Actually, there is very little that is commodity grade hardware with them. They use the same equipment in terms of strength, etc that NASA, L-MART, etc. use. They use the same Al-Li tanks, frames, etc
That's why "commodity" was in quotes - because relative to the rest of the industry, that's what it is. It's not just about materials, but how they're used... better tank designs, mass produced on automated equipment, re-use within the same vehicle of the same components with minor modifications (if any)... etc... etc...
As far as that go, the dragon and the rest of their system is equal OR BETTER than anything coming our of L-Mart, Boeing, etc.
From a certain emotional fan boy perspective, I can see how people might believe that. From an engineering point of view, while the jury is still out, SpaceX's performance record to date isn't all that impressive.
And in fact, it makes perfectly GOOD sense to take the dragon, make a solid bus internally for equipment to hook to, add antenna on the outside, provide various forms of power (solar and nukes), and then you have a solid system to send to various destinations.
Other than the fact that Dragon is optimized for LEO and completely unsuitable for operations beyond the Moon... sure. But by the same measure, it makes perfectly good sense to outfit my minivan with scuba gear and send it out with James Cameron the next time he heads to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Or to put it more clearly - it's a laughably *STUPID* idea. Starting with the tons of heat shielding a deep space probe doesn't need, to the enviromental controls for men that will never ride such a probe, to the extremely limited capacity of the RCS... etc... etc...
To get good information on Europa, you really need a lander.
But to get the answers the lander designers will need to know before they can design their equipment - you need flybys if not an orbiter. One step at a time, each building on the last.
But why is everythng a $2 billion (before inevitable overruns) project?
Because building one-of-a-kind equipment designed to operate for years in extreme environments is hellishly expensive.
What about standardizing on a vehicle platform, with some set instrumentation and a little room for customization if necessary. Make each one substantial enough (RTG's for power) And then start firing these off to Mercury, moons of Jupiter, Saturn, where-ever.
That's like taking a submarine and giving it wheels so it can explore the Sahara desert (except being insulated to survive the cold of the depths means it overheats there) and wings so it can fly to the top of Mt Everest (except the pressure hull and wheels are too heavy) and then sending it to the bottom of the Atlantic (where the water pressure crushes the wheels and the dynamic pressure tears the wings off). Seriously, while I exaggerate a little for effect, then environment and propulsion requirements for different planets (and different missions for the same planet) vary radically. In the same way, a camera that can image at Saturn is mildly blinded by how bright Jupiter is, completely blinded at Mars, and totally fried (as in serious physical damage) at Mercury. (Making the ungrounded assumption we're even looking for the same things at the different potential destinations.)
And I haven't mentioned how the instruments evolve over time, not only due to changing technology but as we learn things at the planetary destination and need to either look more closely at something or look at something else instead.
SpaceX, here's a tip...get into the science mission hardware game too.
SpaceX's business model depends on (relatively) cheap "commodity" grade hardware where the costs of development and production can be amortized over a large number of missions (and crossing their fingers and hoping they don't lose too many while climbing up the learning curve). A model worse suited for mission hardware development can hardly be imagined.
Aaahh.. the infamous No true Scotsman logical fallacy, maintained in such a manner as to provide the believer thereof an unwarranted sense of superiority. Bravo! I've rarely seen a neater way than that to expose the true depths of your ignorance.
Strippers. People that work off tips. Roadside vendors. Mom and pop store. Any cash business.
None of which have sufficient cash to warrant secret compartments of the scale and cost of the ones discussed in the article. You fail at understanding business.
Sorry that you dont consider people and businesses that operate in cash as legitimate.
I never said that businesses that operate on cash aren't legitimate. You fail at reading comprehension.
You might want to stop being an idiotic asshat.
It was a simple and reasonable question. You fail at... well pretty much everything it seems.
Evading answering the question by quoting an bullshit bromide just reveals the depth of your ignorance. But repeating cargo cult phrases is much easier than thinking, so I can understand why you do so.
Translation: "I can't actually support the original claim, or counter the refutation... so I'm going to move the goalposts, fling poo, and generate a smokescreen".
that'll practically secure a conviction for an LA Latino who can easily be painted as a gangster living large while working on spec for the drug lords
Especially since that seems to be exactly what he was doing - and with full knowledge of the kind of people he was dealing with.
That's the point most commenters seem to miss... he wasn't some purely innocent bystander who just happened to get caught up in a dragnet. He was a knowing and willing participant who knew dammed well what was up, a point made clear with his ludicrously paper thin defense of "avoiding working for 'obvious' druggies".
Large amounts of cash seem like a pretty legitimate use for a secret compartment in a car, in many neighborhoods throughout the US.
"Seem" [sic] like? For what purpose? What legitimate business has to move that amount of cash secretly rather than using checks, money orders, electronic transactions, or making (much) smaller deposits more regularly? What legitimate business has to do so on a regular enough basis that it's worth having a secret compartment installed rather than calling in an armored car company?
You don't combat drug (ab)use by prohibition, you use education.
That's a nice fuzzy wuzzy buzzword blurb - but it's utterly and completely disconnected with reality. It's bullshit.
We've been educating people on the results of drug abuse for decades, and of alcohol abuse for over a century... and it hasn't changed a thing. People still use drugs because getting high feels good, or to escape reality, or to self medicate... education prevents none of these things.
The fastest to ISS, but not the fastest docking ever... I believe that record belongs to Gemini 11 which docked on it's first orbit - 96 minutes after launch. Gemini 8 managed the first ever docking between spacecraft in orbit a mere six hours and thirty three minutes after launch.
In the past they've taken four days in order to allow the crew time to get used to weightlessness, and to check out the spacecraft - doubly important for Soyuz since it'll be there for months and doubles as the crew's escape pod. That being said, the 'express' profile has been chosen for no other reason than to save money on mission control personnel... (Though they're trying to spin it otherwise.) In reality, I suspect those controllers are employed year 'round, but the money is only debited from the ISS program when a Soyuz is in [active] flight - making any real savings illusory.
He sold so few initially because he kept a huge chunk of treasury stock and limited not only the buyer pool but also the purchase window. So, your description is based on (very) faulty assumptions.
that system seems to be more realistic than a system that requires every car be programmed to understand the signals being broadcast by the garage.
Yeah, after all.. look at the problems we had getting all the cell phones to work on the same systems. And getting all our appliances on the same voltage and frequency standard. And getting all modems and routers and switches to communicate...
Oh. Wait.
Seriously, you miss that there's a transitional form - where autonomous cars are parked automagically, while valets handle the rest. (Maybe hanging a dongle from the rearview mirror so the system knows where the manually driven car is.) There's also no particular problem with a standard communications format that the car then translates into it's own commands. In the computer field, these are long solved problem types - the problem here will be bringing the auto industry online and cooperating.
I just got done reading a book on Edwin Land, and one of the things the book covered was how careful he was to get his stuff patented and protected as far back as the 1920's. One of the reasons why Polaroid had essentially a monopoly over instant cameras for so long (essentially from the late 40's to the late 80's) is that they patented the hell out of every detail. Or, one can go back even further - one of the reasons Electric Boat took such an early and commanding lead in submarine construction is that back in the late 1800's-early 1900's they held several key patents on submarine design features. Even after the patents expired, the "grace period" they provided allowed EB to build up such a reservoir of capital and experience that by the 1920's they were virtually the last man standing.
The "golden era" of Silicon Valley wasn't so much about lack of patents, as it was the rapid growth of the electronics and computer industries during that time. They were very lucky in that there were several booms, mostly overlapping each other... but the boom times are gone now that industry is more-or-less mature. However, that hasn't stopped them or others from treating such boom times as $DIETY-given right.
To fix the shortage, you can start by paying people what they are worth. IT work requires education (either college, on the job, and/or continuing education classes) This is not cheap, it is not easy to keep up with, and employers should pony up the funds to keep talent that can handle it, and help with paying for it (with both money and time off for classes.) If you look at the market, the places willing to pay for the top talent will get it.
90% of the people think they're in the top 10%.
Over time this will allow for time savings which will translate into needing fewer developers.
And of course, you'll be one of those few survivors bitching and moaning about how the drop in need means a larger pool underemployed or unemployed - and forcing wages downward. You're so much better than them dammit!
Probably more than you're average internet keyboard warrior who pours shit on every other profession except his/her own. Really, all this place seems to be these days is a bitchfest about how useless everyone else is.
You forgot "And how if my wishlist were fulfilled and techies treated like kings and Nobel Prize winners everything would be perfect".
Are there any solutions for the niche market of the paranoid photographer/videographer?
Why yes, yes there is. It's called building it yourself. While encryption isn't illegal, you may have noticed despite the obvious benefits and lack of drawbacks to the consumer, it isn't found pretty much anywhere.
I think you mean "utter lack of benefits and significant drawbacks". I'm a photographer, and there's pretty much zero benefit to encrypting my work, and the risk of losing everything forever because I forget the password is a major disincentive. Not to mention that most photographers want to share their work, whether it's me on 500px or Flickr or my teenage nephew on Facebook and Twitter... and encryption is a barrier to that.
So your niche market isn't niche at all -- it would already be out there, if not for the authoritarian governments of the world
No, the market is niche and you're in the lunatic fringe and in need of adjusting your tinfoil hat.
but we're doing something wrong, or we're just not lucky.
