What happened the last time that NASA ignored a bunch of their engineers? I think they had plenty of time to reconsider while they were picking up Shuttle parts all over the western US.
Which group of engineers would that be? The ones who insisted that ongoing O-ring leakage wasn't a problem because no vehicles had been lost and the engineers were working on a fix? Or the group of engineers who insisted that ongoing debris shedding by the ET wasn't a problem because there hadn't been any serious damage and the engineers were working on a fix?
What makes a design safer isn't necessarily lowest component count; in the space business, proven designs count for a LOT in risk mitigation.
The problem being that Jupiter/DIRECT is just as proven as Ares - that is to say, not at all. While it reuses a few components unmodified, the large remaining balance of reused components are modified (sometime considerably) which takes it right out of 'proven' category.
Consider the Russian Proton rocket: not modern, not the most efficient, but a very reliable system that gets its job done at low cost (assuming that the recent Soyuz QA problems don't mean that their whole production infrastructure has gone rotten from lack of funds).
Keep in mind that 'very reliable' equates to 'reliability essentially equivalent to that of the Shuttle'. One of the conundrums that various bodies and persons involved or interested in space travel shy away from examining is this paradox - cheap and limited in capability or expensive and highly capable, the failure rates keep coming out roughly the same.
One top of the problems enumerated by other poster (time to reach the moon, resupply), Mr Benson seems ignorant of the fact that the ISS lacks radiation shielding - like every other craft in LEO it depends on the Earth's magnetic field to shield it from radiation. The radiation level in the belts, let alone that beyond them, would fry the electronics onboard the ISS and far exceed that considered safe for long term occupation.
It was engineers who did the ground work for Ares - it's not like management created the booster out of thin air and in secrecy and isolation.
I often wonder how today's space fans would have reacted back in the 1960's - when the Saturn (V) initially ended up nearly a third larger than the Nova booster that was supposedly sufficient for a lunar landing mission... and then required a 20% performance increase on top of that in order to be barely able to conduct the mission.
Everything is cheap and fast and easy - on paper. When you start getting off the page and bending real metal, they usually turn out not be fast, cheap, or easy.
Upgrading the B2 to the 1990s is just keeping a 1980s corporate welfare programme for another decade, even while letting it float a decade behind in technology.
Old only equals outmoded by those who've bought into the whole Madison Avenue/$_BIG_COMPANY mindset that you have to be on the upgrade treadmill constantly to keep up with Joneses.
space shuttle runs on 1970s computers With one MEGABYTE of ferris-core memory.
You're nearly twenty years behind the times - the AP-101B computers were replaced (upgraded) with the AP-101S in 1991 and (among other things) the core memory replaced with solid state memory. (As part of the general electronics upgrade to allow for the installation of the glass cockpits.) In fact, practically every piece of major electronics on the Shuttle was upgraded in the 1990's.
The shuttle prgram was late getting started and they didnt want to changes the software.
Huh? At the time the Enterprise and Columbia were built, the AP-101 was top drawer kit. Without going to custom hardware you simply couldn't buy any better off the shelf. (The USAF thought so - it was the main computer on the B-52. The USN agreed and used them on F-15's.)
What Viacom is doing is absolutely pointless. Want to make money? Have free downloads of *all* your shows on your website.
Maybe Viacom (and anyone else) want to be able to decide where their work shows and how much money it makes.
Umm... Lets see. Which is going to get more views, either A) an episode that gets shown on TV say 10 times a year or B) the same episode that is online for viewing 24/7. More views == more money
Wrong.
Views alone don't make money - views that someone pays for makes money.
I've never quite understood the logic by which anime-obsessed, Monty Python-incessantly-quoting dweebs attach themselves onto everyone else's technical achievements.
I suspect the individual who submitted the article may have been using the old school meaning of the word "geek", as opposed to the meaning hijacked onto the word by anime-obsessed, Monty Python-incessantly-quoting dweebs.
Indeed, there was a concern - but mostly among the Nervous Nellies, not among serious scientists. The LRL (which indeed was setup more-or-less as you describe, which you could easily verify with a moment of googling) was a fig leaf to cover those concerns.
