During launch, I'm pretty sure the outside temperatures of the shuttle and fuel tank are normally quite low. There is some atmospheric friction as it launches, but nothing serious like with re-entry.
1) They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage.
2) They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate for failing parts without going off course, spinning out of control, or overstressing the failing part, additional computation power might be helpful. (I'm guessing that the software may have failed to consider that a part that is not performing upto specifications is likely to have reduced structural integrity.)
Unless something is wrong with Discovery or Endeavor, we have 3 working shuttles remaining. Atlantis was scheduled to launch in the near future, and according to an article referenced here previously at Space.com, there's a good chance that if NASA had known that Columbia would not survive reentry, they could have rushed Atlantis and gotten it up just in time. It would have then been fairly straightforward to ferry them over in space suits, probably using one of those self-propelled units.
Of course, it's only speculation that Atlantis could have made it in time; the physical preparations for launch are very time-consuming, even without all the normal safety checks. The Russians could have sent the Progress resupply ship to Columbia, but it's not clear whether the Columbia astronaughts could have opened it and retreived the supplies.
I remember seeing a robot designed for use in the ISS that was essentially a basketball-sized computer and camera. It was controled by gyroscopes. Assuming it could handle the temperature and lack of pressure, there's no reason they couldn't send one out to inspect the underside of the shuttle.
Not that they've actually built it yet, but they could.
And for missions to the ISS, they can inspect it from the space station.
I'm sure they'll be looking at the computers to determine if there was a software problem. While it seems obvious that the disaster was caused by physical dammage, the flight computers could have been a major factor. They were experiencing excessive drag. The flight computers were trying to compensate for the poor performance, and in doing so may have failed to factor in that the increased drag may have indicated a weakened structure. Hence, in trying to stay on course, the flight computers may have put too much stress on the dammaged wing.
Most likely, software changes could have bought them at most a few more irrelevant seconds, but they certainly should be looking at it in case someday those few seconds aren't so irrelvant.
There is no black box. This was a question at the first technical briefing on Saturday. While they do have various data recorders on board, they aren't hardened to survive a crash. For the most part, they aren't necessary, as all the relevant data is transmitted back to Mission Control in real time. Such information would only allow them to better reconstruct the last few seconds after communications were lost (some of which it turns out they did receive data from, only it was too low-power for them to process at the time). While that may be interesting, the useful information will be from earlier on in the flight when the problem first showed up.
True. We're discussing the possible options. All this is from external informed guessing. And while they had enough supplies to make it through today, there was a resupply capsule sent up on Sunday to the space station, which could have gone to Columbia, giving them the supplied needed to await Atlantis without skipping all the normal testing.
With the information we have, we have every reason to believe that it was possible. So in a thread of discussing what they could have done, it's perfectly valid.
If they had known, and if Atlantis were up there with them now (they would have run out of consumables yesterday without rationing, and Atlantis could probably have been launched with one-week's notice in an emergency, skipping a lot of safety checks), then...
Oh, and if Atlantis needed more time, they could have sent the Progress resupply to Columbia instead of the ISS--they could have done a spacewalk to retreive supplies.
Tile repair would be extremely difficult. There was a mission where they conducted tile repair experiments, but the technology just wasn't there in 1985 (the now-Senator from Florida was involved). As I recall from the news coverage at the time, the repair idea was to use some sort of spray-on foam. Using actual tiles would be impractical--the installation process is non-trivial on Earth, let alone in orbit. Each tile is customized for the location (so they can tell where each recovered tile came from; combined with GPS locations they can reconstruct how it disintegrated), and they are probably not completely interchangable between orbiters. Despite all that, they might have been able to load Atlantis with replacement tiles and attempted repair--if anyone could figure out how to replace tiles at the last minute in an entirely novel manner and at great expense, it's NASA.
They would also have stocked Atlantis with lots of supplies in the event they had to stay up there until a Soyuz could dock with it.
They just might have been able to get Atlantis up there with enough fuel left over to then go to the space station. I doubt there's any way Atlantis could have towed Columbia there, and I doubt that there's any way they could have refuled Columbia in orbit to allow it to get there. If they could have, though, even if they couldn't ever repair Columbia, it could have been integrated into the space station, providing it with its own propulsion to boost it's orbit as it slips down a mile or so every year (the ISS will fall back to Earth eventually without shuttles visiting it and restoring its orbit).
If, if, if... I guess playing this what they could have game is analogous to the denial phase of grief. I'm convinced that there were enough options that if NASA had believed they were in trouble, they would have gone for those options.
