How many expensive, embarrasing failures have we seen in the last few years?
I dunno, how many expensive, embarassing rocket ideas have there been? If this can get you most of the way to near-earth orbit cheaply, then other propulsion to take over from there once the hard part of getting out of most of the atmosphere's been done, then balloons are great. But the only way to find that out is by trying it...
I wonder how much taxpayer dollars the Coast Guard will spend to fish these guys out of the sea?
It seems like a really cool thing to do here, but I sure hope that QuinetiQ plans for the inevitiable failure. Frankly, the government should rethink its policy and seek reimbursement from thrillseekers.
Apart from the fact that Quinetiq are a British corporation, and operate under the authority of the British government, and are a great deal more effective than NASA are for the US government.
Knowledge is knowledge. If you want to propagate effective computer security, don't badger and pressure corporations to cow to your wishes with publicity stunts like this one.
Actually, the knowledge of hardware DES cracking is already pretty old.
The reason no one bought them then, and the reason no one will buy them now, is the horrid expense of launching & reusing them - for example, on return to Earth, the Space Shuttle Main Engines are pulled, shipped to California, rebuilt to spec, and tested for ~75% of their design lifetime - any deviation during this test period results in the engine being scrapped. The Shuttle is an old design, and it wasn't efficient when it was new. Or consider the Solid Rocket Boosters, which actually cost more to retrieve and reuse than disposable boosters would.
Quite. NASA, and it's budgets, are intensely political. The Shuttle camp were enormously influential, helped no doubt by political lobbying and kickbacks from key contractors and vendors, and hamstrung the various SSTO projects, which had the potential for cost effective shuttling between the ground and near-Earth orbits.
The solution is to move all space activity into the private sector. Break up NASA and sell it off if anyone wants it, in an open auction. By all means keep a Federal agency to certify space vehicles as safe to launch (if launches are on US territory), but all the activity carried out in the private sector. If there's a business case for it, we'll have a man on Mars decades before NASA's bureacrats have even filled in the paperwork for that mission.
I dont think that any large companies can use them. The use of free (as in beer) appz looks bad on sharehodlers.
Only if you've bought RHAT or LNUX
Plus, senior IT execs need reliable support and assurance that they got the best software in the market for the job, just in case things go wrong. Its a liabilities thing
It's not about things going wrong, and don't kid yourself that it is, after all there are plenty of organizations offering support on Linux, even IBM will do so (if you pay them enough). It's a matter of the right tool for the job, and at the high end, Linux trails behind commercial Unix implementations like Solaris and AIX, tightly integrated with their hardware, and with solid high performance capability, for example Solaris' threading and logical domains.
I always thought that they should market it as an embedded chip, the lynch pin being they could supply you chips that wouldn't require you to relearn a new instruction set. I.e. if you're used to programming a Mips, they'd ship you the chip with the Mips instruction set. If you programmed PPC, then they'd ship you that. That would also give companies exposure to the underlying archetecture of the chip and maybe they'd migrate to its native instruction set.
True, but why not target the Java instruction set, and create a high-performance Java chip, with a bonus of being about to also execute x86 (or SPARC or whatever) applications? Going head to head with Intel in their main market was a strategic mistake. Note that even Intel had to get out of the RAM business when they failed to dominate the market, Transmeta should have studied their competition in more detail. Or at least, hired some expensive consultants to do it for them.
We never do the same thing thousands of times; when something needs to be done over and over again, a program is written to do it, incorporating the learned principles and techniques.
That's simply not true. The majority of software written in the world is corporate data-processing applications, basically forms and workflow on top of databases. Those can be planned and executed using techniques from engineering. How many e-commerce web sites are there, for another example? Another well-understood area.
The real problem is, so-called "programmers" who jump in and start writing code without doing any research or analysis, re-inventing the wheel, in most cases sub-optimally, time and time again.
Software development is not a science in the normal sense. Designing large software systems is an art. It cannot be pigeonholed
That's exactly the sort of attitude that has caused the sort of spectactular failures of software projects to be accepted as the norm. Software Engineering is *not* "hacking" or "coding" or "programming", it's *engineering*, like building a bridge or a skyscraper. Yes, those projects go over time and budget too sometimes, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
That is how it works in the real world. The numbers are essentially meaningless, but the bean counters and suits have to justify their existance somehow
The problem is endemic in the industry. The other Engineering professions require rigorous accreditation before they let practitioners loose in the world, like the PE (in the US) or the Charter (in the UK). But the software industry hires anyone, and lets them get on with whatever they do, with no real management or oversight or planning.
