I work (day job) for an IT consulting company; though I am out at customer sites 80% or more, I and my peers typically do interviews of prospective new contractors a couple or more times a week each.
If I were being racist in interviewing, or the company in hiring, we'd be unable to meet our customer company demands. To be blunt, to be racist in the current Silicon Valley environment is a detriment to corporate survival, and thus remarkably stupid (in addition to all the anti-social apsects, and their stupidity).
There have been some good comments in the discussion here so far... I liked the mention of accent as a barrier. I think to some degree that's true; it's often harder to understand people whose native languages or cultural exposure to English is further off, if they haven't been in the US for long. But part of my job interviewing people is to get past that and figure out how well they know their technical stuff. It is extremely extremely rare for someone to be so bad at communicating that we can't connect and figure out their technical skills. Their communications skills are another axis we rate them on, and accent can be a factor in that. But we find that most customers are very tolerant of smart people who may have to communicate a bit slower and more carefully. Much more so than of people who aren't fundamentally good experienced IT folks. Communications can work itself out; talent is either there or it isn't.
Based on the people who make it as far as a phone interview, it is apparent that there are uneven distributions of people who are actually in the industry. A lot fewer women, and some minorities are underrepresented (the most uncommon accent in interviews for me is Spanish... which is very strange, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a huge hispanic population). That's unfortunate; we're misisng out on potential smart employees just because it's not seen as a career by kids in high school and college. Moreso with women than along racial lines (I know more blacks in IT than women). But both are areas where increasing the industry's visibility to potential employees early on would help.
Basically, the man has a right to have his identity protected in Germany.
This is bizarre to Americans. Here, if you become a figure of interest in the media due to news events or such, there is no such protection. Tron certainly qualifies as "of media interest".
Right. The source article at http://www.wasabisystems.com/gpl/ is not intended to discourage the use of GPL software; it's a not-so-subtle slam on some of Wasabi's competitors who are using Linux (with the GPL) in embedded systems and possibly not properly disclosing the IP issues to their investors.
That might be a SOX violation, yes.
But doesn't matter to Joe Linux User on the street. They aren't claiming there's anything wrong at the user end; just at the distributor end, if you improperly distribute modified Linux (or other GPL) products and don't release the source. In this, RMS and the Free Software Foundation agree.
Wasabi is correct that their use of a Berkeley license makes their operations safer that way. But it also doesn't make a difference to a Linux-using vendor if the vendor obeys the GPL as the GPL requires...
Apple has already demonstrated that they want to keep the system on Apple-only hardware.
That's not what's coming out of Apple's policy or technical rumor mills, where there are already whispers of various Dell models running 10.4 x86, etc.
If I had a mod point in my pocket right now, I'd boost the above "interesting" or "insightful" for the last sentence, and then the second to last. Although I don't entirely agree.
Reading through TFA, I had two simultaneous lines of thought. The surface level one was "this is bunk" for many of the points Jaron was making... a lot of specifics I disagree with or which I can disprove.
The deeper one was "ok, there are other points which can be made to support the point he's trying to make here, though I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with the deeper point yet".
I think my fundamental problem is that the essay was extremely verbose and simultaneously used a lot of arguable or challengable points for the examples he chose to use. The essay thus distracts us from its underlying points, which is rarely a good thing to do. However, I think that he does have some interesting underlying ideas in there.
It's not screwed up. You only hear about or notice the bad software. Most industrial software is very high quality. Think of all that software in your car, your home appliances, your electric tooth brush, your television... Even in computing devices. Think about your ethernet switch, your office telephone, your storage array, you name it... You don't realize there is software there because it doesn't get in your way. It just works. The devices that don't end up driven out of the marketplace very quickly. Bad software being considered ubiquitous is a recent phenomenon that arrived with desktop computing.
You're using industrial different than I meant; I intended "commercial" as in, real world projects for money, and not academic research exercises.
However, your point is still not something I agree with. True industrial software for simple applications tends to be reasonably reliable. That's true for any simple applications, as a rule.
