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#161
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Then and now
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#162
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Then and now
On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:30:27 -0600, "
wrote: On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:06:21 -0600, Vic Smith wrote: Right, but business IT is a small corner of the world of programming. A rather important corner for IBM, however, who still like PL/I (and derivatives) quite a lot. ;-) I highly doubt that. Most of us engage in many business transactions every day. Just guessing, but my estimate is 90% of programming is business/finance related. One of the C programmers under my umbrella when I was an account manager, and whose technical skills I respected, told me it was a dead end, since the functions had all been written, and that's where the "fun" was. That was mid-nineties. "All the functions have been written" is rather like "everything that can be invented, has". He was a nerd that way, but I saw his point. There are only so many common math functions used in business. That's not to say new processing needs don't arise or the work ends. He just found doing anything twice boring. And IT is basically repetition of the same concepts over and over. You get some new stuff now and then, like new database structures and access language, OOB and the like, most recently html and .net, blah, blah. I was working SAP data warehouse and ABAP when I retired, but wasn't young enough to be excited about it. Same old. Input, move, tweak and present data. BTW, SAP is a fast-spreading German enterprise-wide IT solution, and the Indians have 2 legs up on running it. They train in India assiduously. Don't know if the Indian government has a hand in IT training, but the Indians sure have a plan and a goal to employ as many in IT as possible. I see nothing like that here in the U.S. Despite rampant unemployment. In fact the U.S. corporate trend is to continue offshoring work, Obama's bull**** notwithstanding. Everything I did was assembler, Cobol, and a smattering of other languages that got sold to IT managers as the latest panacea. A preferred language is often just tradition or "religion." No issues with that. I could do any mathematical function in COBOL that Fortran could do by making a subprogram call. Wrong. By your own admission you don't even touch a huge area of mathematics. Believe me, you don't need to know higher math in business IT. That's what mathematicians and accountants are for. All you have to do is put their formulae in code and test it. They wouldn't have it any other way. Again, not the point. I'm sure you're very good at what you do. I see what you're saying there, and you're correct. But I didn't mean to imply that COBOL and Fortran are equal, or that business processing touches all the scientific math areas. My point was more to how languages gain fans in their own communities, and that Fortran could easily be replaced by COBOL with calls to assembler sub-routines. No Fortran at all in the mix. But why bother disturbing Fortran fans? If it's working for them that's good enough. General Engineering. Don't ask me what they do. Design armys? ;-) hehe. I recommended he join the FBI when he got his degree. He looked at me like I was crazy. Right. That accounts for real 15% unemployment. There is a big difference between manufacturing and manufacturing employment. The US manufactures more than it ever has. Manufacturing is a lower percentage of employment, however, as one would expect. http://www.uschina.org/public/docume...ufacturing.pdf You can twist figures however you want. This might be of interest. http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/...ing-losing-out You're far more cynical than I. More like realistic. No, cynical. I'll cop to skeptical. That's it. I was a steelworker, autoworker and had other mfg jobs before I went into IT. Saw the writing on the wall. Sure. Unions are dead, except those on the public dole. Unions were a part of it. They're the single reason the auto and steel industries are all but dead. "All but", only because of domestic non-union car manufacturing. Sure. The GM engineers were designing quality products, and GM management was taking good care of customers. It was all the workers fault with their evil unions. Bet you liked your Chevy Vega except for the worker labor part. BTW, my first job out of the Navy in '67 was at U.S. Steel South works. Now look at salaries, benefits, and union productivity obstacles, not to mention union thuggery. It was *not* all management's fault that GM sank. ...and it will continue, perhaps even more rapidly now. Same union at Ford, but huge difference in outcome. "Union thuggery." Funny. You going to trot out a story about how your dad was beaten with baseball bats because he refused to strike. Already heard that one. Decrepit blast furnaces while the rest of the world had moved to BOP. The millwrights I worked with could shave babbitt bearings and the sweethearting Steelworkers union got them all of 3 bucks an hour. There was a book written how the CEO drove that company to ruin. A lot of that is tax policy, too, as well as union work rules. After that I went to IH building dozers and dealt with the management incompetence there. Another place that went bust, but I won't bore you with my personal observations. They involve production and the QC thereof, so don't count.. A book was written about how Archie McCardle drove IH to ruin too. Never read either book, but since I was at both places as a Steelworker and Autoworker I guess it was all my fault and I got the blame. *******s. You see nothing that the unions did wrong here? Nope. There were never fat wages at U.S. Steel or IH. Just incompetent management. I was there. No "work rule" impediments either. Biggest difference was when a foreman at U.S. Steel told you do something that would get you killed, you might do it. At IH you would tell the foreman to go **** himself. Nothing wrong with that "work rule" to me. Details upon request. But most of the non-union manufacturing is gone too. No, it's not. It's just different. You mean just because "Made in China" is stamped on damn near everything a consumer buys, it's different? Okay, I'll go along with that. Oh, cut the bull****. We were talking about US manufacturing. There are a *LOT* of cars made by non-union shops, right here in the US and quite competitively You get off the union bull****. I was talking manufacturing and now you're ragging on unions. Plenty of non-union manufacturing was offshored. First off I only buy union made cars, because I like Chevys. No choice. But most Chevys are union-made - in Canada, a foreign country. I guess I could buy a German or Jap union-made import, or a non-union one made here, but I'm sticking with Chevys. Anyway cars aren't a big expense for me since I get them used and cheap. My car costs don't even come close to $300 a year. I wrench and so does my kid. I just got off the phone ordering a Mexican-made Kenmore fridge for $700 to replace the $500 Mexican-made fridge I bought about 5 years ago and which just started making serious noise today.. A Mexican fridge for a Mexican fridge. A few years ago I spent $600 on a Mexican GE washer and another $200 on a warranty for it. Earlier this year I spent about a $1000 in computer components to build a new box. Nothing made in the U.S. I probably spent $1000 this year on various electronic gifts for my kids. Nothing made in the U.S. Spent a few hundred on power tools. None U.S.made. Got a U.S. made nail set and hammer. Big whoop. My next expense will be a flat screen TV. Probably another $500 for small, at least $1000 for big.. Tell me where to find one made in the U.S. Anybody can read a balance of trade chart for manufactured goods. As you see if you read the article above, some of U.S. manufacturing is non-tradeble products. So I buy U.S. made toilet paper. All the junk mail I get is U.S. made. That's all part of your American "manufacturing" claim. I don't have the figures on tradable vs. non-tradable, but it's easy to read balance of trade charts for manufactured goods. Don't need to though when you can see everything you're buying is made elsewhere. Where the hell are you getting U.S made products besides Jap and German cars made here? You buying Boeing airplanes? Good on you. But you might soon be buying Chinese airplanes. Non-union made. The biggest part was U.S companies could get cheap labor offshore, and better management that paid attention to quality. You've obviously never dealt with offshore production. You might notice that imported items are getting higher marks than Ford, GM and Chrysler in general. That boat has sailed. A lot of those "imported items" are not. Easy claim to make, but if there's no U.S. made counterpart to compare against what's the difference? You don't have a choice. Ok, I'm done with this. It never goes anywhere. You take the last shots. --Vic |
#163
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Then and now (Chrysler engines)
The Daring Dufas writes:
On 12/30/2010 10:36 AM, notbob wrote: Fury I named Christine because you couldn't kill it. :-) LOL!..... |
#164
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#165
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On 12/27/2010 10:30 PM, Stormin Mormon wrote:
Fornication for sainthood? Man, that's some messed up cult. It's likely one of the more popular reasons for starting a cult. Lot of ministers like that free loving. Anyways, Whats up with your news reader in that it drops all the original post below your sig (where it subsequently gets lost)? Everybody is used to this by now, but it is wrong, and why is it that way? Jeff |
#166
