I think that price also includes a lot of R&D stuff that's applicable to other programs (like F-117, F-22, etc...); rather than have a separate R&D budget, they just dumped it all into the B2 program. And everything else gets to look cheaper. They did this with other programs in the past.
But anyway, the basic point about economy of scale still holds.
I'm not sure that MPL cost 5% of what a B-2 bomber would cost; that would make it... roughly 2 billion per plane, and I think it was closer to 500 million. The thing that went wrong with the B-2 was that they spent all the money developing the thing and then ran less than a dozen off of a production line. Thankfully, they're going to use the tech in planes with much better chances of getting economy of scale, and learn from their mistakes.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, NASA makes the same mistake we did when we built the B-2; they don't mass-produce space probes nearly as much as they should. They build all these onesies and twosies and they get the same false economy vibes the Air Force got when they cut back the B-2 order.
I think this sort of false economy also colors their launch vehicle development processes; take Venturestar, for instance; the first orbital vehicle would be able to carry about as much payload as the shuttle, according to the pretty viewgraphs, but shouldn't they wait until they have the tech right before trying to scale it up?
I'm hoping the private launch firms can push reduced costs, and make a Mars trip possible, but so far the only one that looks like it has funding is Beal.
Regarding NASA, I don't know. They've been waiting for the second coming of Apollo for so long they can't conceive of doing business any other way. Thus were the gains of Apollo squandered and the funds going to the shuttle's massive operations budget more or less wasted.
I generally like patents, but the way Apple has acted with the Newton (killing it for spite, but making sure noone else can use the technology or similar concepts either) is IMHO a good reason to get rid of software patents, and as far as I'm concerned, the Newton would be a good posterboy for the necessity of the GNU license.
Why is everyone here so attached to the notion of saying "it's not the launch platform, just the rocket?" The rocket is an integral part of the whole sea launch program.
Besides, even though the launch platform itself may not be at fault, from an operations standpoint it may be a complication. Shipping the rocket from the FSU to wherever their home base on the West Coast is, doing payload integration either there and shipping to Christmas Island, or shipping to Christmas Island and doing the integration there shipboard, then doing the rocket checkout and launch completely isolated from manufacturing and other infrastructure, may not be a good idea.
For the most part, in the US, I'm fairly sure that although the stages were manufactured elsewhere, the rocket launchers have been integrated together at the launch site itself, or relatively close nearby. It seems to be the plan Beal has settled on, for instance.
Except Shapiarelli didn't actually observe channels; he just observed an optical illusion and thought they were channels. The earth-bound telescopes of his time could not have picked up any of the river beds on Mars (which have been known about since the Viking probes, at least, back in the '70's, so why have a press release now?)
With regards to e2compr, I've coped simply by not upgrading the kernel. I know, I probably should...
A word to the wise: keep a spare kernel capable of reading e2compr partitions on a floppy. You'll never know when Debian's going to decide to nuke your master boot record and keep you from booting.
I must be getting senile with age. Katz actually started making sense with this one.
Anyway, I've been wondering lately whether or not Microsoft might actually be more of an ally in the content wars than an enemy? I would be willing to bet that they're not very interested in becoming a minor fiefdom in the Sony/Disney empire.
I'd say Debian would be a good choice. I'd then add: a decent handwriting system; if there were one out there, it probably needs help. I don't know what the state of firewire support in Linux is, but the bit about USB on slashdot wasn't encouraging.
Last of all, I'd suggest buying some old and obsolete computers that might still have interesting UI elements and looking at them. There's a lot of useful stuff that got buried because the management of the company developing it was incompetent, petty, or stealing from their company.
Actually, I have run into problems with calc before, although I don't remember the details; there are, however, equations it can differentiate that it can not integrate again. I can't remember the exact details, as I said. I think it was something like 1/(x-a)^4 or something like that.
I'm currently a user of both an older version of the MacOS and Linux, where Linux is running (on both boxes I have) a combination of Sawmill and Gnome. I've been reading a lot about Aqua, both how much more advanced the rendering library is than anything we have on Linux, and about what a decline in usability it is compared to the MacOS of old. For one critique, check the recent article on arstechnica.com; it goes into more detail than I can.
I haven't used Aqua myself yet, but I'm beginning to think that in some ways its "dock" is inferior from a human interface point of view to the panel in Gnome, depending on how it's configured. If I've set up the pager to hold minimized applications, they're not in danger of being mistaken for application launchers or links to documents or directories. Applets are dissimilar to either; although the default tiles, IMHO, need to be a little better, all of the above seem to be differentiated much better than in MacOS.
I'm not thinking in terms of a "we must have a standard and make everyone use it" schtick that a lot of people get on when they talk about improving Linux's user interfaces; it doesn't seem to have helped Windows and MacOS all that much, IMHO. But how would you change the defaults in gnome (or KDE) to improve usability? Might their relative customability be useful in usability experiments?
I guess a good question would be, even though I like it a lot, is the panel trying to do too much?
