so that automatic protection could be built in that would do something like trigger a hardware trap if the pointer ever held an invalid value. For example, the pointer "register" would include the upper and lower bounds, so that any dereference of the pointer value would lead to an exception (hardware or software). This would obviously require some work within the compliers and would really need pointer provenance adding to the relevant language standards.
The real issue with the way things are is that programmers know what needs to be done, but it is very, very easy to make one or two mistakes when working on large, complex applications where the combinatorial explosion of control flow paths means it is not possible for a human or analysis tool to be able to detect all possible failures. Lots of explicit bounds tests can be added to try and stop them, but that can lead to serious runtime performance penalties.
Isn't the real issue that they will only be allowed (by regulation) to make Cat I approaches, so they will have to divert to their alternate if the weather is poor?
In reality, this may mean that the departure is delayed or cancelled as diversions incur costs and result in aircraft being out of position.
Seems like this government would like to remove the powers from anything that has the ability to challenge them or find against them (ICO, courts, ...)
Added: Whilst at the same time selectively "dis-applying" laws that they themselves have introduced (I'm looking at you, Boris).
That would be the time an engineer moved a 1000A, 80V PSU (about 1m x 1m x 2.5m) without unplugging it, which ripped the three-phase socket off the wall, causing the phases to short together. Luckily, the protection for the circuit kept the bang reasonably local.
Another time, the same guy was having trouble getting some thermocouples to stay in place on a power board (open) he was working on (it was connected to one of above PSUs, but it was only set to 48v). He decided that a large lump of solid brass would do the job, so put it on top. The PCB was a charred, smoking mess by the time the block had stopped jumping in the air and throwing molten metal in all directions...
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