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On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:46:30 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote: On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:30:27 -0600, " wrote: On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:06:21 -0600, Vic Smith wrote: Right, but business IT is a small corner of the world of programming. A rather important corner for IBM, however, who still like PL/I (and derivatives) quite a lot. ;-) I highly doubt that. Most of us engage in many business transactions every day. Just guessing, but my estimate is 90% of programming is business/finance related. I think you would be wrong, considering that even toasters have a computers in them, today. One of the C programmers under my umbrella when I was an account manager, and whose technical skills I respected, told me it was a dead end, since the functions had all been written, and that's where the "fun" was. That was mid-nineties. "All the functions have been written" is rather like "everything that can be invented, has". He was a nerd that way, but I saw his point. There are only so many common math functions used in business. That's not to say new processing needs don't arise or the work ends. He was myopic. He just found doing anything twice boring. That part I understand. And IT is basically repetition of the same concepts over and over. You get some new stuff now and then, like new database structures and access language, OOB and the like, most recently html and .net, blah, blah. I was working SAP data warehouse and ABAP when I retired, but wasn't young enough to be excited about it. Same old. Input, move, tweak and present data. BTW, SAP is a fast-spreading German enterprise-wide IT solution, and the Indians have 2 legs up on running it. They train in India assiduously. That's something kids here don't do. They don't do *anything*, other than perhaps Nintendo and maybe round-ball, assiduously. Don't know if the Indian government has a hand in IT training, but the Indians sure have a plan and a goal to employ as many in IT as possible. I see nothing like that here in the U.S. Despite rampant unemployment. In fact the U.S. corporate trend is to continue offshoring work, Obama's bull**** notwithstanding. They really have no choice. It's too expensive to hire people here. Obummer is piling on a *lot* more crap, too. Everything I did was assembler, Cobol, and a smattering of other languages that got sold to IT managers as the latest panacea. A preferred language is often just tradition or "religion." No issues with that. I could do any mathematical function in COBOL that Fortran could do by making a subprogram call. Wrong. By your own admission you don't even touch a huge area of mathematics. Believe me, you don't need to know higher math in business IT. That's what mathematicians and accountants are for. All you have to do is put their formulae in code and test it. They wouldn't have it any other way. Again, not the point. I'm sure you're very good at what you do. I see what you're saying there, and you're correct. But I didn't mean to imply that COBOL and Fortran are equal, or that business processing touches all the scientific math areas. My point was more to how languages gain fans in their own communities, and that Fortran could easily be replaced by COBOL with calls to assembler sub-routines. No Fortran at all in the mix. But why bother disturbing Fortran fans? If it's working for them that's good enough. Sure, but it's fun to tweak the zealots. Me? I do assembler (don't care what) and VHDL. But I don't do much programming, per se. C ruined that fun. General Engineering. Don't ask me what they do. Design armys? ;-) hehe. I recommended he join the FBI when he got his degree. He looked at me like I was crazy. One of our embedded programmers left a year ago to join the FBI. They asked him whether he wanted white-collar or counter-terrorism detail. He chose counter-terrorism. smack! Right. That accounts for real 15% unemployment. There is a big difference between manufacturing and manufacturing employment. The US manufactures more than it ever has. Manufacturing is a lower percentage of employment, however, as one would expect. http://www.uschina.org/public/docume...ufacturing.pdf You can twist figures however you want. This might be of interest. http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/...ing-losing-out It's not twisting anything. The fact is that we *are* producing more than ever, albeit with a smaller percentage of the workforce. Since more people are doing non-manufacturing work, this is expected. COmpanies are off-shoring because they simply can't afford to hire people here, and it's not only because they want too much money. Our government forces the issue. Prestowitz' article has a lot of holes in it. You're far more cynical than I. More like realistic. No, cynical. I'll cop to skeptical. That's it. No, skeptical means you're still looking for the strings. ;-) I was a steelworker, autoworker and had other mfg jobs before I went into IT. Saw the writing on the wall. Sure. Unions are dead, except those on the public dole. Unions were a part of it. They're the single reason the auto and steel industries are all but dead. "All but", only because of domestic non-union car manufacturing. Sure. The GM engineers were designing quality products, and GM management was taking good care of customers. It was all the workers fault with their evil unions. Bet you liked your Chevy Vega except for the worker labor part. BTW, my first job out of the Navy in '67 was at U.S. Steel South works. Now look at salaries, benefits, and union productivity obstacles, not to mention union thuggery. It was *not* all management's fault that GM sank. ...and it will continue, perhaps even more rapidly now. Same union at Ford, but huge difference in outcome. Not really. Ford was on the ropes a short couple of years ago but did get some concessions that GM didn't get. Why? ...if the government is going to hand the keys over to you. "Union thuggery." Funny. That's exactly what it was. Unions colluded to strike one company, forcing it to knuckle under. If the companies had done the same they'd the bosses would be in jail. You going to trot out a story about how your dad was beaten with baseball bats because he refused to strike. Already heard that one. My father would never have worked in a union shop. Neither would I. They're vile. Decrepit blast furnaces while the rest of the world had moved to BOP. The millwrights I worked with could shave babbitt bearings and the sweethearting Steelworkers union got them all of 3 bucks an hour. There was a book written how the CEO drove that company to ruin. A lot of that is tax policy, too, as well as union work rules. After that I went to IH building dozers and dealt with the management incompetence there. Another place that went bust, but I won't bore you with my personal observations. They involve production and the QC thereof, so don't count.. A book was written about how Archie McCardle drove IH to ruin too. Never read either book, but since I was at both places as a Steelworker and Autoworker I guess it was all my fault and I got the blame. *******s. You see nothing that the unions did wrong here? Nope. There were never fat wages at U.S. Steel or IH. Just incompetent management. I was there. No "work rule" impediments either. You're blind. Biggest difference was when a foreman at U.S. Steel told you do something that would get you killed, you might do it. At IH you would tell the foreman to go **** himself. Nothing wrong with that "work rule" to me. Details upon request. But most of the non-union manufacturing is gone too. No, it's not. It's just different. You mean just because "Made in China" is stamped on damn near everything a consumer buys, it's different? Okay, I'll go along with that. Oh, cut the bull****. We were talking about US manufacturing. There are a *LOT* of cars made by non-union shops, right here in the US and quite competitively You get off the union bull****. I was talking manufacturing and now you're ragging on unions. Unions aren't part of manufacturing? You whine about management, but want the poor unions left alone? yikes! Plenty of non-union manufacturing was offshored. Sure. I've talked about government policy as the other shoe. First off I only buy union made cars, because I like Chevys. Wouldn't touch one, particularly now. I had one, hated it. No choice. But most Chevys are union-made - in Canada, a foreign country. I guess I could buy a German or Jap union-made import, or a non-union one made here, but I'm sticking with Chevys. Anyway cars aren't a big expense for me since I get them used and cheap. My car costs don't even come close to $300 a year. I wrench and so does my kid. I just got off the phone ordering a Mexican-made Kenmore fridge for $700 to replace the $500 Mexican-made fridge I bought about 5 years ago and which just started making serious noise today.. A Mexican fridge for a Mexican fridge. A few years ago I spent $600 on a Mexican GE washer and another $200 on a warranty for it. Earlier this year I spent about a $1000 in computer components to build a new box. Nothing made in the U.S. That's funny. The appliances I've bought in the past couple of years were made in the US. I probably spent $1000 this year on various electronic gifts for my kids. Nothing made in the U.S. I'll bet the processors were. Spent a few hundred on power tools. None U.S.made. Few are. Some are surprising, though. I just bought a router lift, made in Canuckistan. Got a U.S. made nail set and hammer. Big whoop. My next expense will be a flat screen TV. Probably another $500 for small, at least $1000 for big.. Tell me where to find one made in the U.S. Anybody can read a balance of trade chart for manufactured goods. We still are the #3 exporter of manufactured goods. The balance of trade is horrible primarily because of fuel imports. Nothing will be done about that, other to than put us deeper into a recession. As you see if you read the article above, some of U.S. manufacturing is non-tradeble products. So I buy U.S. made toilet paper. All the junk mail I get is U.S. made. That's all part of your American "manufacturing" claim. I don't have the figures on tradable vs. non-tradable, but it's easy to read balance of trade charts for manufactured goods. Don't need to though when you can see everything you're buying is made elsewhere. Everything *YOU* buy is made elsewhere. Where the hell are you getting U.S made products besides Jap and German cars made here? At Lowes, in fact. You buying Boeing airplanes? Good on you. But you might soon be buying Chinese airplanes. Non-union made. The biggest part was U.S companies could get cheap labor offshore, and better management that paid attention to quality. You've obviously never dealt with offshore production. You might notice that imported items are getting higher marks than Ford, GM and Chrysler in general. That boat has sailed. A lot of those "imported items" are not. Easy claim to make, but if there's no U.S. made counterpart to compare against what's the difference? You don't have a choice. Certainly you have a choice. You don't even take it when it's offered. Ok, I'm done with this. It never goes anywhere. You take the last shots. So, you write a long screed, much of it in error, and run off? Whatever. |
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#168
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On 12/27/2010 9:18 AM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
? "Molly Brown" wrote Ed Pawlowski wrote: So you'd really rather have a 19" B & W TV instead of a flat screen HD with a 47" screen? My family lives better with more air conditioning, computers, bigger and better refrigerators. The point that I was trying to make was that his evidence supporting his postulate that things are better now is faulty for the exact same reason that you stated of appliances being “more, bigger, better” In other words he is comparing apples with oranges. We did not have computers or color TVs then but we also didn’t have to call the repair person or mechanic almost every day when those so called “better” appliances and cars crammed with more and more idiotic“ amenities” or “water and energy saver” features break down. I recall changing tubes in the old TVs frequently while the newer ones go for many years with no repair. I typically drive my cars over 150,000 miles and change spark plugs one time at 100k. Maintenance on newer cars is a bit more complex, but it is needed far less. I remember cleaning spark plugs every 5000 miles and replacing them at 10,000 miles, along with point and maybe wires. And resetting the timing along the way and adjusting points after a few thousand miles. I had a 70 MGB. You'd get to work on that almost any day, particularly if you needed to get home! Everything last so much longer on a car today. Certainly internal engine parts. Cars really are a lot better. So are TVs, what you had to go through when color first came out. Now some of those old products were substantially built, and money was spent on appearance (chrome bumpers, furniture cabinets for TVs), but technology has made them a lot more reliable and less of a pain to own and operate. Jeff No thanks, I'll keep my newer cars that are cheaper to operate than any of my older cars. My other appliances are just as good as they were in the past. You can buy a decent basic gas or electric range for about $400 to $500. You can also get better quality for $4000 if that is your desire. Did you include the cost of what you pay to the service technician or the parts supplier or store for renewing every two years that cheap made in China garbage when you said “But since we can more easily afford appliances, we can more easily afford that bag of potatoes. The last time I had an appliance serviced was about 20 years ago. Maybe you need to buy better brands. I did just replace my dryer that was 29 years old and a few years ago, we opted for a new gas range rather than fix the 25 year old one. When I said I wish I could buy the same appliance I used then I wasn’t referring to a TV set, computer or microwave oven but a range, dishwasher, clothes washer, dryer or the early self defrosting refrigerators which were substantially durable than what we have now. I'm not so sure. Other than your perception, do you have evidence? Seems to me that appliances did go through a stage about 5 to 10 years ago where they were less reliable, but they seem to have rebounded. That is my perception, not something I can prove. I can even make a point about color TVs, computers and text messaging cell phones which have killed social skills, conceptual thinking and the English language if you like. The last genius we had was Einstein with E=MC2. I dare you to name one Shakespeare, Beethoven or Da Vinci since then. You don’t even see anymore polymaths like our founding fathers anymore. What we have are bored so called “professionals” who only want to go home and play SimCity or Call of Duty. Why do you think that is? While I agree with you there, it has nothing to do with reliability and quality of a refrigerator. Many do say that TV has destroyed the human species. That would be a different thread though. |
#169
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Not sure. Others have mentioned it to me.
-- Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus www.lds.org .. "Jeff Thies" wrote in message ... On 12/27/2010 10:30 PM, Stormin Mormon wrote: Fornication for sainthood? Man, that's some messed up cult. It's likely one of the more popular reasons for starting a cult. Lot of ministers like that free loving. Anyways, Whats up with your news reader in that it drops all the original post below your sig (where it subsequently gets lost)? Everybody is used to this by now, but it is wrong, and why is it that way? Jeff |
#170
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?
"Jeff Thies" wrote I had a 70 MGB. You'd get to work on that almost any day, particularly if you needed to get home! Everything last so much longer on a car today. Certainly internal engine parts. Cars really are a lot better. So are TVs, what you had to go through when color first came out. Now some of those old products were substantially built, and money was spent on appearance (chrome bumpers, furniture cabinets for TVs), but technology has made them a lot more reliable and less of a pain to own and operate. Jeff Oh, the MG, Healy, and a few others wee nice care if you could keep them running. I didn't mention it, but care from the early 50's would often need a ring job (and maybe bearings) at 50,000 miles. Today, 200,000 is nothing. |
#171
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"
wrote: There is nothing wrong with either but don't expect any guarantees. Don't go deep into debt to get the paper. OK so what abt health care? Such as a biochemistry degree.... or pharmacy degree? Something for a 40 something to switch careers to? |
#172
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?
wrote in message ... " wrote: There is nothing wrong with either but don't expect any guarantees. Don't go deep into debt to get the paper. OK so what abt health care? Such as a biochemistry degree.... or pharmacy degree? Something for a 40 something to switch careers to? Pharmacy is something like 5 years. Pays well though, seems steady as we get older. |
#173
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#174
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On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 09:32:30 -0500, "Ed Pawlowski" wrote:
? wrote in message .. . " wrote: There is nothing wrong with either but don't expect any guarantees. Don't go deep into debt to get the paper. OK so what abt health care? Such as a biochemistry degree.... or pharmacy degree? Something for a 40 something to switch careers to? Pharmacy is something like 5 years. Pays well though, seems steady as we get older. ....and will be completely controlled, lock, stock, and salary, by Obamacare. |
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On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:10:50 -0500, "Stormin Mormon"
wrote: Not sure. Others have mentioned it to me. Dumbass, it's because you insist on top-posting. |
#176
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In article ,
" wrote: ...and will be completely controlled, lock, stock, and salary, by Obamacare. For the better paying jobs, the PharmD is really becoming the entry level degree. -- "Even I realized that money was to politicians what the ecalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter and something to crap on." ---PJ O'Rourke |
#177
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"Ed Pawlowski" wrote:
Pharmacy is something like 5 years. Pays well though, seems steady as we get older. yes I am thinking a pharmacist can be an old man job.... that is work part time even into your 80s and still make decent money yes? |
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#179
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Vic Smith wrote:
.... Just guessing, but my estimate is 90% of programming is business/finance related. By what measure? Unless it is in a nonprofit or academic setting, one could say that _everything_ is business related since that's what companies are about. OTOH, if one is talking of either LOC or other measures of actual code generation, I'd venture direct financial or business applications still remain a subset. .... and that Fortran could easily be replaced by COBOL with calls to assembler sub-routines. No Fortran at all in the mix. But why bother disturbing Fortran fans? If it's working for them that's good enough. What one really shouldn't do is to make rash assertions w/o some basic knowledge of the area at all. "Theoretically possible" doesn't come even close to equating to "easily". I would venture that you're not even aware that there is still active development of the Fortran Standard and modern features continually being added to the language that include object-oriented features, etc., etc., etc., ... What Fortran has that none of the alternatives you've mentioned have is support for vector processing and other features suited to massive computing that are simply not amenable to the models you've outlined nor are there suitable compilers for much of the hardware used in those computing environments of the type. If you were to take and try to accomplish the computation in a fashion as you've outlined above, besides taking orders of magnitude longer to develop you'd find that it wouldn't have adequate performance to be of any use in the end, anyway. -- |
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On Dec 26, 6:52*pm, Molly Brown wrote:
On Dec 26, 1:38*pm, Dean Hoffman wrote: * * The links are to the Carpe Diem site. *It's written by an economics professor. *He is comparing what Americans could buy back in the 60s with what we can buy now. * Things are better now. * *http://tinyurl.com/2bal4ta * *http://tinyurl.com/3y79pgq * *The stuff in his examples are used in the home. Mr. Mark J. Perry should take off his idiot cap and compare how many hours we have to work to buy the same EXACT things we use today with the same EXACT things we used then. You can no longer buy the same exact appliance you used then; in fact I wish you could because it lasted ten times longer. Here are some examples of some things that he REALLY should have compared instead: A five pound bag of Potatoes A pound of 20% fat Ground beef A pound of plain rice Seeing a doctor Seeing a dentist Seeing a lawyer Trash pick-up service (once a week) A kilowatt of electricity used A cubic foot of water used A cubic foot of natural gas used All these have stayed exactly the same. You're probably getting by fairly cheaply on food compared to in the past. A couple tables here from the United States Department of Agriculture if you're interested: http://tinyurl.com/25c6tbe http://tinyurl.com/29d89lh One more here using 1988 as the baseline: http://tinyurl.com/2c22yl7 |
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On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:34:23 -0600, dpb wrote:
Vic Smith wrote: ... Just guessing, but my estimate is 90% of programming is business/finance related. By what measure? Unless it is in a nonprofit or academic setting, one could say that _everything_ is business related since that's what companies are about. By "business" I mean business transaction processing, and the "non-scientific" internal business needs such as accounting, planning, projections, inventory, payrolls, etc. It would take a library books to lay them all out, and though I've run across many of them, I'm far from an expert. The only measure I used, and the only one I know of, is demand for programmers and analysts, in my experience only. I spent about 15 years with CGA and CTG, big programmer body shops. We also did project work, but it was mostly providing bodies. And I knew folks in other big outfits, like EMS and smaller. Sometimes I was in management and a lot of reqs went through my hands. I say "sometimes" because I always worked as a programmer or analyst at a client site, but had "management" responsibilities as a field rep and moved around quite a bit. Suffice it to I never saw a req for a Fortran programmer. Not saying there never was one. I left that to take a staff position with a client about the time we were getting reqs for C ++, late '90's. Of course I'm near Chicago, with a lot of business corporation HQs and processing centers, so I understand my view is skewed. That's why I said "guessing." Bell Labs and Argonne are nearby, but I don't recall ever serving them. My brother worked at Bell Labs and told me the language he was using for switch design was proprietary - don't remember what it was called. He's an egghead with various engineering and CS Masters degrees. I suppose engineering types like my brother and son just use whatever language serves their math needs. Business uses relatively simple math and is mostly processing simple but massive amounts of transactions. Anyway, I knew all the big business programming shops in this area and the approximate size of their programming staffs. It was a massive number. I'm sure Silicone Valley, NASA and others have quite different overall needs. Just going by my experience, that's all. Anybody else can relate theirs. OTOH, if one is talking of either LOC or other measures of actual code generation, I'd venture direct financial or business applications still remain a subset. I don't know. Like I said, my only measure is bodies doing programming. LOC is meaningless. I can code a "Hello World" in one line or a thousand. What I do know is every time I make a move with my CC or bank or cell phone that movement gets processed by millions of lines of code by the many business applications I mentioned. OTOH I'm a gamer, and my games use what I assume is advanced vector processing, and I probably execute more instructions playing games than my financial transactions create. I sometimes read the "programming staff" scroll after a game. Not many programmers at all. All kinds of ways of looking at it. ... and that Fortran could easily be replaced by COBOL with calls to assembler sub-routines. No Fortran at all in the mix. But why bother disturbing Fortran fans? If it's working for them that's good enough. What one really shouldn't do is to make rash assertions w/o some basic knowledge of the area at all. "Theoretically possible" doesn't come even close to equating to "easily". I would venture that you're not even aware that there is still active development of the Fortran Standard and modern features continually being added to the language that include object-oriented features, etc., etc., etc., ... Ok, I take "easily" back. Yes, I was aware that Fortran continues to add to the package. Also know that there has been some implementation of COBOL OOB. And that there are still plenty of RPG AS/400 apps out there. I really thought RPG would be gone by now. I coded some, and found it atrocious using a transparent plastic template as an aid in coding. But it's still with us. Then again I was always happy that I would be out of IT before Y2K rolled around. I was wrong on that projection too. What Fortran has that none of the alternatives you've mentioned have is support for vector processing and other features suited to massive computing that are simply not amenable to the models you've outlined nor are there suitable compilers for much of the hardware used in those computing environments of the type. If you were to take and try to accomplish the computation in a fashion as you've outlined above, besides taking orders of magnitude longer to develop you'd find that it wouldn't have adequate performance to be of any use in the end, anyway. I googled a bit and it looks like most video games - which use vector processing - use C ++. Also new hardware architecture provides vector support. This is all above my pay grade. I don't care if Fortran guys argue with C++ guys. You can google those arguments. Very few people care that Fortran might crunch the numbers you need in 10 minutes while C ++ takes 10 minutes and 6 second - or 12 minutes. Usually just accurate results with available programming skills win the day. I dealt with relatively simple but massive business apps. I found long ago that unless it affects the work at hand it's pointless to argue about language. Since hardware speed improvement allows what is commonly called "bloatware," the language's user interface and maintainability is often more important than efficiency for most processing. Otherwise most code running would be BAL or its platform equivalent. I heard of one large business CICS app in my area which was converted from BAL to COBOL, then they had to reinstall the BAL app because the COBOL was too slow. Don't have the details. Might have been all BS propagated by an assembler fan. On my first IT job I was chastised by the boss - an old BAL programmer - for putting the open/close files routine out of the way at the bottom of the program. They were running an IBM 370 model with VM. Just did what I was taught in college - structured instead of top-down. He said it might cause paging in the CPU memory segment. I tested it both way, and there was no difference in CPU utilization time, but I didn't tell him, just followed his suggestion. His criticism was useful though, because after that I looked hard at anything that ran long, and earned some kudos for it. Won't bore you with details, and you probably know that CPUs are frequently overtaxed by bad coding or flawed processes. That first shop still preferred you eyeball - desk check - your code for syntax/spelling errors instead of running it through the compiler. Got your knuckles rapped for too many compiles. Really backward in that respect. They had plenty of juice. But most of management and programmers had teethed on 360's. Things change. In the business world I went through the transitions from BAL to COBOL, ISAM/VSAM files to IMS and DB2, then OOB and eventually SAP. There were many unmentioned languages in between. Now, except that SAP is the "big boy" commonly used at some outfits, and there are plenty of COBOL apps still running, I don't know anything. I'm retired. The headhunters even gave up on me. Do still have a mild interest in what's happening though and still in limited contact with the business. And I still have my prejudices and what I think are sensible views. One of those views is "use what works best for you." I don't want to argue this stuff, just chatting. Only know what I know. IT moves fast and has passed me by. And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. It was mostly just how I made a living. I was never highly technical or one to make up computer jokes. Just knew enough to be successful at it, and I'm happy at that. My real loves were always women and beer. --Vic |
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Vic Smith wrote:
.... And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. .... So, don't try to pontificate on what you know nothing about... -- |
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On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:51:39 -0600, dpb wrote:
Vic Smith wrote: ... And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. ... So, don't try to pontificate on what you know nothing about... Haven't heard you relate one iota of experience in the field of programming, or any numbers, so maybe you're not the best one to be telling me what to do or not do. In COBOL I would code that as ****-YOU in working storage. --Vic |
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Vic Smith wrote:
On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:51:39 -0600, dpb wrote: Vic Smith wrote: ... And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. ... So, don't try to pontificate on what you know nothing about... Haven't heard you relate one iota of experience in the field ... No you haven't heard. 40 years, BSNE, MSPhys(NucSci) 20 years eng'g code maintenance/development w/ various organizations beginning w/ nuclear power generation design codes on mainframes (Philco 2000 series followed w/ CDC 6600/7600/Cyber w/ FORTRAN 66 thru Fortran F77 in conjunction w/ Philco assembler and CDC Compass as required). From there to 20 years as consulting for various clients from field of robotics and man-replacement equipment and instrumentation for nuclear utilities to evolving to support in I&C R&D for fossil utilities. Not that it's any of your business. -- |
#185
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On 1/1/2011 11:34 AM, dpb wrote:
Vic Smith wrote: On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:51:39 -0600, dpb wrote: Vic Smith wrote: ... And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. ... So, don't try to pontificate on what you know nothing about... Haven't heard you relate one iota of experience in the field ... No you haven't heard. 40 years, BSNE, MSPhys(NucSci) 20 years eng'g code maintenance/development w/ various organizations beginning w/ nuclear power generation design codes on mainframes (Philco 2000 series followed w/ CDC 6600/7600/Cyber w/ FORTRAN 66 thru Fortran F77 in conjunction w/ Philco assembler and CDC Compass as required). From there to 20 years as consulting for various clients from field of robotics and man-replacement equipment and instrumentation for nuclear utilities to evolving to support in I&C R&D for fossil utilities. Not that it's any of your business. -- Cool, I wish I knew as much about programming as you do but there's only so much room in my fat head. :-) TDD |
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On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 11:34:33 -0600, dpb wrote:
Vic Smith wrote: On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:51:39 -0600, dpb wrote: Vic Smith wrote: ... And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. ... So, don't try to pontificate on what you know nothing about... Haven't heard you relate one iota of experience in the field ... No you haven't heard. 40 years, BSNE, MSPhys(NucSci) 20 years eng'g code maintenance/development w/ various organizations beginning w/ nuclear power generation design codes on mainframes (Philco 2000 series followed w/ CDC 6600/7600/Cyber w/ FORTRAN 66 thru Fortran F77 in conjunction w/ Philco assembler and CDC Compass as required). From there to 20 years as consulting for various clients from field of robotics and man-replacement equipment and instrumentation for nuclear utilities to evolving to support in I&C R&D for fossil utilities. Not that it's any of your business. Then keep your mouth shut about it if you don't want to reveal it. Not interested in such a weak programming "resume" anyway. Figured you were a Fortran fan and narrow engineering type by your reactions to my reasonable comments. No business programming knowledge at all. I readily admitted I had none in the scientific arena at the outset. You were too arrogant to state your programming background until pressed. You're just so special. And you're a rude stuffed shirt unable to carry on a civil conversation. I would suspect nuclear engineers don't have to be civil if I didn't have a nuclear physicist cousin who is ever the gentleman. So you get no slack from me. Guess what? I don't have to be civil either. You've responded with nothing but rudeness and combativeness, and shed no light on anything, except YOU like Fortran, and that YOU think it's the cat's meow for crunching numbers and vector processing. Sorry I hurt your sensitive feelings. That's a lie, BTW. And I thank God I'm retired and no longer have to deal with assholes like you any more, as I did for years. This is the last thing I'll say to you. In Fortran, your fav.. Copied straight from Wiki with slight changes, because I haven't coded it since my time was wasted with it in college. I'm sure this program will last longer than any other I've coded. program fu print *, "**** YOU!" print *, "AND TELL YOUR POCKET PROTECTOR TO GET ****ED TOO!" end program fu Most sincerely, --Vic |
#187
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The Daring Dufas wrote:
.... Cool, I wish I knew as much about programming as you do but there's only so much room in my fat head. :-) I think so, too, any more... I returned to family farm when Dad passed away about 10-12 yr ago, now...continued consulting w/ EPRI (aka Electric Power Research Institute) which had been primary customer for several years at their I&C Center located at the Kingston Fossil site (TVA, west of Knoxville, TN) altho was also doing some work for CSI on products for them thru which I was running the consulting work while technically an employee in the new products engineering group (had just released the wireless accelerometer product line to manufacturing the month Dad passed away which you can look up for an idea of it altho it's modified significantly in the 10 years hence). While most work over the years was proprietary or internal R&D that doesn't have directly referenceable material, another product after the switch from the commercial nuclear to consulting was the software for a predecessor of the Remotec ANDROS robot that you can find quite a lot of info on the current products. The incarnation I worked on was a combination of the base vehicle w/ a manipulator arm and instrumentation package for man-replacement purposes in nuclear generating plants and was Westinghouse-purchased for use in some of their units in S Korea. This was while Remotec was still privately held by its founders (from ORNL there in Oak Ridge) several years before was purchased. (Showing my age, that version consisted of an onboard VME-bus two-processor 68000 w/ another operator console system w/ only a single processor. The system ran under CP/M w/ the operating code all LMI Forth. That was my first consulting job on own w/ one other fella' nearly 30 yr ago, now.) I've several technical reports on models and evaluations of reactor safety and primarily incore instrumentation which was my specialty area outside the code maintenance (I was/am, after all, primarily an engineer, not a programmer despite almost continuous involvement in code-related work) while at the commercial reactor vendor. These are, however, not of much general interest altho a couple of the papers presented at ANS annual meetings did end up being referenced in a major textbook on radiation detection and instrumentation which was kinda' kewl... I won't pretend that discussions on statistical analyses of samples of reactor containment vessel material evaluation for radiation-damage lifetime extensions of their concomitant reactors is a worthy subject for a.h.r so won't provide any report numbers of them or similar work... Similarly, the evaluations of the nuclear design codes in comparison to physics startup measurements at the Oconee-class reactors submitted to and defended in front of the NRC ACRS for final licensing approval to allow power operation is somewhat esoteric and rather dull for those outside the field... The more recent stuff is all pretty much tied up in EPRI owing to their licensing agreements and can't say too much about it. The last major task was development of technique for measurement of pulverized coal mass flow rates in individual pipes (typically 14-20" diameter) to large power boilers using advanced nonlinear signal processing techniques to infer the flow from the non-stochastic but chaotic (look up Lorenz attractor for the idea of non-random but non-repetitive processes) turbulence noise in the pipes as picked up on a high-frequency accelerometer. Anyway, enough geezer talk... -- |
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Vic Smith wrote:
On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 11:34:33 -0600, dpb wrote: Vic Smith wrote: On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:51:39 -0600, dpb wrote: Vic Smith wrote: ... And I never was involved on the "scientific" side of it. ... So, don't try to pontificate on what you know nothing about... Haven't heard you relate one iota of experience in the field ... No you haven't heard. 40 years, BSNE, MSPhys(NucSci) 20 years eng'g code maintenance/development w/ various organizations beginning w/ nuclear power generation design codes on mainframes (Philco 2000 series followed w/ CDC 6600/7600/Cyber w/ FORTRAN 66 thru Fortran F77 in conjunction w/ Philco assembler and CDC Compass as required). From there to 20 years as consulting for various clients from field of robotics and man-replacement equipment and instrumentation for nuclear utilities to evolving to support in I&C R&D for fossil utilities. Not that it's any of your business. Then keep your mouth shut about it if you don't want to reveal it. Not interested in such a weak programming "resume" anyway. Figured you were a Fortran fan and narrow engineering type by your reactions to my reasonable comments. No business programming knowledge at all. No, and I didn't claim any unlike your claims in areas outside your areas of expertise I readily admitted I had none in the scientific arena at the outset. So, you then went on to make absolutely ridiculous claims _IN_ the area which is all I was calling you on. You were too arrogant to state your programming background until pressed. You're just so special. No, not arrogant; it simply didn't matter. And you're a rude stuffed shirt unable to carry on a civil conversation. I'm not the one who introduced profanity nor have I stooped to it yet nor have I resorted to ad hominem attacks. I did (and do) suggest you should recognize the limited scope of your own expertise and stick to it. .... Guess what? I don't have to be civil either. No, nor have you been, unfortunately. I've ignored your boorishness and stayed w/ the factual subject matter. -- |
#189
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Then and now
On 1/1/2011 1:29 PM, dpb wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote: ... Cool, I wish I knew as much about programming as you do but there's only so much room in my fat head. :-) I think so, too, any more... I returned to family farm when Dad passed away about 10-12 yr ago, now...continued consulting w/ EPRI (aka Electric Power Research Institute) which had been primary customer for several years at their I&C Center located at the Kingston Fossil site (TVA, west of Knoxville, TN) altho was also doing some work for CSI on products for them thru which I was running the consulting work while technically an employee in the new products engineering group (had just released the wireless accelerometer product line to manufacturing the month Dad passed away which you can look up for an idea of it altho it's modified significantly in the 10 years hence). While most work over the years was proprietary or internal R&D that doesn't have directly referenceable material, another product after the switch from the commercial nuclear to consulting was the software for a predecessor of the Remotec ANDROS robot that you can find quite a lot of info on the current products. The incarnation I worked on was a combination of the base vehicle w/ a manipulator arm and instrumentation package for man-replacement purposes in nuclear generating plants and was Westinghouse-purchased for use in some of their units in S Korea. This was while Remotec was still privately held by its founders (from ORNL there in Oak Ridge) several years before was purchased. (Showing my age, that version consisted of an onboard VME-bus two-processor 68000 w/ another operator console system w/ only a single processor. The system ran under CP/M w/ the operating code all LMI Forth. That was my first consulting job on own w/ one other fella' nearly 30 yr ago, now.) I've several technical reports on models and evaluations of reactor safety and primarily incore instrumentation which was my specialty area outside the code maintenance (I was/am, after all, primarily an engineer, not a programmer despite almost continuous involvement in code-related work) while at the commercial reactor vendor. These are, however, not of much general interest altho a couple of the papers presented at ANS annual meetings did end up being referenced in a major textbook on radiation detection and instrumentation which was kinda' kewl... I won't pretend that discussions on statistical analyses of samples of reactor containment vessel material evaluation for radiation-damage lifetime extensions of their concomitant reactors is a worthy subject for a.h.r so won't provide any report numbers of them or similar work... Similarly, the evaluations of the nuclear design codes in comparison to physics startup measurements at the Oconee-class reactors submitted to and defended in front of the NRC ACRS for final licensing approval to allow power operation is somewhat esoteric and rather dull for those outside the field... The more recent stuff is all pretty much tied up in EPRI owing to their licensing agreements and can't say too much about it. The last major task was development of technique for measurement of pulverized coal mass flow rates in individual pipes (typically 14-20" diameter) to large power boilers using advanced nonlinear signal processing techniques to infer the flow from the non-stochastic but chaotic (look up Lorenz attractor for the idea of non-random but non-repetitive processes) turbulence noise in the pipes as picked up on a high-frequency accelerometer. Anyway, enough geezer talk... -- I have some understanding of the work you've been involved in enough to know how important it is to the safety of nuclear plants especially when it comes to predicting failure of the infrastructure. Tell me if I'm wrong in assuming that some of the testing involves actually sort of listening to the pipes to ascertain the condition? A good pipe has a particular (sound) or characteristic reaction to fluid flow when it's in good shape? I've worked with vibration sensors to monitor bearings in chiller plants before so the early signs of failure could be detected and equipment could be shut down and repaired before a failure could cause catastrophic damage. I'm also wondering about the types of failure that could be caused by high pressure, high velocity fluid flow in pipes in a plant that's running 24/7? You mention turbulence so I guess cavitation would be another concern? Do the high frequency vibrations cause stress fractures in the metal of the pipes, flanges and welds? TDD |
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"dpb" wrote in message I won't pretend that discussions on statistical analyses of samples of reactor containment vessel material evaluation for radiation-damage lifetime extensions of their concomitant reactors is a worthy subject for a.h.r so won't provide any report numbers of them or similar work... Well, thanks for nothing. At the New Years party last night I was discussing that with a couple of ladies and I promised to get back to them with some reports. My chances of getting laid just went down now thanks for you. They were really excited too when I talked about differing containment materials. . |
#191
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Ed Pawlowski wrote:
? "dpb" wrote in message I won't pretend that discussions on statistical analyses of samples of reactor containment vessel material evaluation for radiation-damage lifetime extensions of their concomitant reactors is a worthy subject for a.h.r so won't provide any report numbers of them or similar work... Well, thanks for nothing. At the New Years party last night I was discussing that with a couple of ladies and I promised to get back to them with some reports. My chances of getting laid just went down now thanks for you. They were really excited too when I talked about differing containment materials. . Chuckle, snicker...it's a bummer, ain't it? -- |
#192
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Then and now
The Daring Dufas wrote:
.... I have some understanding of the work you've been involved in enough to know how important it is to the safety of nuclear plants especially when it comes to predicting failure of the infrastructure. Tell me if I'm wrong in assuming that some of the testing involves actually sort of listening to the pipes to ascertain the condition? A good pipe has a particular (sound) or characteristic reaction to fluid flow when it's in good shape? I've worked with vibration sensors to monitor bearings in chiller plants before so the early signs of failure could be detected and equipment could be shut down and repaired before a failure could cause catastrophic damage. I'm also wondering about the types of failure that could be caused by high pressure, high velocity fluid flow in pipes in a plant that's running 24/7? You mention turbulence so I guess cavitation would be another concern? Do the high frequency vibrations cause stress fractures in the metal of the pipes, flanges and welds? TDD That particular work wasn't terribly related to each other -- the pressure vessel samples are chunks of the reactor vessel material that are placed in special specimen holders designed into the vessels on initial installation and then removed after a specified set of intervals and tested. The primary test for these samples is for ductility (testing against radiation-induced embrittlement) to, as you inferred correctly, determine that the vessel and other high pressure components have not undergone excessive degradation so as to still be capable of withstanding operating pressures and temperatures. The accelerometer measurements in piping I referred to earlier were for the pulverized coal flow distribution pipes in coal-fired boilers, not nuclear plants. These are fairly low pressure but high air flow volume pipes and the air is both for coal transport and is also a major fraction of combustion air. Since it isn't liquid fluid flow and is blown not pumped, cavitation isn't an issue there. The turbulence noise here is simply a byproduct of the transport system that we were using w/ the characteristics that fluid transport/flow isn't stochastic but chaotic to find information regarding coal and air flow rates buried in that ultrasonic signal we could pick up via the accelerometer. It had the major advantage of being non-invasive as coal dust is extremely abrasive so it's a major hassle to try to keep instrumentation alive that can survive inside a pipe. Being as how there is no free lunch, the counter problem was that the processing was quite intensive. Back to your question regarding flow noise and measurements in nuclear plants -- in general, the answer is "yes, stuff like that is done" and is done routinely as you're familiar with for preventive maintenance and other various mechanical systems. If you've worked in the area much at all you've probably come across my last employer that I mentioned above, CSI (Computational Systems, Inc) in Knoxville, TN, now a subsidiary of Emerson Electric in the Rosemount catalog of instrumentation. As for other similar measurements in reactors, the secondary piping and so on wasn't particularly my area of expertise. I'll note, however, though, that other than the reactor itself, the rest of the plant is really no different than are the other large generation plants in pressures and/or flow; in fact, super-critical fossil boilers run at much higher pressures and temperatures than do pressurized water reactors. The containment of such fluids was pretty much routine long before commercial nuclear power came along. There is routine monitoring of primary reactor coolant pumps for such problems as you would expect. As a complete sidelight, interestingly, the reason the TMI accident progressed to the point it did was that the operators misinterpreted some pressure/temperature data and fearing cavitation in the RCPs turned them off, thus cutting off forced circulation in the core for several hours. The accident sequence was brought under control and began to be stabilized when the SRO of the subsequent shift recognized the issue and had the pumps restarted as well as the HPI (high pressure injection) system and recovered the core and reestablished core cooling. If the first crew had simply kept their hands in their pockets and let the safety systems and control systems "do their thing" there would have been no event other than a reactor trip and a manual reset of the PORVs and the plant would have gone back to normal operation in a week or so after some routine maintenance. A case where an event can be turned into a major one by a combination of mistakes after a mechanical failure (which wasn't terribly uncommon nor is unexpected, particularly, for a PORV to not automatically reclose which not being manually closed after it failed to reseat and not being recognized was open was the source of the primary coolant loss). Some of the things that are unique to nuclear units that are done to monitor for early signs of failure or mechanical problems in the reactor include "loose parts monitors" and "neutron noise analysis". The first of these uses a group of accelerometers mounted in various places on the reactor vessel and primary coolant piping and "listen" for impact noises that could be the result of some reactor internals failure or similar. They are tied into systems that use a triangulation method on time of arrival for impacts to try to localize where within the plant any particular noise might actually be coming from. Did do the software for a prototype one of these systems for TVA way back when, too...just after the REMOTEC work. Unfortunately, then was about the time TVA was pulling back so only the one prototype was ever finished and by the time things picked up again, technology (and I) had moved on... "Neutron noise" is a very interesting and intellectually and computationally challenging area -- it uses the small fluctuations in the signal of the excore neutron detectors and signal processing to infer things about reactor internals such as the movement of the core inner liner or fuel assembly vibrations. As the inner barrel moves slightly (on order of tens of mils), the change in water density owing the that slight change in thickness is discernible in a very small fluctuation in the neutron flux at the detector. By monitoring this in time, if something were to happen to one of the studs that holds the barrel in place, one could detect a larger amplitude of barrel motion (this has happened at at least on reactor I'm aware of). By knowing this before either the next outage or larger damage became apparent, one can monitor the situation and determine when or if an early shutdown would be required. There are any number of other monitoring systems and instrumentation besides for almost all systems and certainly for those that are directly safety related. Again, undoubtedly, far more than one might care about in ahr... -- |
