Of course you're right to ironically point out that tax payers money should have been better spent, especially for struggling sectors.
In that case I would rather have mixed feelings: too bad for the country, those wasted resources are a shame. Still good news for IT jobs.
And employees are not the ones to blame. We are not parasites fed in an ecosystem maintained by a deficient management. Or are we?
Usually when I hear about a doomed IT project, I share my optimism with other colleagues:
this means that we still have plenty of IT job offers guaranteed by these failing managements.
At the recent Google “Solve for X” conference on February 7, Lockheed Martin's long-term R&D department (“Skunk Works”) announced they are working on a compact fusion reactor. With what seems a 4th generation prototype called "T4", the aerospace giant says to have developed a high beta configuration, which allows a compact reactor design and faster development timeline.
Public reactions describe the announcement of their activities on nuclear fusion remarkable, because Lockheed Martin doesn't usually make public announcements about Skunkwork projects unless they have a high degree of confidence in their chances of success. The developement timeline indicates plans to have a prototype 100-megawatt nuclear fusion machine of Lockheed Martin tested in 2017, and that a fully operational machine should be grid-ready ten years from now.
Some of the properties reported from the presentation:
- A self-tuning feedback mechanism whereby the magnetic field increases the farther out that the plasma goes
- Novel magnetic field configuration that has very few open field lines compared to tokamak design
- Very "good arch curvature" of the field lines The system has a beta of about 1
- System is working with D-T fuel
Although the presentation is short on details, Lockheed Skunk Words has a phenomenal track record, and they are putting their reputation of the line when they make this kind of announcement at a high profile Google event. A video of the presentation is here.
Biolite team has done extensive field test for their homestove, it really works (and rocks) for those people who do the daily cooking with wood stove.
And they use it to charge their cell phones and home light batteries, while saving on wood.
I use the summer camp smaller "geek" version of this stove, I'm happy with it even if it has some limitations the home version hasn't.
Out of 15 SSD tested, only 2 are failure proof under power fault (only one maker and model).
(yes, I've read the pdf)
I'd like to know who is the winner, the anonymous vendor/model called "A-2".
It is not the most expensive, almost the cheapest, but it has at least a power-loss protection.
Another vendor has power-loss protection but his models failed the tests.
Direct link to pdf and figures erratum.
Bit Corruption: SSD#11, SSD#12, SSD#15
Flying Writes: none
ShornWrites: SSD#5, SSD#14, SSD#15
UnserializableWrites: SSD#2, SSD#4, SSD#7, SSD#8, SSD#9, SSD#11, SSD#12, SSD#13, HDD#1
Metadata Corruption: SSD#3
Dead Device: SSD#1
No failure: SSD#6, SSD#10, HDD#2
Their last word conclusion
We recommend system builders either not use SSDs for important information that needs to be durable or that they test their actual SSD models carefully under actual power failures beforehand. Failure to do so risks massive data loss.
Thanks again for this link to the Usenix study, too bad you posted anon (patent need mod up).
This isn't inner waves, but water moving back and forth in a U shaped tank (water is pushed by compressed air on the tops of the U shape, alternatively).
So there's no wave at all in the tank.
I just wonder:
Is the counter-reaction mainly cause by the counter-weight of the water which fills only one side of the U tank, or by the momentum (acceleration) given to the water rolling in the tank ?
In either case, it could be more easily done with some solid weight on rails, with less energy lost (air compression and fluid displacement).
If I copy huge files, while doing video processing, running a VM, and switching from one tab to another in the web browser, the system become quite unusable...
He could still be responsive with dynamic I/O priority handled by GUI and kernel.
What we lack most is some intention-aware GUI and OS kernel, working together so that the right process get the right priority and that I/O bottlenecks are handled gracefully.
Content creation activities are often I/O and CPU demanding, and even on creativity praised OS such as Mac OS we have this big problem of I/O channel unawareness.
Example:
One need to be able to start a huge file copy with a background intent so it will be throttled when the user starts a video effect preview which writes temporary files on one of the same disks of the copy.
The GUI gives the video preview higher priority, even on I/O, and the kernel detects the bottleneck on one of the disks and decide to almost freeze the file copy.
But then the user start the full video rendering in background, the GUI assigns the lower priority and the file copy resume to full I/O speed.
The famous joke is allready at equilibrium and the site knows this !
BTW, thanks for the link
Apple, in their next Mac, is considering a cylindrical tower, w/ an internal 3 plane cooling that cools everything.
Nice design, with the heat sink in the core like a funnel or chimney.
Its shape isn't compact, the cylinder is hollow, and this is not passive cooling
"The form factor also echoes the shape of the single large fan located in the bottom of the machine." ref
To do nothing is to be nothing.
