The real disaster has always been political influence on procurement programs.
I suppose the good news is NASA has learned from their mistakes. Now they just keep pushing the SLS schedule back, which avoids having a launch failure by not having a launch, while the Space Industrial Complex continues to receive their pork.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that they've been doing this as a refit on existing DeLoreans for a few years now, and it's probably not a bad idea to replace the original engine anyhow. But that's done on demand only. This new run is going to have a decent gasoline engine, so you probably don't want to get one of these and then put in the electric mod.
Great, now if we can just get rid of the Chicken Tax and the ban on most imports newer than 25 years old, then we'd have something. Getting rid of the dealer laws that keep Tesla out of a lot of states would be nice too, but let's not push our luck too much here.
Without reading TFA (hey, this is Slashdot!), I'm going to guess that they had a run made of that one quarter panel (front right?) that they ran out of quickly because DMC hadn't ordered a fresh run of them for parts before going bankrupt.
It's like asking for the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, getting an answer of "42", then realizing you didn't actually know what the question was.
H2 is also a pain in the ass because of its "spin isomer" problem. When you cool it down enough to make it liquid, the normal ortho- form changes to the para- form with an exothermic reaction, providing enough heat to boil it back to a gas!
I'm sort of more interested in where the idea of "hit points" came from. It's quite unrealistic to represent the health of a single person character by a single number, and for healing to simply bump the number back up. If you get injured to almost the point of death (1 hit point), you can still fight with full strength? And as you gain more hit points with experience, a hit that could once kill you would now be just a scratch. What?
On the other hand, by being so simplistic, it makes everything... simpler. Imagine if the first versions of D&D tried to have a comprehensive damage system, people would just give up because it would be too much work.
My guess is that it also came from war games, where a unit would be able to take so many points of damage, such as infantry taking losses. The strangeness comes from a number that represented the status of multiple people and equipment being used to represent a single person.
The problem with China isn't that a given product made there is crap, or that your outsourced Chinese manufacturer will keep trying to cut corners while you're not looking. It's that the suppliers to your Chinese company, also themselves in China, are doing the same thing, in a chain that could go multiple levels deep. Stuff like counterfeit chips, or reject genuine chips that were supposed to be destroyed getting into the supply chain.
Ten or so years ago, counterfeit electrolytic capacitors were a particular problem, after some Japanese companies like Nichicon came up with smaller packages for the same ratings, so China made counterfeits in the same size that would die in a few years.
Read Bunnie Huang's blog, you'll find examples there, such as his problems with trying to get a supply of good SD cards.
The entire "aluminum" era case design was shit. Not just minor shit, but complete and total shit. I had one PPC and two Intel of those, all 17-inch. The latch wouldn't stay shut, the case bent such that the CD slot would go out of alignment and you couldn't eject a disk, and skin oil/sweat from the palms of my hands etched the "aluminum" surface something awful. All of them. And the surface of the key caps wore off from my fingernails as I typed. At least my first one (the PPC one) was in such bad shape that the last time I took it in under Applecare, they replaced the case AND the keyboard, so it looked like new just as I stopped using it. One of them had the battery begin to fail, which caused the trackpad button to stop clicking from the expansion. Fortunately I had called Apple about it, and "oh by the way, my battery is crap", "tell me how many cycles it has", "umm, looks like 47", "that's really low, we'll ship you a new battery". By the time the new battery arrived, the old battery had visibly ballooned.
Then I got one of the last 17-inch unibody MBPs from 2011, which I am using right now, upgraded to 16GB RAM. Although I at least try not to be too rough with it, it has survived more shit than it deserves. The worst was probably when I slipped and it fell on the back left corner, leaving a dent in the case. The only bad thing that happened was the monitor cable (mounted at a diagonal angle pointing to that corner) got bumped out of place, and I had to open it up and re-seat the cable. At least I had put in an SSD by then. And the key caps of A S and E have worn down to where you can see the rubber dome through them, and some wear showing on the left shift and control key, but at least I don't get grit inside the keyboard all the time like with regular laptop keyboards. I have never had to pop the key caps on a unibody to get grit/fuzz/eyelash hairs out of it. And the aluminum surface isn't etched from sweat, except just barely along the top edge at the front.
A cousin of mine has an older unibody which had the battery dying (probably due to an event that dented the front right corner of the case), and the hard drive dying (probably from the same event, possibly from his kid mishandling it), but I was able to get replacements and install them myself.
tl;dr: Aluminum-era PowerBooks / MacBook Pros have a shitty case design, stop bitching and get a unibody MacBook Pro, preferably pre-Retina.