But that's not this article's focus. This article focuses on how some other people (not the airship builders) mention problems with airship design.
So, you don't want to see critiques either - just, as deft said, news of either completion or failure?
What makes it particularly stupid is that these people who are predicting the builders' failure are doing so in an industry where virtually nothing has been done for decades. So essentially they are using antiquated data to argue against current endeavours.
On the contrary - the folks critiquing the builders plans (which isn't the same as predicting failure, but you tend towards the black and white) and folks who've been following the industry (as opposed to merely reading of success or failure) know that research has been active and ongoing for decades on the issues mentioned in the article. The field isn't stagnant and the data isn't antiquated - the field is active and the data is current.
This Oil Bubble has been fun, huh? Sort of like the Housing Bubble, different than the Tech Bubble. With the Housing Bubble it was "oh no, real estate is going to just keep going up, after all, no one is making more land." Of course, looking at the situation now, it seems someone was making more land, at least with the price declines we've been seeing.
Those, like myself, who invest in land and housing with an eye on making returns on a time scale of decades will do nicely. The bubble only hurt those who had an eye on the short term.
I wonder just how much "bio-waste" is available anyway, to supply this venture. Would the specific ingredients they require ever amount to enough so as to provide a significant percentage of a states fuel needs.
Not as much as you might think - as a very large portion of such 'waste' is processed into animal feed (for cattle, pigs, and chickens). A very large portion of the remainder is burned to provide steam and/or power for the processing plant itself. A very large portion of the balance is commercially composted. Very little is 'wasted'.
A good chunk of the Command and Control systems on most modern (or most recently refitted) naval vessels in the United States' inventory run on Windows technology.
This is basically the reason why space technology is so primitive. The science has been stifled for years by government regulations.
If being primitive means stable, predictable, and rock solid dependable - by all means bring it on!
Seriously, sometimes you simply don't need more processing power as it doesn't buy you anything. The missile fire control system I worked on in the Navy only had a clock speed of 1MHZ, but it still spend a fair amount of time waiting for the hardware to catch up. (Physical events in the real world take time.) Being able to add a decimal place or two of accuracy when solving the trajectory equations wouldn't have bought you anything either, because the hardware couldn't take advantage of it.
Tightly integrated systems like my fire control system or the Phoenix lander can't be judged by the standards of the FOTM commercial/consumer market.
Beyond that, it has to be tested time and again to make sure there are NO errors.
Well, no, not really. It's far more economical to ensure that the system can recover from serious errors and that errors are fixable, rather than try to assure zero errors. Mainly because the former is possible and the latter isn't.
Well, the shuttle software has zero bugs - or seemingly as close to it as to be indistinguishable from zero. The software for the [nuclear tipped missile] fire control system I used to work on in the Navy, as well as the firmware in the missile had absolutely zero bugs... Its not impossible to get zero bugs, its merely very damn expensive.
basically, its because the code is part of a space vehicle regulated by international arms and trafficking laws. That means Joe Blow doesnt get it.
Even if you did get it, what the hell would you do with it? It isn't like you could borrow a snippet here for the video codec you are writing or post a snippet on the forums there to help someone with the chat program they are writing. Even just reading it straight out is going to be like studying hieroglyphics because you don't have all the hardware specs for the devices being controlled, etc. etc... Unless you're writing some pretty sophisticated device drivers, the mix of hard and soft real time in code like this is waaaay outside of what the vast majority of coders will ever work on.
It's cool and all to have source code to study and learn from, but the code to something like Phoenix strikes me as little more than digital Viagra.
And lots of people have been commuting by themselves because the cost of it wasn't high enough for them to change their behavior. Higher costs will definitely change behavior.
Only if the options are available - which, as I said, in many places they aren't and in others which pride themselves on having it those options don't work all that well or provide sufficient coverage.
And as we see transit use go up, revenue for transit goes up as well, leading to further investment
In theory. In practice revenue isn't sufficient to cover the real world costs of the system and isn't likely to ever be.
we're already seeing Portland's light rail at capacity during peak hours.