My ethernet switches and storage arrays aren't simple applications. I've been an architect at a VAR for both, and sr engineer at a vendor for storage (long ago). I've bought hundreds of each as a customer. And I have friends who work doing the software for vendors of both.
Anyone who actually buys serious ethernet switches should be aware of the history of bugs. And storage arrays? Good god, how many firmware revisions have most of the models out there been through... I can't even count, and in some cases the upgrade procedures are terribly dangerous.
And my office telephone, which used to be a fairly simple digital unit connected to a fairly conventional PBX, is likely to be VOIP soon. With all the bells, whistles, and bugs those are showing in practice...
Don't tell me these things aren't buggy. That assertion goes beyond ridiculous into baldfaced lie territory, or marketing materials.
It's standard practice to gimbal the main engines in a launch vehicle, or an upper stage. That gives you pitch and yaw (and sometimes, if you have 2 or more engines, roll) orientation control while you're under thrust from those main engines, without having to use the smaller RCS engines as well.
Other ways of doing it include using a RCS anyways, with fixed main engines; putting vanes or paddles in the main engine exhaust stream but keeping it fixed; using aerodynamic control fins (only works in an atmosphere during certain speed ranges, useless at liftoff or in space); injecting a liquid or gas into the main rocket engine nozzles on one side but not the other, to give side thrust (LITVC or Liquid Injection Thrust Vector Control, though it can technically use gas as well).
It is not standard practice to gimbal the reaction control system used in space. The assumption to date has been that the four fixed quads approach gives the best reliability under circumstances where part of the system suffers a failure. If you lose one of these oriented thrusters (stuck actuator or thruster fails) then it's like losing a whole standard quad, in terms of the vehicle's remaining dynamics. Lose two, and your maneuverability is severely impaired.
While it's hard to argue with the above logic, such changes don't happen overnight just because a demand increases. When we're talking about properly educating people (and by properly, I mean both intensive CS background in theory and practice, and then practical coding in real world environments in quantity to become a good coder as well), it will take five or more years for a demand spike to produce a supply rise.
The projects I am involved with today won't wait five years for programmers. This is business fact; if they aren't started now, and completed in an economical timeframe, then companies will go out of business and not be around to hire those better programmers in 5 years.
If you shift the question around to "should we set project and programmer standards" and "should standards improve and evolve over time", and the statement to "current standards are inadequate and irresponsible" then sure, no disagreement.
In many cases, development problems are the result of not even following what industry standards and best practices are in place now.
And one thing I don't want to see is formal programming CS programs which produce CS professors exclusively... though some of my CS academic aquaintences dislike me saying so, from what I see, few of their graduates go into coding in industry. That's a pretty unfortunate thing for the world. To be ultimately useful, these skills need to become things which take people out of college, into industry, and successfully into challenging industry projects.
Nontrivial problems to solve. If it was easy, everyone would be doing this stuff right already. That obviously isn't true yet...
I'm sure one could point to, for example, Fog Creek software as another example of somewhere that does a remarkable job with small teams.
The key point is this: small teams. It's a lot easier to find the people who can produce 10x better (in terms of rate of writing, clean/bug free code, whichever metrics you care for) when you need to find 3 or 5 or 10 people. You can't staff a whole large application development project with the best gurus: there aren't enough out there in the world.
What Hawking did was successfully apply quantum mechanics to a point of particular interest in relativity, the event horizon area of black holes. The combination of quantum physics and relativity has been a particular problem spot in physics since the two theories were both public; it was known that they didn't fit together well, and attempts to reconcile them have been a particularly painful part of how modern physics has advanced. See "Grand Unified Theory" et al.
Hawking radiation isn't the end of that path, but it was an interesting point somewhere near the beginning, and was a major step forwards in practical terms. It's not particularly relevant to the grand unified theories now working their way around to identifying testable quantities, and is only of practical interest if you're standing near a small black hole, but it was a pretty big contribution.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: the FAA will be useless based on their desire to want to regulate space tourism.
