LOL, I laughed at that rainbow comment. I have voted on EVMs before and it is not machine to machine or getting your hands sprayed by ink. You get your finger marked once and in the same EVM you cast multpile votes. As for example when I was voting I was voting for State elections as well as national elections and I did it on the same EVM.
From the other posted info, I don't see how you do that. Could you explain for us how the system handles multiple races being voted?
The concern I had reading the articles initially was the same as those up-thread, that it sounded too simple to handle typical US elections where we have tens and tens of separate races for federal, state, and local office up for vote at the same time. If in fact these boxes can handle that,
and you can explain how, then I would really be
interested in seeing that.
Here's an idea on re-entry:
Thrust up and away from your current vector. If you can reduce your angular velocity with minimal encounter of atmosphere during the process, you can reduce your dependence on heat shielding.
The numbers don't work out.
An ablative heatshield needs 6-9 percent of the re-entering mass to protect you from LEO entry speeds, depending on material and trajectory and the capsule's lift and entry corridor details
(and a few lower order effects which don't matter
for this discussion).
9 percent of the vehicle's mass in liquid hydrogen/oxygen rocket fuel will change your
velocity only about 420 meters/sec out of 7,200 m/s orbital velocity. That saves about 12% of
the thermal energy load, but that's only about
1% of the heatshield mass saved...
Use the atmosphere to brake. The atmosphere is
your friend.
Some months ago, my wife and I were randomly lucky
enough to catch a free invite to a test screening of The Incredibles.
Disclaimer:
A lot of the CGI work was half done
(and parts of the movie were storyboards),
so I haven't seen the whole finished thing.
So I am not sure how those parts
finished up.
All of that said...
The pacing even of the half done version
was excellent. The plot held together,
the characters were thought out and had
depth, they developed throughout the film.
Pixar knows how to make movies; it's quite
something to be watching a scene that's half
storyboards still and still feel it's gripping.
This movie is aimed at both adults and kids.
There are child characters, who help save the day,
but the adults character development is the main
theme of the film in my opinion.
I liked. I expect the finished product is going
to entirely live up to the promise of the half
done version I saw.
No, it isn't already obsolete; the Ultralife rechargable batteries have half (max 162 Wh/kg) the energy density of the new Sion Lithium-Sulphur cells (300 Wh/kg).
Anything worthwhile can be paid for by voluntarily invested money instead of tax dollars.
If there's any chance that it will generate
a financial return within 5 years.
Fundamental science and the development of
key engineering concepts do not pay back that soon.
It took decades between the discovery of the structure of DNA and when people started making money off it. Top quarks are not paying anyone's commercial salary other than researchers and a few large particle accellerator component manufacturers.... this decade. But who knows.
Doing studies like this tells us what engineering
and directed science developments will be
useful
in the future, by pointing out applications and
providing directions for research. Without them,
nobody can tell ahead of time what the uses for and payback for new nanotube fibers might be,
the uses for antimatter containment, large lasers, etc.
That long term funding lets investors say
"Ok, we could see making money at this"
and then they may invest.
The rise of technological society has been on
the back of publically funded research, often
followed by commercial development.
The benefits of having some people looking
out a ways on the public dime is well demonstrated. TCP/IP anyone?
Disclaimer: I have before, and will again,
applied for NIAC project funding.
Does this mean we've broken the "station wagon loaded with DVD's" barrier yet?
We just worked this out...
A Saturn Ion station wagon with the back seat
folded down, full of LTO2 tapes, is 418 petabit m/s at 60 MPH,
or about 6 times more bandwidth.
And about $600k worth of tapes.
79 cu ft with back seat folded down
LTO dimentions 21.5 x 105.4 x 102 mm
Rest is just math....
You can work out the DVD bandwidth yourselves.
Latency sucks, though.
Re:Sun Microsystems != typical "technology company
on
Should Sun Just Fold Now?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reliable. Sun IS screwed.
Until you try and actually run some real world
business applications on your massive low-reliability distributed environment.
Google spent... oh, roughly $100m in software development getting to the point that they were saving enough money by using the distributed low cost low reliability PCs. That is a huge barrier to entry on such largescale clusters.
And Google is in a business where a little data loss in the searches is not going to seriously harm anyone. So they operate slightly lossy. They admit this pretty explicitly; one of their people, Anurag Acharya, was an invited speaker at the second
Evaluating and Architecting System dependabilitY
symposium in 2002.
Neither the software investment to make reliable distributed apps nor the lossy data model are acceptable to typical business software.
Do you want your bank losing 1-2% of your
deposits, or having a consistency check error
balancing your account at the end of the month?
How about Amazon randomly deleting or inserting
a few things from your orders...
And even where there is off the shelf distributed software like Oracle RAC, it's such a management and performance hit that people typically go back to buying larger single system image servers after testing it out... ask Oracle what percentage of their sales are RAC versus straight Oracle 9 some time.
There are applications... web farms spring to mind... where the Google model is a natural fit for the problem set. Strangely, that particular answer was well known five years ago, because people are not stupid.
Until every major business application is naturally and easily distributable larger servers will continue to sell. The software is just plain not there yet. Things are trending that direction; in ten years, the current model is in real serious trouble. Maybe sooner. But now? Don't believe dumb hype.
When I think of difficulties faced by these companies, I think of engineering hurdles. Getting insurance is one of those things that I didn't think about,
It's nice that things have progressed to the
point that insurance is now a major problem
in comparison.
Our previous problems were a lot harder...
...but imagine it from the insurance companies perspective.
Insurance is a barrier, but it's one manageable
either with time, location, or money.
Time: Work with insurers in depth to make them
familiar with the environment
Location: Fly out of the Mojave airport, which already has civilian supersonic aircraft and rocket activities (or, somewhere else which is pushing to open up to such activities, such as the spaceport opening up in Oklahoma)
Money: Other insurers will give you a million in third party liability for ten times what Xcor paid, without too much hassle. It took me about 5 hours work over 3 weeks to get an insurance quote for a commercial rocket development program elsewhere in California.
If you are poor and far from Mojave, however, it can get hard.
I imagine that meeting OSHA standards alone would be a non-trivial barrier to starting such a company
I don't know of anyone in the industry who's
working with seriously toxic materials or
propellants.
Not to get too picky here, but the latest Noritsus and Fuju Frontiers are laser printers.
The vendors still produce photo paper printers,
and are offering new models.
I am doing (photo-unrelated) business with a
major (approaching 1000 units) photoprinter user
whose evaluation is that the units that don't use
photo paper are not up to professional image
quality standards. Their recapitalization
cycle is going for new photo paper units from
those vendors, despite clear cost and operations
advantages to the non-photo paper printers.
My point is that BOTH sides have faith.
You believe what you believe, not because
it is true, but because that is what you
have faith in.
No.
Typical liberal educated nonscientists
may have faith in and operate under
assumptions based on faith in science and
the scientific process. But to assume
that nobody believes in
science because it's demonstrably true
and not because they just have faith in
the process, as you appear to claim,
is just idiotic.
Anyone who goes through a good university
science or engineering cirriculum will
reproduce most of the classic experiments
of science themselves. There are some
modern advanced physics and biology that
take enough lab investment that merely
curious people can't do that, but the
theoretical underpinnings for those are
all accessable and testable.
On a day to day operational level,
I have faith in science, but it's
because
I have the ability to and have tested it,
and found it to be true.
This is a replay attack. So don't use a static (replayable) sequence of ports for the knock sequence. Instead, require a dynamic sequence that is a function of the current time.
The scope of the article is really limited to the use of spreadsheets in financial planning (forecasting). For which the criticisms of the author and the material he cites are pretty valid.
The validity of the criticisms depend on assuming that the business users of the spreadsheet (or, in fact, similar database) are business idiots.
Article's author Peter Coffee writes:
The first distortion is the use of point values and simple arithmetic instead of probability distributions and statistical measures. So far as I know, there's no off-the-shelf spreadsheet product--certainly none in common use--that provides for input of numbers as uncertain quantities, even though almost all of our decisions rest on forecasts or on speculations.
Anyone doing forecasting and financials should
be including contengencies on billables and
receivables, probabilities on forecasted sales,
etc. Building those into the spreadsheet is
trivially easy if you understand the business
logic behind such analysis. If you are not
doing so it is likely because you don't know
why it's important to do so. The tools are
clearly up to the task; every company I have
been at knew they had to do that, and had done
it properly.
Luser error, particularly Luser lack of business
sense, does not a good article make nor a good
several hundred post slashdot debate.
Cheap rockets don't solve this problem. Even if the price to lift is $CHEAP/lb up to the X lbs, no amount of money will allow you to get a payload heavier than the rocket's capacity into orbit. (multiple lifts and assemble in space isn't gonna be a cheap solution to this problem either)
Now, if you had cheap rocket with double the payload capacit of current rockets it may make it possible to skimp on the payload construction. But it is maximum payload capacity, not per-trip cost that dictates expensive, exotic, fragile payloads.
This is a common misperception.
In reality, it is often cheaper to fly on the next sized larger rocket than it is to save 10% off the weight of the payload itself. Trying to save the last few pounds because you didn't plan in enough margins for your project is always a horrible experience, expensive and painful.
It's a rule of thumb that the most efficient satellites have hardware cost around the same as the launch cost. R&D and operations costs may be other major factors, but you want to try and balance out the payload and launcher costs to be roughly equal.
Look at the Falcon V. It costs around $12 mil. A roughly equivalently sized Delta II (7925) is about $45 million. A much smaller Delta II (7325) only costs $22 mil (NASA used a bunch of these for small missions in the last 5 years) but only lifts about half as much payload as Falcon V.
Using the rule of thumb, we want to spend about $12 mil on the spacecraft hardware for a Falcon V launch, and about $22 mil for the hardware for a Delta II launch, which weighs half as much. So the price per pound of the Delta II payload is about four times as much.
As a rough rule of thumb, allowing weight to double within otherwise identical performance requirements for electronics and systems will save you about half the total cost. Sometimes more than half, but half is conservative. So the rule of thumb supports the $12 mil payload price on the Falcon.
So we have a total mission whose hardware costs $12 mil to build and $12 mil to launch ($24 million, plus the R&D costs and the operations costs) versus $22 mil to build and $22 mil to launch ($44 million plus R&D costs and operations costs). Capabilities should be roughly identical.
Saving $20 million on the flight is a lot of money, even for rocket people. The R&D and operations costs may add another $50 to $100 million to the mission cost, but even so, saving the $20 million on the hardware and launch is a big deal. And R&D costs may go down a lot if the hardware complexity goes down and weight is allowed to grow, so you can save there too.
And the best part is, the rule of thumb keeps being valid as you keep making cheaper larger rockets to launch things on.
So don't fall for the old story that you don't save overall cost if you make lower cost launchers. You need both cheaper *and* bigger, but if it gets cheaper faster than it gets bigger you win.
The joke was originally come up with by two
UC Santa Cruz students, Eric Lechner and Lars
Norpchen, in the spring of 1988, while they were
residents at the Santa Cruz
Geek HouseThe House.
The Circus page links to the organization's
leadership,
who were many of the various people who
helped elaborate on it (about half of it
is original to Eric and Lars prior to
anyone else contributing).
The joke is now roughly old enough to get
a drivers license in California.
One of the problems is that this has circulated
so widely without attribution that people
tend to believe that it has no copyright
or attributable origin. But that's not true;
Eric and Lars came up with the idea.
They're the ones that sat up on campus
at UC Santa Cruz handing out fliers with
the info on it, to see how people reacted.
-george william herbert
Treasurer, Coalition to Ban DHMO
It's not great, but there are more detailed links
around the BAE website.
It doesn't list how the FLASH is connected;
that's not a standard built-in on the RAD6000
computer. I would guess, hung off the FPGA
interface device, but I don't know that for sure.
This whole situation shows the signs of a textbook pump-and-dump manuever.
Many signs of it, in fact.
But the problem with that sort of theory
is that, in this day and age, if the stock
tanks tomorrow then the investors are going
to sue McBride and cadre into the ground.
And if McBride can't demonstrate that the
SCO internal decisions can't be justified
with the full internal evidence chain and
memos and such, McBride and cadre are going
to be working graveyard shift at 7-11s
for the rest of their lives.
Is it possible that they both are so stupid
as to think they could get away with a pump
and dump after so many CEOs and CFOs and Martha
Stewart have all been busted, and that they
don't have any real internal evidence which
is supporting their position at all? Sure.
Is it likely?
