I got a tube of some sort of thermal goop when I bought a new fan for my video card (the old one was spalling or got a dented ball bearing or something).
I spread the goop on the chip, clipped on the new fan, and THREW THE REST OF THE TUBE AWAY.
So the moral is: if you're going to do a recall, do it on a disposable product.
By now they have probably rebooted it (forced it through safe mode to clear any software fault; space vehicles never really go all the way "down"), so if it's still happenning I would say it's either a hardware fault or corruption of essential software or data in (putatively) nonvolatile memory (not unreasonable in high-rad environments).
If it is corruption of secondary memory, and since they can send valid commands, presumably they can attempt to upload new data/code to fix it.
If they haven't forced it through safe mode, then they're not too worried and are more interested in characterizing the problem than getting on with the scientific mission. Which is a good or a bad thing depending on which sort of information is more valuable. I'm sure the guys in the software group have their bias.
Imagine yourself in India, doing the same thing for 80% less pay.
Or on the street wondering if a Masters in Computer Science will help you get an assistant manager job at a Taco Bell because your employer imagined your job in India costing him 80% less.
>Lexus? For the love of god, why? >Goddamn piece of shit.
You've never
a) Driven one b) Owned one
They're great cars. I'm still driving that thing after 6 years, and it still gets people going "wow, is that new?"
Re:As a racing engineer....
on
The Star Wars Car
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a Lexus GS-400, and a long, straight, flat, low-traffic place to drive it reeely fassst, so, naturally, within a couple of weeks of buying it (new) I went to see where its top end is.
GS-400s have a curvy, stout body, with token ground-effect moulding up front. The specs I'd seen said it should get into the 160s, but with all that sheet-metal I had questions.
At 145, the front end of the body started to float a bit. The wheels didn't come loose, but if I'd tried for 150, they might have. The car was nutating in three dimensions; basically flapping at a low frequency. This was severely reducing my chances of maintaining control, so I got off the throttle and let it coast back to legal speed (it took about a mile to get to 145 from 0, and a mile to idle back down to 65).
The rear end, with its little wing/spoiler/go-fast option, was just fine.
It wasn't even breathing hard at 145. The Tach said I had another 20-30% in the mill.
I did, however, melt about 2,000 miles off the tires (140 treadwear rating; soft, grippy rubber like rock-climbing shoes; specced for 12K miles before replacement under normal driving conditions, but you need that traction in this thing or you're spinning at every green light; I can't imagine what kind of glue the VW Phaeton's tires will have to exude to stick down) and left it as a dusty black film on the rear fenders.
I think with a tighter suspension (they'd softened it to make the car a little less hotrod and a little more luxury sedan) and a shallower nose, or a nose-wing, I could have clocked into the 160s, maybe 170s.
An engineer's pay costs about 1e5 dollars per year. Overhead for that engineer costs about 1e5 dollars per year. 1e9 dollars per year would therefore fund about 5e3 engineers' careers, less any money used to pay for raw materials.
That's about 1 in 2e3 of the engineers Bush's economy has failed to employ.
>>I don't know about you, but if I worked at JPL, I'd actually feel comfortable wearing a wearable computer with full-keyboard cuffs. > >But you don't work at JPL, do you? Do you see any of the engineers in all of the video streams wearing computers? Nope.
Underpaid government workers, most of them. Somewhere in the background of one of those pictures you'll eventually find someone winding the stem of a Palm III belted to his wrist.
Well, if we count backwards the generations from now until the creation of Adam, I think we can safely set the 0:00:00 date to about 6,000 years ago (left as an excercise for the reader).
I'm still wondering how they will account for such things as time standing still for Joshua.
Maybe he was waiting for someone who would have liked to play a game.
>[electronic watches] won't last nearly as long: they'll either get wet, simply stop working, or wear out electronically long before a Rolex begins to stop keeping the correct time.
N.B.: Among watch afficionadoes, Rolex is something of a joke, mostly because they don't keep time nearly as well as equivalently-priced watches from less-widely-marketed makers (International Watch Co., Breitling, et al), and partly because of the enormous number of counterfeitRolexen in the wild.