The FAA AST, the particular part of the agency with responsibility over spaceflight, is a very different group from "The FAA" as a nebulous whole, or "The FAA" referring to the aviation side of things more specifically.
International treaties make governments responsible for all spaceflight activity from their territory. Governments regulate things which they are responsible for, by international treaty. This is pretty much by definition.
The FAA AST has, since commercial spaceflight became a possibility, been both required to by law and actively and generally successfully engaging with the industry to find ways to regulate that protect public safety and the government's inherent interest in the activity, but still encourage the industry to be successful.
With a few relatively minor exceptions, the AST has not gotten in people's way. There have been particular timing and review problems with specific projects, but in general they've been doing a credible, thoughtful, professional, and positive job of helping make things happen for the industry.
This is slightly self serving for me to say this (I have dealings with them and get along with them fine) but it's also true. The liasions from various companies to AST genuinely like what's happening here, because it's letting them move forwards and to some degree helping.
...but very few have bothered to read any of the proposal
There are things/. readers as a collective body are good at. For everything else, there are other forums.
Actual spaceflight companies are reading it in detail, and using other forums. With a couple of exceptions, and I'm one of them, people from those companies don't even come here due to the levels of FUD the/.ers bring.
What has come up so far in those other forums is people who are using VTVL vehicles scratching their heads about the pilots license requirement ("But it has no wings...!"), the person seriously working on a FAA AST regulated commercial ELV launched capsule (me) scratching my head about the pilots license requirement ("But it has no atmospheric controls whatsoever...!"). Other than that requirement, the other stuff got telegraphed to industry and interested parties well, and everyone seems to be giving it a preliminary thumbs-up.
If you RTFA a bit more carefully you'd notice that they contrast DVD (the ROM format) with the various DVD writeable formats, pointing out that DVD ROMs caught on with now nearly 100% market penetration (prerecorded VHS delinda est), but instead of DVD writeables killing off VHS for recording, Tivo did. And basically because of too many DVD writeable formats.
The original CD (ROM), and original DVD (ROM), were both excellent, universal, and well liked formats.
What happened with the writables in the DVD space is an object lesson. Unfortunately, one now being emulated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks.
We are still producing all the components, including a recently revitalized capability to manufacture the fissile pit (technical term for the uranium or plutonium core). We didn't have that ability for about a decade, but have been able to in small quantities again for a few years.
Bombs were being completely dissassembled and rebuilt throughout, for reliability testing and analysis purposes. In some cases, most or all of the other components were replaced.
An AOL ip address would indicate that thousands of clickthroughs are happening, and given that AOL re-distributes the same IP addresses over and over again thousands of times in a week, I doubt this case will have much merit.
That's one explanation, and the one I came up with immediately reading the article. But as of yet we don't see the detailed suit claims and list of IP addresses, so we don't know.
Could be them being dumb and not noticing that there are large ISPs out there who proxy addresses like AOL, or could be something completely different and valid to complain about.
Hopefully they'll put the evidence out there reasonably quickly, unlike say SCO.
I think you're entirely missing the point of the COTS program; NASA is putting some seed money in, but then expects to competitively purchase cargo and possibly crew transfer mission services to ISS from the companies who succeed with their demonstrators.
The ISS cargo mission is enough to create a moderate and sufficient commercial market for cargo launch and delivery services. The crew mission (3 people every 4-6 months) is on the low end of supporting a sufficient commercial market for commercial manned spaceflight. However, there are other customer bases for that service (space tourists in general, Bigelow's station in particular). So hopefully capability developed for that mission will be sellable to commercial markets as well as the government ISS mission consumer.
Ideally, NASA would be a big enough "anchor customer" that it supported the markets entirely itself, and would be fostering a competitive market for providing service. As it is, they are attempting to foster a competitive market. At the announcement briefing at JSC, the NASA presenters were talking like they wantes this to be effectively a venture capital pool for a directed industry, though it will be phrased as development/demonstrator milestone contracts. Never heard that before out of NASA management. The market is sufficiently big for the cargo missions, and the combination of known government manned mission market plus hoped for commercial / tourist manned mission market are probably big enough as well.