Or nobody gives a damn about your product. Or in a world swamped with smartphone related gadgets, one more fairly lame one isn't enough to grab any significant attention. Or your "branding genius and community builder" isn't actually all that good at her job. Or... There's a long laundry list and that just the stuff you have some hope of controlling.
Yep. There's a lot of people who seem to think that Kickstarter is one-stop-shop, when in reality it's really nothing more than a payment processor. Everything else is up to the creator.
The success stories have been on the back of great marketing campaigns done by experienced marketeers.
Only if you define "success" as a project that "made a media splash" and "raised huge amounts of cash in a short period of time". I participated in a project where the only "marketing" largely consisted of an announcement on the creators blog, and an announcement on a blog the creator was already widely known on for the project he was seeking to fund*... word of mouth within the community accomplished the rest.
*It was an ongoing project to document drive-in theaters, a project he'd been known for and working on for years. A large number will go dark over the next few years, making it imperative the work be completed as soon as reasonably possible.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why "commodity" was in quotes - because relative to the rest of the industry, that's what it is. It's not just about materials, but how they're used... better tank designs, mass produced on automated equipment, re-use within the same vehicle of the same components with minor modifications (if any)... etc... etc...
From a certain emotional fan boy perspective, I can see how people might believe that. From an engineering point of view, while the jury is still out, SpaceX's performance record to date isn't all that impressive.
Other than the fact that Dragon is optimized for LEO and completely unsuitable for operations beyond the Moon... sure. But by the same measure, it makes perfectly good sense to outfit my minivan with scuba gear and send it out with James Cameron the next time he heads to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Or to put it more clearly - it's a laughably *STUPID* idea. Starting with the tons of heat shielding a deep space probe doesn't need, to the enviromental controls for men that will never ride such a probe, to the extremely limited capacity of the RCS... etc... etc...
But to get the answers the lander designers will need to know before they can design their equipment - you need flybys if not an orbiter. One step at a time, each building on the last.
Because building one-of-a-kind equipment designed to operate for years in extreme environments is hellishly expensive.
That's like taking a submarine and giving it wheels so it can explore the Sahara desert (except being insulated to survive the cold of the depths means it overheats there) and wings so it can fly to the top of Mt Everest (except the pressure hull and wheels are too heavy) and then sending it to the bottom of the Atlantic (where the water pressure crushes the wheels and the dynamic pressure tears the wings off). Seriously, while I exaggerate a little for effect, then environment and propulsion requirements for different planets (and different missions for the same planet) vary radically. In the same way, a camera that can image at Saturn is mildly blinded by how bright Jupiter is, completely blinded at Mars, and totally fried (as in serious physical damage) at Mercury. (Making the ungrounded assumption we're even looking for the same things at the different potential destinations.)
And I haven't mentioned how the instruments evolve over time, not only due to changing technology but as we learn things at the planetary destination and need to either look more closely at something or look at something else instead.
SpaceX's business model depends on (relatively) cheap "commodity" grade hardware where the costs of development and production can be amortized over a large number of missions (and crossing their fingers and hoping they don't lose too many while climbing up the learning curve). A model worse suited for mission hardware development can hardly be imagined.
Aaahh.. the infamous No true Scotsman logical fallacy, maintained in such a manner as to provide the believer thereof an unwarranted sense of superiority. Bravo! I've rarely seen a neater way than that to expose the true depths of your ignorance.
Translation: "I don't have an answer, but want to make myself seem like an utter clueless jackass". Congratulations! You've succeeded in spades.
None of which have sufficient cash to warrant secret compartments of the scale and cost of the ones discussed in the article. You fail at understanding business.
I never said that businesses that operate on cash aren't legitimate. You fail at reading comprehension.
It was a simple and reasonable question. You fail at... well pretty much everything it seems.
Evading answering the question by quoting an bullshit bromide just reveals the depth of your ignorance. But repeating cargo cult phrases is much easier than thinking, so I can understand why you do so.
Translation: "I can't actually support the original claim, or counter the refutation... so I'm going to move the goalposts, fling poo, and generate a smokescreen".
Especially since that seems to be exactly what he was doing - and with full knowledge of the kind of people he was dealing with.
That's the point most commenters seem to miss... he wasn't some purely innocent bystander who just happened to get caught up in a dragnet. He was a knowing and willing participant who knew dammed well what was up, a point made clear with his ludicrously paper thin defense of "avoiding working for 'obvious' druggies".
"Seem" [sic] like? For what purpose? What legitimate business has to move that amount of cash secretly rather than using checks, money orders, electronic transactions, or making (much) smaller deposits more regularly? What legitimate business has to do so on a regular enough basis that it's worth having a secret compartment installed rather than calling in an armored car company?
