These reporters are just being sensationalist, manufacturing stories to get page views off this big IPO.
And Slashdot link's to 'em for the same reason. That, and/.'s hatred of Wall Street and Facebook.
Truth is as you say. I think it shows a great sense for rational valuation if after the first day the stock stayed within 10% of its opening either way. Much more shows dangerous wild speculation by traders, or the company completely blew their valuation estimates.
Yep. Even GOOG dipped below it's offering price *twice* during it's first week of trading.
Always problematic to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, but you go to war with the army you have, not the army you'd like to have. You don't get to wish you had a new Apollo program so you could re-invent the rocket from scratch. Your goal, if you actually want to go to space instead of dreaming of the stars, is to make the best of the tools you have, improving them as you can.
I really need to point out that I was answering *your* question? If you don't like the truth, that's not my problem.
they tend to fail about 2% of the time
I'm skeptical of this number.
Be skeptical all you want, it's the stone cold truth. Your ignorance is not my problem.
If you make a ton of laughably ridiculous assumptions
There, fixed that for you.
Funny you mention jet airliners. Turbofan engines are more reliable than rocket engines, but still, they fail all the damned time. But they don't cause crashes, because the aircraft can keep flying with an engine failure, and if there's a problem on launch, the pilot can abort the takeoff. Which is exactly what SpaceX does.
Here's a free clue for you: Engine out situations are not the only failures that lead to crashes. (Nor can all engine failures be simply handwaved away by shutting down the engine - because the vehicle will already be an expanding ball of fire by the time the data reaches the controller.)
Anyway, the point is that SpaceX has very different goals than your average space enthusiast. They're not trying to make space travel as easy and reliable as riding a bus. They're trying to get into space, right now, real cheap.
I don't know about the fantasy world you live in, but here on Earth SpaceX has exactly the goals of the average space enthusiast - to lower costs.
Lot of comments here saying that the SpaceX rockets are pretty much the same old technology as the 1950s, and why aren't we focusing on carbon fiber scramjet single-stage spaceplanes or flying saucers powered by dark energy?
Because research on new technologies is very, very expensive. And once the Space Race died down in the early 1970's, none of the governments that funded the research have seen any point in putting real money into them. Or, to put it in perspective, we're at the point aviation technology would be if it got frozen in place around the end of WWII or IC technology would be if it were frozen in the late 1970's.
Because two-stage kerosene-and-oxygen rockets *work*. It's proven technology, you *know* it's going to work
For certain large and handwaving values of "work". In reality, by normal engineering standards, they're horribly unreliable since they tend to fail about 2% of the time. Or again to put this in perspective: If jet airliners failed at the rate rockets do, some place like Chicago-O'Hare would suffer around 8000 crashes on takeoff annually - that's 21 carshes a *day*. The 2Mhz 6502 of the mid 70's would crash 40,000 times a *second*. (You can add the appropriate number of zeros to figure out the crash rate for today's multi gigahtz machines.)
From there, you can add in high-tech electronics, advanced manufacturing, etc., as SpaceX has done.
Unless they can solve the reliability issue, they're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The implementation may be new (I don't know), but the idea isn't. Hold-down clamps have been around for a while, probably since at least the V-2 (A-4). The idea is to hold the thing down long enough for the engine(s) to build up enough thrust to lift properly, rather than just knock the rocket over.
They go back further than that... Both Goddard and Von Braun used them. Though back then the sensors were optical (does the rocket flame look right?) and the operation manual (pull the string that releases the latch that holds the rocket back).
I've never seen a launch aborted this late before. The announcer had already said "Liftoff," and you could see the flames building up rapidly as usual. The rocket was only one second from moving off the pad when the shutdown command was triggered.
The earliest I can recall this happening was on Gemini 6's first launch attempt in Dec 1965.
So the ability to detect an engine problem and shutdown before liftoff is again an amazing feat, and shows advancing technology.
No, it's ancient technology - going all the way back to the 1950's. It's about as bog standard as it gets, and has been for a very, very long time.
