What you meant to say was, "Everyone who reads Slashdot isn't an internet weeny, and has no idea how to find out what a technology of which they haven't heard before might be, other than imploring (counterproductively with a snide remark) to be spoon fed by other participants in the discussion." The answer is the wonderful invention, Google. You can type a word or phrase, like "Grand Central Dispatch", and Google will present you with links to document which discuss it. Oftentimes, one of those documents might appear at the web site of an online community encyclopedia, known as Wikipedia, which not only describes the thing in question, but also frequently provides convenient links to additional information.
My understanding (which may be in error) is that astronauts at ISS are protected from Solar radiation by the low orbit of the ISS. The ISS isn't designed to protect astronauts on long duration stays from harmful radiation which would be encountered at L2 or in Lunar orbit. Perhaps additional shielding could be added, but that would be a substantial additional expense, as the ISS has a high surface area given its habitable volume (it was optimized for a different criterion -- the parts needed to fit in the Shuttle cargo bay).
This theory gets trotted out at Slashdot fairly often in these discussions. It's entirely bogus. Vinyl LPs that people actually listened too wore out or were scratched much more easily than CDs, and had a much higher general replacement rate. Furthermore, cassette tapes and 8-track tapes also wore out much more easily, and were portable. People often bought the same album in two different formats. So, with as much evidence as you have, I'll claim that the advent of the CD actually reduced the rate of re-purchase of the same album.
"But then the methodology is irrelevant. I could be a pretty competent football manager and a tactical genius if I was put in charge of Real Madrid or Manchester United."
No, you could be lucky. A good manager and a good team can still screw it up. Methodology cannot turn a team of "mediocre" developers into a great development team.
Oracle could give Linux a nice run for the money, with the right OpenSolaris based strategy. They would need a healthy dose of clue, however, which I don't expect them to get from Sun.
There are so many people working in the IT industry who are deficient in basic logic, it should scare you. We don't teach it in schools, it's little wonder so many people are so poor at it. We don't teach the basic logical reasoning fallacies, either. We are paying the price for this educational failure in so many ways.
It's likely that, with current technology, it wouldn't have been possible to send robots to perform the repairs that humans actually did perform, to the Hubble. The idea was explored by NASA and rejected due to the almost certain failure of such a mission.
The argument that you meant to posit is that it might have been cheaper to build 4 generations of Hubble telescopes and launch them, than it was to remodel one telescope in orbit. (This argument doesn't get you laughed out of the room.)
The causes of the X-33 program failure are the subject of considerable debate. Here are several good sources of information. You can see that the program received criticism from the GAO, and other sources. I've seen several references to the DoD effort to fund the flight test program, and that request being over-ruled by the Bush administration. I can't recall if these sources below include that claim or not, but you can probably find one or more if you use Google.
Yeah, that's a fascinating and little-told part of the X-33 history. "Ready to fly" is perhaps a slight overstatement, but the tank problem had basically been solved in two different ways (switching to an aluminum-lithium tank was feasible with the tech demonstrated by the second generation Shuttle external tank, but also, cryogenic carbon fiber technology improvements were demonstrated and ready). X-33 certainly could have been made ready to fly, and DoD was ready to fund it. The other successes of the X-33 program have been overlooked, largely because the vehicle didn't fly. The program was not able to demonstrate the turn-around time and other aspects of the overall system design, which were intended to reduce operations cost.
Bush also torpedoed NASA by giving them the directive of going to the Moon and Mars without funding the directives. This led NASA management scrambling to "get on board" with the Bush directives, with the only mechanism available to them being to cancel all the programs which were designed to advance technology and lower cost of access to space. Oh, and shut down the ISS prematurely.
The raging success of the Hubble Space Telescope is due almost entirely to manned spaceflight. Without men and women in space to fix it and upgrade it periodically, that program would be viewed as a hugely embarrassing colossal blunder. Successive generations of instrument replacements have dramatically improved the quality and amount of science that the instrument is capable of performing. It is undoubtedly the single greatest testament to the importance of being able to routinely place men and women in space.