In a well analyzed and properly planned project, the actual coding stage is little more than data entry.
Not a revolutionary change, but definitely a big evolutionary change.
I'm always a little confused when people use this analogy. Revolutions are abrupt and bloody and may kill lots of individuals... but evolution make entire species extinct.
You can download a RTOS, QNX, free for non-commercial use I believe. If you are used to Linux, it will be easy to program since it supports similar APIs. Linux isn't actually POSIX, tho'.
Our system would light the "toilet occupied" light above the door, which we normally only lit when another discrete indicated the door was locked.
That's amazing; I had always assumed that this was a simple mechanical electrical switch in the lock mechanism directly controlling power to the light above the door. I suppose it does make sense to have some computing power if it's a large aircraft, are 747s (which have a block of 6 toilets midway through the cabin) smart enough to know how many cubicles are occupied and adjust a single toilet-free indicator in the main passenger section appropriately?
. We were talking about it the other day and he told me it was all simply common sense and general tips that anybody in the business would already know.
You might be surprised at how un-common common sense actually is...
Do you think that Windows 2000 DataCenter has the same VM system as Windows 2000 Professional? I severely doubt it
It's actually probably the same algorithm, with different parameters. That's how NT4 did it, in Workstation and Server versions. The kernel would note which version it was supposed to be on startup, then initialize the VM system differently.
So, why did Microsoft block some folks from MSN? What were they so "foolish" you ask?
I've built web sites where we've locked out browsers, usually Netscape. The reason is simple: we can make the site do what we want it to do in MSIE, and the cost of making it do what we want it to do (and all the regression testing on different versions and platforms) in Netscape wasn't justified by the number of Netscape users we saw in the logs for a previous version of the site. It was judged by people senior to me (who presumably know this stuff) that it was better for Netscape users to see nothing but a message to use MSIE than it was for them to use the site and see that it was broken for them.
The thing that academic-style organizations that typically set standards on the Internet haven't yet learnt is that commercial organizations don't have time to wait for their deliberations. It is unreasonable to expect everyone in the industry to wait until a standards body can agree - Netscape didn't wait, did they? Remember <BLINK>?
So long as there is a common subset that works in all browsers - and there is, HTML 3.2 - then vendors should be free to add extensions. If you don't want to use them, that is fine by me, but if I want to use them on content I author, that too is my right.
Profit should be made with support and consultancy.
It's not for you or anyone else to say how or how not profit should be made. The market will decide for itself, as ever. Even now, Microsoft et al are making money... how are Red Hat doing?
Why not just have a non-profit organization that issues certificates to anyone that wants one for a nominal fee?
Well, you can generate your own certificate, it's straightforward enough. The issue is trust. When you (a shopper, say) go to a site secured by Verisign, you are in effect saying that you trust Verisign not to issue a certificate to anyone who isn't trustworthy. Of course, for most people, it's "I trust Netscape/Microsoft/Whoever, who trust Verisign, who trust this merchant". If you generate your own certificate, there is no "trusted third party" to confirm you are who you say you are. The reason certificates cost money is because for a certificate to be trustworthy, the issuer has to perform due-diligence checks (for example, company registration documents) to ensure that they are granting it to a legitimate organization.
Logically, this could and perhaps should, be a function of Companies House (or the US equivalent), the body responsible for keeping track of company registrations, filing accounts and so forth. But any company with a strong enough brand (a hardware vendor, a major bank or law firm, a telco) could act as a trusted third party, so long as that TTP is itself trusted by the public. The only problem there is, how to get the browser vendors to distribute their certificates along with the browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I am wondering how you got into that field to start with. The reason I am asking is that I really want to be a UNIX admin
Just find a surgeon and get your fingers removed. Now. Trust me, it will be less painful in the long run.
Suck it up, Bungie. MS stole your soul and your ability to innovate.
Alternatively, MS provided the hard cash and commercial expertise to keep Bungie in business to work on wildly-overambitions projects.
Not everything in life is a conspiracy by Microsoft against the entire world, you know.
Does MS have support in XP?
Actually, yes, but not by default. But it would be straightforward enough to roll it out across an entire network, XP has good remote administration.
How many expensive, embarrasing failures have we seen in the last few years?