If the Boeing Delta II in 1997 had had the same type of status checking, it might have discovered the 17 foot crack in the booster, and aborted also, instead of blowing up on launch
Nope. The pressure fault can't be discovered until after ignition - and the Delta's solid's weren't equipped a with thrust termination system. Not to mention, the fault probably didn't exist at ignition, it had to wait for the burning surface to reach the crack to increase the burning rate and cause the pressure surge.
And a Delta III had a rocket engine failure in 1999, which ruined the mission:
Nope, wrong again. That failure was in the second stage, so if it had been shut down, the flight was already a loss. (Not to mention that fault wasn't present at ignition either.)
A unified interface requires knowledge of all current, separate, and secured networks.
No it doesn't. All it needs is knowledge of the network(s) it's intended to operate on. You've confused "unified interface" with "universal access".
When those walls come down, the same person controlling weather UAVs for the coast guard is using a device that can access a predator with 2 Hellfires flying over Packistan. Now, obviously there has to be a breach for the control to be gained. At the same time, currently there is no possibility of such a breach because of those walls.
Yet, the potential damage of such a breach is trivially fixed - by using something as simple as passwords, or public key cryptography, or tethering a controller to a drone, or firewalls between networks, or... well, you get the idea. There's a whole laundry list of bog standard methods for preventing such access.
Currently, battlefield C&C is communicated with, but can not take actions.
You're a couple of millenia behind on battlefield C&C technology - which is intended to issue commands and initiate actions by it's very nature. That's precisely why the designers of such systems have gone to such great lengths to prevent spoofing and other forms of interference.
Facebook is a mile wide but an inch deep. It's basically a whiny high school full of drama queens that happens to have half a billion people enrolled. As others have posted here already, Google+ actually delivers some substance. It's where smart people go.
Yeah. Right after my father died, all the members of the extended family who couldn't make the funeral used Facebook to share stories about Dad and to hold what amounted to an extended virtual memorial service. That's some real high school drama for you.
The way I like to say it is: Google+ is where Facebook users go when they grow up.
From your description it sounds more like "where self centered narcissistic pricks who have to 'prove' they're better than anyone else" go. Judging people by whether they hang with the right crowd or at the right place is the very definition of high school drama.
When, I read the summary that was the first thing I thought. Most of the people who use Google+ use it specifically because they can do both private and public posting from the same site.
You can do that on Facebook too. Hell, you can do it on Live Journal as well. G+ has no particular advantage there.
Real name policy to blame? I think it might be the reason that critical mass wasn't achieved. I was really hoping that this would trump facebook.
No, the reason G+ isn't trumping Facebook is something so obvious in retrospect I can't believe I didn't figure it out until yesterday and that nobody else has figured it out yet.
When I look at G+, I don't see Facebook - I don't see business pages. I don't see fan pages. I don't see association pages. I don't see games... I see only the ability to make and share posts and to control who sees them... When I look at G+, rather than seeing Facebook... I see Twitter with a graphical interface. G+ hasn't trumped Facebook because it is neither a replacement nor a competitor with Facebook - it's a replacement and a competitor for Twitter.
Seriously, the reason G+ hasn't made significant headway against Facebook is the same reason that MS-Paint hasn't made any headway against Photoshop - they simply aren't comparable. It's not marketing and it's not real names. It's that there's a lot more to Facebook than just sharing stuff with your friends and contacts, and G+ either offers none of it or relies on the user to manage it himself. G+ is badly feature incomplete, and Google shows no inclination to fix this.
Like so many of Google's later offerings, G+ is a day late, a dollar short, and a distant and fading third in the marketplace.
Look, there is a reason that some Army guy has a different method of access to his unmanned recon tracked vehicle than an Air Force guy has to a Predator with Hellfire missiles, who has different methods of access than a weather drone pilot in the Navy. That separation creates very large walls that make it difficult to make mistakes.
It makes it difficult for who to make mistakes? Of what kind? With what consequences?
Should the Pentagon have requirements for how a User Interface should look and feel? Hell yes they should. There should not ever be a simplified method of access across platforms. It's extremely dangerous.
Extremely dangerous to who? In what manner? (And you must answer this without making the mistake of conflating "simplified" with "insecure".)
On top of which, though it may not be obvious to those who don't follow military matters (which is roughly 99.999999% of Slashdot), we're slowly but surely moving towards a 'purple' force rather than four separate forces. Joint operations and interoperability are the watchword today, and for the foreseeable future. Insisting on paywalls just makes that harder without actually providing any benefits.
