I should point out that the bulk of my investment income is made from Linux and other Open Source products, and I haven't lost yet (I've been investing in Linux as a whole for almost 15 years).
Given the paucity of significant investment opportunities in those areas - so what? (Not to mention that 'not losing' is as much a matter of luck as anything else.)
I am looking at this from a business POV, and ROI POV.
The moment you so lightly dismissed the patent question, you stopped looking at it from a serious business or ROI POV and moved over to the fanboy POV. The remainder of this reply is just more of the same.
So looking at it as an investor, I would say that Linux is a much safer investment than Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has the potential for a larger ROI, but Linux appears to me to be much safer.
More fanboy nonsense and FUD - trying to compare a whole laundry list of investments with a wide variety of prospects to single corporation. (A single corporation that despite the fanboy FUD is performing well - and shows no significant prospects of that changing.)
First thing to understand is that so far, there has not been a single proven case of patent infringement against Linux.
That's the first thing from the stereotype/geek-living-in-his-parent's-basement POV. The point of view of a businessman living in the real world, with real money on the line necessarily is very different.
"A random blogger regurgitates PR stuff, drools over PR stuff, and can't be bothered to Google, spellcheck, or edit his writings". Would be an apt description of TFA.
I long for the day when Slashdot linked to substantial material, rather than fanboi crap.
That might have worked on grade school kids, but college students aren't so easy to "put one over" on -- they're adults, and they're usually informed about the issues.
That's what college students would have you believe.
Hopefully in the year 2025/2029 it will be "Lindsay who?" and "Paris who?" and "Britney who?". And if we're *really* lucky people might actually stop obsessing so much over the lives of people that they don't know personally or have anything to do with all together.
And if we are really, really lucky... People will realize that such obsessions are nothing particularly new.
When is the last time we read anything about open source that wasn't about licensing?
In reality, it's pretty much impossible to discuss open source without it being about licensing - because licenses are the legal expression of the open source philosophy. If your are discussing the code, you are discussing the application or the language, not open source.
Thats true of 'geek' special interest magazines - but you err in generalizing from that very specific subset. Hobbyist special interest magazines (like 'Model Railroader') are doing just fine, as are many cooking magazines (a field where the web has made little if any penetration).
You gotta wonder...if an open admission that this administration is actively working to squelch the First Amendment rights of American citizens wasn't redacted, what was?
You are absolutely correct that it is a First Amendment issue - but you have the agressor and the aggrieved reversed.
The law is absolutely clear that when one party is exercising his right to speak, any second party that attempts to interfere is in the wrong. It's also absolutely clear that it doesn't matter who the party of the first part is, it can be a Black Panther or the local KKK head. Both are equally protected.
My point wasn't that this proved that there was life, but that they set up a scientific protocol and then violated it as soon as the results made them nervous.
Possibly because you misunderstood the protocol - or misunderstood the reason the mass spectrometer was employed. (Or mistook PR material for scientific protocols, as seems likely.)
Anyhow, the reason the mass spectrometer was included was simple, under a variety of conditions the other experiments could provide false positives. The mass spectrometer was included as a quality control check to rule-out or rule-in any positives from the other experiments.
Viking was a huge gamble to justify a planetary exploration program based on biology. They (we) spent the money, went all the way, were fantastically successfull (landing on Mars is hard), and then suffered a failure of nerve... and the next US lander was 20 years later.
We didn't suffer a failure of nerve - we suffered a failure of budget. The Vikings were what is now known as 'battlestar' type programs, massive (and very expensive) all-in-one scientific expeditions. With the oil crisis and inflation of the 70's, the budget took a huge hit, and Congress stopped funding these types of missions. Then across the 80's Congress took a hostile attitude towards Mars exploration that further stymied any research. It's not until recently that Congress has reversed it's position, but it has not lifted the budgetary straightjacket.
In other words - like the original buffoon, you want to compare apples to oranges, then ding the orange for not being an apple.
The point is not to do missions that haven't ever been done before (at least in the short term), the point is to do it *cheaply* and *economically*.
Which, I shouldn't have to point out hasn't been done yet. A lot of people are celebrating the 'accomplishments' of the alt.space industry - when they haven't actually done anything yet. (Kinda like celebrating the 'sucess' of a guy who just bought a kayak with the intent to row it around the world.)
NASA and the traditional aerospace companies are inarguably abject failures when it comes to doing space economically.