That's only if you're foolish enough to get one that insists on knowing where everybody is, under the assumption that they're so addicted to their cell phones that they never leave them behind, or ever turn them off.
Mine only uses the "cloud" as an interface to control/monitor it, by polling the cloud server every five minutes or so for updates. I monitor my thermostat, not the other way around. I just have to go to the web page and click on a "Set away" / "End away" button if nobody is going to be home for a while. Regular not being at home (work, etc.) is a job for schedules. It's not a hard thing to do, and if I forget before I leave, I can always change it the next time I'm on the interwebs.
It's not like SLS will necessarily do something that Falcon/Falcon Heavy can't, at least in regards to lifting payloads into whatever orbit you might want.
But it does do one thing that Falcon/FH can't, it's a great way to pass the pork around! The primary mission of SLS is not to launch a rocket, it is to keep Shuttle-era jobs and spending going.
I had an original (no 64-bit) 17" Intel MBP bite the dust recently. It bings but won't get past the gray screen. I used it to replace a G4 "Windtunnel" that bit the dust after almost 10 years of use as a file server. I had to re-spackle the heat sink to keep it going, but it died a year later anyhow. I have another one that I'll eventually use to combine parts to make it work again. Fortunately, Firewire means I can take the external hard drives and plug them into the next machine, in this case a 2011 Mac Mini that I got a few months ago. And for years I've been using a Blue & White G3 as a web server.
President proposes a budget, Congress does whatever the fuck they want with it before passing it on to the Senate. NASA funding is heavily affected by pork considerations. And this year it seems they forgot to under-fund commercial crew.
Constellation deserved to die, its only official mission was to be an ISS ferry, and it required killing ISS to fund it. Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions. (And yes, I know they're planning to use Falcon 9 for commercial crew.)
Actually, I'd say it's also shit house wiring. We've had dumb thermostats for so long, and nobody ever had to wire up power to a dumb thermostat, so you have to add an extra wire (or a wall brick) to power a smart thermostat in most homes.
I don't trust battery-powered devices for unattended stuff like this because it'll eventually fail when nobody is around. Batteries are fine for stuff like clock backup, but I don't even trust it for saving settings in memory, flash memory works just fine for that.
I'm pretty sure that the logic is usually inside the thermostat itself, it's hardly rocket science. The cloud is needed mostly because most people don't have a static IP, and it's probably behind NAT as well. A web interface or mobile app is a great place to put ads, so no wonder Google wanted Nest.
The owner speculated that because the internet was down the Nest kept trying to search for a WiFi signal until its battery died.
It's bad enough trying to power something for a long time with batteries that wants to run relays, but WiFi is just asking for it. My own smart thermostat uses three AA batteries, but they supposedly only last a few days when using WiFi, so you basically have to have a C wire (or wall transformer) to power it when using WiFi.
Oh man, humidity. I set my thermostat schedule to have a lower temperature at night. This is partly because here in central Texas, an indoor temperature of 75F during the day is fine, but I sleep better a few degrees lower. In the fall and spring, the night time temperatures go low enough (like the upper 60s) to keep the AC from running, but not low enough to overcome humidity in the house.
At about 4AM or so the humidity gets high enough that I can't sleep. So I set a midnight to 6AM schedule low enough to keep it running a bit. And I leave the blower fan on 7/24 as well to keep air moving. What I really want is for the blower fan to turn on and off regularly when not cooling, but my thermostat doesn't do that. I'll have an "open" thermostat soon enough.
Yes, and that missing wire is the C ("common") wire, which I described in another post. If you're lucky, there's an unused wire, probably blue, in the cable to the thermostat that can be used for C. It's also a good idea to put flag tags on the wires when you change out the thermostat, so people later will know that it wasn't wired up with the wrong colors.
It very much depends on your system. The controller in the heater may be smart enough to engage the fan on its own, and probably is if it is gas fired and keeps the fan running for a while after turning off the gas. I've never used electric central heating, just gas.
The real disaster has always been political influence on procurement programs.
I suppose the good news is NASA has learned from their mistakes. Now they just keep pushing the SLS schedule back, which avoids having a launch failure by not having a launch, while the Space Industrial Complex continues to receive their pork.
They already do.
I'm pretty sure I've heard that they've been doing this as a refit on existing DeLoreans for a few years now, and it's probably not a bad idea to replace the original engine anyhow. But that's done on demand only. This new run is going to have a decent gasoline engine, so you probably don't want to get one of these and then put in the electric mod.