Why wouldn't customers cut out you, the middleman?
Because they don't want to do all the work the middleman does. They don't want to write the spec. They don't want to monitor progress. They don't want to do the testing and validation. Etc... etc...
My wife's company looked at "cutting out the middleman" for the vertical package that runs the company - and recoiled in horror when they found just what it meant to be dealing with the end developers.
Not to mention the end developers weren't particularly interested in dealing with the end users in the first place - they wanted to sell wholesale, not retail as it were. The consulting company bore the brunt of support and determining the difference between PEBKAC and actual bugs, the developers got a check and a single prioritized list of bugs and features... which was a huge win from their point of view.
First off, if your company was in business to make wrenches, would it be smart to pay someone else to make wrenches and just sell them? Or, would it make more sense to be making wrenches better than other people and sell those? See, one way you are a sales company that isn't making anything and the other is you are actually making something.
As much as people are making of this difference... Beyond metaphysics I don't see a difference between a company where development and marketing come up with a spec and send it to production at the other end of the building and a company where they send it a company at the other end of a continent or the globe.
You confusing a difference of degree with a difference of kind.
They almost certainly aren't, because it doesn't make any sense to do so.
For the vast majority of the bodies in question (99%+), they aren't big enough to survive a collision that generates sufficient energy to divert them. For the tiny percent that are big enough (up above the "smash a city" size) the odds against such a collision are truly enormous - in the "happens less than a handful of times in the entire life of the solar system" range. Anything else (I.E. accumulations of smaller collisions) occurs on time scales of decades to millenia and are based on collisions with bodies too small to track anyhow. Such a diversion would have to be discovered by routine monitoring of their orbits and would be pretty hard to discern anyhow due to the slow rate of change and how hard it is to precisely track the locations of such bodies. (And such routine monitoring would also detect the diversion of larger bodies.)
And that's not even addressing the whole "space is really big and the number of asteroids in question is very tiny" side of the matter.
Which is exactly the point of the exercise. From the earliest days, Wikipedia bragged about how hard it was going to be to troll Wikipedia. How bad articles and bad edits would be detected and corrected within hours, if not minutes. How the structure and community of Wikipedia was robust and resilient.
However, as it has turned out, this is not the case. And most of the replies so far are doing everything they can to avoid discussing this elephant in the room.
Oh, and don't count out Google+ as competition just yet.
I haven't counted them in as Facebook competition yet. G+ is more a competitor to Twitter than it is to Facebook, given it's near complete lack of any features beyond the ability to share posts.
They recently completely revamped the Google+ interface and have shown that they're in it for the long haul. They will be waiting for Zuckerberg & Co. to stumble and give users an excuse to jump ship.
The term you're looking for isn't "revamping the user interface", it's "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic". Users are extraordinarily unlikely to jump ship to G+, as there's pretty much nothing to attract them. No games. No groups. No business or fan pages... Just a bare-bones and very feature incomplete site.
As with most Google offerings... it's a day late, a dollar short, and a distant and lagging third in the marketplace. Really all that Google leads in are Search and Maps - and they're driving people away from Maps.
Of course, the investors will be howling for Facebook to bring in the numbers
The investors can howl all they want - as with Google, the game is rigged such that Zuckerberg has voting control and the investors have nothing.
Yet that is the whole premise of modern 'protests'. Sign a meaningless petition. "Like" a meaningless blurb or post a meaningless forward on Facebook. Send an "outraged" tweet or two. Get the bumper sticker. Get the T-shirt... Go on with your life in the sure and smug knowledge that you've made a difference.
Oh, and don't forget - declare victory quickly before the next meme comes along.
Slashdot Mirror
What with animal sacrifice, arranged marriages, etc... the Jews of that era weren't too pretty by modern standards either.
And Slashdot link's to 'em for the same reason. That, and /.'s hatred of Wall Street and Facebook.
Yep. Even GOOG dipped below it's offering price *twice* during it's first week of trading.
I really need to point out that I was answering *your* question? If you don't like the truth, that's not my problem.
