Others have touched on this here, but to be more to the point: GPS is a good (although sometimes overly-relied on) tool for navigating from Point A to Point B. What I find it most useful for, however, is allowing me the freedom to drive, hike, or bike way off the beaten path to the point of getting lost, only to ask GPS how to get back home if and when I do get lost. For me, especially in the city scenario, GPS actually enables me learning the city faster and with a larger working area than without it simply because I'm no longer concerned about getting "lost".
It is interesting, to say the least, to see non-NASA people's opinions on this issue, and moreover, to see people's opinions who are technically minded but outside of NASA. As someone working on Constellation at NASA, I am living this issue every day, and have been living it for months now. There is lots of misinformation on this thread, and lots of opinions I disagree with. I won't take the time to really respond to any of them, but in the case of the former, it's entirely understandable considering the poor communication coming out of NASA (both in general and on this specific issue) as well as the poor quality of news reporting as it relates to spaceflight (and by extension, nearly everything technical in nature). In the case of the latter, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Mine is that we need to get society off this rock as soon as possible and establish a permanent self-sustaining settlement on another one as a means of risk mitigation against the various calamities that could destroy human civilization. Second, I feel it should be us (the United States) because someone is going to do it - it will happen eventually. That point should not be up for debate. For us to sit around spending money on things like wars and bailouts instead of continuing the role as the leader in space is, in my humble opinion, short sighted. But I digress.
The one thing I will say is that Constellation is not dead - yet. It's had its head cut off by reassignment of the program manager. It's been dealt a tough blow most recently with HQ telling the prime contractors (Lockheed, ATK, Oceaneering) that they need to put money into reserve for contract termination liability - the costs associated with winding down a contract. Typically this contract clause is never enforced, and especially not at this time of the year. Our fiscal year ends on Sept 30. These contract termination liability costs now represent about 50% of the money left in the budget for this fiscal year, which essentially means that things need to be cut to the bone to get there. Many people feel that enforcing this clause is a pretty shady way of circumventing Congress and the law, because until Congress signs a new budget or specifically tells NASA to stop working on Constellation, NASA is legally obligated to continue working on it as the program of record. By enforcing this clause, it could be construed as circumventing this legal process. If a budget agreement is not found by the end of the fiscal year (and that is looking more and more likely), then NASA gets a continuing resolution - the same money allocated the same way for next year as it was this year. So hypothetically, NASA could pick back up with this "new money" and continue working on Constellation.
That being said, for months now, before this contract termination issue came up, most of the different Constellation projects (Orion, suit, etc) have been working to try to scale back design, remove Lunar content, accelerate the schedule, reduce scope, etc to try to "bridge the gap" between what Congress says they should be doing and what HQ and the executive branch says they should be doing.
Lastly, I think that most people at NASA don't necessarily have a problem with Obama's general plan for NASA - they have a problem with its lack of specificity, lack of a concrete goal, lack of a timeline. I get the feeling that if Obama came back and said he wants to cancel Constellation, come up with a new heavy lifter (both things he has said before) but also that the goal is to establish a human presence on "X" surface "Y" years from now, more people might get on board.
Kudos to this guy for putting together what looks like a big budget trailer for $300. However, I don't see any original filmmaking ideas - only technical content.
I saw this short film months ago and think it has a lot more originality and an awesome sci-fi slant. Plus, augmented reality is sweet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_reTt7Hj4
Sigh, I didn't say I had special knowledge and the guy in the article didn't say he regarded them as off the shelf, but whatever. I'm tired of this conversation.
In my mind, modifying the internals of a consumer off the shelf product makes it, by definition, non-identical. You can keep talking all day long, but as long as they change components (not peripherals, but primary components that are required for the product to function) for the specific application of spaceflight, it is NOT identical.
A fan is not a peripheral function to a computer if the computer fails when the fan fails to do it's job adequately.
Also, stop being a drama queen with statements like "You've been exposed as a fraud." You're turning a rational and logical argument into a petty one.
http://consumerist.com/5393720/3-cellphone-apps-to-block-texting-while-driving
I think the better long-term solution is to have sensors built in the car that triangulate the phone's position in space, and locks out certain phone functions if it determines the driver is trying to use the phone. It checks the data against the speed of the car and the weight on all the seats, so the passenger could still use a phone, for example.
But of course, you could always put a big chunk of lead on the passenger seat and then lean over and reach to that side of the car to send a text message...which doesn't sound very safe either...
After living in Korea for a year, and seeing some of the crap that Korean taxi drivers pull (including trying to beat up Western women for apparently no reason, running their hands through my leg hair, and various other strange antics)...I am convinced that Korean taxi drivers are clinically demented and all possible technological solutions should be employed to distract them at all times. Therefore, I fully support the recent move to overturn the taxi TV ban.
So, if you take a consumer grade product, screen and test it, make modifications to it, it's not based solely off an existing consumer product? That's funny.
Thanks for helping to prove my point, though.