According to the article, NASA could have probably kept them alive in orbit long enough to get Atlantis up there to rescue them. Of course, that risks having the same thing happen to Atlantis...
Slashdot seems to be fairly united in its hatred of pop ups, so why support them by linking to sites that use them in such an aggressive manner?
Perhaps because the people at Slashdot who decided to post the story use Mozilla and turned off pop-ups? Or maybe they use IE and have a pop-up blocker?
Alpha didn't have support for x86 anymore than PPC has support for 68K. They just had a good emulation system in software. Technically, "emulation" might be an understatment; they would dynamically translate the instructions, doing the work once for each block of code so programs ran faster the longer they ran.
Personally, I think that it was bad marketing and the loss of support from Microsoft (probably as a result of poor sales) that were the problem, not technical issues.
So what sort of compression algorithm does FLAC use?
One idea that would be really cool is if they could get acheive lossless compression by noting the differences between the original and the.OGG, and appending that to the.OGG. Then if you can just strip off the added info when you make copies to restricted-space devices. The only question is whether this can be done with a competitive compression ratio.
They call it a "use tax." So if they find that I purchased something out-of-state with less than 5% sales tax (the MA rate; I'm a MA resident), do they have to prove that I used it in MA before they can charge me with tax evasion? Most of my Amazon purchases were given as gifts to relatives out of state; many of them were shipped directly to them, and none of them were removed from their packaging in MA.
Actually, I believe he isn't releasing the code because he is starting a company to market it. There are lots of places that would happily pay thousands of dollars for that software, and much more if he would help customize it for their particular project.
I'm fairly certain that there is no significant quantity of fossil fuel used in the production of chips. What is used is electricity. However, it doesn't grab headlines to say that each chip consumes 2kwh in production. Instead, they look at how much fossil fuel is burned to produce that amount of electricity. But, the truth is that when you look at plants like Micron's in Boise, ID, the electricity is from hydro-electric plants, and in Korea, it's probably from nice clean nuclear plants.
I was thinking that if I had a treadmill (or some other exxercise machine), I would want to set it up so that I could mount a laptop such that I could use it while exercising.
Just a nitpick, but uncompressed data is not a good thing. Using lossless compression may well be, but in many cases a fast CPU can uncompress fast enough to make the data access faster when using compressed storage than uncompressed.
And even if you're using lossless compression, doubling the frame rate will hardly double the data. Imagine, for example, computing the added frame by interpolating from the prior and next frame, and then only storing the differences. The point is that doubling the frame rate doesn't double the real information, as it reduces the typical difference between frames.
But your point is valid; 20G/hour for video and sound is not unreasonable. That's 50 hours/TB. A 10TB drive would give you a 500 hour ReplayTV; right at what people at the high end are upgrading to now.
Rebates are obnoxious. You have to process extra paperwork. You have to wait to get your money back. You have to pay sales tax on the full price.
On the other hand, you can use rebates along with price matching policies to get some great deals. I keep hearing of stories of people who see a drive advertised by, say, Microcenter with no rebate, and get Best Buy to match the price while still being able to claim the store rebate.
Much of the price of the drive is independent of capacity. The additional platters and heads for high-capacity drives are significant, but so are the electronics and motors that are identical in 40G and 250G drives.
Hence, the cheapest $/byte drives to manufacture are the highest capacity drives. However the highest capacity drives are often sold at a premium, leaving the best price point somewhere in the middle.
I'm pretty sure that this is the second time this has happened. The first time it was the 80G drives for under $80. However, that was back when Pricewatch didn't include shipping in the price.
What's even more interesting is when the best $/byte drive changes to a higher capacity. Currently you pay a big premium for your storage if you go with something larger than 120GB. With the recent addition of 250G drives, it might not be long before 160G drives take over the best price per byte spot.
For something like this, wouldn't you want to use true local time instead of the time in the given timezone? Remember that time zones with the absence of daylight savings time are set up so that the sun is in the highest point in the sky at noon somewhere roughly in the middle of the time zone. Before time zones were created, each town set their clocks so that noon was true noon.
So the first thing to do in something like this is use GPS to determine your longituted and thereby compute the exact +/- UTC for your location.
I would suggest JunkBuster, but using a proxy has several disadvantages (reduced speed, different behaviour for 404 sites, etc.). But imagine if your browser had JunkBuster built in. It turns out, it does! Most graphical browsers support Proxy Auto Configuration. The idea is that it uses a JavaScript function for each URL to decide what proxy to use. If it looks like an ad, you send it to a black hole; otherwise, you go straight to the site.