I don't know anything about the internal NASA management bureaucracy, but I do know about bureaucracy in business and government agencies. It is by no means guaranteed that Mr. Cook is responsible for the failures of the projects that he managed. He might well be, but it certainly does not automatically follow. Bureaucracies excel at separating authority from responsibility (in fact, it can be argued that this is a core purpose of a bureaucracy, although personally I would disagree with that goal). Mr. Cook might well have known, for example, how to salvage on or more of those projects. Many of the failures to complete R&D on next-generation launch technologies were due to the budget over-run problems of the Space Shuttle program, which left the other programs continually starved for and competing for limited funding pools which were stretched too thin. NASA didn't have the budget flexibility to sustain an R&D program like X-33 through to completion.
The relatively well documented failure of the X-33 VentureStar project, for example, is known to be in part due to a project requirement (a cryogenic carbon fiber composite H2 tank) that the Lockheed Martin engineers identified as a risk (due to immature materials technology). Yes, it was NASA who insisted on taking the risk without proper scheduling and funding for risk reduction, and that is a failure of project management.
However, the internal NASA politics that led to this may be pretty complicated, and I haven't seen any discussion of that. Mr. Cook might well have fought on behalf of the engineers, but lost. It's also possible to look at the X-33 program and decide that it was on the verge of success. The project was under-funded, but the problems appeared to be reasonably clear engineering and materials science problems, which also appeared to have pretty clear solutions paths available (for a fee). The ramp for the aerospike engine was too heavy, and the carbon fiber tank technology was immature. Both of those are materials technology problems where the solutions could be had. In fact, it appears that the tank problem was solvable with current tech (aluminum-lithium alloy, like the modern version of the Space Shuttle external tank) and improved carbon fiber technology, which was apparently demonstrated after the cancellation of the X-33 program. The aerospike ramp weight also could be solved. Meanwhile, the heat shield technology developed was apparently impressive, and the aerospike engine work was also viewed in retrospect as pretty successful.
Another thing I've observed is that government agencies, at least under the Bush administration, were literally obsessed with talking about "lessons learned" from failed projects. Unfortunately, they tended to learn the wrong lessons, often because the real lessons were not politically or organizationally acceptable. Here's an article on the X-33 as an example: Lesson in Failed X-33 Bid, New Engine Promising. The real lessons: doing something useful (reducing the cost of payload to LEO) is hard work, the X-33 was close to achieving the difficult objectives the project was assigned, and yes, it would have been well worth an extra $1 Billion to complete the project and demonstrate the suite of useful technologies developed. Instead, NASA senior management internalized a false "lesson" because they don't need to admit management failure when they simply throw up their hands and blame the concept of a reusable LEO launcher.
The actual problem is that most of the people proposing non-solutions (like "1000 trickles") have no concept of the magnitude of the problem. I'm fully in favor of rooftop solar, as much of it as possible, as fast as possible. It only solves about 3% of the problem. You can't get electricity on the scale of a modern industrialized society from 1000 trickles. You need a few big electron sources (of which rooftop solar might be one) to feed the grid. At 3% each, we don't even need 1000, we need 34, but it doesn't look like we have even 34, yet.
Sure, there are several other promising potential technologies, but they won't all pan out, and frankly we are not doing enough, fast enough. One of the reasons is that many people think the problem is going to fix itself with two solutions -- wind and solar. It won't. It doesn't even get us close to half way. What's wrong with this picture is that we (as a society) don't understand the magnitude of the problem, and thus are poorly prepared to evaluate the options available.
Another big problem is that people expect things to change slowly, that there will be enough time for society, technology, industry, government, people and the economy to adjust. In the strictly abstract sense, this is true: the economy will adjust, and we will adjust. However, the recent financial collapse and recession should demonstrate to us that factors leading to a collapse are often invisible until it's too late. There is too much inertia in an economy to adapt overnight the day the oil runs out, or even the decade for that matter. We are likely to find ourselves "adapting" by being suddenly unable to grow enough food to feed the population. That's gonna suck, big time.
Another example... a great many of the eco green energy "trickles" proposed require tearing down and rebuilding every office, apartment, house, and government building, and rebuilding them with a host of "trickle" green technologies, to make them more efficient. Sure, we can do that, but it might take 300 years.
