Today it is 30 years since the accident at Three Mile Island in the US with a meltdown as the result. Not only did the core suffer a meltdown but the building of further nuclear power plants in the US was hampered and not only there, in many countries all over the world – including Sweden – there was serious discussion on if nuclear power should be allowed at all.
Wednesday, March 28, 1979 is the date that will go to history as one of the darkest days in the history of nuclear power. After this disaster the building of new uclear plants in the the US was completely stopped. Not until now, 30 years later are actually new plants being planned for. In total 26 new nuclear power plants all over the country. China are planning to increase the number of reactors from eleven to 32 in the coming years.
And actually the disaster is a testament to the great security that was employed in building the Three Mile Island reactor. The public was never in any real danger despite the disaster, the enclosement of the core was working exactly as planned and the release of nuclear particles into the atmosphere was actually lower than one year of normal operation for a plant like this.
The nuclear power pland of Harrisburg, Three Mile Island.
People who knows me knows that I prefer nuclear power to fossil-fuel power plants and I would rather see several new reactors built rather than new coal plants in Germany and Poland. Not to mention the emerging economies in Asia.
The truth is that many more people dies from pollution each year than from ionizing radiation and when the Chernobyl disaster struck it was Swedish nuclear power plants who first noticed an increase in the background radiation level.
Technology can always be better and there are still some old dodgy reactors around in Russia. Let’s help them build new modern reactors that are safe to use and build on the rather safe technology that we have used in Sweden, where the reactor never can go critical, if something goes wrong it will just shut down.
Computer Sweden is running an article about nine operating systems that everyone who was a part of the personal computer revolution can not forget about.
TeleNova Compis
First out is CP/M. I loved this OS, I was the first OS and micro computer I ever got in touch with in 7th grade in school. The actual machine was a Compis Telenova computer that was equipped with an Intel 80186 CPU running at 8 MHz. Later versions such as Compis II could also run MS-DOS early versions. The computer was ordered and sponsored by the state own telephone company, ”Televerket”, and was aimed to be an educational computer that could be used in schools. It was cheaper than IBM PC machines at the time and it had graphics that was way beyond what most other computers had. The original COMPIS was monochrome (green or amber) but there later came colour versions with upgrader 16 colour graphic cards. The entire machine was developed by a Swedish company Teli and the school where I was attending my 7th to 9th grade used these machines.
I learned my firs programming skills on these machines, they were equipped with a language called COMAL which was a cross between a traditional BASIC interpreter but with several add-ons borrowed from Pascal, making it a language with modern loop constructs and everything needed to teach basic programming to students. Actually a quite good language in itself – it even had built-in commands to do ”turtle graphics” a special way of programming graphics where you move a a virtual pen around a drawing board with command such att GOTO 320,480; PENDOWN; DRAWLINE -100,0; PENUP; GOTO 0,480; and so on. How many computers in 1985 could do graphics with 1280×800 pixels (monochrome) or 640×400 in colour? I later got a Commodore VIC-20 computer at home and I found it rather marvellous how different they were. I tried my best writing essays and stuff on the Commodore but it just screamed ”play games” and later ”learn how to make games”…
Then came the IBM PC machines with DOS. It was felt that DOS was a superior operating system, I don’t think it was technically better than CP/M and actually suffered from some of the same limitations and had even some drawbacks CP/M lacked. But it was picked up by IBM from a small upstart company called Microsoft and the rest is history. When I attended college the IBM machines started become increasingly popular and the PS/2 was the choice of most schools. During this time I used a Commodore 128D at home at this time, I had learned 6502 assembler and could do quite a bit of ”demos” programming. Techniques such as using interrupts for timing, programming the VIC and SID chips and so on was mastered during these days :)
Other people used Mac OS at this time, but I never had a Mac, liked them or came anywhere around where they where being used. In fact I think the only one in the school was in the music lab for the musicians to use as a MIDI controller.
Amiga OS 1.3 Workbench
Then came the Amiga. The revolution was complete. A proper, unix influenced OS, that was really powerful, came with enough tools to make a difference out of the box and friendly to be programmed and used, borrowing menu systems and ideas from both X-Windows System and Mac OS ”System” together with a powerful handling of various devices and a great shell command line interface. I loved my Amiga, I used it way into 1996 even though I had a 386SX 25 with 20 MB of memory (quite a lot in those days) but the Amiga was always the number one computer. I did BASIC and 68000 assembly language programming on it and this was the place where I learned C. The great language that is still my favourite among programming languages, one of the most versatile and useful languages. Hated and loved equally but never disputed as a very useful language I hacked away on a Lattice 3.1 compiler on the Amiga.
Then there was OS/2, a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft that went belly-up and the last thing I ever saw from it was in Arlanda airport around 1996 when they used it on the gate computers. MS Windows had already taken over completely, even at version 3.11 it was becoming the standard for the IBM PC computers. I never used any of those myself, I was already into Linux which was running on my 386 alongside with Amiga OS on the Amiga 500 I loved so dearly.
Linux of course! What a revolution! My first distribution was a bunch of diskettes called ”Slackware” which I installed. Finally you could hack your own kernel, I managed to run this on various architectures including the strange Micro-Channel Architecture that IBM put into some computers just to make a mess of the IDE interface, and I have been using Linux for most serious tasks ever since together with Windows 95 and now Windows XP. Not doing Vista just yet…
June 30: Three months celebration today! I have now been running for three months and know I can do 4 km of jogging at a slow pace. It is wonderful considering how I felt when I started on March 30! At that time I ran 1 min walked 2 min and then did that for 20 minutes. I had problems maintaining this and by the end of the first attempt I walked 4-5 minutes after running one minute.