...which is why I said, "they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product." But they still have to meet the requirements. You can't just buy an HP off the shelf and say, "Alright, here is our ISS laptop." It has to meet specific requirements first.
As someone who works in space flight hardware, I will state what I think is obvious to most slashdotters: These are not just "consumer grade electronics." True, they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product, but they have to meet a very stringent set of requirements to operate in space.
*They need to cool themselves effectively despite having no gravity, which means heat doesn't rise and you lose all naturally convective heating
*They need to be radiation hardened to mitigate against bit flips and the like due to radiation particles
*They need to meet specific reliability and usability requirements driven by spaceflight
And lastly, with everyone complaining about how the government wastes money, do you really expect that it would be better for NASA to contract out development, design, testing and building of a one-off product (laptop, camera, MP3 player, camcorder, PDA, etc) where it isn't necessary?
The Palm Pre was certainly only a disappointment to those people who expected it to be the second coming of Jesus or to overtake the iPhone within months of release. I have a Pre and it is the best phone I have ever owned. The OS is top notch. The hardware isn't perfect but neither was the iPhone when it came out. As someone else said, the problem is that you need to compete with the ecology of Apple - not just the h/w or s/w. So even if all the small shortcomings of WebOS are addressed, and the next Pre has none of the h/w issues of the first, and it's very popular - it still doesn't mean that it will "kill" the iPhone.
It will take a while - at least a year or so - for the iPhone to be dethroned by any competing architecture. It will happen, for sure. Whether it's one year or ten years from now is up to Apple, their competitors, and shear luck.
"Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox"
vs.
"Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures."
...I'm sitting here wondering how stable these algorithms are over long periods of time. I'm assuming that the "practice" data set and the "test" data set are equal in terms of time distribution (date of movie release; date of review). But 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I see the RMSE numbers slowly drifting upwards as the algorithm was optimized to the 2000-2009 data set, not the 2000-2020 data set or tahe 2000-2030 data set. But this is not my area of expertise so I'm wondering what others have to say on this topic.
A few years back I asked myself the same question about my own webspace, which I really only use for email and self-storage.
I used javascript to basically make my webpage fade back and forth between a photo from one of my travels and a photo of a cubicle. It isn't indexed by search engines, and doesn't take a whole lot of space. This was back in grad school so I've since changed it, as the statement wasn't really that subtle.
You could also throw up a simple elegant artwork you've done or something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Others have touched on this here, but to be more to the point: GPS is a good (although sometimes overly-relied on) tool for navigating from Point A to Point B. What I find it most useful for, however, is allowing me the freedom to drive, hike, or bike way off the beaten path to the point of getting lost, only to ask GPS how to get back home if and when I do get lost. For me, especially in the city scenario, GPS actually enables me learning the city faster and with a larger working area than without it simply because I'm no longer concerned about getting "lost".
Thanks to the inviter!!!
shane.m.mcfarland, at the standard popular google mail domain. Definitely willing to give it a shot and see how it goes.... Thanks-
+1 for you. This is really annoying. I keep being forced to play SWAT or Snipers. If I wanted that I'd have COD.
It is interesting, to say the least, to see non-NASA people's opinions on this issue, and moreover, to see people's opinions who are technically minded but outside of NASA. As someone working on Constellation at NASA, I am living this issue every day, and have been living it for months now. There is lots of misinformation on this thread, and lots of opinions I disagree with. I won't take the time to really respond to any of them, but in the case of the former, it's entirely understandable considering the poor communication coming out of NASA (both in general and on this specific issue) as well as the poor quality of news reporting as it relates to spaceflight (and by extension, nearly everything technical in nature). In the case of the latter, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Mine is that we need to get society off this rock as soon as possible and establish a permanent self-sustaining settlement on another one as a means of risk mitigation against the various calamities that could destroy human civilization. Second, I feel it should be us (the United States) because someone is going to do it - it will happen eventually. That point should not be up for debate. For us to sit around spending money on things like wars and bailouts instead of continuing the role as the leader in space is, in my humble opinion, short sighted. But I digress.
The one thing I will say is that Constellation is not dead - yet. It's had its head cut off by reassignment of the program manager. It's been dealt a tough blow most recently with HQ telling the prime contractors (Lockheed, ATK, Oceaneering) that they need to put money into reserve for contract termination liability - the costs associated with winding down a contract. Typically this contract clause is never enforced, and especially not at this time of the year. Our fiscal year ends on Sept 30. These contract termination liability costs now represent about 50% of the money left in the budget for this fiscal year, which essentially means that things need to be cut to the bone to get there. Many people feel that enforcing this clause is a pretty shady way of circumventing Congress and the law, because until Congress signs a new budget or specifically tells NASA to stop working on Constellation, NASA is legally obligated to continue working on it as the program of record. By enforcing this clause, it could be construed as circumventing this legal process. If a budget agreement is not found by the end of the fiscal year (and that is looking more and more likely), then NASA gets a continuing resolution - the same money allocated the same way for next year as it was this year. So hypothetically, NASA could pick back up with this "new money" and continue working on Constellation.