Oh, nobody will argue that. But honest folks will also point out that NASA and the the traditional aerospace companies have never seriously tried, or even been tasked with 'doing space economically'.
They'll tell you that it "can't be done", but then, they said that SS1 couldn't be done, either.
With regards to the first - there is no evidence to date that they are wrong. None. (The guys closest to possibly doing so, SpaceX, have just postponed their next flight - again.) With regards to SS1, no they didn't say it could not be done - that's an urban legend.
The latter is proven by the fact that the insurance company put up the money for the X-Prize on the advice of traditional aerospace consultants, who are the "experts", don't you know.
ROTFLAMO. I love how you create 'facts' from thin air, and in utter ignorance of reality.
When the insurance company funded the prize - SS1 was just a private paper study in Rutan's files, unfunded and unnanounced beyond some vague rumors. (Burt said, on multiple occasions, he wouldn't even start work on a vehicle until the Prize was fully funded.) At the time the prize was funded (by insurance, and for a limited time), not one team was fully funded, and not one team had flown or even ground tested significant hardware. With the evidence publically available at the time - the insurance company made a good bet. Even the alt.space community was surprised when Rutan rolled out his design and timetable.
As I understand it, NASA hasn't done any credible work on this subject aside from the space stations and some microenvironment experiments (eg, glass balls containing small self-sustaining ecosystems). Biosphere II with its many flaws is better than anything NASA has done. Russians have done probably the best work here.
Biosphere II, with zero sucessful runs is better than the NASA experiments with three different (manned!) configurations, four sucessful runs, and over a year of total 'lock-in' time?
Let's just say your understanding is a wee bit flawed.
You gain experience by building and flying - you make progress by analysis and studies. The writeup on this accident even makes this clear, he found out what went wrong by analyzing what happened. John's mistake lies in incorrectly generalizing from his specific experience with a tiny tradespace to a larger field.
For example - the mission mode used for the lunar missions came not from 'building and testing things', but from analysis and studies. And a damm good thing too! The original proposed approaches, before anyone thought too hard about it, stood little chance of working and would not only have been far more dangerous - but much more expensive to boot. Or take the Gemini program, where there were (IIRC) four different potential rendezvous modes. We could have flown four Gemini/Agena pairs to find that three of them would require too much fuel or were otherwise beyond the capability of the vehicles... But we didn't. A bunch of engineers sat down and ran the math and analyzed the approaches - and we scored a bullseye on the first try. Etc... etc... Examples abound when you actually sit down and study the history of just the space program and read the source documents.
I'd be the first to admit that studies and analysis can be over done, but to sneer and reject them outright is a sign of ignorance.
For this to be something worthy of criticism, we need to know how many other calls of the type "X is too expensive and probably overengineered" he has made and which turned out to be true.
That's the key - I have followed John for years... And he has yet to prove one 'best practice' wrong. Look right in the writeup of this accident - where it didn't occur to him to try a drop test in the hangar first, instead testing a new function for the first time in the field. In computers this would be the equivalent of compiling a program - and then running it without checking the compiler error log. It's dumb - and everyone knows not to do it.
It's an error many of the various alt.space rocket builders make, again and again.
As I haven't followed Carmack I don't know to what extent the above holds true, but I do understand he is trying to do a "hands-on" approach rather than a big-design-up-front one. It is to be expected that he will make a number of mistakes along the way since he's practically forced to invent the entire field.
There is nothing wrong with a hands-on, incremental process - that is an excellent and time honored way to make progress. Carmack's problems stem not from this process, but from re-inventing the field instead of building on the shoulders of what others have done.
Yes, because NASA never installed any sensors backwards, thus never indicating when to pop open a drag 'chute.
Nobody has claimed NASA doesn't make mistakes. But Armadillo is a whole 'nother ballgame - they have an ongoing history of making mistakes again and again because of taking shortcuts. Their whole history has been 'two steps forward, one step back because we screwed up again'.
Not that I'm not a fan of NASA. I am. I own the Space Shuttle Operators Manual, and when I was 11 (when I got it) I probably could have flown the shuttle, or at least co-piloted that darn thing.
You significantly underestimate the difficulty of learning how to co-pilot the shuttle.
Point is, mistakes happen. That's fine. What's great about Carmak and co. is that they tend to not only admit, but they also learn from them.