"After he accommodates all rover team members who wish to own a custom-made Mars watch, he will market his patented rarity to the public."
The more power to him. I hope he takes a cue from the people at Audemars-Piguet, Piaget, Jaeger Le Coultre, et al, and prices these rarities in the high-5-figures.
Some of us/. readers are literal rocket scientists.
The fuel-burn calculations for certain kinds of Space Shuttle orbiter maneuvering are performed on (old) HP scientific programmable calculators on the shuttles while in flight (unless they've upgraded in the last few years).
I bet my Palm V could handle launch conditions no sweat.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm-hmm.
I got a tube of some sort of thermal goop when I bought a new fan for my video card (the old one was spalling or got a dented ball bearing or something).
I spread the goop on the chip, clipped on the new fan, and THREW THE REST OF THE TUBE AWAY.
So the moral is: if you're going to do a recall, do it on a disposable product.
Safe mode is called safe mode because it's not supposed to make anything worse. If it does, someone's got some 'splainin' to do, loocee.
By now they have probably rebooted it (forced it through safe mode to clear any software fault; space vehicles never really go all the way "down"), so if it's still happenning I would say it's either a hardware fault or corruption of essential software or data in (putatively) nonvolatile memory (not unreasonable in high-rad environments).
If it is corruption of secondary memory, and since they can send valid commands, presumably they can attempt to upload new data/code to fix it.
If they haven't forced it through safe mode, then they're not too worried and are more interested in characterizing the problem than getting on with the scientific mission. Which is a good or a bad thing depending on which sort of information is more valuable. I'm sure the guys in the software group have their bias.
It's not that your brain solves the problem in the background; it's that you forget the things that are blocking the solution from coming forward.
>Well, aside from it not being very nice(i.e. selling out your fellow man)....what is the downside of exporting work to India?
When the people sold out start cooking and eating the people who sold them out.
"Think outside the box? How?"
Imagine yourself in India, doing the same thing for 80% less pay.
Or on the street wondering if a Masters in Computer Science will help you get an assistant manager job at a Taco Bell because your employer imagined your job in India costing him 80% less.
NOW GET BACK TO WORK!
"work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay mill-owner for permission to come to work"
Ah. So you've seen the Bush plan for the feudal future of America.
But it ain't already free. They're just being greedy and trying to make more money out of it.
Pretty hypocritical, considering it wouldn't exist without a lot of donated tax-money research and net-hacker time.
>Lexus? For the love of god, why?
>Goddamn piece of shit.
You've never
a) Driven one
b) Owned one
They're great cars. I'm still driving that thing after 6 years, and it still gets people going "wow, is that new?"
I have a Lexus GS-400, and a long, straight, flat, low-traffic place to drive it reeely fassst, so, naturally, within a couple of weeks of buying it (new) I went to see where its top end is.
GS-400s have a curvy, stout body, with token ground-effect moulding up front. The specs I'd seen said it should get into the 160s, but with all that sheet-metal I had questions.
At 145, the front end of the body started to float a bit. The wheels didn't come loose, but if I'd tried for 150, they might have. The car was nutating in three dimensions; basically flapping at a low frequency. This was severely reducing my chances of maintaining control, so I got off the throttle and let it coast back to legal speed (it took about a mile to get to 145 from 0, and a mile to idle back down to 65).
The rear end, with its little wing/spoiler/go-fast option, was just fine.
It wasn't even breathing hard at 145. The Tach said I had another 20-30% in the mill.
I did, however, melt about 2,000 miles off the tires (140 treadwear rating; soft, grippy rubber like rock-climbing shoes; specced for 12K miles before replacement under normal driving conditions, but you need that traction in this thing or you're spinning at every green light; I can't imagine what kind of glue the VW Phaeton's tires will have to exude to stick down) and left it as a dusty black film on the rear fenders.