So, your argument has just been flipped on its head. The trickles might be necessary, but they are not sufficient. We need to spend a little more time thinking about the big parts of the problem.
Wrong. Most parking lots, most of the time, are mostly empty. Don't put the solar bits within 50 feet of most big box stores, and you have a huge functioning solar collector, most of the time.
Like the entire discussion isn't flamebait. Moderator, I challenge you to enter into a discussion with me regarding the management of software development teams, and Agile methodologies. Obviously you are not aware that the first practice of nearly every agile methodology is assembling a competent team. Agile methods specifically reject the notion that you can take random people and assemble a team to develop software efficiency. The person who submitted the original discussion topic doesn't show many signs of being an appropriate member of an agile team. I'd fire him, first.
You were so close, but then you got wound up in a slave/master metaphor. So many people think that what everyone else on the team is doing is easy, and not important. Frankly this guy's management, by making a good developer a scrum master, probably has a clue. The fact that the team isn't working may well be a failure of management -- to fire people who are not productive. My guess is, however, that day is coming. This is probably a case of giving a disfunctional team enough rope to hang itself. I'd get an intern all right, but he or she wouldn't be scrum master. Which person on that team would I fire first... hrm...
The problem is that you need about 30,000 square miles of solar panels, at current efficiencies of about 14%, to solve the problem. There are apparently only about 500,000 acres of rooftop. If these guys shoot for "solar roadway" and miss by a fair bit, they might wind up with "solar parking lot", which would solve a bigger chunk of the problem than "solar rooftops" could.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to understand why they are protesting. You need to understand the Constitution of the United States of America.
What you meant to say was, "Everyone who reads Slashdot isn't an internet weeny, and has no idea how to find out what a technology of which they haven't heard before might be, other than imploring (counterproductively with a snide remark) to be spoon fed by other participants in the discussion." The answer is the wonderful invention, Google. You can type a word or phrase, like "Grand Central Dispatch", and Google will present you with links to document which discuss it. Oftentimes, one of those documents might appear at the web site of an online community encyclopedia, known as Wikipedia, which not only describes the thing in question, but also frequently provides convenient links to additional information.
You may have better luck pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Please, God, don't give it yet another One True Religion, as it's motivation.
My understanding (which may be in error) is that astronauts at ISS are protected from Solar radiation by the low orbit of the ISS. The ISS isn't designed to protect astronauts on long duration stays from harmful radiation which would be encountered at L2 or in Lunar orbit. Perhaps additional shielding could be added, but that would be a substantial additional expense, as the ISS has a high surface area given its habitable volume (it was optimized for a different criterion -- the parts needed to fit in the Shuttle cargo bay).
Sure. Or it could be that the control group getting the sugar pill, is also getting prozac (or whatever) some other way, like, in their water supply.
s/listened too/listened to/
This theory gets trotted out at Slashdot fairly often in these discussions. It's entirely bogus. Vinyl LPs that people actually listened too wore out or were scratched much more easily than CDs, and had a much higher general replacement rate. Furthermore, cassette tapes and 8-track tapes also wore out much more easily, and were portable. People often bought the same album in two different formats. So, with as much evidence as you have, I'll claim that the advent of the CD actually reduced the rate of re-purchase of the same album.
No, you could be lucky. A good manager and a good team can still screw it up. Methodology cannot turn a team of "mediocre" developers into a great development team.
That's why they call it an estimate. Make your own. Work backwards from the undisputed declining sales figures of the recording industry.
What mill dust are you cranking?
Doing double duty, the post also adds to the weight of evidence that posts which begin with "meh" are equivalent to line noise.
Oracle could give Linux a nice run for the money, with the right OpenSolaris based strategy. They would need a healthy dose of clue, however, which I don't expect them to get from Sun.
There are so many people working in the IT industry who are deficient in basic logic, it should scare you. We don't teach it in schools, it's little wonder so many people are so poor at it. We don't teach the basic logical reasoning fallacies, either. We are paying the price for this educational failure in so many ways.
