It doesn't really make much sense to attempt to "predict" launches. Very seldom do they happen at the time they're originally planned. If it's not a delay caused by equipment malfunction in any one of the thousands of complex components of the vehicle, or ground support, it's weather.
More than once, I've driven out to Vandenberg in the middle of the night to watch a launch, and ended up having to go home disappointed. Spacelaunch is not a spectator sport! (though, when you get lucky, they're great to watch). About two years ago, I drove down for the ICESAT/CHIPSAT launch. It was delayed for about an hour, so I waited, and a marine layer rolled in off the sea. When the launch happened, I saw about the first 10 seconds of the flight before it disappeared. I got home, and my wife, who was watching from the front yard saw the whole thing clear as day.
I wonder if I could run Linux on it. . . I'd love to build a beowulf cluster of these. If I sat Natalie Portman on it, would it alert me when she needed service? I bet a penis-bird could perch on one of these, but only up until about two or three beers. I will not mention Goatse, I will not mention Goatse. . .
new cars have really flimsy body panels that are a pain when involved in low-speed fender benders,
Or more accurately, they are NOT a pain. Those flimsy panels are a "crumple zone" designed to absorb energy on impact - so your body doesn't have to.
bought 1992 diesel Mercedes (now *that*'s a durable car!), and run it on biodiesel.
I have a buddy at work who bought a mid-80's diesel mercedes, and hacked it to run on vegetable oil. Still only gets about 27 mpg, because those cars are TANKS.
My 1985 Toyota wagon got 27mpg or better for its first decade,
That's nothing. My 1972 VW Karmann Ghia got 36mpg. With the top down. At a cruise speed of 75 mph. (though it's stop-n-go milage was in the 12-15 mpg range).
But the point about the auto insurance being the reason that makes being energy efficient not cost efficient, is absolutely true. Whether you're talking about the guy who buys a big truck to tow his boat every couple of weekends, and could commute in a small, efficient car, but doesn't because of the extra insurance costs.. . or if you're talking about motorcycles. Registration is also a major, major, expense in some states.
There are "deals" you can get with insurance companies on vehicles classed as "recreational" - but they don't go far enough to make it cost effective.
The irony is the outcry over a few diesel cars that have very advanced emissions control systems, and are even cleaner than most cars on the road today. Yet nobody blinks about the unregulated (NAFTA) travel of tens of thousands of Mexican trucks, with absolutely no emissions controls whatsoever, plying American roads delivering goods from across the border.
If I, as a user, have to "Pay-per-use" for their AJAX word-processor, then screw it. I'll download and install one of the fine, free alternatives, or bite the bullet, and buy a copy of MS Office.
The reason Web Apps failed, is because they tried to impose a "pay-per-use" model, and failed to develop any reasonably workable micropayments system (in other words, pay-per-use means macropayments per use.)
Fuck that.
I already have a monthly electric bill, a monthly transportation bill, a monthly mortgage payment, a monthly internet service fee, a monthly phone bill. I earn a flat monthly salary.
I want a flat fee up front, and unlimited use on the back end of the deal, and I don't want planned obsolescence built into the product either. Nicking into my monthly budget is why web apps failed in the past, and why they will fail in the future.
If you ask me, this is one of the great failings of the much vaunted "information age" - pundits warned about it, but they had no idea of the impact of uncalled falsehoods on the Information Free Marketplace of Ideas.
There have been famous cases to decide the legal status of these kinds of underhanded propaganda campaigns. . (Most famously, Nike's "right to lie" case), but to my knowledge, nobody has addressed the impact such commercial propaganda has on the general consuming public, or consumer goods markets. It's ultimately a sticky free-speech issue.
I'm taking a Tech Writing course this semester, and in the introductory chapter, they discuss the ethics of Tech Writing - it's a Tech Writer's ethical duty to ensure corporate communiations are factually correct and truthful.
We're having some interesting discussions about material coming out of Microsoft, Gartner, et al. . .
No. I expect Microsoft to allow a third party company to take the risk to develop the technology to fix it, establish a market and a user base, then either buy the company outright, or build the same tool (same basic functionality, barely good-enough), and bundle it with the OS, putting the third party company out of business.
I simply don't know why Microsoft has allowed SysInternals to live for so long. Distracted by Linux?
Do you think that food will be delivered via spaceship to entire planets?
Probably not - if there isn't a cheaper, more reliable, more transportible manufacturing process for food, of course traditional agriculture will take over on backwaters.