I dunno, how many expensive, embarassing rocket ideas have there been? If this can get you most of the way to near-earth orbit cheaply, then other propulsion to take over from there once the hard part of getting out of most of the atmosphere's been done, then balloons are great. But the only way to find that out is by trying it...
I wonder how much taxpayer dollars the Coast Guard will spend to fish these guys out of the sea?
It seems like a really cool thing to do here, but I sure hope that QuinetiQ plans for the inevitiable failure. Frankly, the government should rethink its policy and seek reimbursement from thrillseekers.
Apart from the fact that Quinetiq are a British corporation, and operate under the authority of the British government, and are a great deal more effective than NASA are for the US government.
It's very cool stuff, you can read about it in the design whitepaper
The correct URL for the white paper is here.
Try one of the these. StrongARM processor, 802.11b networking, operates from -30 to 50 degrees Celsius, backlit screen with temperature compensation.
Knowledge is knowledge. If you want to propagate effective computer security, don't badger and pressure corporations to cow to your wishes with publicity stunts like this one.
Actually, the knowledge of hardware DES cracking is already pretty old.
The reason no one bought them then, and the reason no one will buy them now, is the horrid expense of launching & reusing them - for example, on return to Earth, the Space Shuttle Main Engines are pulled, shipped to California, rebuilt to spec, and tested for ~75% of their design lifetime - any deviation during this test period results in the engine being scrapped. The Shuttle is an old design, and it wasn't efficient when it was new. Or consider the Solid Rocket Boosters, which actually cost more to retrieve and reuse than disposable boosters would.
Quite. NASA, and it's budgets, are intensely political. The Shuttle camp were enormously influential, helped no doubt by political lobbying and kickbacks from key contractors and vendors, and hamstrung the various SSTO projects, which had the potential for cost effective shuttling between the ground and near-Earth orbits.
The solution is to move all space activity into the private sector. Break up NASA and sell it off if anyone wants it, in an open auction. By all means keep a Federal agency to certify space vehicles as safe to launch (if launches are on US territory), but all the activity carried out in the private sector. If there's a business case for it, we'll have a man on Mars decades before NASA's bureacrats have even filled in the paperwork for that mission.
The problem is that you typically do not want your space project going to the "lowest bidder".
How do you think the shuttle manufacturers source components?
I can see some advantages as long as things are executed
The lowest bigger who meets the specification. But remember NASA are the people who spend $10,000 to procure a hammer.
I dont think that any large companies can use them. The use of free (as in beer) appz looks bad on sharehodlers.
Only if you've bought RHAT or LNUX
Plus, senior IT execs need reliable support and assurance that they got the best software in the market for the job, just in case things go wrong. Its a liabilities thing
It's not about things going wrong, and don't kid yourself that it is, after all there are plenty of organizations offering support on Linux, even IBM will do so (if you pay them enough). It's a matter of the right tool for the job, and at the high end, Linux trails behind commercial Unix implementations like Solaris and AIX, tightly integrated with their hardware, and with solid high performance capability, for example Solaris' threading and logical domains.
I always thought that they should market it as an embedded chip, the lynch pin being they could supply you chips that wouldn't require you to relearn a new instruction set. I.e. if you're used to programming a Mips, they'd ship you the chip with the Mips instruction set. If you programmed PPC, then they'd ship you that. That would also give companies exposure to the underlying archetecture of the chip and maybe they'd migrate to its native instruction set.
True, but why not target the Java instruction set, and create a high-performance Java chip, with a bonus of being about to also execute x86 (or SPARC or whatever) applications? Going head to head with Intel in their main market was a strategic mistake. Note that even Intel had to get out of the RAM business when they failed to dominate the market, Transmeta should have studied their competition in more detail. Or at least, hired some expensive consultants to do it for them.
We never do the same thing thousands of times; when something needs to be done over and over again, a program is written to do it, incorporating the learned principles and techniques.
That's simply not true. The majority of software written in the world is corporate data-processing applications, basically forms and workflow on top of databases. Those can be planned and executed using techniques from engineering. How many e-commerce web sites are there, for another example? Another well-understood area.
The real problem is, so-called "programmers" who jump in and start writing code without doing any research or analysis, re-inventing the wheel, in most cases sub-optimally, time and time again.
Do you really think CISCO.com is going to be /.'ed enough to need a mirror?
Well it seems to be right now...