Slashdot Mirror
During launch, I'm pretty sure the outside temperatures of the shuttle and fuel tank are normally quite low. There is some atmospheric friction as it launches, but nothing serious like with re-entry.
New computers would have several advantages:
1) They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage.
2) They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate for failing parts without going off course, spinning out of control, or overstressing the failing part, additional computation power might be helpful. (I'm guessing that the software may have failed to consider that a part that is not performing upto specifications is likely to have reduced structural integrity.)
Unless something is wrong with Discovery or Endeavor, we have 3 working shuttles remaining. Atlantis was scheduled to launch in the near future, and according to an article referenced here previously at Space.com, there's a good chance that if NASA had known that Columbia would not survive reentry, they could have rushed Atlantis and gotten it up just in time. It would have then been fairly straightforward to ferry them over in space suits, probably using one of those self-propelled units.
Of course, it's only speculation that Atlantis could have made it in time; the physical preparations for launch are very time-consuming, even without all the normal safety checks. The Russians could have sent the Progress resupply ship to Columbia, but it's not clear whether the Columbia astronaughts could have opened it and retreived the supplies.
I remember seeing a robot designed for use in the ISS that was essentially a basketball-sized computer and camera. It was controled by gyroscopes. Assuming it could handle the temperature and lack of pressure, there's no reason they couldn't send one out to inspect the underside of the shuttle.
Not that they've actually built it yet, but they could.
And for missions to the ISS, they can inspect it from the space station.
I'm sure they'll be looking at the computers to determine if there was a software problem. While it seems obvious that the disaster was caused by physical dammage, the flight computers could have been a major factor. They were experiencing excessive drag. The flight computers were trying to compensate for the poor performance, and in doing so may have failed to factor in that the increased drag may have indicated a weakened structure. Hence, in trying to stay on course, the flight computers may have put too much stress on the dammaged wing.
Most likely, software changes could have bought them at most a few more irrelevant seconds, but they certainly should be looking at it in case someday those few seconds aren't so irrelvant.
There is no black box. This was a question at the first technical briefing on Saturday. While they do have various data recorders on board, they aren't hardened to survive a crash. For the most part, they aren't necessary, as all the relevant data is transmitted back to Mission Control in real time. Such information would only allow them to better reconstruct the last few seconds after communications were lost (some of which it turns out they did receive data from, only it was too low-power for them to process at the time). While that may be interesting, the useful information will be from earlier on in the flight when the problem first showed up.
True. We're discussing the possible options. All this is from external informed guessing. And while they had enough supplies to make it through today, there was a resupply capsule sent up on Sunday to the space station, which could have gone to Columbia, giving them the supplied needed to await Atlantis without skipping all the normal testing.
With the information we have, we have every reason to believe that it was possible. So in a thread of discussing what they could have done, it's perfectly valid.
If they had known, and if Atlantis were up there with them now (they would have run out of consumables yesterday without rationing, and Atlantis could probably have been launched with one-week's notice in an emergency, skipping a lot of safety checks), then...
Oh, and if Atlantis needed more time, they could have sent the Progress resupply to Columbia instead of the ISS--they could have done a spacewalk to retreive supplies.
Tile repair would be extremely difficult. There was a mission where they conducted tile repair experiments, but the technology just wasn't there in 1985 (the now-Senator from Florida was involved). As I recall from the news coverage at the time, the repair idea was to use some sort of spray-on foam. Using actual tiles would be impractical--the installation process is non-trivial on Earth, let alone in orbit. Each tile is customized for the location (so they can tell where each recovered tile came from; combined with GPS locations they can reconstruct how it disintegrated), and they are probably not completely interchangable between orbiters. Despite all that, they might have been able to load Atlantis with replacement tiles and attempted repair--if anyone could figure out how to replace tiles at the last minute in an entirely novel manner and at great expense, it's NASA.
They would also have stocked Atlantis with lots of supplies in the event they had to stay up there until a Soyuz could dock with it.
They just might have been able to get Atlantis up there with enough fuel left over to then go to the space station. I doubt there's any way Atlantis could have towed Columbia there, and I doubt that there's any way they could have refuled Columbia in orbit to allow it to get there. If they could have, though, even if they couldn't ever repair Columbia, it could have been integrated into the space station, providing it with its own propulsion to boost it's orbit as it slips down a mile or so every year (the ISS will fall back to Earth eventually without shuttles visiting it and restoring its orbit).
If, if, if... I guess playing this what they could have game is analogous to the denial phase of grief. I'm convinced that there were enough options that if NASA had believed they were in trouble, they would have gone for those options.