Both dTrace and ZFS represent substantial contributions to the state of the art in the operating system world.
It's likely that, with current technology, it wouldn't have been possible to send robots to perform the repairs that humans actually did perform, to the Hubble. The idea was explored by NASA and rejected due to the almost certain failure of such a mission.
The argument that you meant to posit is that it might have been cheaper to build 4 generations of Hubble telescopes and launch them, than it was to remodel one telescope in orbit. (This argument doesn't get you laughed out of the room.)
The causes of the X-33 program failure are the subject of considerable debate. Here are several good sources of information. You can see that the program received criticism from the GAO, and other sources. I've seen several references to the DoD effort to fund the flight test program, and that request being over-ruled by the Bush administration. I can't recall if these sources below include that claim or not, but you can probably find one or more if you use Google.
excellent X-33 overview
X-33 VentureStar what really happened?
New Mission for Lockheed Spaceplane?
X-33 and NASA's Proposed 2001-2005 Space Launch Initiative
GAO: SPACE TRANSPORTATION Status of the X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle Program
GAO: SPACE TRANSPORTATION Progress of the X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle Program
NASA Defends Itself Against X-33 Critique
Yeah, that's a fascinating and little-told part of the X-33 history. "Ready to fly" is perhaps a slight overstatement, but the tank problem had basically been solved in two different ways (switching to an aluminum-lithium tank was feasible with the tech demonstrated by the second generation Shuttle external tank, but also, cryogenic carbon fiber technology improvements were demonstrated and ready). X-33 certainly could have been made ready to fly, and DoD was ready to fund it. The other successes of the X-33 program have been overlooked, largely because the vehicle didn't fly. The program was not able to demonstrate the turn-around time and other aspects of the overall system design, which were intended to reduce operations cost.
Bush also torpedoed NASA by giving them the directive of going to the Moon and Mars without funding the directives. This led NASA management scrambling to "get on board" with the Bush directives, with the only mechanism available to them being to cancel all the programs which were designed to advance technology and lower cost of access to space. Oh, and shut down the ISS prematurely.
The raging success of the Hubble Space Telescope is due almost entirely to manned spaceflight. Without men and women in space to fix it and upgrade it periodically, that program would be viewed as a hugely embarrassing colossal blunder. Successive generations of instrument replacements have dramatically improved the quality and amount of science that the instrument is capable of performing. It is undoubtedly the single greatest testament to the importance of being able to routinely place men and women in space.
I don't know anything about the internal NASA management bureaucracy, but I do know about bureaucracy in business and government agencies. It is by no means guaranteed that Mr. Cook is responsible for the failures of the projects that he managed. He might well be, but it certainly does not automatically follow. Bureaucracies excel at separating authority from responsibility (in fact, it can be argued that this is a core purpose of a bureaucracy, although personally I would disagree with that goal). Mr. Cook might well have known, for example, how to salvage on or more of those projects. Many of the failures to complete R&D on next-generation launch technologies were due to the budget over-run problems of the Space Shuttle program, which left the other programs continually starved for and competing for limited funding pools which were stretched too thin. NASA didn't have the budget flexibility to sustain an R&D program like X-33 through to completion.
The relatively well documented failure of the X-33 VentureStar project, for example, is known to be in part due to a project requirement (a cryogenic carbon fiber composite H2 tank) that the Lockheed Martin engineers identified as a risk (due to immature materials technology). Yes, it was NASA who insisted on taking the risk without proper scheduling and funding for risk reduction, and that is a failure of project management.
However, the internal NASA politics that led to this may be pretty complicated, and I haven't seen any discussion of that. Mr. Cook might well have fought on behalf of the engineers, but lost. It's also possible to look at the X-33 program and decide that it was on the verge of success. The project was under-funded, but the problems appeared to be reasonably clear engineering and materials science problems, which also appeared to have pretty clear solutions paths available (for a fee). The ramp for the aerospike engine was too heavy, and the carbon fiber tank technology was immature. Both of those are materials technology problems where the solutions could be had. In fact, it appears that the tank problem was solvable with current tech (aluminum-lithium alloy, like the modern version of the Space Shuttle external tank) and improved carbon fiber technology, which was apparently demonstrated after the cancellation of the X-33 program. The aerospike ramp weight also could be solved. Meanwhile, the heat shield technology developed was apparently impressive, and the aerospike engine work was also viewed in retrospect as pretty successful.