The key to understanding the criticism of Armadillo is this: Most of Carmack's mistakes come not from screwups or ignorance - but from a cowboy attitude and a certainty on his part that he doesn't have to follow widely known aerospace best practices. Him admitting to many of his rocketry mistakes is like me slamming through the front wall of a store and then 'admitting' that I should have used my brakes to stop.
I've noticed that Carmack gets a lot of flack whenever Armadillo stumbles, and it's an interesting psychological phenomena. You'd think that especially on Slashdot, there would be a lot of people who like seeing smart people succeed, but in Carmack's case, there seems to be a lot of resentment about a "mere" video game programmer daring to learn something like rocket science.
No, the resentment comes because he's largely the Keystone Kops of the alt.Space community - constantly blundering about and making bonehead mistakes because he charges ahead without a great of thought and often making mistakes that common good practice would have prevented.
This seems to be especially true of amny "real" engineers, who seem jealous that an outsider with money is trying to do what they can't seem to do, which is produce very low cost access to space. "Yeah, if I had Carmack's money, I could do what he's doing better than he could do it..."
And the hell of it is - a competent engineer (with Carmack's money and like Carmack unfettered by bureaucracy) probably could do better on the same amount of money. Why? Because John spends a lot of money, time, and energy reinventing the wheel and losing vehicles due to bonehead mistakes caused by failing to follow good practice. (No fewer than *three* in this instance - failure to practice configuration contral and ensure the backup matched the flight hardware, failure to perform hardware validation against software requirements/expectations, failure to perform basic testing of new functions in the hangar rather than in the field.) He suffered a lot of failures early on because he didn't use aerospace grade wiring harnesses ("They are expensive and probably overengineered" was his reason as best I can recall) for just one example.
I read some of them and wondered how they could have ever made those mistakes (like not drop-testing the ground shutoff code, something that would be very cheap and easy to do and give much greater confidence in that critical part of the system), but I am going to have to assume that there is much more to the development and testing of these things than is obvious from Carmack's posting.
That assumption would be partly right - and partly wrong. Some of Carmack's problems come from trying to bash together old stuff in new ways. Others come from his lack of attention to detail and his somewhat cowboy attitude. (This accident in particular could have been avoided if he had either tested the function in the hangar first rather than under power - a basic principle of flight testing for decades. Or it could have been avoided by validating his hardware lineup/practicing configuration control - another basic principle going back decades.)
He's taken the open source mentality into the rocketry arena and many teams are all the better for it.
Are his complete plans and specifications available for download? No? Then he hasn't taken the open source mentality anywhere.
What he has done is taken the emo blogger mentality and applied it to the rocketry arena.
This is the type of information that NASA would happily write a few hundred page reports on and they encase in cement and bury.
That's what the space fanboy community would like to believe. The truth is that NASA routinely publishes this kind of reports routinely - but most in the space fanboy community can't be bothered to look.
I've been lurking on the rocketry group for a while now and it's great to see the open discussions about everything from rocket design to safety. I've learned more in a few months that I ever did watching all those NASA shuttle launches over the years.
That's your own fault for not getting off your ass years ago and finding the various rocketry groups/fora/newgroups. Not NASA's.
This is a good thing. It proves (again and again) that new technology is never perfect.
You'd have a point, if what Armadillo was doing was new technology. Carmack hasn't spent the past few years inventing anything new - he's spent it reinventing the wheel. Crash after failure after crash has been caused by bonehead mistakes the majors learned to avoid years (if not decades ago) - like this incident, caused because the backup vehicle had a different model IMU. Nobody bothered to check the hardware specs for the software against the physical hardware the software would run on/operate.
When someone can't even get their basic facts straight... They really shouldn't be calling someone else a 'buffoon'. (For the record: 3 Apollo crew and 2 Shuttle crews.)
On the other hand - would you care to stack NASA's accomplishments to date against that of the entire alt.space industry to date?
Oh? You don't want to? I'm not suprised given the paucity of accomplishments among the latter.
Armadillo learns by *doing*, not just by creating paper studies. When they're ready to put humans in space, you can bet that their ships will have had hundreds of test flights.
That's known as making lemonade. Armadillo has to learn by doing - because they have zero experience on which to base studies and analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is a fanboi red herring raised by the OP to divert attention from the fact that Linux *is* vulnerable. Thus, it is properly labled FUD.
Given the paucity of significant investment opportunities in those areas - so what? (Not to mention that 'not losing' is as much a matter of luck as anything else.)
The moment you so lightly dismissed the patent question, you stopped looking at it from a serious business or ROI POV and moved over to the fanboy POV. The remainder of this reply is just more of the same.