Personally, I don't think that big wooden tables, and handmade vintage western-style clothing will be in the "universe of the future". At least not as standard equipment on spaceships. I think that a lot of those kinds of goods will be mass-produced by indentured child labor on some backwater shithole planet where the locals aren't able to organize labor laws. Which, I suppose, is part of what the Serenity-verse is all about. The dearth of that kind of thing blows my suspension of disbelief for this show. As does the whole "reavers" concept. (One wouldn't "devolve" to cannibalism etc, and still have the wherewithal to properly maintain and equip spacecraft for very long - one would thing).
On the other hand, suspension of disbelief isn't what I like about the show. For me, it's all about Jayne. Jayne, Jayne, Jayne. Great character. Great writing. They could be "Circus clowns in space" and I'd still love the show, as long as it had Jayne.
I was a big fan of Frank Miller's work in the 1980's. Ronin. Elektra. Dark Knight. I was very much looking forward to Sin City. Trailers looked interesting. Unfortunately, it sucked ass IMO. A big part of it was the incredibly wooden performances by otherwise good actors. I'm wondering if George Lucas was secretly directing it using a remote controlled Rodriguez-bot? But I guess another part of it was: it was a movie, inspired by a comic book, inspired by film-noir movies. Visually; it was just missing something for me. I don't know if it was the rigid format (Miller was one of the first American comic artists to push format/framing - inspired by Goseke Kojima - Manga, before Manga was cool. . . ) - I don't know if it was that, or what.
But I'm pretty sure Serenity won't disappoint me. Bought the boxed set last year.
Re:Ah - the answer is clearer now...
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
A buddy of mine at work wanted a TDI.
Instead, he bought an old mercedes diesel, but he burns vegetable oil (not biodiesel). He has to start it on diesel until the engine is warm enough, and channels coolant along the fuel line in copper tubes to preheat the vegetable oil. Too much hackery for me. At least for a daily driver I need to be reliable.
As I said - the TDI is really nice for it's milage, and decent performance too. And the fact that it will run biodiesel without hacks. But where I live (not near a major city) - none of the auto zone/pepboys type places, not walmart, none of them seem to have the right oil. I've been tempted to run it on just normal delvac, but the TDI zealots on the web board scared me away from that, they say it'll burn out the turbocharger.
When the time comes (20k more miles) I'm going to save up, and set aside time to change-out the timing belt though.
Long story short - it's easy to complain about other people's decisions when you don't understand all of the elements that go into making the decision.
It's also easy to get into a mode of thinking where you don't question authority, because you assume you don't have all the facts they have.
The real problem is that his high school did not prepare him. More likely, it coddle him into thinking that he was one of the top.
My son is hitting this problem in grade school. Problem is - he IS very smart, but last year, he did crap work, and his teacher let him get away with it. His parents (my wife and I) also let him get away with it. We're paying for it this year, because this year, his teacher is not letting him get away with the crap work anymore, and we're having to spend a lot more time with him getting him to improve his standards.
Good thing this happened in grade school, instead of college, though.
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
I think that Palm's fatal mistake was not adding wireless communication quickly enough. The Palm VII (I think) - was the first one that could connect to the internet directly via wireless, (or was it the IV?) and the monthly expense for the service was too much.
The killer-app of the internet has always been email, but every time someone tries to make money off of it, (through subscription), they generally fail (unless it's bundled with other products, like the basic internet connection).
Maybe coverage wasn't good for the Palm VII either. I dunno.
Connecting messaging with contacts and calendaring has been successful on desktop computers, but that level of integration has been difficult to attain on a PDA/Cellphone with any degree of elegance. I agree that there was a kind of fad-ism with the Palm. But had they accomplished the convenience of cell-phone sms text messaging and/or chat and/or email, in the PDA form factor, without being an additional expense incremental to the user's monthly cell-phone bill, I think they would have been wildly successful.
I expect ipod/cell-phone combos to fail. Camera phones are also gimmicky. But if I had a form-factor like a Motorola razor phone, with the functionality of the graffiti interface, and reasonable service fees for messaging, I think it'd see a great deal of practical use, evolving into necessity.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't really make much sense to attempt to "predict" launches. Very seldom do they happen at the time they're originally planned. If it's not a delay caused by equipment malfunction in any one of the thousands of complex components of the vehicle, or ground support, it's weather.
More than once, I've driven out to Vandenberg in the middle of the night to watch a launch, and ended up having to go home disappointed. Spacelaunch is not a spectator sport! (though, when you get lucky, they're great to watch).
About two years ago, I drove down for the ICESAT/CHIPSAT launch. It was delayed for about an hour, so I waited, and a marine layer rolled in off the sea. When the launch happened, I saw about the first 10 seconds of the flight before it disappeared. I got home, and my wife, who was watching from the front yard saw the whole thing clear as day.
I'm staying home for Monday's Delta IV launch.
Well, there's "most advanced" - and the more accurate; "Who would win in a fight". And that's been working for comic-book geeks for decades.
I wonder if I could run Linux on it. . .
I'd love to build a beowulf cluster of these.
If I sat Natalie Portman on it, would it alert me when she needed service?
I bet a penis-bird could perch on one of these, but only up until about two or three beers.
I will not mention Goatse, I will not mention Goatse. . .
Well, then there's the sticky problem of how they're going to record and produce the music.
They could always buy Apple Records though. Kill two birds (The lawsuit, and the RIAA) with one stone. . .
new cars have really flimsy body panels that are a pain when involved in low-speed fender benders,
Or more accurately, they are NOT a pain. Those flimsy panels are a "crumple zone" designed to absorb energy on impact - so your body doesn't have to.
bought 1992 diesel Mercedes (now *that*'s a durable car!), and run it on biodiesel.
I have a buddy at work who bought a mid-80's diesel mercedes, and hacked it to run on vegetable oil. Still only gets about 27 mpg, because those cars are TANKS.
:( I'm only getting about 40 with my TDI. (40 miles 90% hwy each day)
;)
I keep my tires inflated right and everything.
But I don't drive sane. No no.
If I had to flee a storm, I would much rather do it in a Prius.
Yeah, but if you were fleeing a nuclear attack, the EMP would ruin your day. Then again, same goes for just about anything built after 1975.
Since Mal had him tied up and in front of a large turbine, he just kicked the "bad" guy into it.
Yeah, me too.
That, and when he stuffed his own crew member out an airlock (during ascent) to incite a "come to Jesus" moment.
Actually - I don't have data to back this up right now, but wind, is the fastest growing power generation source in the US right now.
So charge the batteries at night when demand is at its lowest.
With roof-mounted photovoltaics too!
no, wait. . .
My 1985 Toyota wagon got 27mpg or better for its first decade,
That's nothing. My 1972 VW Karmann Ghia got 36mpg. With the top down. At a cruise speed of 75 mph. (though it's stop-n-go milage was in the 12-15 mpg range).
But the point about the auto insurance being the reason that makes being energy efficient not cost efficient, is absolutely true. Whether you're talking about the guy who buys a big truck to tow his boat every couple of weekends, and could commute in a small, efficient car, but doesn't because of the extra insurance costs.. . or if you're talking about motorcycles. Registration is also a major, major, expense in some states.
There are "deals" you can get with insurance companies on vehicles classed as "recreational" - but they don't go far enough to make it cost effective.
The irony is the outcry over a few diesel cars that have very advanced emissions control systems, and are even cleaner than most cars on the road today. Yet nobody blinks about the unregulated (NAFTA) travel of tens of thousands of Mexican trucks, with absolutely no emissions controls whatsoever, plying American roads delivering goods from across the border.
It makes NO fucking sense.
What cough? The fucker had no lungs. Just a brain, eyes, and heart. No lungs, no cough.
Lawyers will eat it all.
Every last red cent.
That's my guarantee to y'all.
If I, as a user, have to "Pay-per-use" for their AJAX word-processor, then screw it. I'll download and install one of the fine, free alternatives, or bite the bullet, and buy a copy of MS Office.
The reason Web Apps failed, is because they tried to impose a "pay-per-use" model, and failed to develop any reasonably workable micropayments system (in other words, pay-per-use means macropayments per use.)
Fuck that.
I already have a monthly electric bill, a monthly transportation bill, a monthly mortgage payment, a monthly internet service fee, a monthly phone bill. I earn a flat monthly salary.
I want a flat fee up front, and unlimited use on the back end of the deal, and I don't want planned obsolescence built into the product either.
Nicking into my monthly budget is why web apps failed in the past, and why they will fail in the future.
If you ask me, this is one of the great failings of the much vaunted "information age" - pundits warned about it, but they had no idea of the impact of uncalled falsehoods on the Information Free Marketplace of Ideas.
There have been famous cases to decide the legal status of these kinds of underhanded propaganda campaigns. . (Most famously, Nike's "right to lie" case), but to my knowledge, nobody has addressed the impact such commercial propaganda has on the general consuming public, or consumer goods markets. It's ultimately a sticky free-speech issue.
Heh.
I'm taking a Tech Writing course this semester, and in the introductory chapter, they discuss the ethics of Tech Writing - it's a Tech Writer's ethical duty to ensure corporate communiations are factually correct and truthful.
We're having some interesting discussions about material coming out of Microsoft, Gartner, et al. . .