The $500 million is hoped to fund several demonstrations, not one.
It would be appalling if nobody was able to, at the end of this, also fly cheaper resupply missions than Shuttle's loaded mission cost (which is over $1 billion a flight now, with the lower flight rates post-Columbia).
Do these remind anyone else of the camera balls that the Tinkers used for their security systems in The Peace War?
The general idea of a throwable, usually round camera or sensor ball has been in science fiction and various sci-fi games since the early 80s at least. Vernor didn't originate it, though he was one of the earlier people to use it in writing.
They've been technically feasible for about 10 years now, and have been prototyped here and there. This is the first reasonably affordable production line model.
Sparc is screwed as an architecture I reckon. It lagged behind the other Riscs in terms of performance
Niagra is a real leapfrog forwards, though, assuming it performs in people's real world applications environments as fast as it does in benchmarks. For workloads which are thread partitionable (large numbers of parallel processes, like apache, a java web applications server, etc) it acts much closer to a SMP multiprocessor server with something like 32 cores than either an Intel hyperthreading or HT/multicore, or AMD multicore CPU.
Paraphrasing from that... The single CPU 1 GHz 8-core T1000 system hs about 3x faster on SPECweb than dual 3.8 GHz Xeons, 2x as fast on SPECjbb business apps benchmarks than dual Xeons, etc
Your typical FPS game will vary, of course, until Carmack gets around to massively multithreading...
Except that it isn't unenforcable; it takes a little legal effort to pierce the IP address anonymity veil, but a John Doe libel suit will do that, as he and his attorney and the ISP involved all understand now.
He's just pissed that he doesn't know RIGHT NOW who did it, without filing that John Doe libel suit. Which is a very different problem, fundamentally, than the false allegation of there being zero accountability.
There are only 5 published data points to date; there exist more, but scientists are being unusually paranoid about talking about the data, because of the possible consequences.
There have been leaks of data since early summer that the northern loop was in trouble in one way or another. These have included the Iceland downwelling regions having shrunk from the normal 7-11 zones to 1 weak zone, a southerly deflection and apparent volume reduction of the north atlantic conveyor visible on satellite IR data, and the data from bouy measurements which just got formally published.
It's sort of annoying that those gathering the data are being more conservative than normal in publishing, as planning for next year and the year after would make a big difference if there is a conveyor shutdown and Europe's about to have another Little Ice Age. Is it worse to be right but quiet and too late, or wrong and too loud and scare people?
Dude, you're on drugs. Nobody's saying that they can't reposess the car if you default on the loan.
The only question is, who is legally the owner of the car after purchase, and that is John Q Purchaser, not Mr Bank, who only gets a lien on it. That lien entitles them to reposess in case of default, but that lien is not ownership, or equivalent to ownership, or any such thing. It's just a lien.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were being racist in interviewing, or the company in hiring, we'd be unable to meet our customer company demands. To be blunt, to be racist in the current Silicon Valley environment is a detriment to corporate survival, and thus remarkably stupid (in addition to all the anti-social apsects, and their stupidity).
There have been some good comments in the discussion here so far... I liked the mention of accent as a barrier. I think to some degree that's true; it's often harder to understand people whose native languages or cultural exposure to English is further off, if they haven't been in the US for long. But part of my job interviewing people is to get past that and figure out how well they know their technical stuff. It is extremely extremely rare for someone to be so bad at communicating that we can't connect and figure out their technical skills. Their communications skills are another axis we rate them on, and accent can be a factor in that. But we find that most customers are very tolerant of smart people who may have to communicate a bit slower and more carefully. Much more so than of people who aren't fundamentally good experienced IT folks. Communications can work itself out; talent is either there or it isn't.
Based on the people who make it as far as a phone interview, it is apparent that there are uneven distributions of people who are actually in the industry. A lot fewer women, and some minorities are underrepresented (the most uncommon accent in interviews for me is Spanish... which is very strange, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a huge hispanic population). That's unfortunate; we're misisng out on potential smart employees just because it's not seen as a career by kids in high school and college. Moreso with women than along racial lines (I know more blacks in IT than women). But both are areas where increasing the industry's visibility to potential employees early on would help.
