Slashdot Mirror
ASTRA 1K De-orbited
dda writes "Following the story about ASTRA 1K launch failure: Early this morning, it has been de-orbited over the pacific ocean, due to the rapid degradation of the satellite, coupled to the technical difficulties and risks associated with such a mission, according to the SES-ASTRA operator."
Q: Dear Trollaxor,
My girlfriend has been hanging around the wrong sorts lately, and has been coming home talking about Linux and using a ton of buzzwords I know she barely understands. I'm a FreeBSD user and know better than to fall in with the GNU crowd. How can I convince my girlfriend, who is falling farther and farther into groupthink everyday, to see the light before it's too late?
--Losing Her to GNU
A: Dear Losing...
First, let's get this right out into the open. I'm on to you. I know you dirty GNU hippies are always looking for ways to push Linux and that sneaky reverse-propoganda is not below you-- you're even willing to sling a little mud on yourself to do so. As cool as FreeBSD is, especially when compared to Linux, its users do not have girlfriends. So that right away revealed your question to me as an insidious lie. I will not assist you by giving you the answer you asked for. You'd just reverse engineer it and use it to push Linux down our throats even more effectively
Secondly, just give it up. FreeBSD is better than Linux in so many ways I won't even go into it here. FreeBSD 4.4 breaks all known Linux benchmarks, and is used in serious serving situations-- Apple.com, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. However, I will give you a very stinging, ironic instance where FreeBSD outshines Linux in server performance.
The threading model native in FreeBSD is the same that MySQL (the substandard, Open Source database) uses, and so MySQL performs around 23% faster under FreeBSD on identical harware than it does under Linux. "So what?" you ask. Well, here's the other shoe dropping: SLASH, and therefore Slashdot, uses MySQL-- so Slashdot, the premier Linux propganda site, would actually perform better under FreeBSD than the OS it claims is the best thing to happen to humanity since fire! Slashdot is actually hobbled by the OS it champions to legions of pillow-biters everyday!
geez now we use politcally correct terms for satellites getting cratered.
BC
... Tacos? Or did it miss New Zealand?
...they fsck up sat launches!
It was probably just a shipping container filled with
old pinball machine parts. They collect on the
insurance and reuse the original components in
another bird. It's a tough world, you gotta make
money any way you can.
Isn't there any safe method to get those birds up in the sky? Where is Kim Stanley Robinson's Space Elevator when you need it...
Rockets fail on launch pad killing hundreds in massive explosions!
Scenario: I'm out boating. I decide to take a few tons of heavy metals, computer components, batteries, and corrosion resistant materials and just toss the fucking loot into the ocean.
Before doing this, I make a press release entitled:
LISTEN HERE HIZZOS! I AM DUMPING ILLEGAL SHIT INTO THE OCEAN!
Why don't space companies have to clean up after their fucking messes? I want to throw shit into the ocean too! Look at the trouble that Carnival got into about dumping trash. This isn't trash too? Granted, it's not diseases feces and medical waste along with food, but I cannot imagine the ocean really needs more garbage tossed into it.
Actually it wasn't KSR who introduced the space elevator. Arthur C. Clarke had popularized it before in his novel Fountains of Paradise. In his foreword he credits Yuri Artsutanov who wrote about Space Elevators in Pravda in the 1960s.
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain