A variety of reasons, and there's probably a bunch more that I'm not aware of:
Legal counsel decides it's a bad idea because it could expose them to liability
It really does expose them to liability. For example, you could exceed FCC restrictions on the ISM bands by programming your card to emit more power than it should on frequencies it's not allowed in the US to be in.
They are selling the same hardware as three different products with only the drivers different.
You could make a linux-based device cheaper than their stand-alone equivelent.
There are bits of licensed code in the driver that aren't theirs to give out.
They are using a reference design and the driver contains features unique to their product. If they let the driver out, people will be able to buy the cheaper implementation of the same reference design and get those features.
Because there's no way to retract them, and because them deploying at the wrong time would result in loss of vehicle, the landing gear are not computer-controlled.
The closest they came was having an unmanned shuttle attached to the back of a 747.
The Enterprise never had engines or plumbing installed. It has all of the fittings for use as a test piece, so it was mated to a booster and brought to the launch pad to make sure that everything would hook together properly, but it never did any powered flight, just some manned glide test flights to prove that it was aerodynamically stable.
The problem is, you can't simply count the cost of making a robotic shuttle. You have to test the landing software to make sure it works properly. And the costs won't be that much lower, because you still need the 98-99% reliability to make it worth your while, so you'd still end up tearing-down and rebuilding the shuttle and all of the usual problems.
The Saturn V, minus the third stage, can cary a *lot* of payload to orbit. That's what they used to launch the Skylab station. Just because it was mostly used to go to the moon doesn't mean that that's the only trajectory it can follow.
The problem with the ISS as a base, is that it's in the absolute wrong orbit. It only gets a few economical opportunities for lunar launch angles a month, is equally sub-optimal fuel-wise for both the Russians and the US. And space construction techniques are hamstrung by NASA not letting any ISS astronauts even *try* to debug broken modules and by spacesuits that require long pre-breathe procedures and are essentially minor-change versions of the suits from Apollo.
I got a lesson on this from a friend of mine, and he's right.
Sunken costs mean jack.
So, really, the correct question to ask is if it's cheaper to keep paying for the shuttle so we can launch these already fabbed pieces, or is it cheaper to redesign the bits and launch them on an expendable booster? Or, is it cheaper to build a Shuttle-C like booster that has trunion pins?
The problem is, even without crew, the shuttle will still be expensive as all hell to run, not even counting the costs necessary to modify it to be robotic. And they will still be screwed if another one blows up.
The reason why the shuttle behaved like an aircraft was that it was also intended to launch from Vanderberg AFB, grab a Russian sattelite and/or launch a nuke, and then land. You need crossrange (a.k.a. gliding range) for that. Heck, you need crossrange to hit polar orbit without ending up in the drink in case of abort.
The problem is, both groups wanted reusable, but congress wanted NASA and the airforce to do *Everything* (even stuff that is launched on Atlas, Delta, and Titan launchers) on the shuttle. When, had they just made something for exploration of space and space station logistics, they could have made some different (and, in retrospect, better) design decisions.
The USAF has *always* been chomping at the bit to take over space. Since the 50s. One of the main reasons why the Russians orbited the first satelite is because we wanted the first satelite to be a civilian satelite, for a variety of political and international relations reasons. The USAF *could* have launched something sooner, but was told not to.
On the other hand, we did cause Russia to waste a similar amount of money to ensure they had strategic parity. Buran was just as much, if not more, of a military vehicle as the shuttle.
The problem is, at this stage of the game, the shuttle is simply too complicated and sophisticated for what we need.
If you really need heavy-lift, especailly after the shuttle retirement, the best option is an expendable canister with two RS-68 engines (what the Delta IV uses) strapped to an external tank and two SRBs.
If you need return mass, you might as well just go expendable. It's a lot cheaper. Or run the man-rated transport people with just 2 crew.
See, I don't think there's a point in restarting Saturn V production.
The thing is, with the aerospace components we've got now, with the alloys and welding techniques, it would be about as smart to restart Saturn V production as it would be for Porsche to dig up the plans for the 914 and restart that production line. I mean, sure the 914 was a cool little machine at a good price, but when Porsche decided to make an "economical" sports car, they started over and made the Boxter instead.
It stopped making sense to restart the production lines after 1980. By that point, all of the non-custom components were completely obselete, the electronics were dated, etc. By 1984, we had all of the Saturn V-related facilities completely repurposed for the shuttle, so even if we could build a Saturn V, we'd have nowhere to launch it.