I find it interesting that everyone went to vote for the Republican candidate in the primary that they'll have the perfect excuse to vote against in the general election.
Is this out of maliciousness or because of other reasons?
My piece of advice to you is, if you need to be convincing Republicans that the filtering software is bad, try not to be as patronizing as Jamie is sounding in his victory speeches.
It almost sounds like he's laughing at the Republicans for voting his way instead of validating his prejudices.
Hey, Jamie, have you thought that the defeat of filtering might be showing that maybe the Republicans aren't as bad as you think?
Actually, I think the "plane analogy" is faulty. Having seen pictures of the F-16 controls, and flown in a Cessna, I have to say they don't really look alike. Even the "stick" is different on an F-16. Also, many other fighters have a fairly large number of controls "on" the stick, which the Cessna doesn't have either.
And when you start talking helicopters, of course, things get even worse.
I'm worried about this too, both from the possible DeCSS-struggle-like angle and the fact that this is yet another way to soak up CPU cycles (which I think explains a lot of what Intel does; I think they came up with USB 2.0 because Firewire wasn't going to use enough CPU cycles).
I know of no people who have said they need this. This looks like yet another product big companies have said they wanted but ordinary people will get screwed into buying.
That's precisely what historically aggravated me about Windows, BTW.
I'd like to second the comment about Debian; it was a little rocky getting going at first, but gnome-apt _really works_. And it seems to work a lot better than linuxppc when installed. The guys at LinuxPPC are very cool; I just wish they would use debian as a base instead!
I just checked, noone's asked this one yet. Which of the proposed improvements in the internet's infrastructure (IPv6 et alia) do you think will actually do something about distributed DOS attacks of this nature?
Although I think Tesla is one of the great unsung heroes, I really wonder what the point is for this teacher to have drafted the class into crusading over a bunch of issues they probably don't understand.
They need to be spending more time learning, and less time lecturing other people about what they've been told.
I doubt more moderation would work already. If all usenet were moderated, the moderators would suddenly be held liable by the courts for possibly allowing things to be posted that some government or corporation doesn't like, like DeCSS...
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I think that price also includes a lot of R&D stuff that's applicable to other programs (like F-117, F-22, etc...); rather than have a separate R&D budget, they just dumped it all into the B2 program. And everything else gets to look cheaper. They did this with other programs in the past.
But anyway, the basic point about economy of scale still holds.
I'm not sure that MPL cost 5% of what a B-2 bomber would cost; that would make it... roughly 2 billion per plane, and I think it was closer to 500 million. The thing that went wrong with the B-2 was that they spent all the money developing the thing and then ran less than a dozen off of a production line. Thankfully, they're going to use the tech in planes with much better chances of getting economy of scale, and learn from their mistakes.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, NASA makes the same mistake we did when we built the B-2; they don't mass-produce space probes nearly as much as they should. They build all these onesies and twosies and they get the same false economy vibes the Air Force got when they cut back the B-2 order.
I think this sort of false economy also colors their launch vehicle development processes; take Venturestar, for instance; the first orbital vehicle would be able to carry about as much payload as the shuttle, according to the pretty viewgraphs, but shouldn't they wait until they have the tech right before trying to scale it up?
That 112 billion dollars in today's money was however spread out over ten years or so. Roughly 11 billion a year, if you want to put it that way.
I'm hoping the private launch firms can push reduced costs, and make a Mars trip possible, but so far the only one that looks like it has funding is Beal.
Regarding NASA, I don't know. They've been waiting for the second coming of Apollo for so long they can't conceive of doing business any other way. Thus were the gains of Apollo squandered and the funds going to the shuttle's massive operations budget more or less wasted.
I generally like patents, but the way Apple has acted with the Newton (killing it for spite, but making sure noone else can use the technology or similar concepts either) is IMHO a good reason to get rid of software patents, and as far as I'm concerned, the Newton would be a good posterboy for the necessity of the GNU license.
Why is everyone here so attached to the notion of saying "it's not the launch platform, just the rocket?" The rocket is an integral part of the whole sea launch program.
Besides, even though the launch platform itself may not be at fault, from an operations standpoint it may be a complication. Shipping the rocket from the FSU to wherever their home base on the West Coast is, doing payload integration either there and shipping to Christmas Island, or shipping to Christmas Island and doing the integration there shipboard, then doing the rocket checkout and launch completely isolated from manufacturing and other infrastructure, may not be a good idea.
For the most part, in the US, I'm fairly sure that although the stages were manufactured elsewhere, the rocket launchers have been integrated together at the launch site itself, or relatively close nearby. It seems to be the plan Beal has settled on, for instance.
Actually, we know because "SeaLaunch" is the name of both the launch platform and the rocket system, a specially modified version of the Zenit.
Except Shapiarelli didn't actually observe channels; he just observed an optical illusion and thought they were channels. The earth-bound telescopes of his time could not have picked up any of the river beds on Mars (which have been known about since the Viking probes, at least, back in the '70's, so why have a press release now?)