Great, now if we can just get rid of the Chicken Tax and the ban on most imports newer than 25 years old, then we'd have something. Getting rid of the dealer laws that keep Tesla out of a lot of states would be nice too, but let's not push our luck too much here.
Without reading TFA (hey, this is Slashdot!), I'm going to guess that they had a run made of that one quarter panel (front right?) that they ran out of quickly because DMC hadn't ordered a fresh run of them for parts before going bankrupt.
The French also fucked up Vietnamese romanization in the 17th century by filling it with dozens of accent combinations including combinations of two accent marks. There are so many combinations that VISCII uses sub-0x20 code points for printable characters.
It's like asking for the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, getting an answer of "42", then realizing you didn't actually know what the question was.
Even more so when you *cough* launch an actual second stage to orbit *cough*.
H2 is also a pain in the ass because of its "spin isomer" problem. When you cool it down enough to make it liquid, the normal ortho- form changes to the para- form with an exothermic reaction, providing enough heat to boil it back to a gas!
I'm sort of more interested in where the idea of "hit points" came from. It's quite unrealistic to represent the health of a single person character by a single number, and for healing to simply bump the number back up. If you get injured to almost the point of death (1 hit point), you can still fight with full strength? And as you gain more hit points with experience, a hit that could once kill you would now be just a scratch. What?
On the other hand, by being so simplistic, it makes everything... simpler. Imagine if the first versions of D&D tried to have a comprehensive damage system, people would just give up because it would be too much work.
My guess is that it also came from war games, where a unit would be able to take so many points of damage, such as infantry taking losses. The strangeness comes from a number that represented the status of multiple people and equipment being used to represent a single person.
As objects at L1 are not stable, fuel would be necessary to maintain the position of the space-based sun shade.
The L1 point itself is not stable but there are halo and Lissajous orbits around it that are relatively stable. The bad news is that a sun shade happens to be the one kind of thing where that would be least useful.
The problem with China isn't that a given product made there is crap, or that your outsourced Chinese manufacturer will keep trying to cut corners while you're not looking. It's that the suppliers to your Chinese company, also themselves in China, are doing the same thing, in a chain that could go multiple levels deep. Stuff like counterfeit chips, or reject genuine chips that were supposed to be destroyed getting into the supply chain.
Ten or so years ago, counterfeit electrolytic capacitors were a particular problem, after some Japanese companies like Nichicon came up with smaller packages for the same ratings, so China made counterfeits in the same size that would die in a few years.
Read Bunnie Huang's blog, you'll find examples there, such as his problems with trying to get a supply of good SD cards.
You misspelled "Crescent(R)". Hope this helps!
The entire "aluminum" era case design was shit. Not just minor shit, but complete and total shit. I had one PPC and two Intel of those, all 17-inch. The latch wouldn't stay shut, the case bent such that the CD slot would go out of alignment and you couldn't eject a disk, and skin oil/sweat from the palms of my hands etched the "aluminum" surface something awful. All of them. And the surface of the key caps wore off from my fingernails as I typed. At least my first one (the PPC one) was in such bad shape that the last time I took it in under Applecare, they replaced the case AND the keyboard, so it looked like new just as I stopped using it. One of them had the battery begin to fail, which caused the trackpad button to stop clicking from the expansion. Fortunately I had called Apple about it, and "oh by the way, my battery is crap", "tell me how many cycles it has", "umm, looks like 47", "that's really low, we'll ship you a new battery". By the time the new battery arrived, the old battery had visibly ballooned.
Then I got one of the last 17-inch unibody MBPs from 2011, which I am using right now, upgraded to 16GB RAM. Although I at least try not to be too rough with it, it has survived more shit than it deserves. The worst was probably when I slipped and it fell on the back left corner, leaving a dent in the case. The only bad thing that happened was the monitor cable (mounted at a diagonal angle pointing to that corner) got bumped out of place, and I had to open it up and re-seat the cable. At least I had put in an SSD by then. And the key caps of A S and E have worn down to where you can see the rubber dome through them, and some wear showing on the left shift and control key, but at least I don't get grit inside the keyboard all the time like with regular laptop keyboards. I have never had to pop the key caps on a unibody to get grit/fuzz/eyelash hairs out of it. And the aluminum surface isn't etched from sweat, except just barely along the top edge at the front.