Be skeptical all you want, it's the stone cold truth. Your ignorance is not my problem.
There, fixed that for you.
Here's a free clue for you: Engine out situations are not the only failures that lead to crashes. (Nor can all engine failures be simply handwaved away by shutting down the engine - because the vehicle will already be an expanding ball of fire by the time the data reaches the controller.)
I don't know about the fantasy world you live in, but here on Earth SpaceX has exactly the goals of the average space enthusiast - to lower costs.
Because research on new technologies is very, very expensive. And once the Space Race died down in the early 1970's, none of the governments that funded the research have seen any point in putting real money into them. Or, to put it in perspective, we're at the point aviation technology would be if it got frozen in place around the end of WWII or IC technology would be if it were frozen in the late 1970's.
For certain large and handwaving values of "work". In reality, by normal engineering standards, they're horribly unreliable since they tend to fail about 2% of the time. Or again to put this in perspective: If jet airliners failed at the rate rockets do, some place like Chicago-O'Hare would suffer around 8000 crashes on takeoff annually - that's 21 carshes a *day*. The 2Mhz 6502 of the mid 70's would crash 40,000 times a *second*. (You can add the appropriate number of zeros to figure out the crash rate for today's multi gigahtz machines.)
Unless they can solve the reliability issue, they're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
They go back further than that... Both Goddard and Von Braun used them. Though back then the sensors were optical (does the rocket flame look right?) and the operation manual (pull the string that releases the latch that holds the rocket back).
The earliest I can recall this happening was on Gemini 6's first launch attempt in Dec 1965.
No, it's ancient technology - going all the way back to the 1950's. It's about as bog standard as it gets, and has been for a very, very long time.
Nope. The pressure fault can't be discovered until after ignition - and the Delta's solid's weren't equipped a with thrust termination system. Not to mention, the fault probably didn't exist at ignition, it had to wait for the burning surface to reach the crack to increase the burning rate and cause the pressure surge.
Nope, wrong again. That failure was in the second stage, so if it had been shut down, the flight was already a loss. (Not to mention that fault wasn't present at ignition either.)
So, you're oh-for-three.
Yeah, but he forgot to bash Microsoft and to genuflect in the direction of Cupertino and Mountain View...
No it doesn't. All it needs is knowledge of the network(s) it's intended to operate on. You've confused "unified interface" with "universal access".
Yet, the potential damage of such a breach is trivially fixed - by using something as simple as passwords, or public key cryptography, or tethering a controller to a drone, or firewalls between networks, or... well, you get the idea. There's a whole laundry list of bog standard methods for preventing such access.
You're a couple of millenia behind on battlefield C&C technology - which is intended to issue commands and initiate actions by it's very nature. That's precisely why the designers of such systems have gone to such great lengths to prevent spoofing and other forms of interference.
Yeah. Right after my father died, all the members of the extended family who couldn't make the funeral used Facebook to share stories about Dad and to hold what amounted to an extended virtual memorial service. That's some real high school drama for you.
From your description it sounds more like "where self centered narcissistic pricks who have to 'prove' they're better than anyone else" go. Judging people by whether they hang with the right crowd or at the right place is the very definition of high school drama.
In other words - you treat G+ differently than you do Facebook... and then make it like it's Facebook's fault.
That's a feature of who you friend, not of the site.
You can do that on Facebook too. Hell, you can do it on Live Journal as well. G+ has no particular advantage there.
No, the reason G+ isn't trumping Facebook is something so obvious in retrospect I can't believe I didn't figure it out until yesterday and that nobody else has figured it out yet.
When I look at G+, I don't see Facebook - I don't see business pages. I don't see fan pages. I don't see association pages. I don't see games... I see only the ability to make and share posts and to control who sees them... When I look at G+, rather than seeing Facebook... I see Twitter with a graphical interface. G+ hasn't trumped Facebook because it is neither a replacement nor a competitor with Facebook - it's a replacement and a competitor for Twitter.
Seriously, the reason G+ hasn't made significant headway against Facebook is the same reason that MS-Paint hasn't made any headway against Photoshop - they simply aren't comparable. It's not marketing and it's not real names. It's that there's a lot more to Facebook than just sharing stuff with your friends and contacts, and G+ either offers none of it or relies on the user to manage it himself. G+ is badly feature incomplete, and Google shows no inclination to fix this.