And the difference in traffic levels isn't grossly observable. Sure, the guys with the traffic counters notice the 1% difference - but the guy in traffic doesn't.
It can take a while to build out new infrastucture, but planning is alread preceedign apace.
Planning isn't the problem, building it to reasonably functional level and solving the 'last mile' problem is.
Re:For a 20% product, it's interesting; but...
on
Google Lively Review
·
· Score: 1
Looking at it in terms of a "20%" product that one of their engineers whipped out on their 'spare' time, it's fairly cool. I don't think they really expected the level of interest that would be shown though, or they would have held it back a bit longer for some more polish.
I'd say it's pretty typical of a Google rollout - it's half finished and not even really ready for a beta since it lacks documentation and key features and functionality.
In a year, when it's been hammered on a bit more and Google either rolls it into a full fledged product or cuts it loose, I'll start paying more attention.
I wouldn't hold my breath... Google's corporate attention span resembles nothing so much as five year olds - very intensive on something for five minutes and then off to the next thing. They may come back to the original thing, or they may not.
I'd suspect that's a result of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google
If that were true, what's the reason for the Google Video policies, then?
Because Google, having bought YouTube, has stayed true to form and left the job of integrating the two half finished. Google has a lot of high powered developers, but I've never figured out what most of them are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Which group of engineers would that be? The ones who insisted that ongoing O-ring leakage wasn't a problem because no vehicles had been lost and the engineers were working on a fix? Or the group of engineers who insisted that ongoing debris shedding by the ET wasn't a problem because there hadn't been any serious damage and the engineers were working on a fix?
The problem being that Jupiter/DIRECT is just as proven as Ares - that is to say, not at all. While it reuses a few components unmodified, the large remaining balance of reused components are modified (sometime considerably) which takes it right out of 'proven' category.
Keep in mind that 'very reliable' equates to 'reliability essentially equivalent to that of the Shuttle'. One of the conundrums that various bodies and persons involved or interested in space travel shy away from examining is this paradox - cheap and limited in capability or expensive and highly capable, the failure rates keep coming out roughly the same.
One top of the problems enumerated by other poster (time to reach the moon, resupply), Mr Benson seems ignorant of the fact that the ISS lacks radiation shielding - like every other craft in LEO it depends on the Earth's magnetic field to shield it from radiation. The radiation level in the belts, let alone that beyond them, would fry the electronics onboard the ISS and far exceed that considered safe for long term occupation.
It was engineers who did the ground work for Ares - it's not like management created the booster out of thin air and in secrecy and isolation.
I often wonder how today's space fans would have reacted back in the 1960's - when the Saturn (V) initially ended up nearly a third larger than the Nova booster that was supposedly sufficient for a lunar landing mission... and then required a 20% performance increase on top of that in order to be barely able to conduct the mission.
Everything is cheap and fast and easy - on paper. When you start getting off the page and bending real metal, they usually turn out not be fast, cheap, or easy.
Old only equals outmoded by those who've bought into the whole Madison Avenue/$_BIG_COMPANY mindset that you have to be on the upgrade treadmill constantly to keep up with Joneses.
You're nearly twenty years behind the times - the AP-101B computers were replaced (upgraded) with the AP-101S in 1991 and (among other things) the core memory replaced with solid state memory. (As part of the general electronics upgrade to allow for the installation of the glass cockpits.) In fact, practically every piece of major electronics on the Shuttle was upgraded in the 1990's.
Huh? At the time the Enterprise and Columbia were built, the AP-101 was top drawer kit. Without going to custom hardware you simply couldn't buy any better off the shelf. (The USAF thought so - it was the main computer on the B-52. The USN agreed and used them on F-15's.)
Umm... Lets see. Which is going to get more views, either A) an episode that gets shown on TV say 10 times a year or B) the same episode that is online for viewing 24/7. More views == more money
Wrong.
Views alone don't make money - views that someone pays for makes money.
I suspect the individual who submitted the article may have been using the old school meaning of the word "geek", as opposed to the meaning hijacked onto the word by anime-obsessed, Monty Python-incessantly-quoting dweebs.