A cousin of mine has an older unibody which had the battery dying (probably due to an event that dented the front right corner of the case), and the hard drive dying (probably from the same event, possibly from his kid mishandling it), but I was able to get replacements and install them myself.
tl;dr: Aluminum-era PowerBooks / MacBook Pros have a shitty case design, stop bitching and get a unibody MacBook Pro, preferably pre-Retina.
That's only if you're foolish enough to get one that insists on knowing where everybody is, under the assumption that they're so addicted to their cell phones that they never leave them behind, or ever turn them off.
Mine only uses the "cloud" as an interface to control/monitor it, by polling the cloud server every five minutes or so for updates. I monitor my thermostat, not the other way around. I just have to go to the web page and click on a "Set away" / "End away" button if nobody is going to be home for a while. Regular not being at home (work, etc.) is a job for schedules. It's not a hard thing to do, and if I forget before I leave, I can always change it the next time I'm on the interwebs.
It's not like SLS will necessarily do something that Falcon/Falcon Heavy can't, at least in regards to lifting payloads into whatever orbit you might want.
But it does do one thing that Falcon/FH can't, it's a great way to pass the pork around! The primary mission of SLS is not to launch a rocket, it is to keep Shuttle-era jobs and spending going.
And this is why IPv6 is taking so long to gain traction, amirite?
I had an original (no 64-bit) 17" Intel MBP bite the dust recently. It bings but won't get past the gray screen. I used it to replace a G4 "Windtunnel" that bit the dust after almost 10 years of use as a file server. I had to re-spackle the heat sink to keep it going, but it died a year later anyhow. I have another one that I'll eventually use to combine parts to make it work again. Fortunately, Firewire means I can take the external hard drives and plug them into the next machine, in this case a 2011 Mac Mini that I got a few months ago. And for years I've been using a Blue & White G3 as a web server.
President proposes a budget, Congress does whatever the fuck they want with it before passing it on to the Senate. NASA funding is heavily affected by pork considerations. And this year it seems they forgot to under-fund commercial crew.
Constellation deserved to die, its only official mission was to be an ISS ferry, and it required killing ISS to fund it. Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions. (And yes, I know they're planning to use Falcon 9 for commercial crew.)
Actually, I'd say it's also shit house wiring. We've had dumb thermostats for so long, and nobody ever had to wire up power to a dumb thermostat, so you have to add an extra wire (or a wall brick) to power a smart thermostat in most homes.
I don't trust battery-powered devices for unattended stuff like this because it'll eventually fail when nobody is around. Batteries are fine for stuff like clock backup, but I don't even trust it for saving settings in memory, flash memory works just fine for that.
Probably the same kind of idiot who thinks turning the thermostat setting higher will make the house heat faster. And there are a lot of them.
I'm pretty sure that the logic is usually inside the thermostat itself, it's hardly rocket science. The cloud is needed mostly because most people don't have a static IP, and it's probably behind NAT as well. A web interface or mobile app is a great place to put ads, so no wonder Google wanted Nest.
The owner speculated that because the internet was down the Nest kept trying to search for a WiFi signal until its battery died.
It's bad enough trying to power something for a long time with batteries that wants to run relays, but WiFi is just asking for it. My own smart thermostat uses three AA batteries, but they supposedly only last a few days when using WiFi, so you basically have to have a C wire (or wall transformer) to power it when using WiFi.
Oh man, humidity. I set my thermostat schedule to have a lower temperature at night. This is partly because here in central Texas, an indoor temperature of 75F during the day is fine, but I sleep better a few degrees lower. In the fall and spring, the night time temperatures go low enough (like the upper 60s) to keep the AC from running, but not low enough to overcome humidity in the house.
At about 4AM or so the humidity gets high enough that I can't sleep. So I set a midnight to 6AM schedule low enough to keep it running a bit. And I leave the blower fan on 7/24 as well to keep air moving. What I really want is for the blower fan to turn on and off regularly when not cooling, but my thermostat doesn't do that. I'll have an "open" thermostat soon enough.
Yes, and that missing wire is the C ("common") wire, which I described in another post. If you're lucky, there's an unused wire, probably blue, in the cable to the thermostat that can be used for C. It's also a good idea to put flag tags on the wires when you change out the thermostat, so people later will know that it wasn't wired up with the wrong colors.
It very much depends on your system. The controller in the heater may be smart enough to engage the fan on its own, and probably is if it is gas fired and keeps the fan running for a while after turning off the gas. I've never used electric central heating, just gas.