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On 1/1/2011 4:38 PM, dpb wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote: ... I have some understanding of the work you've been involved in enough to know how important it is to the safety of nuclear plants especially when it comes to predicting failure of the infrastructure. Tell me if I'm wrong in assuming that some of the testing involves actually sort of listening to the pipes to ascertain the condition? A good pipe has a particular (sound) or characteristic reaction to fluid flow when it's in good shape? I've worked with vibration sensors to monitor bearings in chiller plants before so the early signs of failure could be detected and equipment could be shut down and repaired before a failure could cause catastrophic damage. I'm also wondering about the types of failure that could be caused by high pressure, high velocity fluid flow in pipes in a plant that's running 24/7? You mention turbulence so I guess cavitation would be another concern? Do the high frequency vibrations cause stress fractures in the metal of the pipes, flanges and welds? TDD That particular work wasn't terribly related to each other -- the pressure vessel samples are chunks of the reactor vessel material that are placed in special specimen holders designed into the vessels on initial installation and then removed after a specified set of intervals and tested. The primary test for these samples is for ductility (testing against radiation-induced embrittlement) to, as you inferred correctly, determine that the vessel and other high pressure components have not undergone excessive degradation so as to still be capable of withstanding operating pressures and temperatures. The accelerometer measurements in piping I referred to earlier were for the pulverized coal flow distribution pipes in coal-fired boilers, not nuclear plants. These are fairly low pressure but high air flow volume pipes and the air is both for coal transport and is also a major fraction of combustion air. Since it isn't liquid fluid flow and is blown not pumped, cavitation isn't an issue there. The turbulence noise here is simply a byproduct of the transport system that we were using w/ the characteristics that fluid transport/flow isn't stochastic but chaotic to find information regarding coal and air flow rates buried in that ultrasonic signal we could pick up via the accelerometer. It had the major advantage of being non-invasive as coal dust is extremely abrasive so it's a major hassle to try to keep instrumentation alive that can survive inside a pipe. Being as how there is no free lunch, the counter problem was that the processing was quite intensive. Back to your question regarding flow noise and measurements in nuclear plants -- in general, the answer is "yes, stuff like that is done" and is done routinely as you're familiar with for preventive maintenance and other various mechanical systems. If you've worked in the area much at all you've probably come across my last employer that I mentioned above, CSI (Computational Systems, Inc) in Knoxville, TN, now a subsidiary of Emerson Electric in the Rosemount catalog of instrumentation. As for other similar measurements in reactors, the secondary piping and so on wasn't particularly my area of expertise. I'll note, however, though, that other than the reactor itself, the rest of the plant is really no different than are the other large generation plants in pressures and/or flow; in fact, super-critical fossil boilers run at much higher pressures and temperatures than do pressurized water reactors. The containment of such fluids was pretty much routine long before commercial nuclear power came along. There is routine monitoring of primary reactor coolant pumps for such problems as you would expect. As a complete sidelight, interestingly, the reason the TMI accident progressed to the point it did was that the operators misinterpreted some pressure/temperature data and fearing cavitation in the RCPs turned them off, thus cutting off forced circulation in the core for several hours. The accident sequence was brought under control and began to be stabilized when the SRO of the subsequent shift recognized the issue and had the pumps restarted as well as the HPI (high pressure injection) system and recovered the core and reestablished core cooling. If the first crew had simply kept their hands in their pockets and let the safety systems and control systems "do their thing" there would have been no event other than a reactor trip and a manual reset of the PORVs and the plant would have gone back to normal operation in a week or so after some routine maintenance. A case where an event can be turned into a major one by a combination of mistakes after a mechanical failure (which wasn't terribly uncommon nor is unexpected, particularly, for a PORV to not automatically reclose which not being manually closed after it failed to reseat and not being recognized was open was the source of the primary coolant loss). Some of the things that are unique to nuclear units that are done to monitor for early signs of failure or mechanical problems in the reactor include "loose parts monitors" and "neutron noise analysis". The first of these uses a group of accelerometers mounted in various places on the reactor vessel and primary coolant piping and "listen" for impact noises that could be the result of some reactor internals failure or similar. They are tied into systems that use a triangulation method on time of arrival for impacts to try to localize where within the plant any particular noise might actually be coming from. Did do the software for a prototype one of these systems for TVA way back when, too...just after the REMOTEC work. Unfortunately, then was about the time TVA was pulling back so only the one prototype was ever finished and by the time things picked up again, technology (and I) had moved on... "Neutron noise" is a very interesting and intellectually and computationally challenging area -- it uses the small fluctuations in the signal of the excore neutron detectors and signal processing to infer things about reactor internals such as the movement of the core inner liner or fuel assembly vibrations. As the inner barrel moves slightly (on order of tens of mils), the change in water density owing the that slight change in thickness is discernible in a very small fluctuation in the neutron flux at the detector. By monitoring this in time, if something were to happen to one of the studs that holds the barrel in place, one could detect a larger amplitude of barrel motion (this has happened at at least on reactor I'm aware of). By knowing this before either the next outage or larger damage became apparent, one can monitor the situation and determine when or if an early shutdown would be required. There are any number of other monitoring systems and instrumentation besides for almost all systems and certainly for those that are directly safety related. Again, undoubtedly, far more than one might care about in ahr... -- I think I understand about the pulverized coal. Ultrasonic transducers are used to measure the flow of material through the pipes because a paddle wheel would quickly disintegrate? Rereading what you wrote it seems that you were listening for a specific resonance or you were trying to separate the sound of the airflow from the noise of the flow of the pulverized coal mixed with it. Is that what all the processing power is required for? It kind of reminds me of what modern military sonar systems do. Heck, I find everything interesting, back in the last century BI, "Before Internet", I spent a lot of time in libraries reading every sort of engineering, scientific or medical journal I could get my hands on. Years ago, there was a Star Trek convention in Huntsville, Alabama hosted by NASA engineers and instead of looking for Mr. Spock, I was hanging out with the engineers looking at and discussing all the neat stuff they had on display like cross sections of the Space Shuttle fuel tank showing the different layers in its construction. Don't worry about the subject matter, I find it all interesting, besides, it will make me go searching The Web for more information. :-) TDD |
#194
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The Daring Dufas wrote:
.... I think I understand about the pulverized coal. Ultrasonic transducers are used to measure the flow of material through the pipes because a paddle wheel would quickly disintegrate? Rereading what you wrote it seems that you were listening for a specific resonance or you were trying to separate the sound of the airflow from the noise of the flow of the pulverized coal mixed with it. Is that what all the processing power is required for? It kind of reminds me of what modern military sonar systems do. ... Anything like a paddle wheel wouldn't make it 5 minutes. In an early stage of the work, I tried a hardened steel drill rod as a sounding rod in one small-scale test facility. The test duration was only for a couple of days and it came out oval in cross-section in even that short a time frame with a good third of the frontal surface gone. The utilities are very reluctant to insert stuff into the coal pipes that could fail and either block the flow in a pipe w/ a resultant high pressure event back at the pulverizer or block a burner nozzle in the furnace and cause an event there. The air:fuel mixture is right at the limits and so it's a real danger of fire or explosion if something goes wrong outside the boiler or in a coal pipe. Needless to say, an open 14" pipe w/ a burn out isn't a desirable event... In at least few cases where they have happened the flame has actually melted the side of a boiler containment and ended up w/ an entire boiler open. That wreaks havoc in a plant _very_ quickly. As far as more explanation of exactly what the computations are, unfortunately, the actual technique is proprietary but it does not look at the signal in a conventional sense at all; it is not, as I've stated, based on frequency components per se, but on the fact that turbulent flow is chaotic, not random. It doesn't repeat exactly, but there are certain patterns and we have identified some 30 scale-invariant measures that can be calculated from the broadband ultrasonic signal as picked up by a passive accelerometer as minute vibrations transmitted through the pipe wall. We do not introduce any additional energy into the pipe at all as does a classic ultrasonic detector. There were some other research teams looking at other techniques such as microwave and/or more approximating conventional ultrasonics but our technique was/is unique. -- |
#195
