DC-X had tremendous teething problems and Armadillo isn't building an orbital rocket. Multiengine clusters are still pretty difficult to get working, but they do seem to be the accepted solution to the thrust problem. It just isn't easy. If it was, everyone would be building orbit-capable rockets, instead of a just a few relatively wealthy countries.
For starters, engines don't always burn equally, so you've got to worry about the rocket stack deflecting into the launch tower. That means complicated steering gear. Multiple engines change the nature of the flame stream under the rocket, so you need different materials and cooling strategies to keep the engines from blowing up. Etc Etc.
Over on NASA's site there's an electronic version of Stages to Saturn that details all of the design and fabrication woes of the Saturn boosters. Go read it, and any account of the Soviet N-1 failure and get back to me on how hard it is.
In short, there's a good reason why people describe hard problems that can fail spectacularly as rocket science, mmmKay?
We know how to make the rocket, the only problem is finding vendors for the vacuum tubes and ferrite cores nad other pieces of late 1950's-1960's technology. By the time we re-did the designs to use modern components, we'd have spent as much as designing a rocket from scratch. I still think a cluster using the Russian engines on the new Atlas in the first stage and SSMEs in a recoverable second and third stage would be able to heft a lot of mass to high orbit.
Of course, we could start with the F-1 plans and build a truly monstrous rocket engine. Problem is it probably wouldn't pay for itself. We rarely need to lift huge masses, unless we're bound for the Moon.
To paraphrase: "I don't really like this. Microsoft Windows is mature and popular, replacing it will take a *lot* of time, and most people won't switch..."
Sometimes you need to move on. X was principally used because it was already there, and the MIT License made it easy to graft onto Linux. There's no reason to not look at the many things X did right and the many things it did wrong and attempt to fix them. X was designed to put a fancy interface on relatively dumb terminals. At the time it was designed it was really inconceivable that I would be carrying around more computing power in my briefcase than was present on my entire college campus.
As for the network transparency. X is slow and insecure enough that I habitually build remote connections over ssh using VNC, not X. If we are already ignoring the ostensible reason for X's complexity, why should we fight so hard to maintain it?
That is the problem with the USA, anyone will do anything for money.
Yes, only in the USA would people do this. That's why I never receive spam from Asia, Africa, or Europe. Your knee-jerk anti-americanism is as bad as the spammers' greed, I'm afraid.
What we've seen in the last 100-200 years is simply astounding by geo-time.
Maybe. I studied geology before switching to CS and I can tell you that the "rate problem" bugs just about everyone at some point. In some situations, magor geological change can occur overnight -- literally. Most of the topography of western Washington was shaped in a single bad afternoon when an ice dam holding back a large inland sea failed. Bob Ballard has presented evidence that the current configuration of the Black Sea formed in something less than a week when something similar happened at the Dardanelles.
We get snapshots of evidence, but there are gaps. What happened in the gaps? If the two measurements show the climate to have been the same, it is easiest (and probably correct) to assume that the climate was stable between the two samples. But, and this is important, we don't know that if there were no human observers to take contemporaneous measurements.
That's the problem. No scientist worth his salt is going to say anything without qualifications, and no politician worth his salt is going to inconvience his constituents while there is a shadow of a doubt.
It does matter. There's an upper limit (H-bombs are also relatively "clean," unless you choose to make them dirty, which compromises their yield. The hole could be bigger but glow a lot less and for a much shorter time.
That's true for fission bombs, but thermonuclear bombs are a lot harder. A lot of the research data you would need remains classified to this day. In fact, it's one of the reasons that most of the Project Orion documents remain classified. The interactions between the bomb and the shield at the back of the spacecraft are very similar to the interactions that make the "secret" work in the H-bomb.
Of course, all bets are off if you can get a hold of someone who already has designed a few. Say, a starving Russian physicist with an axe to grind. You just won't be getting instructions off of the Internet any time soon.
but the majority of Americans, unfortunately, consider the rest of the world to be full of dark-colored half-people.
What worries me is that there are people who actually believe statements like this. Can't you see that spewing unsupported bigotry like this makes you no better than people you seek to condemn? Maybe Nietzche was right, we inevitably become that which we seek to destroy.
Good idea. Let's also make sure that all other sources of power have absolutely no negative effect on future generations before we expand their use as well.