Now I can run for 30 minutes without stopping and generally I could likely push myself more but at a gentle pace of around 7’45″/km I get around my jogging track in the woods. The terrain is hilly and there are a lot of up and downhills. Feels good.
I cut my feet last sunday when I was at the beach swimming. Some idiot had smashed a bottle or something where I went into the water so I got several rather painful and deep cut on my left foot and one even deeper (and more painful) cut on my right foot. So today I was taking it easy.
I set out on my normal routine but decided to quit after my first lap on the 2 km track since I discovered I was not running normally, instead because of the extra pain I was not letting my feet work in the proper position so I realized I was probably doing myself damage if I’d continue that.
But I did 2 km in 16 minutes, that’s a slightly lower tempo than usual but I am happy of getting out at all tonight. I will have to see how it feels on thursday, my feet are okay now, don’t think the feet were damaged further by the running tonight but I think it was wise to get home instead of doing the second lap and downhill finale. It was more painful downhill than anything else.
June 29: No running today, my feet hurts too much from the cuts I received yesterday so I will postpone it until tomorrow and see what happens then.
Apparently Swedish news papers have dubbed the LTE technology developed by among others Ericsson to ”Super 3G” and are waiting to call it 4G.
I have heard rumours that Ericsson internally are very careful not using the term 4G on LTE but waiting for LTE-Advanced with even higher bitrates to see if it is deserving the designation.
Super 3G gives the impression that it evolves from Turbo-3G which is not really the case, this is a new radio system and although some things such as MIMO actually was specified in HSPA it still was not in widespread use as it will probably become in LTE.
LTE can deliver a gross maximum bitrate in the downlink pushing 300 Mbit/s and LTE-Advanced is said to be pushing towards the 1 Gbit/s which would be really getting mobile broadband to take off.
For me the major hurdle is the uplink however which in all systems, today as well as LTE systems are considerably lower in bitrate than the uplink. This limits the use for mobile applications that transmits lots of data (video cameras) and the industry is looking for cheap way of communicating with cameras in vehicles such as taxis, buses and trains and even with a good coverage for LTE it will not be enough.
We had a photo course this weekend and the last day we had a visit from Sally, a great model for the students to practice shooting using model lights and bouncers and everything else that goes with it.
Denna helg eller weekend som det heter på svenska har vi haft en fotokurs i studion. Här har vi Sally som kom över idag och hjälpte till som modell så att kursdeltagarna skulle ha något att fotografera.
The Swedish evening newspaper ”Expressen” closed down parts of its site recently since a leading computer and technology site idg.se reported that harmful code was being spread (swedish text) from the site.
Expressen has a weather site and the weather site links codes from many different parts on the net. In this case apparently there was code linked from a Chinese site that included a java-script based attack vector taking advantage of a known security hole in Adobe Reader.
I am not surprised really because of the way papers links to ads that contains flash animations, various types of scripts including java script, java code that runs on the client side and so on it is only a question of time before someone hacks into the ad site, replacing an ad with harmful code, thereby spreading it to thousands of visitors per hour visiting totally legitimate sites through perhaps hundreds of site linking ads from the hacked site. It is actually surprising that this is not more commonly happening than it is right now.
I see a surprisingly large amount of foreign sites delivering ads on Swedish news paper sites, perhaps there is nothing to do about this but it must be a nightmare to keep a tight security on a system like this.
For the user even more so – depending on the security model of your web reader and operating system the result from this could be devastating for the user who surf to any of these sites. The only way of being sure this does not happen is to have safely linked material, material that can not contain attack vectord that a third party may use to gain access to desktop computers all over the worls.
On the government’s site today new statistics on secret surveillance has been reported. The number of allowed bugging of phone calls have increased from 196 cases in 2007 to 1 315 cases for last year a whopping 670%.
One of the biggest problem of using electrical (battery powered) cars is the problem of charging them. The amount of energy needed for a normal trip to work would require several hours of charging the car, it has been estimated to somewhere around 8 to 12 hours of charging. This is of course very different from filling the car with petrol which takes a couple of minutes and the battery charge time of 8 hours or so would work if you charged the car over night, went to work, charged it while working and then returned home.
The problem here is of course obvious – I think a lot of people want to use their cars shopping and transporting and that makes it much harder, not to mention taking a longer trip that is more than say an hour or so that would be difficult in an electric car this way. Imagine visiting even close by relatives and having to stay the night because you have to re-charge your car battery over night just for the trip home. Someone suggested that there would be ”battery stations” where the whole battery pack could be changed in the car, removing the flat battery and inserting a fresh one and then this way save the charge time. Not very practical however because you may imagine the stack of batteries required to fill even a fraction of the energy need normal gas stations fill?
A 1,2 volt re-chargeable NiCd cell.
But there is a solution now, the Swedish paper ”Ny Teknik”, new technology, reports about scientists at MIT in the US having come up with a new type of battery that can be charged in about 20 seconds which is incredible. The paper is scarce on the details for it but it is a definite improvement and if this could go into serial production that could save the battery powered car from being nice but not very useful!
One problem they note however is that house-hold electrical outlet would not be able to deliver the charge current necessary, that would require high amp industrial connections which could be put at special ”charge stations” but not really practical at home – it would require changing the electricity system completely between the transformer and the house and the electrical grid is not built to take such currents from ordinary houses.
So a cross between these technologies seems the ideal, a full charge may take say 5 hours or so when at home, over night and at the ”e-station” you can fill her up in about 20 seconds and then continue driving. Enough of these charge stations along the roads and the problem seems possible to solve actually.
It sure is an interesting technology, something I have waited a long time for.
