We watch a show to see a particular performance, not to watch a pitch for some product. Ads break up story continuity. It's bad enough to go to a movie theater and have to wait through 15 minutes of ads to see the movie you paid to see but at least once the ads are over, they're not stopping the movie at various plot points to show some more ads.
If I want to find out about cars, stereos, DVRs, whatever, I go to the net and research what's out there. If I want to watch a performance, I want to see the performance.
Linda Ham squashed a couple of requests to inspect the shuttle via spy satellite.
Linda Ham dismissed the issue, saying, "Really, I don't think there is much we can do, so you know it's not really a factor during flight [be]cause there isn't much we can do about it."
A far cry from the early NASA attitude of "Failure is not an option." I think Ms. Ham should be charged with negligent homicide for that decision. She was wrong on the foam and she was wrong that NASA couldn't have done anything about the problem had the spy cameras provided clear evidence of the damage.
When I was a kid, I remember seeing films of rockets blowing up for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons Alan Shepherd (first American Astronaut) was feted was he had the balls to get on top of a rocket that was just as likely to blow up as to fly. Browse through John Camack's blog to see how many times he has had something go wrong.
A worst case scenario would entail the rocket blowing up at 80,000 feet because a valve got stuck or the fuel didn't flow quite the same way at 80,000 that it does at sea level when the rocket is steady versus swinging on the end of tether or the guidance mechanism doesn't work the way they thought it would and the rocket flies into the balloon instead of away from it.
Rutan and Carmack have already demonstrated why you test before you go for the big prize - way too many things can, and do, go wrong.
I doubt anyone is stupid enough to try to fly an untested rocket which is why I think the announcement is just a stunt.
I think the announcement is just a publicity stunt that appears to be working. When it's time to launch the rocket, there'll be some reason to put it off. Nobody in their right mind would fly in a rocket that has zero flight testing.
From what I see, Apple = Steve. Apple's success lies in Steve's hands, or more to the point, as goes Jobs, goes Apple.
It sure looks that way. The upside to having Jobs pay attention to so many details in a new product launch is you know what you're getting when you buy an Apple product. The downside is there's no one who knows what to do when he's gone because he's micro-managed everything.
It's very hard to start a company that lasts more than 5 years. It's even harder to start a company that survives its founder's leaving.
If you're going to go watch the first shot and you want to party, hang out at the airport the night before. Mojave proper is dead.
Secondly, when the wind kicks up the night before, don't go home discouraged. It was gusting up to 70 mph around 3 am the last time around and when the sun came up, the gusts completely died off.
Don't expect to have a great view of what's happening. The spaceship is tiny when it's 200 feet away and invisible when it's 10 miles away. Maybe this time around, they'll turn on a smoke generator just before they launch so you know where to look but then again, they may not. Last time, the craft was almost directly in the sun and it was awfully hard to see until it was spewing smoke.
While you're there, be sure to check out the Aloha Air plane that peeled its skin in midflight. It's next to the two rightmost 747s that are parked half a mile northeast of the viewing area.
In his speech to the American Astronomical Society, he said:
Some have observed that this analysis is flawed. This might well be, but it is the analysis I've conducted and the judgment I've reached based on a very close, regular review of the Return to Flight challenges currently underway. Others may reach a different conclusion and harbor a different opinion, but none who have offered opposing views will be responsible for the outcome. In that regard, several editorial opinions have been offered asserting that my judgment is risk averse. Journalists have written stories about other journalists and the empowered opinionated who are offering this view and describe the criticism as "withering." Actually, it's pretty much standard fare for commentary on just about everything around Washington these days.
Looks to me like he's made up his mind. If Bush overrides the decision, then Bush has to come up with either more money or tell O'Keefe what other project to cut. Neither outcome is likely so looks to me like O'Keefe doesn't have any options.
All of the comments that start "Nasa should..." completely miss the point. O'Keefe made his call and , currently, O'Keefe runs Nasa. He's made it very clear that *his* decision will stand despite all the flack he's taken over *his* decision. Bush is about the only person who can either over rule or remove O'Keefe and Bush has a history of supporting people he appoints. Kerry flip flops so much that whatever he says he would do about Hubble if he were President doesn't carry much weight in my mind.
O'Keefe is facing a grim reality - he can't fund all the projects he's got running. I'm not voting for Bush this year because he's run up a huge budget deficit - a deficit so large that us boomers won't live long enough to see retired. You younger ones will be paying for it long after we're gone. Since I'm pissed about the budget deficit, I can't very well say Nasa should get more money or fault O'Keefe for saying "you gotta choose and this is what my choices are..."