Ooh, a fellow user of both debian and e2compr.
With regards to e2compr, I've coped simply by not upgrading the kernel. I know, I probably should...
A word to the wise: keep a spare kernel capable of reading e2compr partitions on a floppy. You'll never know when Debian's going to decide to nuke your master boot record and keep you from booting.
I must be getting senile with age. Katz actually started making sense with this one.
Anyway, I've been wondering lately whether or not Microsoft might actually be more of an ally in the content wars than an enemy? I would be willing to bet that they're not very interested in becoming a minor fiefdom in the Sony/Disney empire.
I'd say Debian would be a good choice. I'd then add: a decent handwriting system; if there were one out there, it probably needs help. I don't know what the state of firewire support in Linux is, but the bit about USB on slashdot wasn't encouraging.
Last of all, I'd suggest buying some old and obsolete computers that might still have interesting UI elements and looking at them. There's a lot of useful stuff that got buried because the management of the company developing it was incompetent, petty, or stealing from their company.
By the logic above the word processor or spreadsheet didn't even exist until Microsoft saw fit to copy the concept from someone else's program.
Actually, I have run into problems with calc before, although I don't remember the details; there are, however, equations it can differentiate that it can not integrate again. I can't remember the exact details, as I said. I think it was something like 1/(x-a)^4 or something like that.
I'm currently a user of both an older version of the MacOS and Linux, where Linux is running (on both boxes I have) a combination of Sawmill and Gnome. I've been reading a lot about Aqua, both how much more advanced the rendering library is than anything we have on Linux, and about what a decline in usability it is compared to the MacOS of old. For one critique, check the recent article on arstechnica.com; it goes into more detail than I can.
I haven't used Aqua myself yet, but I'm beginning to think that in some ways its "dock" is inferior from a human interface point of view to the panel in Gnome, depending on how it's configured. If I've set up the pager to hold minimized applications, they're not in danger of being mistaken for application launchers or links to documents or directories. Applets are dissimilar to either; although the default tiles, IMHO, need to be a little better, all of the above seem to be differentiated much better than in MacOS.
I'm not thinking in terms of a "we must have a standard and make everyone use it" schtick that a lot of people get on when they talk about improving Linux's user interfaces; it doesn't seem to have helped Windows and MacOS all that much, IMHO. But how would you change the defaults in gnome (or KDE) to improve usability? Might their relative customability be useful in usability experiments?
I guess a good question would be, even though I like it a lot, is the panel trying to do too much?
I'm using gnome and sawmill on a 100 mhz pentium with 80 megs of ram, and it feels fine.
Hmm, all the posters from the third world are complaining about having slow machines that are actually faster than mine. Time to upgrade?
I find it interesting that everyone went to vote for the Republican candidate in the primary that they'll have the perfect excuse to vote against in the general election.
Is this out of maliciousness or because of other reasons?
My piece of advice to you is, if you need to be convincing Republicans that the filtering software is bad, try not to be as patronizing as Jamie is sounding in his victory speeches.
It almost sounds like he's laughing at the Republicans for voting his way instead of validating his prejudices.
Hey, Jamie, have you thought that the defeat of filtering might be showing that maybe the Republicans aren't as bad as you think?
Actually, I think the "plane analogy" is faulty. Having seen pictures of the F-16 controls, and flown in a Cessna, I have to say they don't really look alike. Even the "stick" is different on an F-16. Also, many other fighters have a fairly large number of controls "on" the stick, which the Cessna doesn't have either.
And when you start talking helicopters, of course, things get even worse.
I like Mexican food too, but I prefer real Mexican food to the fake American Microwaved Dilberito stuff.
What are you saying, Chris? That CP/M had
better inherent security? AFAIK Unix wasn't
a competitor for the first PC OS.
I'm worried about this too, both from the possible DeCSS-struggle-like angle and the fact that this is yet another way to soak up CPU cycles (which I think explains a lot of what Intel does; I think they came up with USB 2.0 because Firewire wasn't going to use enough CPU cycles).
I know of no people who have said they need this. This looks like yet another product big companies have said they wanted but ordinary people will get screwed into buying.
That's precisely what historically aggravated me about Windows, BTW.
I'd like to second the comment about Debian; it was a little rocky getting going at first, but gnome-apt _really works_. And it seems to work a lot better than linuxppc when installed. The guys at LinuxPPC are very cool; I just wish they would use debian as a base instead!
I just checked, noone's asked this one yet. Which of the proposed improvements in the internet's infrastructure (IPv6 et alia) do you think will actually do something about distributed DOS attacks of this nature?
Although I think Tesla is one of the great unsung heroes, I really wonder what the point is for this teacher to have drafted the class into crusading over a bunch of issues they probably don't understand.
They need to be spending more time learning, and less time lecturing other people about what they've been told.
Is anyone else creeped out about this?
I doubt more moderation would work already. If all usenet were moderated, the moderators would suddenly be held liable by the courts for possibly allowing things to be posted that some government or corporation doesn't like, like DeCSS...