More fanboy nonsense and FUD - trying to compare a whole laundry list of investments with a wide variety of prospects to single corporation. (A single corporation that despite the fanboy FUD is performing well - and shows no significant prospects of that changing.)
That's the first thing from the stereotype
"A random blogger regurgitates PR stuff, drools over PR stuff, and can't be bothered to Google, spellcheck, or edit his writings". Would be an apt description of TFA.
I long for the day when Slashdot linked to substantial material, rather than fanboi crap.
That's what college students would have you believe.
Well, maybe they would constitute a majority is some remote county in Montana.
And if we are really, really lucky... People will realize that such obsessions are nothing particularly new.
In reality, it's pretty much impossible to discuss open source without it being about licensing - because licenses are the legal expression of the open source philosophy. If your are discussing the code, you are discussing the application or the language, not open source.
Thats true of 'geek' special interest magazines - but you err in generalizing from that very specific subset. Hobbyist special interest magazines (like 'Model Railroader') are doing just fine, as are many cooking magazines (a field where the web has made little if any penetration).
You are absolutely correct that it is a First Amendment issue - but you have the agressor and the aggrieved reversed.
The law is absolutely clear that when one party is exercising his right to speak, any second party that attempts to interfere is in the wrong. It's also absolutely clear that it doesn't matter who the party of the first part is, it can be a Black Panther or the local KKK head. Both are equally protected.
Possibly because you misunderstood the protocol - or misunderstood the reason the mass spectrometer was employed. (Or mistook PR material for scientific protocols, as seems likely.)
Anyhow, the reason the mass spectrometer was included was simple, under a variety of conditions the other experiments could provide false positives. The mass spectrometer was included as a quality control check to rule-out or rule-in any positives from the other experiments.
We didn't suffer a failure of nerve - we suffered a failure of budget. The Vikings were what is now known as 'battlestar' type programs, massive (and very expensive) all-in-one scientific expeditions. With the oil crisis and inflation of the 70's, the budget took a huge hit, and Congress stopped funding these types of missions. Then across the 80's Congress took a hostile attitude towards Mars exploration that further stymied any research. It's not until recently that Congress has reversed it's position, but it has not lifted the budgetary straightjacket.
Which, I shouldn't have to point out hasn't been done yet. A lot of people are celebrating the 'accomplishments' of the alt.space industry - when they haven't actually done anything yet. (Kinda like celebrating the 'sucess' of a guy who just bought a kayak with the intent to row it around the world.)
Oh, nobody will argue that. But honest folks will also point out that NASA and the the traditional aerospace companies have never seriously tried, or even been tasked with 'doing space economically'.
With regards to the first - there is no evidence to date that they are wrong. None. (The guys closest to possibly doing so, SpaceX, have just postponed their next flight - again.) With regards to SS1, no they didn't say it could not be done - that's an urban legend.
ROTFLAMO. I love how you create 'facts' from thin air, and in utter ignorance of reality.
When the insurance company funded the prize - SS1 was just a private paper study in Rutan's files, unfunded and unnanounced beyond some vague rumors. (Burt said, on multiple occasions, he wouldn't even start work on a vehicle until the Prize was fully funded.) At the time the prize was funded (by insurance, and for a limited time), not one team was fully funded, and not one team had flown or even ground tested significant hardware. With the evidence publically available at the time - the insurance company made a good bet. Even the alt.space community was surprised when Rutan rolled out his design and timetable.
Incorrect. Words and phrases can be trademarked as well. If you create anything and call it a 'Tin Man' - you violate the trademark.
Biosphere II, with zero sucessful runs is better than the NASA experiments with three different (manned!) configurations, four sucessful runs, and over a year of total 'lock-in' time?
Let's just say your understanding is a wee bit flawed.
You gain experience by building and flying - you make progress by analysis and studies. The writeup on this accident even makes this clear, he found out what went wrong by analyzing what happened. John's mistake lies in incorrectly generalizing from his specific experience with a tiny tradespace to a larger field.
For example - the mission mode used for the lunar missions came not from 'building and testing things', but from analysis and studies. And a damm good thing too! The original proposed approaches, before anyone thought too hard about it, stood little chance of working and would not only have been far more dangerous - but much more expensive to boot. Or take the Gemini program, where there were (IIRC) four different potential rendezvous modes. We could have flown four Gemini/Agena pairs to find that three of them would require too much fuel or were otherwise beyond the capability of the vehicles... But we didn't. A bunch of engineers sat down and ran the math and analyzed the approaches - and we scored a bullseye on the first try. Etc... etc... Examples abound when you actually sit down and study the history of just the space program and read the source documents.