What if you want to go to slashdot.org and the only thing in your autocomplete history is slashdot.org/some/page.html (because someone emailed you a link, or you cut/paste one from somewhere). Your scheme makes it impossible to actually go to an address when you type the full thing in and press enter.
In that case, you type 'slashdot.org' followed by the escape key to disable autocomplete. You then finish with the enter key. Or, if you prefered, you could still type down arrow to fill the address bar and backspace out the unwanted bits.
The way it's set up now, 99% of the time, you have to type the down arrow key to select the first item when 99% of the time, the first item is the one you want. Most of the time, it's an unnecessary keystroke.
Currently, if I type 'sl' in the address bar, the dropdown menu shows slashdot.org as my most likely choice. To acknowledge I really want to go to slashdot.org, I have to type two more strokes - a down arrow and an enter. Why can't I just type an enter key?
It's not too terribly likely I meant to type 'sl' as a complete address but in the off chance that it was, an escape key could dismiss the drop down menu and let me type enter at that point.
There's also the issue of additional costs. Quite frequently, government contracts call for additional documentation or features not found in an off the shelf item.
It's a case of a single customer insisting on features that only that customer wants so that customer pays the full cost of the features. What's interesting is that the people in charge of contracts don't care what the cost is as long as their pet feature is included. To be fair, the project managers are frequently implementing requirements that are imposed by Congress (another the-cost-be-damned consumer since they don't pay for it) but I've seen occasions where the project manager has generated off-the-cuff requirements.
I've seen cost inflation hit 4 fold due to those factors.
The parent was pointing out that automatic updates, the obvious solution to having to install updates manually, open the door to installing patches the user may not want installed. It's one of those fucked if you do, fucked if you don't situations.
And all because Microsoft thought automatically downloading and executing code would be a good idea. At least Sun had the sense to make Java applets execute in a sandbox.
Cosmic rays create randomly oriented streaks. Noise induced specks have a random "snow-like" appearance. The bands appear to be some sort of malfunction in the imaging circuitry.
This image shows all three imaging problems. There appears to be a short cosmic ray streak in the lower left quadrant veering about 30 degrees downward and to the right, there may be some speckle in the black band or it may be a real signal (the white dots in the black band) and there's banding throughout the entire image that spreads from the white regions to the black and back to the white.
The Apple engineers have it good - Apple hasn't sold any yet. Way back when...
I used to work for a company called System Development Corporation. In the mid 60's, SDC's sales force went "a bit" off the technological capabilities then available. They promised the London Times a Quark-like page compositing system with a CRT monitor with display specs similar to what Jobs announced today. Realize that a "big machine" back then had 512 Kbytes of memory. First time Engineering heard about the deal was after the sale.
Re:The city was being reasonable, not Smirnoff
on
Reverse Graffiti
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If the property is worth protecting then the city should maintain it. I think the city is pissed off because the ads clearly show what a lousy job the city is doing maintaining the infrastructure.
A simple way for both sides to win in this dustup would be to require the advertiser to completely clean the surface after some reasonable period has elapsed. That way the city gets cleaned up and the advertiser gets their message out.
Amazon takes $200 Million over 4 years from Toysrus in exchange for exclusively listing Toysrus' stock and then decides that Toysrus isn't keeping up its end of the deal? Based on the what's in the articles, which may not be correct, if Amazon is upset that Toysrus isn't stocking enough goods, it's Amazon's tough luck. Amazon should have exercised due diligence and made sure that Toysrus was going to be able to stock goods and Toysrus' purchasing department knew what to stock before accepting the deal.
A deal is a deal - at least it used to be back when we knew the definition of "is."
Funny you should use the Rotary Rocket as your example. This past weekend, we ran into the test pilot for the Roton while we were in Mojave to see the space shot. Asked him why the Roton never went anywhere.
"Didn't work." was his reply. The thing was too heavy.
It seems your point is that since motion is risky, it should be very slow. It's not clear to me that 300 meters a day is the optimal tradeoff between speed and safety but lets for the moment say it is.
If you're only going to be able to move 300 meters/day then you're going to need a lot of days to get anywhere beyond your landing zone. To get anywhere, you'll need a power source that doesn't crap out after 3-6 months.