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On 1/1/2011 8:30 PM, dpb wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote: ... I think I understand about the pulverized coal. Ultrasonic transducers are used to measure the flow of material through the pipes because a paddle wheel would quickly disintegrate? Rereading what you wrote it seems that you were listening for a specific resonance or you were trying to separate the sound of the airflow from the noise of the flow of the pulverized coal mixed with it. Is that what all the processing power is required for? It kind of reminds me of what modern military sonar systems do. ... Anything like a paddle wheel wouldn't make it 5 minutes. In an early stage of the work, I tried a hardened steel drill rod as a sounding rod in one small-scale test facility. The test duration was only for a couple of days and it came out oval in cross-section in even that short a time frame with a good third of the frontal surface gone. The utilities are very reluctant to insert stuff into the coal pipes that could fail and either block the flow in a pipe w/ a resultant high pressure event back at the pulverizer or block a burner nozzle in the furnace and cause an event there. The air:fuel mixture is right at the limits and so it's a real danger of fire or explosion if something goes wrong outside the boiler or in a coal pipe. Needless to say, an open 14" pipe w/ a burn out isn't a desirable event... In at least few cases where they have happened the flame has actually melted the side of a boiler containment and ended up w/ an entire boiler open. That wreaks havoc in a plant _very_ quickly. As far as more explanation of exactly what the computations are, unfortunately, the actual technique is proprietary but it does not look at the signal in a conventional sense at all; it is not, as I've stated, based on frequency components per se, but on the fact that turbulent flow is chaotic, not random. It doesn't repeat exactly, but there are certain patterns and we have identified some 30 scale-invariant measures that can be calculated from the broadband ultrasonic signal as picked up by a passive accelerometer as minute vibrations transmitted through the pipe wall. We do not introduce any additional energy into the pipe at all as does a classic ultrasonic detector. There were some other research teams looking at other techniques such as microwave and/or more approximating conventional ultrasonics but our technique was/is unique. -- In other words your sensors were passive listening devices not active like the ultrasonic flow sensors I'm familiar with? I'm guessing you were looking for a semblance of a pattern in the white noise of the chaos. Am I getting warmer? :-) TDD |
#196
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The Daring Dufas wrote:
.... In other words your sensors were passive listening devices not active like the ultrasonic flow sensors I'm familiar with? Yes, as I said they were/are simply high frequency (75 kHz resonance) commercially available accelerometers... ... I'm guessing you were looking for a semblance of a pattern in the white noise of the chaos. Am I getting warmer? :-) Except white noise implies a stochastic process whereas a chaotic process, while not strictly repeatable, is not stochastic. Hence, typical statistical measures used for such processes are not effective and the measures used in the analysis are, as mentioned, nonlinear and then combined in other nonlinear ways for prediction. (I know, that's a lot of mumbo-jumbo unless one already knows the answer, but as I say, the specifics are proprietary so can't really reveal much more about the details). Suffice it to say that there is information buried in the audible and supersonic noise of the flow and that can be related to the actual air and coal flow rates in a given pipe over a range of operating conditions and air:fuel ratios and flow rates by a set of specific operations on the recorded waveform. One important feature of these computations is that they all produce quantities that are independent of the actual magnitude of the signal itself (iow, they're self-normalizing). This is a key feature in that it means that simply a level change from a location difference doesn't affect a given signature. It also means, of course, that simple measures such as the mean aren't what is giving the actual correlations. But, from those correlations a prediction of flow is possible for a given new set of measures computed for the same pipe from any set of operating conditions and this has been shown to be valid over a range of operating conditions and at various power plants of differing sizes and styles and manufacturer (albeit the correlations are at least to this point plant-specific, the measures used in those are for the most part the same ones of of the total set of those identified as candidates). -- |
#197
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On 1/1/2011 11:26 PM, dpb wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote: ... In other words your sensors were passive listening devices not active like the ultrasonic flow sensors I'm familiar with? Yes, as I said they were/are simply high frequency (75 kHz resonance) commercially available accelerometers... ... I'm guessing you were looking for a semblance of a pattern in the white noise of the chaos. Am I getting warmer? :-) Except white noise implies a stochastic process whereas a chaotic process, while not strictly repeatable, is not stochastic. Hence, typical statistical measures used for such processes are not effective and the measures used in the analysis are, as mentioned, nonlinear and then combined in other nonlinear ways for prediction. (I know, that's a lot of mumbo-jumbo unless one already knows the answer, but as I say, the specifics are proprietary so can't really reveal much more about the details). Suffice it to say that there is information buried in the audible and supersonic noise of the flow and that can be related to the actual air and coal flow rates in a given pipe over a range of operating conditions and air:fuel ratios and flow rates by a set of specific operations on the recorded waveform. One important feature of these computations is that they all produce quantities that are independent of the actual magnitude of the signal itself (iow, they're self-normalizing). This is a key feature in that it means that simply a level change from a location difference doesn't affect a given signature. It also means, of course, that simple measures such as the mean aren't what is giving the actual correlations. But, from those correlations a prediction of flow is possible for a given new set of measures computed for the same pipe from any set of operating conditions and this has been shown to be valid over a range of operating conditions and at various power plants of differing sizes and styles and manufacturer (albeit the correlations are at least to this point plant-specific, the measures used in those are for the most part the same ones of of the total set of those identified as candidates). -- The only problem I'm having is grokking the difference between stochastic and chaotic. I suppose there must be a enough difference between random and disorderly for your system to work. I love this kind of stuff. :-) TDD |
#198
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The Daring Dufas wrote:
.... The only problem I'm having is grokking the difference between stochastic and chaotic. I suppose there must be a enough difference between random and disorderly for your system to work. I love this kind of stuff. :-) Indeed, there is a fundamental difference. The beginning of the following link is on the line of the way I used to try present it to the bleary-eyed utility guys who really only wanted to know enough as to whether they thought it (the R&D project; EPRI is a utility self-funded research organization so we had to have buy-in from the member utilities to continue to have the resources to support the effort) made enough sense to continue or not and like you, wanted at least a grasp of the concept. http://www.math.tamu.edu/~mpilant/math614/chaos_vs_random.pdf I'd not read the Wikipedia entry on chaos; so often they're not of much help so did--it's not terrible reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory For a non-technical read if you're interested in such things, I'd recommend _Chaos: Making a New Science_ by James Gleick It's the best written of several of the popular expositions imo for a general overview of chaotic systems in natural processes. For more esoteric approach, Benoit Mandelbrot is a stretch but two of his at least summarized rather than actual papers include _The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature_ and _Fractals_and_Chaos:_The_Mandelbrot_Set_ and_Beyond_ Of course, there's an almost unlimited literature on turbulent flow but other than how it's touched upon in some of the above as a field I don't know of any popularization of the subject itself. The pneumatic transport of solids is, of course, a subset within it with another whole literature/history... None of those will explain the processing we're doing; but they are an interesting introduction into a whole (relatively) new way of looking at much of the physical world. -- |
#199
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On 1/2/2011 9:23 AM, dpb wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote: ... The only problem I'm having is grokking the difference between stochastic and chaotic. I suppose there must be a enough difference between random and disorderly for your system to work. I love this kind of stuff. :-) Indeed, there is a fundamental difference. The beginning of the following link is on the line of the way I used to try present it to the bleary-eyed utility guys who really only wanted to know enough as to whether they thought it (the R&D project; EPRI is a utility self-funded research organization so we had to have buy-in from the member utilities to continue to have the resources to support the effort) made enough sense to continue or not and like you, wanted at least a grasp of the concept. http://www.math.tamu.edu/~mpilant/math614/chaos_vs_random.pdf I'd not read the Wikipedia entry on chaos; so often they're not of much help so did--it's not terrible reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory For a non-technical read if you're interested in such things, I'd recommend _Chaos: Making a New Science_ by James Gleick It's the best written of several of the popular expositions imo for a general overview of chaotic systems in natural processes. For more esoteric approach, Benoit Mandelbrot is a stretch but two of his at least summarized rather than actual papers include _The_Fractal_Geometry_of_Nature_ and _Fractals_and_Chaos:_The_Mandelbrot_Set_ and_Beyond_ Of course, there's an almost unlimited literature on turbulent flow but other than how it's touched upon in some of the above as a field I don't know of any popularization of the subject itself. The pneumatic transport of solids is, of course, a subset within it with another whole literature/history... None of those will explain the processing we're doing; but they are an interesting introduction into a whole (relatively) new way of looking at much of the physical world. -- Thanks for the links, I may comprehend it yet. :-) TDD |
#200
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The Daring Dufas wrote:
On 1/2/2011 9:23 AM, dpb wrote: .... None of those will explain the processing we're doing; ... But the validity of the processing inherently requires that the underlying process be chaotic, not stochastic; it (the method) is simply a way of making approximating functions that are indirectly related to things like the Lyapanov numbers, etc., that can be measured and computed in sufficient quantity and speed to be the basis of an instrument. Thanks for the links, I may comprehend it yet. :-) .... It is indeed a fascinating field w/ almost as many bizarre features as string theory and higher dimensions. Enjoy... -- |
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