Like so many of Google's later offerings, G+ is a day late, a dollar short, and a distant and fading third in the marketplace.
It makes it difficult for who to make mistakes? Of what kind? With what consequences?
Extremely dangerous to who? In what manner? (And you must answer this without making the mistake of conflating "simplified" with "insecure".)
On top of which, though it may not be obvious to those who don't follow military matters (which is roughly 99.999999% of Slashdot), we're slowly but surely moving towards a 'purple' force rather than four separate forces. Joint operations and interoperability are the watchword today, and for the foreseeable future. Insisting on paywalls just makes that harder without actually providing any benefits.
Because they don't want to do all the work the middleman does. They don't want to write the spec. They don't want to monitor progress. They don't want to do the testing and validation. Etc... etc...
My wife's company looked at "cutting out the middleman" for the vertical package that runs the company - and recoiled in horror when they found just what it meant to be dealing with the end developers.
Not to mention the end developers weren't particularly interested in dealing with the end users in the first place - they wanted to sell wholesale, not retail as it were. The consulting company bore the brunt of support and determining the difference between PEBKAC and actual bugs, the developers got a check and a single prioritized list of bugs and features... which was a huge win from their point of view.
As much as people are making of this difference... Beyond metaphysics I don't see a difference between a company where development and marketing come up with a spec and send it to production at the other end of the building and a company where they send it a company at the other end of a continent or the globe.
You confusing a difference of degree with a difference of kind.
They almost certainly aren't, because it doesn't make any sense to do so.
For the vast majority of the bodies in question (99%+), they aren't big enough to survive a collision that generates sufficient energy to divert them. For the tiny percent that are big enough (up above the "smash a city" size) the odds against such a collision are truly enormous - in the "happens less than a handful of times in the entire life of the solar system" range. Anything else (I.E. accumulations of smaller collisions) occurs on time scales of decades to millenia and are based on collisions with bodies too small to track anyhow. Such a diversion would have to be discovered by routine monitoring of their orbits and would be pretty hard to discern anyhow due to the slow rate of change and how hard it is to precisely track the locations of such bodies. (And such routine monitoring would also detect the diversion of larger bodies.)
And that's not even addressing the whole "space is really big and the number of asteroids in question is very tiny" side of the matter.
Which is exactly the point of the exercise. From the earliest days, Wikipedia bragged about how hard it was going to be to troll Wikipedia. How bad articles and bad edits would be detected and corrected within hours, if not minutes. How the structure and community of Wikipedia was robust and resilient.
However, as it has turned out, this is not the case. And most of the replies so far are doing everything they can to avoid discussing this elephant in the room.
I haven't counted them in as Facebook competition yet. G+ is more a competitor to Twitter than it is to Facebook, given it's near complete lack of any features beyond the ability to share posts.
The term you're looking for isn't "revamping the user interface", it's "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic". Users are extraordinarily unlikely to jump ship to G+, as there's pretty much nothing to attract them. No games. No groups. No business or fan pages... Just a bare-bones and very feature incomplete site.
As with most Google offerings... it's a day late, a dollar short, and a distant and lagging third in the marketplace. Really all that Google leads in are Search and Maps - and they're driving people away from Maps.
The investors can howl all they want - as with Google, the game is rigged such that Zuckerberg has voting control and the investors have nothing.
Yet that is the whole premise of modern 'protests'. Sign a meaningless petition. "Like" a meaningless blurb or post a meaningless forward on Facebook. Send an "outraged" tweet or two. Get the bumper sticker. Get the T-shirt... Go on with your life in the sure and smug knowledge that you've made a difference.
Oh, and don't forget - declare victory quickly before the next meme comes along.
Yeah, losing money never matters. Especially when one can handwave irrelevant statistics as a smokescreen.
Yeah, half a billion of my taxpayer dollars vanish - and that amounts to "just a made up controversy".
The point you claimed I missed is exactly the point I made... Are you drunk, stoned, or just fucking stupid?
That's not nearly as sexy as climate change, and doesn't receive nearly the amount of propaganda coverage. So it isn't even on their radar.