It's OK that we can't make a Saturn V anymore. It'll cost just as much to redesign the Saturn V around more modern parts than it will be to make a brand new design, with a few microcontrollers instead of heavy 60's vintage computers, more optimal aerodynamics and staging, etc, some ability to recover portions of it, etc.
We can still make J-2 rockets (they re-used everything but the nozzle to make the X-33's rocket engines) and a F-1-performing rocket isn't that hard to get started, either. Remember, part of the reason why the SSME is so damn expensive and tempremental is because it's got staged combustion. The F-1 was much simpler.
The problem is, people are far too attached to the *machine*, instead of the *idea*. I mean, sure, the Saturn V was the last machine that NASA has built that really lived up to its promises. The shuttle is a *beautiful* machine that has some nice properties, but has been strung along for the past 20 years and really never lived up to its promises. So, instead of asking why we can't build the Saturn V, we need to be asking why we can't get stuff up to space cheaply and safely.
However, now that I live in Silicon Valley, it's all different. I didn't even notice the whole "Cats don't *need* to sharpen their claws" bit in the page referenced (quick Google search) because I was convinced without needing to see that.
I mean, really, is it any surprise that cats need to make adjustment to their primary tools? If they were sentient, I'm sure they'd spend a lot of time maintaining their claws.
See, the thing is, "declawing" is not as simple as it sounds. It's the removal of the outer digit, not just the claw. Which is a much more violent operation. You are cutting off enough to cause neurological effects like phantom limbs, which is just Not Fun.
Your toes are useless, right? Wana know what happens when you lop them off? It takes you a while to learn how to walk again, even though you are primarily walking on the sole of your foot. This is even worse for a cat, because they walk on their digits.
And the last digit of your fingers... Isn't it useful? Do you really want to consider life without it? If I were to chop off the last digit of your finger because you were taking too much crap apart, would you be particularly able to deal with it? I mean, years later you'd probably accept your lot in life about it and be "well adjusted", but is that really necessary?
Cats have had claws for quite a long time, even on the evolutionary scale. You can't just flip a switch and expect them to be declawed for your convenience, complete with new instincts. Especially when I know plenty of folks who have intact-clawed cats who are able to prevent their cats from dismantling their house. Even the semi-feral ones.
You know, being somewhat pedantic, I always wondered.... if you can't feed them after midnight, when can you START feeding them the next day?
And how do they handle daylight savings time and moving between time zones? I mean, the notion of DST is really an invented thing with absolutely no bearing on "real" time (i.e. the position of the sun in the sky at a given moment in time) and it should be banned.
The current leading theory is that we are too damn clean. As kids, our immune system isn't exposed to *enough* stuff for it to develop properly, so it starts to think that innocuous substances are harmful.
Well, it's also the case that we've got far too many cats and dogs *in general*, so it's really not a good idea to let them breed. I mean, when PETA goes out and says that "nope, we have too many cats, so, despite the fact that we'd kill people to save the animals, we can't see any better way to deal with the cat overpopulation problem than putting 'em down," you know that it's bad.:/
That, and often times, the ones that *should* breed and enhance the pedigree are not sold, just the ones that don't fit quite so perfectly up to the breed standard.
Since most of the purebread cat breeders are doing it out of love, not out of fiscal interest, most of these have, thankfully, unselfish reasons.
I always wanted to name one conCATinate, after the string operation.
I mean, cats love strings, although they haven't been known to put them back together.;)
Unfortunately, She Who Must Be Obeyed, who already puts up with an astonishingly large amount of my bad behaviour, has dictated that we can talk about the cat, but it is NOT going to have a geek pun for a name.
Notice I said "functional-programming types of paradigms", not functional programming.
It does have first-class functions (the Proc class) it's just that the syntax is driven towards making closures accessible instead of functions and creating Procs is a lot more involved.
On the other hand, what they do with the closures (a.k.a. Code Blocks) is quite amazing on its own merits. The concept of being able to iterate over arbitrary stuff in a variety of ways with them comes in quite handy, plus all of the other ways to make the language easier to deal with.
No, there is a difference. It's a mistaken notion that Ruby is like Python meets Perl.
It's more like Smalltalk + Regular Expression + Incidental Other Goodies + Culture.
I've tried both, and I like Ruby far more than Python. Ruby is an incredible language that tends to enable really simple, yet sophisticated code. When people talk about the Ruby Way, they aren't kidding. Ruby is endearing to me in ways that Python never was.
Ruby and Python are both drinking from the smalltalk fountain, but they are still very different. Ruby plows head-on into more functional-programming types of paradigms while still using objects.
They are still managing to squeeze more transistors into less space, remember. It's just that the P4 design took things way too far. This has happened before, most notably with the MIPS R4400.
You also have to remember that the whole thing is probably clocked at least partially asynchronously. The on-die L2 cache doesn't need to operate at 4 GHz.
And modern semiconductor manufacturing *is* nanotechnology.
But, your ending conclusion still holds. Without changes in our understanding of physics and/or sub-atomic structures, we will hit a limit at some point. I, for one, welcome our 65535 processor massively parallel machine desktop overlords.
Power and computing ability to handle the storage and transmission of a lot of video, no.
Besides, the main thing that they need is a few good frames at high resolution, not a whole bunch of low resolution frames. Unfortunately, we're not at the point where you can put stuff in a probe that's not necessary for science or spacecraft engineering but looks cool yet.
Although, on the earth side, it's different. Notice how it seems to take a mission control room with 16 NASA scientists, none of whom are doing anything *other* than watching their screens because of the massive light-speed delay prevents them from commanding it before it'll be too late, where any data is already being recorded for later analysis, etc. I mean, it looks cool and if I was a NASA scientist, I'm sure *I'd* be nagging my pointy haired boss to let me sit in the control room during landing, but it's not really necessary.;)
I think the answer to your question about abandoning poor Huygens is that it's a communications window. After 3 hours, it's no longer at the right angles and range and whatnot to properly make contact. Plus it'll be out of juice by that point.
Re:SQL is good for some things, but not for others
on
An Alternative to SQL?
·
· Score: 1
Well, you could always try it in PostgreSQL with some of the more exotic indexed data types that are available...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the trick is to sell a little of all of the stock you have acquired / partially been given every time the market looks up.
The thing is, stock is preferentially taxed. So it can be useful. It's just not something that you'd want to count on.
Oh, sure.
And we'd be able to follow the money of drug dealers, kidnappers, terrorists, etc.
It's harder than CSI makes it sound.
You should notice that they are going after the chipset manufacturers, not the card manufacturers.
The shuttles have *never* had an unmanned flight.
Because there's no way to retract them, and because them deploying at the wrong time would result in loss of vehicle, the landing gear are not computer-controlled.
The closest they came was having an unmanned shuttle attached to the back of a 747.
The Enterprise never had engines or plumbing installed. It has all of the fittings for use as a test piece, so it was mated to a booster and brought to the launch pad to make sure that everything would hook together properly, but it never did any powered flight, just some manned glide test flights to prove that it was aerodynamically stable.
The problem is, you can't simply count the cost of making a robotic shuttle. You have to test the landing software to make sure it works properly. And the costs won't be that much lower, because you still need the 98-99% reliability to make it worth your while, so you'd still end up tearing-down and rebuilding the shuttle and all of the usual problems.
The Saturn V, minus the third stage, can cary a *lot* of payload to orbit. That's what they used to launch the Skylab station. Just because it was mostly used to go to the moon doesn't mean that that's the only trajectory it can follow.
VW + Porsche cooperation, yeah.
;)
Like the VW/Porsche SUV. Except that the 914 didn't suck.
The problem with the ISS as a base, is that it's in the absolute wrong orbit. It only gets a few economical opportunities for lunar launch angles a month, is equally sub-optimal fuel-wise for both the Russians and the US. And space construction techniques are hamstrung by NASA not letting any ISS astronauts even *try* to debug broken modules and by spacesuits that require long pre-breathe procedures and are essentially minor-change versions of the suits from Apollo.
There's a problem here.
I got a lesson on this from a friend of mine, and he's right.
Sunken costs mean jack.
So, really, the correct question to ask is if it's cheaper to keep paying for the shuttle so we can launch these already fabbed pieces, or is it cheaper to redesign the bits and launch them on an expendable booster? Or, is it cheaper to build a Shuttle-C like booster that has trunion pins?
The problem is, even without crew, the shuttle will still be expensive as all hell to run, not even counting the costs necessary to modify it to be robotic. And they will still be screwed if another one blows up.
The reason why the shuttle behaved like an aircraft was that it was also intended to launch from Vanderberg AFB, grab a Russian sattelite and/or launch a nuke, and then land. You need crossrange (a.k.a. gliding range) for that. Heck, you need crossrange to hit polar orbit without ending up in the drink in case of abort.
The problem is, both groups wanted reusable, but congress wanted NASA and the airforce to do *Everything* (even stuff that is launched on Atlas, Delta, and Titan launchers) on the shuttle. When, had they just made something for exploration of space and space station logistics, they could have made some different (and, in retrospect, better) design decisions.
The USAF has *always* been chomping at the bit to take over space. Since the 50s. One of the main reasons why the Russians orbited the first satelite is because we wanted the first satelite to be a civilian satelite, for a variety of political and international relations reasons. The USAF *could* have launched something sooner, but was told not to.
On the other hand, we did cause Russia to waste a similar amount of money to ensure they had strategic parity. Buran was just as much, if not more, of a military vehicle as the shuttle.
Not really.
The problem is, at this stage of the game, the shuttle is simply too complicated and sophisticated for what we need.
If you really need heavy-lift, especailly after the shuttle retirement, the best option is an expendable canister with two RS-68 engines (what the Delta IV uses) strapped to an external tank and two SRBs.
If you need return mass, you might as well just go expendable. It's a lot cheaper. Or run the man-rated transport people with just 2 crew.
See, I don't think there's a point in restarting Saturn V production.
The thing is, with the aerospace components we've got now, with the alloys and welding techniques, it would be about as smart to restart Saturn V production as it would be for Porsche to dig up the plans for the 914 and restart that production line. I mean, sure the 914 was a cool little machine at a good price, but when Porsche decided to make an "economical" sports car, they started over and made the Boxter instead.
It stopped making sense to restart the production lines after 1980. By that point, all of the non-custom components were completely obselete, the electronics were dated, etc. By 1984, we had all of the Saturn V-related facilities completely repurposed for the shuttle, so even if we could build a Saturn V, we'd have nowhere to launch it.
It's OK that we can't make a Saturn V anymore. It'll cost just as much to redesign the Saturn V around more modern parts than it will be to make a brand new design, with a few microcontrollers instead of heavy 60's vintage computers, more optimal aerodynamics and staging, etc, some ability to recover portions of it, etc.
We can still make J-2 rockets (they re-used everything but the nozzle to make the X-33's rocket engines) and a F-1-performing rocket isn't that hard to get started, either. Remember, part of the reason why the SSME is so damn expensive and tempremental is because it's got staged combustion. The F-1 was much simpler.
The problem is, people are far too attached to the *machine*, instead of the *idea*. I mean, sure, the Saturn V was the last machine that NASA has built that really lived up to its promises. The shuttle is a *beautiful* machine that has some nice properties, but has been strung along for the past 20 years and really never lived up to its promises. So, instead of asking why we can't build the Saturn V, we need to be asking why we can't get stuff up to space cheaply and safely.
Growing up in the Midwest, neither did I.
However, now that I live in Silicon Valley, it's all different. I didn't even notice the whole "Cats don't *need* to sharpen their claws" bit in the page referenced (quick Google search) because I was convinced without needing to see that.
I mean, really, is it any surprise that cats need to make adjustment to their primary tools? If they were sentient, I'm sure they'd spend a lot of time maintaining their claws.
See, the thing is, "declawing" is not as simple as it sounds. It's the removal of the outer digit, not just the claw. Which is a much more violent operation. You are cutting off enough to cause neurological effects like phantom limbs, which is just Not Fun.
Your toes are useless, right? Wana know what happens when you lop them off? It takes you a while to learn how to walk again, even though you are primarily walking on the sole of your foot. This is even worse for a cat, because they walk on their digits.
And the last digit of your fingers... Isn't it useful? Do you really want to consider life without it? If I were to chop off the last digit of your finger because you were taking too much crap apart, would you be particularly able to deal with it? I mean, years later you'd probably accept your lot in life about it and be "well adjusted", but is that really necessary?
Cats have had claws for quite a long time, even on the evolutionary scale. You can't just flip a switch and expect them to be declawed for your convenience, complete with new instincts. Especially when I know plenty of folks who have intact-clawed cats who are able to prevent their cats from dismantling their house. Even the semi-feral ones.
You know, being somewhat pedantic, I always wondered.... if you can't feed them after midnight, when can you START feeding them the next day?