No. I expect Microsoft to allow a third party company to take the risk to develop the technology to fix it, establish a market and a user base, then either buy the company outright, or build the same tool (same basic functionality, barely good-enough), and bundle it with the OS, putting the third party company out of business.
I simply don't know why Microsoft has allowed SysInternals to live for so long. Distracted by Linux?
Even better, Task Schedler allows a normal user to schedule to run a Task as System. .)
(unless they patched that bug. .
Do you think that food will be delivered via spaceship to entire planets?
Probably not - if there isn't a cheaper, more reliable, more transportible manufacturing process for food, of course traditional agriculture will take over on backwaters.
Personally, I don't think that big wooden tables, and handmade vintage western-style clothing will be in the "universe of the future". At least not as standard equipment on spaceships. I think that a lot of those kinds of goods will be mass-produced by indentured child labor on some backwater shithole planet where the locals aren't able to organize labor laws. Which, I suppose, is part of what the Serenity-verse is all about. The dearth of that kind of thing blows my suspension of disbelief for this show. As does the whole "reavers" concept. (One wouldn't "devolve" to cannibalism etc, and still have the wherewithal to properly maintain and equip spacecraft for very long - one would thing).
On the other hand, suspension of disbelief isn't what I like about the show. For me, it's all about Jayne. Jayne, Jayne, Jayne. Great character. Great writing. They could be "Circus clowns in space" and I'd still love the show, as long as it had Jayne.
I don't concur.
I was a big fan of Frank Miller's work in the 1980's. Ronin. Elektra. Dark Knight. I was very much looking forward to Sin City. Trailers looked interesting.
Unfortunately, it sucked ass IMO. A big part of it was the incredibly wooden performances by otherwise good actors. I'm wondering if George Lucas was secretly directing it using a remote controlled Rodriguez-bot? But I guess another part of it was: it was a movie, inspired by a comic book, inspired by film-noir movies. Visually; it was just missing something for me. I don't know if it was the rigid format (Miller was one of the first American comic artists to push format/framing - inspired by Goseke Kojima - Manga, before Manga was cool. . . ) - I don't know if it was that, or what.
But I'm pretty sure Serenity won't disappoint me. Bought the boxed set last year.
A buddy of mine at work wanted a TDI.
Instead, he bought an old mercedes diesel, but he burns vegetable oil (not biodiesel). He has to start it on diesel until the engine is warm enough, and channels coolant along the fuel line in copper tubes to preheat the vegetable oil. Too much hackery for me. At least for a daily driver I need to be reliable.
As I said - the TDI is really nice for it's milage, and decent performance too. And the fact that it will run biodiesel without hacks.
But where I live (not near a major city) - none of the auto zone/pepboys type places, not walmart, none of them seem to have the right oil. I've been tempted to run it on just normal delvac, but the TDI zealots on the web board scared me away from that, they say it'll burn out the turbocharger.
When the time comes (20k more miles) I'm going to save up, and set aside time to change-out the timing belt though.
Long story short - it's easy to complain about other people's decisions when you don't understand all of the elements that go into making the decision.
It's also easy to get into a mode of thinking where you don't question authority, because you assume you don't have all the facts they have.
That mode of thinking is intellectual laziness.
The real problem is that his high school did not prepare him. More likely, it coddle him into thinking that he was one of the top.
My son is hitting this problem in grade school. Problem is - he IS very smart, but last year, he did crap work, and his teacher let him get away with it. His parents (my wife and I) also let him get away with it. We're paying for it this year, because this year, his teacher is not letting him get away with the crap work anymore, and we're having to spend a lot more time with him getting him to improve his standards.
Good thing this happened in grade school, instead of college, though.
I think that Palm's fatal mistake was not adding wireless communication quickly enough. The Palm VII (I think) - was the first one that could connect to the internet directly via wireless, (or was it the IV?) and the monthly expense for the service was too much.
The killer-app of the internet has always been email, but every time someone tries to make money off of it, (through subscription), they generally fail (unless it's bundled with other products, like the basic internet connection).
Maybe coverage wasn't good for the Palm VII either. I dunno.
Connecting messaging with contacts and calendaring has been successful on desktop computers, but that level of integration has been difficult to attain on a PDA/Cellphone with any degree of elegance. I agree that there was a kind of fad-ism with the Palm. But had they accomplished the convenience of cell-phone sms text messaging and/or chat and/or email, in the PDA form factor, without being an additional expense incremental to the user's monthly cell-phone bill, I think they would have been wildly successful.
I expect ipod/cell-phone combos to fail. Camera phones are also gimmicky. But if I had a form-factor like a Motorola razor phone, with the functionality of the graffiti interface, and reasonable service fees for messaging, I think it'd see a great deal of practical use, evolving into necessity.