Hope you like living in the dark.
Re:ST theme became clear the other day
on
New Heinlein Novel
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· Score: 4, Informative
Vice Pres Chaney: Sec of Defense
Oh please. He got his soon-to-be-wife pregnant so he could claim a sole-provider exemption from the draft during Vietnam. When you look up chickenhawk, Cheney is the example picture. He's quite willing to send someone else's son into battle, but when his ass was on the line he chickened out. Not to mention that we know how the SecDef puts his life on the line all of the time (cf Robert McNamara).
A partial list of Vietnam-eligible Bush advisers who were granted deferments:
Dick Cheney, Vice President
John Ashcroft, Attorney General
Karl Rove, Chief Campaign Strategist
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Sec. Defense
Elliot Abrams, National Security Council
Richard Perle, Chairman, Defense Policy Board
In all fairness, I will point out that William Jefferson Clinton was also a draft dodger. Of course, it was a bad thing when he did it, but only understandable when a Republican did it.
Re:Thank you - If I had mod points, you == +1
on
Blaster Writer Caught
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Do you really feel that the brutalization of minor criminals will do anything more than turn them into brutes? Remember, I'm not talking about lifers, these folks will be released back into society. I don't think that prison should be a stay in a hotel, but allowing the inmates to live in conditions out of The Lord of the Flies doesn't seem to fulfill the purpose of prison in the first place.
It's thinking like this that makes outfits like the Taliban possible. Crime went down in Afghanistan after they assumed control, after all. Do you really want to live in that kind of state?
Apples to Oranges, I'm afraid. Let me put it to you this way: if 40% of first time drivers were involved in fatal accidents, would we demand an overhaul of car safety regulations? I think you can answer that one for yourself.
The foam stopped accelerating with the Shuttle as soon as it broke off and began to fall. Meanwhile, the Shuttle kept accelerating, thus increasing the relative velocities. The difference in velocity was measurable by looking at the time it took for the foam to strike the wing. The distance is known, and the time could be captured from the film. Of course, it was a bit approximate, but the foam strike test that did so much damage was well below the maximum velocity determined from the tape. The tests were conservative.
Until they start to uphold the rights of the people instead of the rights of stockholders, this fiasco will continue.
Because we all know that stockholders aren't people, right? A better construction (and I think closer to your original meaning) would be :
until they start to uphold the rights of all of the people instead of just the rights of stockholders, this fiasco will continue.
I agree with this sentiment. The question is, how do we make them?
Slow down cowboy! In your rant you've managed to use the same argument two ways! First you argue that catalytic converters are bad because they trade a small amount of toxic pollutant for a larger amount of basically non-toxic, but extremely enviromentally unfriendly pollutants. Then you turn around and rant about flourescent lighting. Flourescent lights may have small amounts of toxic chemicals in them, but bulb life is much longer than incandcescent and power consumption is much lower. This means less waste in landfills and less pollution from generation (which is mostly that dreaded CO2 you were ranting about when the topic was cat converters).
Why is the trade-off that is so good for cars so bad for lighting?
Try the toolset. Open a module, find a placeable and view its properties. Alter the color on something and close it. Now open another and chances are you'll hit a nice big oops in one of the OpenGL DLLs. Now search "Toolset crash" on nwn.bioware.com. The game runs fine but the toolset has issues, particularly with ATI gear. Bioware's developers have specifically stated that it has to do with the fact that the Toolset opens multiple OpenGL windows and many video drivers have problems with that. I finally fixed the issue by finding a hacked version of the Catalysts that would run on the Mobility Radeon 9000 in my Dell, now I only get the crash every six hours or so, instead of inside the first 15 minutes.
Still think I'm making shit up? If so, it's a shared hallucination with a large part of the NWN developer community. Try to hold your bile a little next time.
Tell me about it. The Neverwinter Nights toolset uses multiple OpenGL windows and it crashes -- a lot. Evidently it's stable enough if you're running the exact GeForce cards that the devs use, but anything else and it can be troublesome.
Still more users just don't know enough to update regularly. These people are a menace to their neighbors on the net, but they've never been properly educated on the importance and the how of maintaining their security... and why would they? There's no incentive to tell them something that might drive to another platform.