And how do they handle daylight savings time and moving between time zones? I mean, the notion of DST is really an invented thing with absolutely no bearing on "real" time (i.e. the position of the sun in the sky at a given moment in time) and it should be banned.
Well, the claw thing is kinda a contreversial thing.
Naw, there's an even better theory...
The current leading theory is that we are too damn clean. As kids, our immune system isn't exposed to *enough* stuff for it to develop properly, so it starts to think that innocuous substances are harmful.
Well, it's also the case that we've got far too many cats and dogs *in general*, so it's really not a good idea to let them breed. I mean, when PETA goes out and says that "nope, we have too many cats, so, despite the fact that we'd kill people to save the animals, we can't see any better way to deal with the cat overpopulation problem than putting 'em down," you know that it's bad. :/
That, and often times, the ones that *should* breed and enhance the pedigree are not sold, just the ones that don't fit quite so perfectly up to the breed standard.
Since most of the purebread cat breeders are doing it out of love, not out of fiscal interest, most of these have, thankfully, unselfish reasons.
I always wanted to name one conCATinate, after the string operation.
;)
I mean, cats love strings, although they haven't been known to put them back together.
Unfortunately, She Who Must Be Obeyed, who already puts up with an astonishingly large amount of my bad behaviour, has dictated that we can talk about the cat, but it is NOT going to have a geek pun for a name.
Notice I said "functional-programming types of paradigms", not functional programming.
;)
It does have first-class functions (the Proc class) it's just that the syntax is driven towards making closures accessible instead of functions and creating Procs is a lot more involved.
On the other hand, what they do with the closures (a.k.a. Code Blocks) is quite amazing on its own merits. The concept of being able to iterate over arbitrary stuff in a variety of ways with them comes in quite handy, plus all of the other ways to make the language easier to deal with.
And, then of course, there's the functional library.
It's in the packages/ports trees for most modern unix-ish operating system. It's installable from cygwin. And it's available as a windows binary.
It supports CGI and FastCGI, plus there's an Apache module.
And there's a variety of frameworks that are trying to be Ruby's answer to Zope, but that's not anything required.
No, there is a difference. It's a mistaken notion that Ruby is like Python meets Perl.
It's more like Smalltalk + Regular Expression + Incidental Other Goodies + Culture.
I've tried both, and I like Ruby far more than Python. Ruby is an incredible language that tends to enable really simple, yet sophisticated code. When people talk about the Ruby Way, they aren't kidding. Ruby is endearing to me in ways that Python never was.
Ruby and Python are both drinking from the smalltalk fountain, but they are still very different. Ruby plows head-on into more functional-programming types of paradigms while still using objects.
I had a watch AM radio that we got while we were in Japan.
It was about the same size as a normal watch, however.
Some $%!$% broke the band a year or two later. Dono what happened to it after that...
They are still managing to squeeze more transistors into less space, remember. It's just that the P4 design took things way too far. This has happened before, most notably with the MIPS R4400.
You also have to remember that the whole thing is probably clocked at least partially asynchronously. The on-die L2 cache doesn't need to operate at 4 GHz.
And modern semiconductor manufacturing *is* nanotechnology.
But, your ending conclusion still holds. Without changes in our understanding of physics and/or sub-atomic structures, we will hit a limit at some point. I, for one, welcome our 65535 processor massively parallel machine desktop overlords.
Camera, yes.
;)
Power and computing ability to handle the storage and transmission of a lot of video, no.
Besides, the main thing that they need is a few good frames at high resolution, not a whole bunch of low resolution frames. Unfortunately, we're not at the point where you can put stuff in a probe that's not necessary for science or spacecraft engineering but looks cool yet.
Although, on the earth side, it's different. Notice how it seems to take a mission control room with 16 NASA scientists, none of whom are doing anything *other* than watching their screens because of the massive light-speed delay prevents them from commanding it before it'll be too late, where any data is already being recorded for later analysis, etc. I mean, it looks cool and if I was a NASA scientist, I'm sure *I'd* be nagging my pointy haired boss to let me sit in the control room during landing, but it's not really necessary.
I think the answer to your question about abandoning poor Huygens is that it's a communications window. After 3 hours, it's no longer at the right angles and range and whatnot to properly make contact. Plus it'll be out of juice by that point.
Well, you could always try it in PostgreSQL with some of the more exotic indexed data types that are available... ;)