Right. The source article at http://www.wasabisystems.com/gpl/ is not intended to discourage the use of GPL software; it's a not-so-subtle slam on some of Wasabi's competitors who are using Linux (with the GPL) in embedded systems and possibly not properly disclosing the IP issues to their investors. That might be a SOX violation, yes. But doesn't matter to Joe Linux User on the street. They aren't claiming there's anything wrong at the user end; just at the distributor end, if you improperly distribute modified Linux (or other GPL) products and don't release the source. In this, RMS and the Free Software Foundation agree. Wasabi is correct that their use of a Berkeley license makes their operations safer that way. But it also doesn't make a difference to a Linux-using vendor if the vendor obeys the GPL as the GPL requires...
That's not what's coming out of Apple's policy or technical rumor mills, where there are already whispers of various Dell models running 10.4 x86, etc.
If I had a mod point in my pocket right now, I'd boost the above "interesting" or "insightful" for the last sentence, and then the second to last. Although I don't entirely agree.
Reading through TFA, I had two simultaneous lines of thought. The surface level one was "this is bunk" for many of the points Jaron was making... a lot of specifics I disagree with or which I can disprove.
The deeper one was "ok, there are other points which can be made to support the point he's trying to make here, though I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with the deeper point yet".
I think my fundamental problem is that the essay was extremely verbose and simultaneously used a lot of arguable or challengable points for the examples he chose to use. The essay thus distracts us from its underlying points, which is rarely a good thing to do. However, I think that he does have some interesting underlying ideas in there.
...was Bittorrent...
You're using industrial different than I meant; I intended "commercial" as in, real world projects for money, and not academic research exercises.
However, your point is still not something I agree with. True industrial software for simple applications tends to be reasonably reliable. That's true for any simple applications, as a rule.
My ethernet switches and storage arrays aren't simple applications. I've been an architect at a VAR for both, and sr engineer at a vendor for storage (long ago). I've bought hundreds of each as a customer. And I have friends who work doing the software for vendors of both.
Anyone who actually buys serious ethernet switches should be aware of the history of bugs. And storage arrays? Good god, how many firmware revisions have most of the models out there been through... I can't even count, and in some cases the upgrade procedures are terribly dangerous.
And my office telephone, which used to be a fairly simple digital unit connected to a fairly conventional PBX, is likely to be VOIP soon. With all the bells, whistles, and bugs those are showing in practice...
Don't tell me these things aren't buggy. That assertion goes beyond ridiculous into baldfaced lie territory, or marketing materials.
It's standard practice to gimbal the main engines in a launch vehicle, or an upper stage. That gives you pitch and yaw (and sometimes, if you have 2 or more engines, roll) orientation control while you're under thrust from those main engines, without having to use the smaller RCS engines as well.
Other ways of doing it include using a RCS anyways, with fixed main engines; putting vanes or paddles in the main engine exhaust stream but keeping it fixed; using aerodynamic control fins (only works in an atmosphere during certain speed ranges, useless at liftoff or in space); injecting a liquid or gas into the main rocket engine nozzles on one side but not the other, to give side thrust (LITVC or Liquid Injection Thrust Vector Control, though it can technically use gas as well).
It is not standard practice to gimbal the reaction control system used in space. The assumption to date has been that the four fixed quads approach gives the best reliability under circumstances where part of the system suffers a failure. If you lose one of these oriented thrusters (stuck actuator or thruster fails) then it's like losing a whole standard quad, in terms of the vehicle's remaining dynamics. Lose two, and your maneuverability is severely impaired.
While it's hard to argue with the above logic, such changes don't happen overnight just because a demand increases. When we're talking about properly educating people (and by properly, I mean both intensive CS background in theory and practice, and then practical coding in real world environments in quantity to become a good coder as well), it will take five or more years for a demand spike to produce a supply rise.