You don't need a huge staff to steer the machine as it creeps towards its next destination. And if instead, it "sprints" to its next destination at 10x its current speed and ends up waiting for its next set of instructions, well gee, it can spend the time it's waiting taking a gander at its new environment. And if you have scads of power, then you can crank up your transmitter's power and send more data in a shorter amount of time.
Having power to burn gives you lots of options you don't otherwise have. At a billion bucks a mission, I hate to see NASA trimming its options to mollify Greenpeace.
We appear to be talking past each other. You're right that it's a bumpy place so you have to move carefully. My main point is you can do better than 100 feet a day. Heck, even one mile a day is 50 times better and you're still crawling.
You can not do better however, if you don't have the necessary power to survive the winter or have enough power to handle the competing power claims which is the case with the current design. Choosing solar cells as the primary power source doomed the craft to a very short useful life.
To JPL's credit, the Prometheus project has settled on the idea of returning to nuclear power. The Prometheus power supply design task right now is choosing how to best extract that power.
So let's hope it's not just a tweak of something that was in QST magazine thirty years ago.
Then he patents the tweak because that's what made an idea that didn't work (nobody is using it) to an idea that did work.
My father was issued the third patent on variable pitch propellers. The key difference between his design and the first two designs was his worked and the first two didn't.
Even if you're right that the budgeting was intentionally understating the costs of the mission, i.e., hope for add'l funding down the line, you don't address the key point. The machine won't last long enough to get anywhere even if funding was extended.
As to tripping on unknown terrain, if your machine has a top speed of a few feet per hour, you're not going to be able to speed up when you can see several hundred feet of relatively clear path. The machine is maxed out before it hits relatively smooth terrain where you can move quickly without fear.
Actually, I wasn't joking about Beagle. They know approximately where the debris should be. Getting there, if you have power and time to do so, is possible. Hell, the pioneers only covered 15 miles a day and they crossed a continent in a few months. Once the rover was in the general neighborhood, and presuming it's no rougher than where it is now, searching 100 square miles wouldn't take more than a year. Remember, I'm postulating a faster rover than the current model.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who don't remember the series, it was a television takeoff on James Bond which ran in the mid 60's.
If I want to find out about cars, stereos, DVRs, whatever, I go to the net and research what's out there. If I want to watch a performance, I want to see the performance.
Linda Ham dismissed the issue, saying, "Really, I don't think there is much we can do, so you know it's not really a factor during flight [be]cause there isn't much we can do about it."
A far cry from the early NASA attitude of "Failure is not an option." I think Ms. Ham should be charged with negligent homicide for that decision. She was wrong on the foam and she was wrong that NASA couldn't have done anything about the problem had the spy cameras provided clear evidence of the damage.
How much do you think it cost VP to post this story?
A worst case scenario would entail the rocket blowing up at 80,000 feet because a valve got stuck or the fuel didn't flow quite the same way at 80,000 that it does at sea level when the rocket is steady versus swinging on the end of tether or the guidance mechanism doesn't work the way they thought it would and the rocket flies into the balloon instead of away from it.
Rutan and Carmack have already demonstrated why you test before you go for the big prize - way too many things can, and do, go wrong.
I doubt anyone is stupid enough to try to fly an untested rocket which is why I think the announcement is just a stunt.
I think the announcement is just a publicity stunt that appears to be working. When it's time to launch the rocket, there'll be some reason to put it off. Nobody in their right mind would fly in a rocket that has zero flight testing.
It sure looks that way. The upside to having Jobs pay attention to so many details in a new product launch is you know what you're getting when you buy an Apple product. The downside is there's no one who knows what to do when he's gone because he's micro-managed everything.
It's very hard to start a company that lasts more than 5 years. It's even harder to start a company that survives its founder's leaving.
If you're going to go watch the first shot and you want to party, hang out at the airport the night before. Mojave proper is dead.
Secondly, when the wind kicks up the night before, don't go home discouraged. It was gusting up to 70 mph around 3 am the last time around and when the sun came up, the gusts completely died off.
Don't expect to have a great view of what's happening. The spaceship is tiny when it's 200 feet away and invisible when it's 10 miles away. Maybe this time around, they'll turn on a smoke generator just before they launch so you know where to look but then again, they may not. Last time, the craft was almost directly in the sun and it was awfully hard to see until it was spewing smoke.
While you're there, be sure to check out the Aloha Air plane that peeled its skin in midflight. It's next to the two rightmost 747s that are parked half a mile northeast of the viewing area.
