We have some regular focus points, but as an overall trend...
]]>Try breaking a main shaft, gearset (for turbine drives), or even the prop badly enough, on a conventional shaft drive ship... That's a drydock, too.
If you're the Navy, you build for maintainability and you have spares, or enough ships you can accept one out of service if it prangs.
Pods should be able to be made to drop in from above into wells (not the way it's usually done, now, that I know of, but it's structurally and systems-wise feasible, and I do have a degree in Naval Architecture though I don't practice in the field now). So that would reduce the repair to a big enough crane dockside to lift out the borken one and drop the new one in.
]]>But whereas Bob got away with it, this went Wrong...
Higher background attention level from Other Places, or Andy's just not as good, or?
]]>"The Armageddon Score" (Laundry Files book 6) is already written in first draft and will be published next July. And ...
... It's narrated in the first person by Mo, not Bob, and it overlaps with (and sheds a very different light on) some of the events in "The Rhesus Chart".
Yeah, I remembered that you'd said that in a few places.
It will be interesting to look back from a year from now and try to figure out whether Bob or Mo or who had the most accurate / least inaccurate viewpoint on events...
Everyone's being traumatized in some ways through stories in the books; I get the feeling that Bob is aware of his damage but not self-aware of it, if that differentiation makes sense?...
]]>Unreliable Narrator 8-)
]]>When you don't know what the signal looks like yet, it's much more convenient for ad hoc data dives than a database, because it's got all the functions easy to get to.
Past 10M or so data points, less practical.
]]>There are x86 systems out there which can do more than 4 TB of RAM, in the server space at least; 6 TB in the Dell R920 and SuperMicro 4048-TRFT, probably others. These are both small workgroup servers (5 U of rack space, etc). For non-mainstream-x86 they go to at least 32 TB.
Regarding Moore's law and the end of transistors and such; we have a number of strange changes coming. Memristors, phase-change RAM, quantum computing, truly massive parallelism reaching down out of computer science R&D into practical problems. We could already "do away with disks" putting FLASH on the RAM bus - but it wears out quickly enough that that's probably a mistake. Memristors and PCRAM don't. A lot of system stuff is designed around there being Register-Cache-Cache-Cache-RAM-(bus)-Disk-Network speed heirarchies of access to data. It may well flatten to Register-Cache-Cache-Cache-RAM/Persistent Fast Storage-(bus)-Network. Everything has been a file, but may not be shortly.
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