I find it much more likely that they have
evidence, that it's a lot weaker than they
think it is, and it's a lot lot weaker than
they have said it is. But that they have some
code snippets (not previously publically
disclosed) which are in fact improperly grabbed
out of the UNIX SysV source. The risk of that
has been something anyone in open source with
half a brain has been worried about for a
long time. That it might have happened in
a minor but not serious manner is not at all
beyond credibility. I think it's also unlikely
that they have enough to effectively sue anyone
and win in the long term, but they could well
have convinced themselves otherwise.
I believe that the time that would pass while the core is being compressed and the reaction builds would be plenty long enough for the outwards force of the explosive charges to ruin the capsule, despite the 1-foot gap between the fission device and the container. The fusion reaction might still go, but I doubt it'd be anywhere near its potential.
A 1 foot gap? Modern US weapons are only
about a foot in diameter. See:
List of all US nuclear bombs
This is an easy problem to solve. Deformation
of the hohlraum (bomb outer casing / "radiation case") will happen, but you just need to make
sure it doesn't rupture from the primary's
implosion charges before the fission reactions
run to completion. If the primary doesn't
detonate, the hohlraum will rupture eventually.
But that doesn't matter, if it lasts long
enough that the primary fires first.
Its thickness and strength are constrained
by how long it has to hold intact, not with
making it survive the internal explosion
permanently.
Frankly, I suspect there is a lot of deliberate misinformation about constructing nuclear devices out there. I have serious doubts about a tamped implosion device working well, if at all; I'm sure that if it were workable, the folks at Oak Ridge would've tried it long before they started fooling around with explosive lenses. That's probably why we didn't hear very much about the tests India and Pakistan performed.
Apollo 11 landed 1.7 miles from its touchdown target point. The 13 miles is the distance to the recovery ship, the USS Hornet, which was not right near the target landing position for reasons which the history documents don't make clear to me.
Essentially the last column is irrellevant to the question at hand, which is how accurate the capsule landings are. If the recovery ship is either accidentally or intentionally not right next to the target landing point, it's not the fault of the capsule design or operation or capabilities. I included that data for completeness' sake.
That is a spacecraft, sir. We do not refer to it as a capsule.
Strange, the NASA Orbital Space Plane staff, Boeing, Orbital Sciences, Lockheed-Martin, etc. are all referring to capsule options for OSP.
It is both a spacecraft and a capsule, sure, but Shuttle is both a spacecraft and a winged gliding spaceplane, Soyuz is both a spacecraft and a capsule, etc. Capsule is a proper term of the art for spacecraft description and in use as such in the NASA teams and contractor teams on OSP.
To land in a specific place? The Apollo capsules had a whole fleet spread across the Pacific to retrieve it and the crew.
I have in front of me NASA SP-2000-4029,
Apollo By The Numbers by Richard W Orloff.
From pp 305, Entry, Splashdown and Recovery table
Mission - Distance to landing target point - Distance to recovery ship
(distances in nautical miles)
Apollo 7 - 1.9 mi - 7.0 mi
Apollo 8 - 1.4 mi - 2.6 mi
Apollo 9 - 2.7 mi - 3.0 mi
Apollo 10 - 1.3 mi - 2.9 mi
Apollo 11 - 1.7 mi - 13 mi
Apollo 12 - 2.0 mi - 3.9 mi
Apollo 13 - 1.0 mi - 3.5 mi
Apollo 14 - 0.6 mi - 3.8 mi
Apollo 15 - 1.0 mi - 5.0 mi
Apollo 16 - 3.0 mi - 2.7 mi
Apollo 17 - 1.0 mi - 3.5 mi
Not one Apollo landed more than 3 miles from its landing target point, including Apollo 13 which had such troubles even getting home safely.
Even if you double that miss distance to 6 miles,
there are plenty of bays and lakes in the US which you could safely land in (12 mile diameter or more). San Pablo Bay or San Francisco Bay, any of the Great Lakes, 6 miles offshore basically anywhere, etc.
The precision landing question is validly "Do I land on a runway or do I need a 5-10 mile wide open space?". But that's very different than "needing an ocean full of recovery ships". If it's accurate enough that I can land it in San Francisco Bay and recover it with a coast guard boat or tug, and Apollo was, then there's no big deal at all unless there's an emergency urgent deorbit away from the usual landing zone (a problem which Shuttle shares, and if it lands mid-ocean is SOL).
did you ever wonder why is there a 2K$ gap between the lowest end Sparc and the highest end x86 machine of the same class ?