... though some of my CS academic aquaintences dislike me saying so, from what I see, few of their graduates go into coding in industry. That's a pretty unfortunate thing for the world. To be ultimately useful, these skills need to become things which take people out of college, into industry, and successfully into challenging industry projects.
The projects I am involved with today won't wait five years for programmers. This is business fact; if they aren't started now, and completed in an economical timeframe, then companies will go out of business and not be around to hire those better programmers in 5 years.
If you shift the question around to "should we set project and programmer standards" and "should standards improve and evolve over time", and the statement to "current standards are inadequate and irresponsible" then sure, no disagreement.
In many cases, development problems are the result of not even following what industry standards and best practices are in place now.
And one thing I don't want to see is formal programming CS programs which produce CS professors exclusively
Nontrivial problems to solve. If it was easy, everyone would be doing this stuff right already. That obviously isn't true yet...
Not commonly done, no. But then, bad input corner condition security holes are pretty common too.
I don't claim to perfectly code to check all that stuff every time myself, but I do know why you want to do it.
I'm sure one could point to, for example, Fog Creek software as another example of somewhere that does a remarkable job with small teams.
The key point is this: small teams. It's a lot easier to find the people who can produce 10x better (in terms of rate of writing, clean/bug free code, whichever metrics you care for) when you need to find 3 or 5 or 10 people. You can't staff a whole large application development project with the best gurus: there aren't enough out there in the world.
Hawking radiation, not plural.
What Hawking did was successfully apply quantum mechanics to a point of particular interest in relativity, the event horizon area of black holes. The combination of quantum physics and relativity has been a particular problem spot in physics since the two theories were both public; it was known that they didn't fit together well, and attempts to reconcile them have been a particularly painful part of how modern physics has advanced. See "Grand Unified Theory" et al.
Hawking radiation isn't the end of that path, but it was an interesting point somewhere near the beginning, and was a major step forwards in practical terms. It's not particularly relevant to the grand unified theories now working their way around to identifying testable quantities, and is only of practical interest if you're standing near a small black hole, but it was a pretty big contribution.
The FAA AST, the particular part of the agency with responsibility over spaceflight, is a very different group from "The FAA" as a nebulous whole, or "The FAA" referring to the aviation side of things more specifically.
International treaties make governments responsible for all spaceflight activity from their territory. Governments regulate things which they are responsible for, by international treaty. This is pretty much by definition.
The FAA AST has, since commercial spaceflight became a possibility, been both required to by law and actively and generally successfully engaging with the industry to find ways to regulate that protect public safety and the government's inherent interest in the activity, but still encourage the industry to be successful.
With a few relatively minor exceptions, the AST has not gotten in people's way. There have been particular timing and review problems with specific projects, but in general they've been doing a credible, thoughtful, professional, and positive job of helping make things happen for the industry.
This is slightly self serving for me to say this (I have dealings with them and get along with them fine) but it's also true. The liasions from various companies to AST genuinely like what's happening here, because it's letting them move forwards and to some degree helping.
There are things
Actual spaceflight companies are reading it in detail, and using other forums. With a couple of exceptions, and I'm one of them, people from those companies don't even come here due to the levels of FUD the /.ers bring.
What has come up so far in those other forums is people who are using VTVL vehicles scratching their heads about the pilots license requirement ("But it has no wings...!"), the person seriously working on a FAA AST regulated commercial ELV launched capsule (me) scratching my head about the pilots license requirement ("But it has no atmospheric controls whatsoever...!"). Other than that requirement, the other stuff got telegraphed to industry and interested parties well, and everyone seems to be giving it a preliminary thumbs-up.
The original CD (ROM), and original DVD (ROM), were both excellent, universal, and well liked formats.
What happened with the writables in the DVD space is an object lesson. Unfortunately, one now being emulated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks.
We are still producing all the components, including a recently revitalized capability to manufacture the fissile pit (technical term for the uranium or plutonium core). We didn't have that ability for about a decade, but have been able to in small quantities again for a few years.