And those people would still not update if they were running Linux (or, more particuarly sendworm, er sendmail). I still fail to see how poor system management practices are the fault of anyone other than the system owner.
That isn't to say that I hold Microsoft totally blameless. Eighteen months into a major security initiative seems a little long to find a bug of this importance, particularly in a service that can't be stopped or adequately firewalled on a local network. You'd think that those kinds of services would be the first to be audited.
Weird that a site that's so high on "personal responsibility" in so many other areas completely abandons its ideals when the chance to bash Billy Gates comes up.
You do realize that, by your reasoning, the RIAA is perfectly in the right in going after Napster et al, since they engendered a computing culture that promotes theft of service? And that's just one example.
I wonder what your reaction will be the next time there's a big oops in your favorite operating system? I've seen apt eat more than a few machines myself, so don't think that the attitude you describe is unique to Windows users.
While Microsoft thinks the "solution" is to move the target server, the real solution is to fix those gaping holes in their products.
I don't like MS either, but this is blatantly unfair. MS did fix the gaping hole -- last month. The problem is that their customers didn't implement the fix, so they are taking reasonable precautions to avoid damage. Beat them up for the things for which they deserve, but not this.
No, they want to spend billions building new plants so this does not occur.
Nice rant, but more plants wouldn't have helped this problem. It was a distribution fault that rippled through the system, not an undercapacity problem. We probably need more power plants, but we definitely need more lines. Problem is that absolutely no one wants steel high voltage towers running through their neighborhoods.
And before you rage about NIMBY, I haven't seen you volunteer for a steel tower in your back yard yet. Lead, and perhaps others will follow.
Slashdot Mirror
DC-X had tremendous teething problems and Armadillo isn't building an orbital rocket. Multiengine clusters are still pretty difficult to get working, but they do seem to be the accepted solution to the thrust problem. It just isn't easy. If it was, everyone would be building orbit-capable rockets, instead of a just a few relatively wealthy countries.
Over on NASA's site there's an electronic version of Stages to Saturn that details all of the design and fabrication woes of the Saturn boosters. Go read it, and any account of the Soviet N-1 failure and get back to me on how hard it is.
In short, there's a good reason why people describe hard problems that can fail spectacularly as rocket science, mmmKay?
Urban Legend
We know how to make the rocket, the only problem is finding vendors for the vacuum tubes and ferrite cores nad other pieces of late 1950's-1960's technology. By the time we re-did the designs to use modern components, we'd have spent as much as designing a rocket from scratch. I still think a cluster using the Russian engines on the new Atlas in the first stage and SSMEs in a recoverable second and third stage would be able to heft a lot of mass to high orbit.
Of course, we could start with the F-1 plans and build a truly monstrous rocket engine. Problem is it probably wouldn't pay for itself. We rarely need to lift huge masses, unless we're bound for the Moon.
Sometimes you need to move on. X was principally used because it was already there, and the MIT License made it easy to graft onto Linux. There's no reason to not look at the many things X did right and the many things it did wrong and attempt to fix them. X was designed to put a fancy interface on relatively dumb terminals. At the time it was designed it was really inconceivable that I would be carrying around more computing power in my briefcase than was present on my entire college campus.
As for the network transparency. X is slow and insecure enough that I habitually build remote connections over ssh using VNC, not X. If we are already ignoring the ostensible reason for X's complexity, why should we fight so hard to maintain it?
Yes, only in the USA would people do this. That's why I never receive spam from Asia, Africa, or Europe. Your knee-jerk anti-americanism is as bad as the spammers' greed, I'm afraid.
Indeed. Claiming that the use of "Act of God" in legislation or contracts is roughly equivalent to saying that an atheist never says "goddammit."
Maybe. I studied geology before switching to CS and I can tell you that the "rate problem" bugs just about everyone at some point. In some situations, magor geological change can occur overnight -- literally. Most of the topography of western Washington was shaped in a single bad afternoon when an ice dam holding back a large inland sea failed. Bob Ballard has presented evidence that the current configuration of the Black Sea formed in something less than a week when something similar happened at the Dardanelles.
We get snapshots of evidence, but there are gaps. What happened in the gaps? If the two measurements show the climate to have been the same, it is easiest (and probably correct) to assume that the climate was stable between the two samples. But, and this is important, we don't know that if there were no human observers to take contemporaneous measurements.