That being said, for months now, before this contract termination issue came up, most of the different Constellation projects (Orion, suit, etc) have been working to try to scale back design, remove Lunar content, accelerate the schedule, reduce scope, etc to try to "bridge the gap" between what Congress says they should be doing and what HQ and the executive branch says they should be doing.
Lastly, I think that most people at NASA don't necessarily have a problem with Obama's general plan for NASA - they have a problem with its lack of specificity, lack of a concrete goal, lack of a timeline. I get the feeling that if Obama came back and said he wants to cancel Constellation, come up with a new heavy lifter (both things he has said before) but also that the goal is to establish a human presence on "X" surface "Y" years from now, more people might get on board.
Kudos to this guy for putting together what looks like a big budget trailer for $300. However, I don't see any original filmmaking ideas - only technical content. I saw this short film months ago and think it has a lot more originality and an awesome sci-fi slant. Plus, augmented reality is sweet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_reTt7Hj4
Ad Astra! Ad Luna! Ad Lagrange Point 2!
Sigh, I didn't say I had special knowledge and the guy in the article didn't say he regarded them as off the shelf, but whatever. I'm tired of this conversation.
In my mind, modifying the internals of a consumer off the shelf product makes it, by definition, non-identical. You can keep talking all day long, but as long as they change components (not peripherals, but primary components that are required for the product to function) for the specific application of spaceflight, it is NOT identical.
A fan is not a peripheral function to a computer if the computer fails when the fan fails to do it's job adequately.
Also, stop being a drama queen with statements like "You've been exposed as a fraud." You're turning a rational and logical argument into a petty one.
http://consumerist.com/5393720/3-cellphone-apps-to-block-texting-while-driving I think the better long-term solution is to have sensors built in the car that triangulate the phone's position in space, and locks out certain phone functions if it determines the driver is trying to use the phone. It checks the data against the speed of the car and the weight on all the seats, so the passenger could still use a phone, for example. But of course, you could always put a big chunk of lead on the passenger seat and then lean over and reach to that side of the car to send a text message...which doesn't sound very safe either...
After living in Korea for a year, and seeing some of the crap that Korean taxi drivers pull (including trying to beat up Western women for apparently no reason, running their hands through my leg hair, and various other strange antics)...I am convinced that Korean taxi drivers are clinically demented and all possible technological solutions should be employed to distract them at all times. Therefore, I fully support the recent move to overturn the taxi TV ban.
So, if you take a consumer grade product, screen and test it, make modifications to it, it's not based solely off an existing consumer product? That's funny. Thanks for helping to prove my point, though.
...which is why I said, "they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product." But they still have to meet the requirements. You can't just buy an HP off the shelf and say, "Alright, here is our ISS laptop." It has to meet specific requirements first.
As someone who works in space flight hardware, I will state what I think is obvious to most slashdotters: These are not just "consumer grade electronics." True, they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product, but they have to meet a very stringent set of requirements to operate in space. *They need to cool themselves effectively despite having no gravity, which means heat doesn't rise and you lose all naturally convective heating *They need to be radiation hardened to mitigate against bit flips and the like due to radiation particles *They need to meet specific reliability and usability requirements driven by spaceflight And lastly, with everyone complaining about how the government wastes money, do you really expect that it would be better for NASA to contract out development, design, testing and building of a one-off product (laptop, camera, MP3 player, camcorder, PDA, etc) where it isn't necessary?
The Palm Pre was certainly only a disappointment to those people who expected it to be the second coming of Jesus or to overtake the iPhone within months of release. I have a Pre and it is the best phone I have ever owned. The OS is top notch. The hardware isn't perfect but neither was the iPhone when it came out. As someone else said, the problem is that you need to compete with the ecology of Apple - not just the h/w or s/w. So even if all the small shortcomings of WebOS are addressed, and the next Pre has none of the h/w issues of the first, and it's very popular - it still doesn't mean that it will "kill" the iPhone. It will take a while - at least a year or so - for the iPhone to be dethroned by any competing architecture. It will happen, for sure. Whether it's one year or ten years from now is up to Apple, their competitors, and shear luck.
"Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox" vs. "Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures."
...I'm sitting here wondering how stable these algorithms are over long periods of time. I'm assuming that the "practice" data set and the "test" data set are equal in terms of time distribution (date of movie release; date of review). But 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I see the RMSE numbers slowly drifting upwards as the algorithm was optimized to the 2000-2009 data set, not the 2000-2020 data set or tahe 2000-2030 data set. But this is not my area of expertise so I'm wondering what others have to say on this topic.
A few years back I asked myself the same question about my own webspace, which I really only use for email and self-storage. I used javascript to basically make my webpage fade back and forth between a photo from one of my travels and a photo of a cubicle. It isn't indexed by search engines, and doesn't take a whole lot of space. This was back in grad school so I've since changed it, as the statement wasn't really that subtle. You could also throw up a simple elegant artwork you've done or something else.