I think with a tighter suspension (they'd softened it to make the car a little less hotrod and a little more luxury sedan) and a shallower nose, or a nose-wing, I could have clocked into the 160s, maybe 170s.
And Burt Rutan thinks he has a rocket.
Not enough e's, n's, or g's in that otherwise semantic-free name. They should call it
eggnog gegeben engineering
if they really want to frot your glottis.
To 1 sig. fig.:
An engineer's pay costs about 1e5 dollars per year. Overhead for that engineer costs about 1e5 dollars per year. 1e9 dollars per year would therefore fund about 5e3 engineers' careers, less any money used to pay for raw materials.
That's about 1 in 2e3 of the engineers Bush's economy has failed to employ.
Just explain to George W. Bush that it'll get him the votes of all the astronauts and refresh his soul if he'll paint it for you.
>>I don't know about you, but if I worked at JPL, I'd actually feel comfortable wearing a wearable computer with full-keyboard cuffs.
>
>But you don't work at JPL, do you? Do you see any of the engineers in all of the video streams wearing computers? Nope.
Underpaid government workers, most of them. Somewhere in the background of one of those pictures you'll eventually find someone winding the stem of a Palm III belted to his wrist.
This guy has played both Sam Giancana and Frank Costello, and his early TV career smells of all-mobbed-up.
I think the Academy is probably rethinking its policy of bringing heat down on people willing to turn a buck selling their screener tapes.
Well, if we count backwards the generations from now until the creation of Adam, I think we can safely set the 0:00:00 date to about 6,000 years ago (left as an excercise for the reader).
I'm still wondering how they will account for such things as time standing still for Joshua.
Maybe he was waiting for someone who would have liked to play a game.
Now, how about a Beowulf cluster of Timex Sinclairs?
How about a Beowulf cluster of Timex stem-wound day-dates with faux leather strap!
I don't know about you, but if I worked at JPL, I'd actually feel comfortable wearing a wearable computer with full-keyboard cuffs.
A modern, "bulky" PDA watch would feel kind of elegant in that environment.
A single-function, one-time-zone (MIT: Martian Invasion Time?) device would feel positively underpowered.
Even though I don't work at JPL, I won't wear an analog watch with fewer than 3 extra dials and a date window on the face.
Swear to god, the first time I was ever offered a $20 Rolex on the street, I almost bought it because it was spelled "Rollex".
>[electronic watches] won't last nearly as long: they'll either get wet, simply stop working, or wear out electronically long before a Rolex begins to stop keeping the correct time.
N.B.: Among watch afficionadoes, Rolex is something of a joke, mostly because they don't keep time nearly as well as equivalently-priced watches from less-widely-marketed makers (International Watch Co., Breitling, et al), and partly because of the enormous number of counterfeit Rolexen in the wild.
And, in case anyone's wondering, the original Moon watch is the Omega Speedmaster Professional.
"After he accommodates all rover team members who wish to own a custom-made Mars watch, he will market his patented rarity to the public."
The more power to him. I hope he takes a cue from the people at Audemars-Piguet, Piaget, Jaeger Le Coultre, et al, and prices these rarities in the high-5-figures.
Some of us /. readers are literal rocket scientists.
The fuel-burn calculations for certain kinds of Space Shuttle orbiter maneuvering are performed on (old) HP scientific programmable calculators on the shuttles while in flight (unless they've upgraded in the last few years).
I bet my Palm V could handle launch conditions no sweat.
>Push my kids into becoming professional liars?
Then you are leaving leadership to the professional liars.
And since when did I say there had to be countries?
Grand Theft Auto III, the game that changed the face of gaming forever.
Who left the cap off the nitrous tank, again...
Think about it.
This planet has an abundant, self-procreating biome. Trillions of tons of edible matter.
Which other planet in the solar system comes close to that?
>Which is why I'm encouraging my kids to either pursue mechanical engineering or aerospace tech; I want them OFF this planet as soon as its possible.
Send your kids into political science courses so they can help fix the only planet humans will ever call home.