Software development is not a science in the normal sense. Designing large software systems is an art. It cannot be pigeonholed
That's exactly the sort of attitude that has caused the sort of spectactular failures of software projects to be accepted as the norm. Software Engineering is *not* "hacking" or "coding" or "programming", it's *engineering*, like building a bridge or a skyscraper. Yes, those projects go over time and budget too sometimes, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
That is how it works in the real world. The numbers are essentially meaningless, but the bean counters and suits have to justify their existance somehow
The problem is endemic in the industry. The other Engineering professions require rigorous accreditation before they let practitioners loose in the world, like the PE (in the US) or the Charter (in the UK). But the software industry hires anyone, and lets them get on with whatever they do, with no real management or oversight or planning.
In a well analyzed and properly planned project, the actual coding stage is little more than data entry.
Not a revolutionary change, but definitely a big evolutionary change.
I'm always a little confused when people use this analogy. Revolutions are abrupt and bloody and may kill lots of individuals... but evolution make entire species extinct.
You can download a RTOS, QNX, free for non-commercial use I believe. If you are used to Linux, it will be easy to program since it supports similar APIs. Linux isn't actually POSIX, tho'.
Fascinating :0)
(Moderators: up #2507617 please).
Our system would light the "toilet occupied" light above the door, which we normally only lit when another discrete indicated the door was locked.
That's amazing; I had always assumed that this was a simple mechanical electrical switch in the lock mechanism directly controlling power to the light above the door. I suppose it does make sense to have some computing power if it's a large aircraft, are 747s (which have a block of 6 toilets midway through the cabin) smart enough to know how many cubicles are occupied and adjust a single toilet-free indicator in the main passenger section appropriately?
. We were talking about it the other day and he told me it was all simply common sense and general tips that anybody in the business would already know.
You might be surprised at how un-common common sense actually is...
Do you think that Windows 2000 DataCenter has the same VM system as Windows 2000 Professional? I severely doubt it
It's actually probably the same algorithm, with different parameters. That's how NT4 did it, in Workstation and Server versions. The kernel would note which version it was supposed to be on startup, then initialize the VM system differently.
NASA also thought about this, all the way up to Petabytes.
So, why did Microsoft block some folks from MSN? What were they so "foolish" you ask?
I've built web sites where we've locked out browsers, usually Netscape. The reason is simple: we can make the site do what we want it to do in MSIE, and the cost of making it do what we want it to do (and all the regression testing on different versions and platforms) in Netscape wasn't justified by the number of Netscape users we saw in the logs for a previous version of the site. It was judged by people senior to me (who presumably know this stuff) that it was better for Netscape users to see nothing but a message to use MSIE than it was for them to use the site and see that it was broken for them.
The thing that academic-style organizations that typically set standards on the Internet haven't yet learnt is that commercial organizations don't have time to wait for their deliberations. It is unreasonable to expect everyone in the industry to wait until a standards body can agree - Netscape didn't wait, did they? Remember <BLINK>?
So long as there is a common subset that works in all browsers - and there is, HTML 3.2 - then vendors should be free to add extensions. If you don't want to use them, that is fine by me, but if I want to use them on content I author, that too is my right.
Profit should be made with support and consultancy.
It's not for you or anyone else to say how or how not profit should be made. The market will decide for itself, as ever. Even now, Microsoft et al are making money... how are Red Hat doing?
Why not just have a non-profit organization that issues certificates to anyone that wants one for a nominal fee?
Well, you can generate your own certificate, it's straightforward enough. The issue is trust. When you (a shopper, say) go to a site secured by Verisign, you are in effect saying that you trust Verisign not to issue a certificate to anyone who isn't trustworthy. Of course, for most people, it's "I trust Netscape/Microsoft/Whoever, who trust Verisign, who trust this merchant". If you generate your own certificate, there is no "trusted third party" to confirm you are who you say you are. The reason certificates cost money is because for a certificate to be trustworthy, the issuer has to perform due-diligence checks (for example, company registration documents) to ensure that they are granting it to a legitimate organization.
Logically, this could and perhaps should, be a function of Companies House (or the US equivalent), the body responsible for keeping track of company registrations, filing accounts and so forth. But any company with a strong enough brand (a hardware vendor, a major bank or law firm, a telco) could act as a trusted third party, so long as that TTP is itself trusted by the public. The only problem there is, how to get the browser vendors to distribute their certificates along with the browser.