Another thing I've observed is that government agencies, at least under the Bush administration, were literally obsessed with talking about "lessons learned" from failed projects. Unfortunately, they tended to learn the wrong lessons, often because the real lessons were not politically or organizationally acceptable. Here's an article on the X-33 as an example: Lesson in Failed X-33 Bid, New Engine Promising. The real lessons: doing something useful (reducing the cost of payload to LEO) is hard work, the X-33 was close to achieving the difficult objectives the project was assigned, and yes, it would have been well worth an extra $1 Billion to complete the project and demonstrate the suite of useful technologies developed. Instead, NASA senior management internalized a false "lesson" because they don't need to admit management failure when they simply throw up their hands and blame the concept of a reusable LEO launcher.
The actual problem is that most of the people proposing non-solutions (like "1000 trickles") have no concept of the magnitude of the problem. I'm fully in favor of rooftop solar, as much of it as possible, as fast as possible. It only solves about 3% of the problem. You can't get electricity on the scale of a modern industrialized society from 1000 trickles. You need a few big electron sources (of which rooftop solar might be one) to feed the grid. At 3% each, we don't even need 1000, we need 34, but it doesn't look like we have even 34, yet.
Sure, there are several other promising potential technologies, but they won't all pan out, and frankly we are not doing enough, fast enough. One of the reasons is that many people think the problem is going to fix itself with two solutions -- wind and solar. It won't. It doesn't even get us close to half way. What's wrong with this picture is that we (as a society) don't understand the magnitude of the problem, and thus are poorly prepared to evaluate the options available.
Another big problem is that people expect things to change slowly, that there will be enough time for society, technology, industry, government, people and the economy to adjust. In the strictly abstract sense, this is true: the economy will adjust, and we will adjust. However, the recent financial collapse and recession should demonstrate to us that factors leading to a collapse are often invisible until it's too late. There is too much inertia in an economy to adapt overnight the day the oil runs out, or even the decade for that matter. We are likely to find ourselves "adapting" by being suddenly unable to grow enough food to feed the population. That's gonna suck, big time.
Another example... a great many of the eco green energy "trickles" proposed require tearing down and rebuilding every office, apartment, house, and government building, and rebuilding them with a host of "trickle" green technologies, to make them more efficient. Sure, we can do that, but it might take 300 years.
So, your argument has just been flipped on its head. The trickles might be necessary, but they are not sufficient. We need to spend a little more time thinking about the big parts of the problem.
Wrong. Most parking lots, most of the time, are mostly empty. Don't put the solar bits within 50 feet of most big box stores, and you have a huge functioning solar collector, most of the time.
Like the entire discussion isn't flamebait. Moderator, I challenge you to enter into a discussion with me regarding the management of software development teams, and Agile methodologies. Obviously you are not aware that the first practice of nearly every agile methodology is assembling a competent team. Agile methods specifically reject the notion that you can take random people and assemble a team to develop software efficiency. The person who submitted the original discussion topic doesn't show many signs of being an appropriate member of an agile team. I'd fire him, first.
You were so close, but then you got wound up in a slave/master metaphor. So many people think that what everyone else on the team is doing is easy, and not important. Frankly this guy's management, by making a good developer a scrum master, probably has a clue. The fact that the team isn't working may well be a failure of management -- to fire people who are not productive. My guess is, however, that day is coming. This is probably a case of giving a disfunctional team enough rope to hang itself. I'd get an intern all right, but he or she wouldn't be scrum master. Which person on that team would I fire first... hrm...
The problem is that you need about 30,000 square miles of solar panels, at current efficiencies of about 14%, to solve the problem. There are apparently only about 500,000 acres of rooftop. If these guys shoot for "solar roadway" and miss by a fair bit, they might wind up with "solar parking lot", which would solve a bigger chunk of the problem than "solar rooftops" could.