Indeed, there was a concern - but mostly among the Nervous Nellies, not among serious scientists. The LRL (which indeed was setup more-or-less as you describe, which you could easily verify with a moment of googling) was a fig leaf to cover those concerns.
Yeah, I have. And they're pretty dammed impressive. They've got good cashflow, nice margins, and decent profits.
I'm only furious because too many folks claim they've looked at the balance sheets - and then repeat (groundlessly) the analysts party line.
Had the author spoke in generalities, you'd have a point.
My router is only rebooted when the house loses power... on average about once a year or so.
So, you don't want to see critiques either - just, as deft said, news of either completion or failure?
On the contrary - the folks critiquing the builders plans (which isn't the same as predicting failure, but you tend towards the black and white) and folks who've been following the industry (as opposed to merely reading of success or failure) know that research has been active and ongoing for decades on the issues mentioned in the article. The field isn't stagnant and the data isn't antiquated - the field is active and the data is current.
But the challenges still remain.
Oh? Never heard the saying "mad as a hatter"?
Oh? The preponderance of historical evidence says otherwise.
Those, like myself, who invest in land and housing with an eye on making returns on a time scale of decades will do nicely. The bubble only hurt those who had an eye on the short term.
Not as much as you might think - as a very large portion of such 'waste' is processed into animal feed (for cattle, pigs, and chickens). A very large portion of the remainder is burned to provide steam and/or power for the processing plant itself. A very large portion of the balance is commercially composted. Very little is 'wasted'.
You do know the UK and the US are different countries do you not?
Got a cite on that?
If being primitive means stable, predictable, and rock solid dependable - by all means bring it on!
Seriously, sometimes you simply don't need more processing power as it doesn't buy you anything. The missile fire control system I worked on in the Navy only had a clock speed of 1MHZ, but it still spend a fair amount of time waiting for the hardware to catch up. (Physical events in the real world take time.) Being able to add a decimal place or two of accuracy when solving the trajectory equations wouldn't have bought you anything either, because the hardware couldn't take advantage of it.
Tightly integrated systems like my fire control system or the Phoenix lander can't be judged by the standards of the FOTM commercial/consumer market.
Well, the shuttle software has zero bugs - or seemingly as close to it as to be indistinguishable from zero. The software for the [nuclear tipped missile] fire control system I used to work on in the Navy, as well as the firmware in the missile had absolutely zero bugs... Its not impossible to get zero bugs, its merely very damn expensive.
Just like fusion - earthquake prediction is always fifty years away.
Even if you did get it, what the hell would you do with it? It isn't like you could borrow a snippet here for the video codec you are writing or post a snippet on the forums there to help someone with the chat program they are writing. Even just reading it straight out is going to be like studying hieroglyphics because you don't have all the hardware specs for the devices being controlled, etc. etc... Unless you're writing some pretty sophisticated device drivers, the mix of hard and soft real time in code like this is waaaay outside of what the vast majority of coders will ever work on.
It's cool and all to have source code to study and learn from, but the code to something like Phoenix strikes me as little more than digital Viagra.
Only if the options are available - which, as I said, in many places they aren't and in others which pride themselves on having it those options don't work all that well or provide sufficient coverage.
In theory. In practice revenue isn't sufficient to cover the real world costs of the system and isn't likely to ever be.
And the difference in traffic levels isn't grossly observable. Sure, the guys with the traffic counters notice the 1% difference - but the guy in traffic doesn't.
Planning isn't the problem, building it to reasonably functional level and solving the 'last mile' problem is.
I'd say it's pretty typical of a Google rollout - it's half finished and not even really ready for a beta since it lacks documentation and key features and functionality.
I wouldn't hold my breath... Google's corporate attention span resembles nothing so much as five year olds - very intensive on something for five minutes and then off to the next thing. They may come back to the original thing, or they may not.
Because Google, having bought YouTube, has stayed true to form and left the job of integrating the two half finished. Google has a lot of high powered developers, but I've never figured out what most of them are doing.