What has been discussed in this thread are not the lowest end SPARC systems, but low/mid workgroup servers. The cheapest servers and workstations are under a thousand dollars (V100, SB150).
How do you explain why the Clinton administration covered up the fact that the plane that was downed in NY during his administration was shot by a rocket-launched missile? There is video evidence showing such a missle coming at the plane from a boat on the river. And the government did nothing - they made the situation 'go away'. The plane was ripped appart, the engines not even near the rest of hte plane. The only way that could have happened is if it were shot. "Air turbulence", as was officially claimed, doesn't hold water.
TWA flight 800?
There was no video of any missile.
There were a few people who said they saw an ascending flaming object that then exploded.
The
NTSB Report
explains that the evidence (radar and other) clearly shows
that the plane climbed sharply after the
onboard explosion, while it was certainly already
on fire, explaining the ascending streak of light
reports without any missile.
As for ripped apart, it exploded.
We know there was an explosion in the fuel
tank, everyone agrees that there was an explosion
in the fuel tank based on the soot inside the
tank and the blown apart tank bulkheads.
See the NTSB report and all the critics
responses. The NTSB report clearly shows
how and why the airplane broke up after
that explosion resulting in the debris
patterns.
The only remaining question is whether it
blew up due to some electrical fault in
wiring in or near the tank, or due to a
missile or something whackier like a
meteor. There was no smoking wire
recovered in the debris to prove it was
an accident, but there have been a large
number of fuel tank explosions in military
and civilian transport aircraft due to such
wiring faults. This was far from the first
one to happen.
There is no actual evidence of a missile.
Even psychopathic paranoid lunatics now
agree on that.
Can we prove conclusively it wasn't?
No. But if planes have blown up tens of
times before due to wiring faults,
and you don't find any actual physical
evidence of a missile, Ockham's razor
suggests wiring short.
A-bombs are fucking simple.
Get n amount of fissionable material. (n depends on what type)
Wrap it in plastic explosive.
Detonate to compress, achieve critical density, and set off the explosion.
Which is why the
Nuclear Weapons FAQ
runs to book size to explain the engineering
and physics required. Sure.
Slashdot Mirror
From the other posted info, I don't see how you do that. Could you explain for us how the system handles multiple races being voted?
The concern I had reading the articles initially was the same as those up-thread, that it sounded too simple to handle typical US elections where we have tens and tens of separate races for federal, state, and local office up for vote at the same time. If in fact these boxes can handle that, and you can explain how, then I would really be interested in seeing that.
The numbers don't work out.
An ablative heatshield needs 6-9 percent of the re-entering mass to protect you from LEO entry speeds, depending on material and trajectory and the capsule's lift and entry corridor details (and a few lower order effects which don't matter for this discussion).
9 percent of the vehicle's mass in liquid hydrogen/oxygen rocket fuel will change your velocity only about 420 meters/sec out of 7,200 m/s orbital velocity. That saves about 12% of the thermal energy load, but that's only about 1% of the heatshield mass saved...
Use the atmosphere to brake. The atmosphere is your friend.
Disclaimer:
A lot of the CGI work was half done (and parts of the movie were storyboards), so I haven't seen the whole finished thing. So I am not sure how those parts finished up.
All of that said...
The pacing even of the half done version was excellent. The plot held together, the characters were thought out and had depth, they developed throughout the film. Pixar knows how to make movies; it's quite something to be watching a scene that's half storyboards still and still feel it's gripping.
This movie is aimed at both adults and kids. There are child characters, who help save the day, but the adults character development is the main theme of the film in my opinion.
I liked. I expect the finished product is going to entirely live up to the promise of the half done version I saw.
Sion tech description
Ultralife batteries specs sheet
the Ultralife rechargable batteries
have half (max 162 Wh/kg) the energy
density of the new Sion Lithium-Sulphur
cells (300 Wh/kg).
See:
Sion tech description
Ultralife batteries specs sheet
Fundamental science and the development of key engineering concepts do not pay back that soon. It took decades between the discovery of the structure of DNA and when people started making money off it. Top quarks are not paying anyone's commercial salary other than researchers and a few large particle accellerator component manufacturers.... this decade. But who knows.
