[Beowulf] Re: Linux laptops, and M$ advertisement

[Peter St. John]

I was a little dismissive of the Emergency Stop topic. In an ideal world, a
team from the law faculty and the engineering (both civil and electrical)
and...yeah it's a mess.
Peter


On 4/17/07, David Mathog <mathog at caltech.edu> wrote:
>
> "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 4. Physicist who builds his own damn Supercomputer agonizes for days
> over
> > the emergency shut off switch wiring, because he can, he teaches
> > electricity; but he could just walk one hundred yards down Science
> Drive and
> > get an EE grad student to do it for him.
>
> The problem with the Emergency Stop switch is not designing or
> building the electrical wiring to implement it, it's interpreting
> the electrical code to determine if one is required.  Parts of the
> code were apparently written by a Zen master so that the answer to
> what seems like a straighforward question "do we need an
> Emergency Stop switch?" depends on the answer to "is this room full
> of machines a machine room"?  The latter is apparently an
> electrical code koan, as only the enlightened can divine the answer.
> And maybe not even then - there seems to be room for considerable debate
> on the issue.  Indeed, the answer may depend not so much on what
> the room holds, but rather on how it was wired, as certain sections
> of the code may be "relaxed" in machine room construction.
>
> Suffice it to say that a definitive "required" or "not required"
> has not yet been obtained from the folks in charge of the room's
> construction.
>
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
>
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