I'd be the first to admit that studies and analysis can be over done, but to sneer and reject them outright is a sign of ignorance.
I don't care who is open or financed or not - because that has nothing to do with my point.
But you have a chip on your shoulders about engineers, and a fanboy worship of Carmak. Facts don't matter to you.
That's the key - I have followed John for years... And he has yet to prove one 'best practice' wrong. Look right in the writeup of this accident - where it didn't occur to him to try a drop test in the hangar first, instead testing a new function for the first time in the field. In computers this would be the equivalent of compiling a program - and then running it without checking the compiler error log. It's dumb - and everyone knows not to do it.
It's an error many of the various alt.space rocket builders make, again and again.
There is nothing wrong with a hands-on, incremental process - that is an excellent and time honored way to make progress. Carmack's problems stem not from this process, but from re-inventing the field instead of building on the shoulders of what others have done.
Nobody has claimed NASA doesn't make mistakes. But Armadillo is a whole 'nother ballgame - they have an ongoing history of making mistakes again and again because of taking shortcuts. Their whole history has been 'two steps forward, one step back because we screwed up again'.
You significantly underestimate the difficulty of learning how to co-pilot the shuttle.
The key to understanding the criticism of Armadillo is this: Most of Carmack's mistakes come not from screwups or ignorance - but from a cowboy attitude and a certainty on his part that he doesn't have to follow widely known aerospace best practices. Him admitting to many of his rocketry mistakes is like me slamming through the front wall of a store and then 'admitting' that I should have used my brakes to stop.
No, the resentment comes because he's largely the Keystone Kops of the alt.Space community - constantly blundering about and making bonehead mistakes because he charges ahead without a great of thought and often making mistakes that common good practice would have prevented.
And the hell of it is - a competent engineer (with Carmack's money and like Carmack unfettered by bureaucracy) probably could do better on the same amount of money. Why? Because John spends a lot of money, time, and energy reinventing the wheel and losing vehicles due to bonehead mistakes caused by failing to follow good practice. (No fewer than *three* in this instance - failure to practice configuration contral and ensure the backup matched the flight hardware, failure to perform hardware validation against software requirements/expectations, failure to perform basic testing of new functions in the hangar rather than in the field.) He suffered a lot of failures early on because he didn't use aerospace grade wiring harnesses ("They are expensive and probably overengineered" was his reason as best I can recall) for just one example.
That assumption would be partly right - and partly wrong. Some of Carmack's problems come from trying to bash together old stuff in new ways. Others come from his lack of attention to detail and his somewhat cowboy attitude. (This accident in particular could have been avoided if he had either tested the function in the hangar first rather than under power - a basic principle of flight testing for decades. Or it could have been avoided by validating his hardware lineup/practicing configuration control - another basic principle going back decades.)
Are his complete plans and specifications available for download? No? Then he hasn't taken the open source mentality anywhere.
What he has done is taken the emo blogger mentality and applied it to the rocketry arena.
That's what the space fanboy community would like to believe. The truth is that NASA routinely publishes this kind of reports routinely - but most in the space fanboy community can't be bothered to look.
That's your own fault for not getting off your ass years ago and finding the various rocketry groups/fora/newgroups. Not NASA's.
You'd have a point, if what Armadillo was doing was new technology. Carmack hasn't spent the past few years inventing anything new - he's spent it reinventing the wheel. Crash after failure after crash has been caused by bonehead mistakes the majors learned to avoid years (if not decades ago) - like this incident, caused because the backup vehicle had a different model IMU. Nobody bothered to check the hardware specs for the software against the physical hardware the software would run on/operate.
When someone can't even get their basic facts straight... They really shouldn't be calling someone else a 'buffoon'. (For the record: 3 Apollo crew and 2 Shuttle crews.)
On the other hand - would you care to stack NASA's accomplishments to date against that of the entire alt.space industry to date?
Oh? You don't want to? I'm not suprised given the paucity of accomplishments among the latter.
That's known as making lemonade. Armadillo has to learn by doing - because they have zero experience on which to base studies and analysis.
Just because the text (which is under copyright) are public domain does not mean the characters (which are under trademark) are.