Doing studies like this tells us what engineering and directed science developments will be useful in the future, by pointing out applications and providing directions for research. Without them, nobody can tell ahead of time what the uses for and payback for new nanotube fibers might be, the uses for antimatter containment, large lasers, etc.
That long term funding lets investors say "Ok, we could see making money at this" and then they may invest.
The rise of technological society has been on the back of publically funded research, often followed by commercial development. The benefits of having some people looking out a ways on the public dime is well demonstrated. TCP/IP anyone?
Disclaimer: I have before, and will again, applied for NIAC project funding.
We just worked this out...
A Saturn Ion station wagon with the back seat folded down, full of LTO2 tapes, is 418 petabit m/s at 60 MPH, or about 6 times more bandwidth.
And about $600k worth of tapes.
You can work out the DVD bandwidth yourselves.
Latency sucks, though.
Google spent... oh, roughly $100m in software development getting to the point that they were saving enough money by using the distributed low cost low reliability PCs. That is a huge barrier to entry on such largescale clusters.
And Google is in a business where a little data loss in the searches is not going to seriously harm anyone. So they operate slightly lossy. They admit this pretty explicitly; one of their people, Anurag Acharya, was an invited speaker at the second Evaluating and Architecting System dependabilitY symposium in 2002.
Neither the software investment to make reliable distributed apps nor the lossy data model are acceptable to typical business software. Do you want your bank losing 1-2% of your deposits, or having a consistency check error balancing your account at the end of the month? How about Amazon randomly deleting or inserting a few things from your orders...
And even where there is off the shelf distributed software like Oracle RAC, it's such a management and performance hit that people typically go back to buying larger single system image servers after testing it out... ask Oracle what percentage of their sales are RAC versus straight Oracle 9 some time.
There are applications... web farms spring to mind... where the Google model is a natural fit for the problem set. Strangely, that particular answer was well known five years ago, because people are not stupid.
Until every major business application is naturally and easily distributable larger servers will continue to sell. The software is just plain not there yet. Things are trending that direction; in ten years, the current model is in real serious trouble. Maybe sooner. But now? Don't believe dumb hype.
Our previous problems were a lot harder...
Insurance is a barrier, but it's one manageable either with time, location, or money.If you are poor and far from Mojave, however, it can get hard.
I don't know of anyone in the industry who's working with seriously toxic materials or propellants.We're just crazy, not insane.
I am doing (photo-unrelated) business with a major (approaching 1000 units) photoprinter user whose evaluation is that the units that don't use photo paper are not up to professional image quality standards. Their recapitalization cycle is going for new photo paper units from those vendors, despite clear cost and operations advantages to the non-photo paper printers.
Typical liberal educated nonscientists may have faith in and operate under assumptions based on faith in science and the scientific process. But to assume that nobody believes in science because it's demonstrably true and not because they just have faith in the process, as you appear to claim, is just idiotic.
Anyone who goes through a good university science or engineering cirriculum will reproduce most of the classic experiments of science themselves. There are some modern advanced physics and biology that take enough lab investment that merely curious people can't do that, but the theoretical underpinnings for those are all accessable and testable.
On a day to day operational level, I have faith in science, but it's because I have the ability to and have tested it, and found it to be true.
Lots of variations possible.
Article's author Peter Coffee writes:
Anyone doing forecasting and financials should be including contengencies on billables and receivables, probabilities on forecasted sales, etc. Building those into the spreadsheet is trivially easy if you understand the business logic behind such analysis. If you are not doing so it is likely because you don't know why it's important to do so. The tools are clearly up to the task; every company I have been at knew they had to do that, and had done it properly.Luser error, particularly Luser lack of business sense, does not a good article make nor a good several hundred post slashdot debate.
This is a common misperception.
In reality, it is often cheaper to fly on the next
sized larger rocket than it is to save 10% off the weight of the payload itself. Trying to save the last few pounds because you didn't plan in enough margins for your project is always a horrible experience, expensive and painful.
It's a rule of thumb that the most efficient
satellites have hardware cost around the same
as the launch cost. R&D and operations costs
may be other major factors, but you want to
try and balance out the payload and launcher
costs to be roughly equal.
Look at the Falcon V. It costs around $12 mil.
