-
Power Systems Reliability Challenges
It is becoming more common for fire ants to build nests in pad mounted equipment. Their nesting materials can cause short circuits, the ants can eat away at conductor insulation, and they make equipment maintenance a challenge. from Power System Reliability, by Richard Brown, in the Electric Power Engineering Handbook The subdued poetry of engineering…
-
Software comes from the sky and labor is overpaid: NOT!
John Dvorak concludes an otherwise sensible article on the effect of Linux/Office-clone packages combined with netbooks with the following: If Intel can provide users with powerful little systems for $99 and has been pushing prices lower and lower over the years, why can’t Microsoft? Intel makes elaborate hardware in billion-dollar factories. Microsoft stamps out a…
-
Marine One Blueprints via Pirates Bay
Goodness. The US blueprints for Marine1 show up in Iran. “What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said. Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same…
-
Are threads evil? (updated)
This paper by Prof. Edward Lee explains something of why “threads” are such a painful abstraction. As Prof. Lee notes, threads intrinsically create unspecified program operation (which he calls non-determinism) and resource conflicts which we then attempt to “prune” via synchronization and complex tools. In an earlier note, I argued that we should design real-time…
-
Venture Capital falls off the cliff
Through all the bumps and strains in the broader economy, venture outlays kept up an almost eerily steady pace over the previous 21 months, ranging between $7.3 billion and $8 billion each quarter, from the start of 2007 to the third quarter of last year, according to the MoneyTree survey, which tracks venture-capital investments. But…
-
Mobile device security and President Obama
Obama’s fighting hard to keep his Blackberry President Barack Obama will have a beloved BlackBerry — and maybe a second, more secure smartphone-like device — with him in the White House. The president has been adamant about continuing to use a BlackBerry, a smartphone with Internet and e-mail access, despite concerns that are likely making…