O'Keefe is facing a grim reality - he can't fund all the projects he's got running. I'm not voting for Bush this year because he's run up a huge budget deficit - a deficit so large that us boomers won't live long enough to see retired. You younger ones will be paying for it long after we're gone. Since I'm pissed about the budget deficit, I can't very well say Nasa should get more money or fault O'Keefe for saying "you gotta choose and this is what my choices are..."
Perhaps the interviewer posted a transcript somewhere?
In that case, you type 'slashdot.org' followed by the escape key to disable autocomplete. You then finish with the enter key. Or, if you prefered, you could still type down arrow to fill the address bar and backspace out the unwanted bits.
The way it's set up now, 99% of the time, you have to type the down arrow key to select the first item when 99% of the time, the first item is the one you want. Most of the time, it's an unnecessary keystroke.
It's not too terribly likely I meant to type 'sl' as a complete address but in the off chance that it was, an escape key could dismiss the drop down menu and let me type enter at that point.
It's a case of a single customer insisting on features that only that customer wants so that customer pays the full cost of the features. What's interesting is that the people in charge of contracts don't care what the cost is as long as their pet feature is included. To be fair, the project managers are frequently implementing requirements that are imposed by Congress (another the-cost-be-damned consumer since they don't pay for it) but I've seen occasions where the project manager has generated off-the-cuff requirements.
I've seen cost inflation hit 4 fold due to those factors.
The parent was pointing out that automatic updates, the obvious solution to having to install updates manually, open the door to installing patches the user may not want installed. It's one of those fucked if you do, fucked if you don't situations.
And all because Microsoft thought automatically downloading and executing code would be a good idea. At least Sun had the sense to make Java applets execute in a sandbox.
This image shows all three imaging problems. There appears to be a short cosmic ray streak in the lower left quadrant veering about 30 degrees downward and to the right, there may be some speckle in the black band or it may be a real signal (the white dots in the black band) and there's banding throughout the entire image that spreads from the white regions to the black and back to the white.
The Apple engineers have it good - Apple hasn't sold any yet. Way back when...
I used to work for a company called System Development Corporation. In the mid 60's, SDC's sales force went "a bit" off the technological capabilities then available. They promised the London Times a Quark-like page compositing system with a CRT monitor with display specs similar to what Jobs announced today. Realize that a "big machine" back then had 512 Kbytes of memory. First time Engineering heard about the deal was after the sale.
A simple way for both sides to win in this dustup would be to require the advertiser to completely clean the surface after some reasonable period has elapsed. That way the city gets cleaned up and the advertiser gets their message out.
Your post is spot on. When I read Boise was involved, my immediate reaction was "With Boise as his lawyer, the guy's toast."
A deal is a deal - at least it used to be back when we knew the definition of "is."
"Didn't work." was his reply. The thing was too heavy.
If you're only going to be able to move 300 meters/day then you're going to need a lot of days to get anywhere beyond your landing zone. To get anywhere, you'll need a power source that doesn't crap out after 3-6 months.
You don't need a huge staff to steer the machine as it creeps towards its next destination. And if instead, it "sprints" to its next destination at 10x its current speed and ends up waiting for its next set of instructions, well gee, it can spend the time it's waiting taking a gander at its new environment. And if you have scads of power, then you can crank up your transmitter's power and send more data in a shorter amount of time.
Having power to burn gives you lots of options you don't otherwise have. At a billion bucks a mission, I hate to see NASA trimming its options to mollify Greenpeace.
You can not do better however, if you don't have the necessary power to survive the winter or have enough power to handle the competing power claims which is the case with the current design. Choosing solar cells as the primary power source doomed the craft to a very short useful life.
To JPL's credit, the Prometheus project has settled on the idea of returning to nuclear power. The Prometheus power supply design task right now is choosing how to best extract that power.
Then he patents the tweak because that's what made an idea that didn't work (nobody is using it) to an idea that did work.
My father was issued the third patent on variable pitch propellers. The key difference between his design and the first two designs was his worked and the first two didn't.
As to tripping on unknown terrain, if your machine has a top speed of a few feet per hour, you're not going to be able to speed up when you can see several hundred feet of relatively clear path. The machine is maxed out before it hits relatively smooth terrain where you can move quickly without fear.
Actually, I wasn't joking about Beagle. They know approximately where the debris should be. Getting there, if you have power and time to do so, is possible. Hell, the pioneers only covered 15 miles a day and they crossed a continent in a few months. Once the rover was in the general neighborhood, and presuming it's no rougher than where it is now, searching 100 square miles wouldn't take more than a year. Remember, I'm postulating a faster rover than the current model.