A roughly equivalently sized Delta II (7925) is about $45 million. A much smaller Delta II (7325) only costs $22 mil (NASA used a bunch of these for small missions in the last 5 years) but only lifts about half as much payload as Falcon V.
Using the rule of thumb, we want to spend about $12 mil on the spacecraft hardware for a Falcon V launch, and about $22 mil for the hardware for a Delta II launch, which weighs half as much. So the price per pound of the Delta II payload is about four times as much.
As a rough rule of thumb, allowing weight to double within otherwise identical performance
requirements for electronics and systems will
save you about half the total cost. Sometimes
more than half, but half is conservative. So the rule of thumb supports the $12 mil payload price on the Falcon.
So we have a total mission whose hardware costs $12 mil to build and $12 mil to launch ($24 million, plus the R&D costs and the operations costs) versus $22 mil to build and $22 mil to launch ($44 million plus R&D costs and operations costs). Capabilities should be roughly identical.
Saving $20 million on the flight is a lot of money, even for rocket people.
The R&D and operations costs may add another $50 to $100 million to the mission cost, but even so, saving the $20 million on the hardware and launch is a big deal. And R&D costs may go down a lot if the hardware complexity goes down and weight is allowed to grow, so you can save there too.
And the best part is, the rule of thumb keeps being valid as you keep making cheaper larger
rockets to launch things on.
So don't fall for the old story that you don't save overall cost if you make lower cost launchers. You need both cheaper *and* bigger, but if it gets cheaper faster than it gets
bigger you win.
Bzzt. The original site is:
http://www.circus.com/~no_dhmo/index.html
The joke was originally come up with by two UC Santa Cruz students, Eric Lechner and Lars Norpchen, in the spring of 1988, while they were residents at the Santa Cruz Geek House The House.
The Circus page links to the organization's leadership, who were many of the various people who helped elaborate on it (about half of it is original to Eric and Lars prior to anyone else contributing).
The joke is now roughly old enough to get a drivers license in California.
One of the problems is that this has circulated so widely without attribution that people tend to believe that it has no copyright or attributable origin. But that's not true; Eric and Lars came up with the idea. They're the ones that sat up on campus at UC Santa Cruz handing out fliers with the info on it, to see how people reacted.
-george william herbert
Treasurer, Coalition to Ban DHMO
RAD6000 6U Compact PCI page at BAE Systems.
It's not great, but there are more detailed links around the BAE website.
It doesn't list how the FLASH is connected; that's not a standard built-in on the RAD6000 computer. I would guess, hung off the FPGA interface device, but I don't know that for sure.
Many signs of it, in fact. But the problem with that sort of theory is that, in this day and age, if the stock tanks tomorrow then the investors are going to sue McBride and cadre into the ground.
And if McBride can't demonstrate that the SCO internal decisions can't be justified with the full internal evidence chain and memos and such, McBride and cadre are going to be working graveyard shift at 7-11s for the rest of their lives.
Is it possible that they both are so stupid as to think they could get away with a pump and dump after so many CEOs and CFOs and Martha Stewart have all been busted, and that they don't have any real internal evidence which is supporting their position at all? Sure. Is it likely?
I find it much more likely that they have evidence, that it's a lot weaker than they think it is, and it's a lot lot weaker than they have said it is. But that they have some code snippets (not previously publically disclosed) which are in fact improperly grabbed out of the UNIX SysV source. The risk of that has been something anyone in open source with half a brain has been worried about for a long time. That it might have happened in a minor but not serious manner is not at all beyond credibility. I think it's also unlikely that they have enough to effectively sue anyone and win in the long term, but they could well have convinced themselves otherwise.
But I don't know so for a fact.
List of all US nuclear bombs
This is an easy problem to solve. Deformation of the hohlraum (bomb outer casing / "radiation case") will happen, but you just need to make sure it doesn't rupture from the primary's implosion charges before the fission reactions run to completion. If the primary doesn't detonate, the hohlraum will rupture eventually. But that doesn't matter, if it lasts long enough that the primary fires first. Its thickness and strength are constrained by how long it has to hold intact, not with making it survive the internal explosion permanently.
There is plenty of in depth technical info at the Nuclear Weapon Archive.
Including a detailed FAQ for the Q-filled.