According to the article, NASA could have probably kept them alive in orbit long enough to get Atlantis up there to rescue them. Of course, that risks having the same thing happen to Atlantis...
Slashdot seems to be fairly united in its hatred of pop ups, so why support them by linking to sites that use them in such an aggressive manner?
Perhaps because the people at Slashdot who decided to post the story use Mozilla and turned off pop-ups? Or maybe they use IE and have a pop-up blocker?
Alpha didn't have support for x86 anymore than PPC has support for 68K. They just had a good emulation system in software. Technically, "emulation" might be an understatment; they would dynamically translate the instructions, doing the work once for each block of code so programs ran faster the longer they ran.
Personally, I think that it was bad marketing and the loss of support from Microsoft (probably as a result of poor sales) that were the problem, not technical issues.
So what sort of compression algorithm does FLAC use?
.OGG, and appending that to the .OGG. Then if you can just strip off the added info when you make copies to restricted-space devices. The only question is whether this can be done with a competitive compression ratio.
One idea that would be really cool is if they could get acheive lossless compression by noting the differences between the original and the
They call it a "use tax." So if they find that I purchased something out-of-state with less than 5% sales tax (the MA rate; I'm a MA resident), do they have to prove that I used it in MA before they can charge me with tax evasion? Most of my Amazon purchases were given as gifts to relatives out of state; many of them were shipped directly to them, and none of them were removed from their packaging in MA.
I believe that only a small part of it is based on gcc; the bulk of the work is in an external program not covered by the GPL.
Actually, I believe he isn't releasing the code because he is starting a company to market it. There are lots of places that would happily pay thousands of dollars for that software, and much more if he would help customize it for their particular project.
I'm fairly certain that there is no significant quantity of fossil fuel used in the production of chips. What is used is electricity. However, it doesn't grab headlines to say that each chip consumes 2kwh in production. Instead, they look at how much fossil fuel is burned to produce that amount of electricity. But, the truth is that when you look at plants like Micron's in Boise, ID, the electricity is from hydro-electric plants, and in Korea, it's probably from nice clean nuclear plants.
I was thinking that if I had a treadmill (or some other exxercise machine), I would want to set it up so that I could mount a laptop such that I could use it while exercising.
Just a nitpick, but uncompressed data is not a good thing. Using lossless compression may well be, but in many cases a fast CPU can uncompress fast enough to make the data access faster when using compressed storage than uncompressed.
And even if you're using lossless compression, doubling the frame rate will hardly double the data. Imagine, for example, computing the added frame by interpolating from the prior and next frame, and then only storing the differences. The point is that doubling the frame rate doesn't double the real information, as it reduces the typical difference between frames.
But your point is valid; 20G/hour for video and sound is not unreasonable. That's 50 hours/TB. A 10TB drive would give you a 500 hour ReplayTV; right at what people at the high end are upgrading to now.
Rebates are obnoxious. You have to process extra paperwork. You have to wait to get your money back. You have to pay sales tax on the full price.
On the other hand, you can use rebates along with price matching policies to get some great deals. I keep hearing of stories of people who see a drive advertised by, say, Microcenter with no rebate, and get Best Buy to match the price while still being able to claim the store rebate.
Much of the price of the drive is independent of capacity. The additional platters and heads for high-capacity drives are significant, but so are the electronics and motors that are identical in 40G and 250G drives.
Hence, the cheapest $/byte drives to manufacture are the highest capacity drives. However the highest capacity drives are often sold at a premium, leaving the best price point somewhere in the middle.
Bzzzt.
You're right that TB is TereByte. However, a TB is the next step up from GB, not the other way around.
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
TB=2^40 or 10^12
PB=2^50 or 10^15
EB=2^60 or 10^18
I'm pretty sure that this is the second time this has happened. The first time it was the 80G drives for under $80. However, that was back when Pricewatch didn't include shipping in the price.
What's even more interesting is when the best $/byte drive changes to a higher capacity. Currently you pay a big premium for your storage if you go with something larger than 120GB. With the recent addition of 250G drives, it might not be long before 160G drives take over the best price per byte spot.
For something like this, wouldn't you want to use true local time instead of the time in the given timezone? Remember that time zones with the absence of daylight savings time are set up so that the sun is in the highest point in the sky at noon somewhere roughly in the middle of the time zone. Before time zones were created, each town set their clocks so that noon was true noon.
So the first thing to do in something like this is use GPS to determine your longituted and thereby compute the exact +/- UTC for your location.
Is this a sustainable industry, or are they just using up inventory of old ICBMs?
You can find documentation and an example configuration at http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/