Bombs were being completely dissassembled and rebuilt throughout, for reliability testing and analysis purposes. In some cases, most or all of the other components were replaced.
The compartment is normally full of pure nitrogen ("inerted") prior to launch; any oxygen there is due to a leak somewhere.
Could be them being dumb and not noticing that there are large ISPs out there who proxy addresses like AOL, or could be something completely different and valid to complain about.
Hopefully they'll put the evidence out there reasonably quickly, unlike say SCO.
I think you're entirely missing the point of the COTS program; NASA is putting some seed money in, but then expects to competitively purchase cargo and possibly crew transfer mission services to ISS from the companies who succeed with their demonstrators.
The ISS cargo mission is enough to create a moderate and sufficient commercial market for cargo launch and delivery services. The crew mission (3 people every 4-6 months) is on the low end of supporting a sufficient commercial market for commercial manned spaceflight. However, there are other customer bases for that service (space tourists in general, Bigelow's station in particular). So hopefully capability developed for that mission will be sellable to commercial markets as well as the government ISS mission consumer.
Ideally, NASA would be a big enough "anchor customer" that it supported the markets entirely itself, and would be fostering a competitive market for providing service. As it is, they are attempting to foster a competitive market. At the announcement briefing at JSC, the NASA presenters were talking like they wantes this to be effectively a venture capital pool for a directed industry, though it will be phrased as development/demonstrator milestone contracts. Never heard that before out of NASA management. The market is sufficiently big for the cargo missions, and the combination of known government manned mission market plus hoped for commercial / tourist manned mission market are probably big enough as well.
The $500 million is hoped to fund several demonstrations, not one.
It would be appalling if nobody was able to, at the end of this, also fly cheaper resupply missions than Shuttle's loaded mission cost (which is over $1 billion a flight now, with the lower flight rates post-Columbia).
They've been technically feasible for about 10 years now, and have been prototyped here and there. This is the first reasonably affordable production line model.
Niagra is a real leapfrog forwards, though, assuming it performs in people's real world applications environments as fast as it does in benchmarks. For workloads which are thread partitionable (large numbers of parallel processes, like apache, a java web applications server, etc) it acts much closer to a SMP multiprocessor server with something like 32 cores than either an Intel hyperthreading or HT/multicore, or AMD multicore CPU.
See the T-1000 benchmarks page.
Paraphrasing from that...
The single CPU 1 GHz 8-core T1000 system hs about 3x faster on SPECweb than dual 3.8 GHz Xeons, 2x as fast on SPECjbb business apps benchmarks than dual Xeons, etc
Your typical FPS game will vary, of course, until Carmack gets around to massively multithreading...
Except that it isn't unenforcable; it takes a little legal effort to pierce the IP address anonymity veil, but a John Doe libel suit will do that, as he and his attorney and the ISP involved all understand now.
He's just pissed that he doesn't know RIGHT NOW who did it, without filing that John Doe libel suit. Which is a very different problem, fundamentally, than the false allegation of there being zero accountability.
There are only 5 published data points to date; there exist more, but scientists are being unusually paranoid about talking about the data, because of the possible consequences.
There have been leaks of data since early summer that the northern loop was in trouble in one way or another. These have included the Iceland downwelling regions having shrunk from the normal 7-11 zones to 1 weak zone, a southerly deflection and apparent volume reduction of the north atlantic conveyor visible on satellite IR data, and the data from bouy measurements which just got formally published.
It's sort of annoying that those gathering the data are being more conservative than normal in publishing, as planning for next year and the year after would make a big difference if there is a conveyor shutdown and Europe's about to have another Little Ice Age. Is it worse to be right but quiet and too late, or wrong and too loud and scare people?
Dude, you're on drugs. Nobody's saying that they can't reposess the car if you default on the loan.
The only question is, who is legally the owner of the car after purchase, and that is John Q Purchaser, not Mr Bank, who only gets a lien on it. That lien entitles them to reposess in case of default, but that lien is not ownership, or equivalent to ownership, or any such thing. It's just a lien.