Apollo 11 landed 1.7 miles from its touchdown
target point. The 13 miles is the distance to
the recovery ship, the USS Hornet,
which was not right near the target landing
position for reasons which the history documents
don't make clear to me.
Essentially the last column is irrellevant to
the question at hand, which is how accurate the
capsule landings are. If the recovery ship is
either accidentally or intentionally not right
next to the target landing point, it's not the
fault of the capsule design or operation or
capabilities. I included that data for
completeness' sake.
Strange, the NASA Orbital Space Plane staff,
Boeing, Orbital Sciences, Lockheed-Martin,
etc. are all referring to capsule options
for OSP.
It is both a spacecraft and a capsule,
sure, but Shuttle is both a spacecraft
and a winged gliding spaceplane, Soyuz
is both a spacecraft and a capsule, etc.
Capsule is a proper term of the art for
spacecraft description and in use as such
in the NASA teams and contractor teams
on OSP.
From pp 305, Entry, Splashdown and Recovery table
Mission - Distance to landing target point - Distance to recovery ship
(distances in nautical miles)
Apollo 7 - 1.9 mi - 7.0 mi
Apollo 8 - 1.4 mi - 2.6 mi
Apollo 9 - 2.7 mi - 3.0 mi
Apollo 10 - 1.3 mi - 2.9 mi
Apollo 11 - 1.7 mi - 13 mi
Apollo 12 - 2.0 mi - 3.9 mi
Apollo 13 - 1.0 mi - 3.5 mi
Apollo 14 - 0.6 mi - 3.8 mi
Apollo 15 - 1.0 mi - 5.0 mi
Apollo 16 - 3.0 mi - 2.7 mi
Apollo 17 - 1.0 mi - 3.5 mi
Not one Apollo landed more than 3 miles from its landing target point, including Apollo 13 which had such troubles even getting home safely.
Even if you double that miss distance to 6 miles, there are plenty of bays and lakes in the US which you could safely land in (12 mile diameter or more). San Pablo Bay or San Francisco Bay, any of the Great Lakes, 6 miles offshore basically anywhere, etc.
The precision landing question is validly "Do I land on a runway or do I need a 5-10 mile wide open space?". But that's very different than "needing an ocean full of recovery ships". If it's accurate enough that I can land it in San Francisco Bay and recover it with a coast guard boat or tug, and Apollo was, then there's no big deal at all unless there's an emergency urgent deorbit away from the usual landing zone (a problem which Shuttle shares, and if it lands mid-ocean is SOL).
What has been discussed in this thread are not the lowest end SPARC systems, but low/mid workgroup servers. The cheapest servers and workstations are under a thousand dollars (V100, SB150).
This is irrelevant to the larger thread, however.
disclaimer
I work for a Sun VAR in my day job.
TWA flight 800?
There was no video of any missile.
There were a few people who said they saw an ascending flaming object that then exploded.
The NTSB Report explains that the evidence (radar and other) clearly shows that the plane climbed sharply after the onboard explosion, while it was certainly already on fire, explaining the ascending streak of light reports without any missile.
As for ripped apart, it exploded. We know there was an explosion in the fuel tank, everyone agrees that there was an explosion in the fuel tank based on the soot inside the tank and the blown apart tank bulkheads. See the NTSB report and all the critics responses. The NTSB report clearly shows how and why the airplane broke up after that explosion resulting in the debris patterns.
The only remaining question is whether it blew up due to some electrical fault in wiring in or near the tank, or due to a missile or something whackier like a meteor. There was no smoking wire recovered in the debris to prove it was an accident, but there have been a large number of fuel tank explosions in military and civilian transport aircraft due to such wiring faults. This was far from the first one to happen.
There is no actual evidence of a missile. Even psychopathic paranoid lunatics now agree on that.
Can we prove conclusively it wasn't? No. But if planes have blown up tens of times before due to wiring faults, and you don't find any actual physical evidence of a missile, Ockham's razor suggests wiring short.
Which is why the Nuclear Weapons FAQ runs to book size to explain the engineering and physics required. Sure.
Why doesn't anyone bother with research anymore?
...beyond what is found in, for example;
p df
[warning 5+mb download]
http://www.sun.com/processors/manuals/usIII_um.
?
If that's not good enough, fine, what areas need
more info? What exactly are they looking for?