That's the problem. No scientist worth his salt is going to say anything without qualifications, and no politician worth his salt is going to inconvience his constituents while there is a shadow of a doubt.
It does matter. There's an upper limit (H-bombs are also relatively "clean," unless you choose to make them dirty, which compromises their yield. The hole could be bigger but glow a lot less and for a much shorter time.
Of course, all bets are off if you can get a hold of someone who already has designed a few. Say, a starving Russian physicist with an axe to grind. You just won't be getting instructions off of the Internet any time soon.
What worries me is that there are people who actually believe statements like this. Can't you see that spewing unsupported bigotry like this makes you no better than people you seek to condemn? Maybe Nietzche was right, we inevitably become that which we seek to destroy.
Hope you like living in the dark.
Oh please. He got his soon-to-be-wife pregnant so he could claim a sole-provider exemption from the draft during Vietnam. When you look up chickenhawk, Cheney is the example picture. He's quite willing to send someone else's son into battle, but when his ass was on the line he chickened out. Not to mention that we know how the SecDef puts his life on the line all of the time (cf Robert McNamara).
A partial list of Vietnam-eligible Bush advisers who were granted deferments:
In all fairness, I will point out that William Jefferson Clinton was also a draft dodger. Of course, it was a bad thing when he did it, but only understandable when a Republican did it.
It's thinking like this that makes outfits like the Taliban possible. Crime went down in Afghanistan after they assumed control, after all. Do you really want to live in that kind of state?
Apples to Oranges, I'm afraid. Let me put it to you this way: if 40% of first time drivers were involved in fatal accidents, would we demand an overhaul of car safety regulations? I think you can answer that one for yourself.
The foam stopped accelerating with the Shuttle as soon as it broke off and began to fall. Meanwhile, the Shuttle kept accelerating, thus increasing the relative velocities. The difference in velocity was measurable by looking at the time it took for the foam to strike the wing. The distance is known, and the time could be captured from the film. Of course, it was a bit approximate, but the foam strike test that did so much damage was well below the maximum velocity determined from the tape. The tests were conservative.
/* Too drunk -- debug later */
Because we all know that stockholders aren't people, right? A better construction (and I think closer to your original meaning) would be :
until they start to uphold the rights of all of the people instead of just the rights of stockholders, this fiasco will continue.
I agree with this sentiment. The question is, how do we make them?
Why is the trade-off that is so good for cars so bad for lighting?
Still think I'm making shit up? If so, it's a shared hallucination with a large part of the NWN developer community. Try to hold your bile a little next time.
Tell me about it. The Neverwinter Nights toolset uses multiple OpenGL windows and it crashes -- a lot. Evidently it's stable enough if you're running the exact GeForce cards that the devs use, but anything else and it can be troublesome.
And those people would still not update if they were running Linux (or, more particuarly sendworm, er sendmail). I still fail to see how poor system management practices are the fault of anyone other than the system owner.
That isn't to say that I hold Microsoft totally blameless. Eighteen months into a major security initiative seems a little long to find a bug of this importance, particularly in a service that can't be stopped or adequately firewalled on a local network. You'd think that those kinds of services would be the first to be audited.
And ATi still owns them, right? Which means they can use ArtX's experiences to help them in the console world.
You do realize that, by your reasoning, the RIAA is perfectly in the right in going after Napster et al, since they engendered a computing culture that promotes theft of service? And that's just one example.
I wonder what your reaction will be the next time there's a big oops in your favorite operating system? I've seen apt eat more than a few machines myself, so don't think that the attitude you describe is unique to Windows users.
I don't like MS either, but this is blatantly unfair. MS did fix the gaping hole -- last month. The problem is that their customers didn't implement the fix, so they are taking reasonable precautions to avoid damage. Beat them up for the things for which they deserve, but not this.
Nice rant, but more plants wouldn't have helped this problem. It was a distribution fault that rippled through the system, not an undercapacity problem. We probably need more power plants, but we definitely need more lines. Problem is that absolutely no one wants steel high voltage towers running through their neighborhoods.
And before you rage about NIMBY, I haven't seen you volunteer for a steel tower in your back yard yet. Lead, and perhaps others will follow.