That's a nice fuzzy wuzzy buzzword blurb - but it's utterly and completely disconnected with reality. It's bullshit.
We've been educating people on the results of drug abuse for decades, and of alcohol abuse for over a century... and it hasn't changed a thing. People still use drugs because getting high feels good, or to escape reality, or to self medicate... education prevents none of these things.
The fastest to ISS, but not the fastest docking ever... I believe that record belongs to Gemini 11 which docked on it's first orbit - 96 minutes after launch. Gemini 8 managed the first ever docking between spacecraft in orbit a mere six hours and thirty three minutes after launch.
In the past they've taken four days in order to allow the crew time to get used to weightlessness, and to check out the spacecraft - doubly important for Soyuz since it'll be there for months and doubles as the crew's escape pod. That being said, the 'express' profile has been chosen for no other reason than to save money on mission control personnel... (Though they're trying to spin it otherwise.) In reality, I suspect those controllers are employed year 'round, but the money is only debited from the ISS program when a Soyuz is in [active] flight - making any real savings illusory.
You should read up on Survivor Bias.
He sold so few initially because he kept a huge chunk of treasury stock and limited not only the buyer pool but also the purchase window. So, your description is based on (very) faulty assumptions.
Yeah, after all.. look at the problems we had getting all the cell phones to work on the same systems. And getting all our appliances on the same voltage and frequency standard. And getting all modems and routers and switches to communicate...
Oh. Wait.
Seriously, you miss that there's a transitional form - where autonomous cars are parked automagically, while valets handle the rest. (Maybe hanging a dongle from the rearview mirror so the system knows where the manually driven car is.) There's also no particular problem with a standard communications format that the car then translates into it's own commands. In the computer field, these are long solved problem types - the problem here will be bringing the auto industry online and cooperating.
Like all "golden eras"... they never were.
I just got done reading a book on Edwin Land, and one of the things the book covered was how careful he was to get his stuff patented and protected as far back as the 1920's. One of the reasons why Polaroid had essentially a monopoly over instant cameras for so long (essentially from the late 40's to the late 80's) is that they patented the hell out of every detail. Or, one can go back even further - one of the reasons Electric Boat took such an early and commanding lead in submarine construction is that back in the late 1800's-early 1900's they held several key patents on submarine design features. Even after the patents expired, the "grace period" they provided allowed EB to build up such a reservoir of capital and experience that by the 1920's they were virtually the last man standing.
The "golden era" of Silicon Valley wasn't so much about lack of patents, as it was the rapid growth of the electronics and computer industries during that time. They were very lucky in that there were several booms, mostly overlapping each other... but the boom times are gone now that industry is more-or-less mature. However, that hasn't stopped them or others from treating such boom times as $DIETY-given right.
90% of the people think they're in the top 10%.
And of course, you'll be one of those few survivors bitching and moaning about how the drop in need means a larger pool underemployed or unemployed - and forcing wages downward. You're so much better than them dammit!
You forgot "And how if my wishlist were fulfilled and techies treated like kings and Nobel Prize winners everything would be perfect".
Unless you have a stable funding model... I suspect they'll be working at jobs where they can feed their families and keep a roof over their head.
Admire them for what they did, but don't fool yourself into believing that money doesn't matter to real people in the real world.
If it were possible, I'd moderate you -5 "completely misses the point'.
Answer that question and you'll get an invite to Stockholm.
I think you mean "utter lack of benefits and significant drawbacks". I'm a photographer, and there's pretty much zero benefit to encrypting my work, and the risk of losing everything forever because I forget the password is a major disincentive. Not to mention that most photographers want to share their work, whether it's me on 500px or Flickr or my teenage nephew on Facebook and Twitter... and encryption is a barrier to that.
No, the market is niche and you're in the lunatic fringe and in need of adjusting your tinfoil hat.
Or nobody gives a damn about your product. Or in a world swamped with smartphone related gadgets, one more fairly lame one isn't enough to grab any significant attention. Or your "branding genius and community builder" isn't actually all that good at her job. Or... There's a long laundry list and that just the stuff you have some hope of controlling.
Yep. There's a lot of people who seem to think that Kickstarter is one-stop-shop, when in reality it's really nothing more than a payment processor. Everything else is up to the creator.
Only if you define "success" as a project that "made a media splash" and "raised huge amounts of cash in a short period of time". I participated in a project where the only "marketing" largely consisted of an announcement on the creators blog, and an announcement on a blog the creator was already widely known on for the project he was seeking to fund*... word of mouth within the community accomplished the rest.
*It was an ongoing project to document drive-in theaters, a project he'd been known for and working on for years. A large number will go dark over the next few years, making it imperative the work be completed as soon as reasonably possible.