All the big players have their own space agencies to fund too. If the NASA had to compete with the California Space Agency you bet they'd be flying less missions too.
As someone watching the selection process with curiousity, one thing struck me; where's Darwin?
It's interesting that Plato was selected (instead?). Clearly from a ESA perspective it's more in line with current thinking; reuse either the Herschel or Gaia bus and build on Corot. I imagine that the French delegation were pushing hard too. But ESA has invested quite a lot of time on the Darwin concept and I would have though that it would have made it at to at least the study phase.
Was Darwin too far out on the cutting edge compared to Plato? Was it too closely mingled with TPF? Too expensive?
Also 3M+3L = 8 or 9 missions? Too much choice, it seems. Hope there are enough study scientists to go round.
Actually, they're pretty moderate and reasonable with their analyses, they advocate market solutions for problems that a market can solve i.e. most things.
They go with the least-worst economic system (free-market with a small dash of government regulation to stop the worse excesses of capitalism) since that appears to have won the argument so far. So they obsess about what Greenspan says, but isn't that their job? That's the "Economist" bit in "The Economist".
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
I don't think the report argues for this at all, it merely says that the overall managerial strength has to rise in proportion to the overall complexity of the thing you are building.
I would not say that Beagle2 management was incompent, just did not have time or money soon enough to do things as they should have been done or how they would have wanted to do them.
Doesn't even exist I believe; at least not in the context of making copies for personal use, at least according to this Register article. At least in the US there is at least some legal protection (currently under attack, admittedly)
Mike Batt is one of those, um, quirky composers that springs up in the UK from time to time. Undoubtably a serious musician, however probably his best known work is is theme tune to The Wombles, a song which is lodged in the collective unconscious of anybody who grew up in the UK during the 70s and 80s. He had a band called The Wombles and dressed up as a Womble and well, you get the idea. Could only have happened in the 70s.
He also wrote and produced 'Bright Eyes' (from Watership Down) for Art Garfunkel, which I didn't know until 5 minutes ago.
That's part of the distribution of costs agreement between NASA and ESA; NASA is paying the majority of the costs (and so American astronomers get the majority of observing time). ESA contributes an instrument and the launch vehicle and ESA member states gets a corresponding amount of science time, through a European Coordinating Facility.
It's not a bad agreement and not all that uncommon.
Which is true, but missing the point somewhat. Given an half decent optimizing compiler, C/C++ should almost always be faster than Java, but not so much faster that the speed becomes a deciding factor over the advantages that Java has compared to C/C++.
Now, there are always a certain class of programmer who must always have the absolute fastest performance possible. For them, C/C++ is the weapon of choice, if they don't have the time to hand-craft assembler.
For everyone else, it becomes a decision based on personal perference, technical imperative, management decision or dogma.
Beagle 2 wasn't an ESA mission; it was a U.K. mission piggy-backing on Mars Express, which _is_ an ESA mission. MArs Express is working fine, give or take a lower-than-designed power budget.
I think that the U.N. as an entire organization gets a bad rap due to the going-nowhere and doing-nothing nature of the General Assembly (a talking shop, par excellence) and the Security Council (almost always veto-deadlocked, and impotent even when it does agree on something). However, the ITU, along with other organisations under the U.N. umbrella (like the UNHCR), doesn't actually do a bad job as such.
If it wasn't for some obtuse decisions and the opaque decision-making process which ICANN has specialised in, and the commercialisation of the Internet at a core level (Hi VeriSign!); I doubt very much if anyone would care who ran the Internet. Unfortunately, the running of the Internet does have the look of an elite club about it (for good historical reasons), and those on the outside feel disenfranchised by the process through which decisions are made for them.
In the end, this isn't about who's better at running the Internet, but rather a case of who has the power.
Yes, but I think this scheme has led to, or been required by, a lowering of, well for want of better phrase, gentlemanly conduct.
Not so long ago; if there was an element of doubt in a decision, but the batsmen knew that he was out; he'd walk, before the umpire made a decision.
I guess it sounds a bit twee in these days of the multi-billion euro/dollar/whatever machine that the sports industry has become, but I guess it was very much the spirit of the game. However, as the stakes were raised, fewer and fewer batsmen would do this; and the third umpire became necessary, which just encouraged more and more batsmen to stick around until the third umpire made the decision; everybody ends up looking at the red/green light that they use, rather than at the officials on the pitch.
Actually, they're aimed at being much cheaper, Rosetta, Mars Express and Venus Express use/will use the same platform and control system, Rosetta and Mars Express share the same Flight Control Team and support staff.
This may not sound like a big deal, but it can really cut down on the cost
I don't think you've got good reasons at all. Yes, ESA is an international organisation, but it isn't the barrel o' pork that NASA is, and it is by comparison, reasonably stream-lined organisation. Maybe not as efficient as a private company, but since there is no data on the efficiency of private compnaies organising a space program, we may never know.
The use of the U.K. Blue Streak launcher by the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) was probably a mistake, but as the basis for developing launcher tech it wasn't a bad start; remember Europe didn't have the experience the US had through the Gemini program and effectively was starting from scratch, since the native expertise was whisked off to the US after WWII to work of the US space program.
I think you'll find that Ariane 4 was actually one of the most successful launchers around.
Had the Cluster project not chosen take to get a free ride on an unqualified launcher, no one would have given a rat's ass about Ariane 501. Unfortunately Arianespace started to believe their own PR...
ESA have always had a small fraction of the budget available to NASA; on that basis they've rather well really.
Yes, but all this 20/20 hindsight stuff is very interesting if you're only interested in retrofitting today's technology onto that developed more than 10 years ago. Where was DBC and Eiffel then? Stuck in academia, no doubt.
I wouldn't be surprised to see of the innovations in Eiffel make their way into other environments (except Java, of course, where the recommended solution to adding DBC to Java was of course, to program in Eiffel. Gee, thanks.)
Don't know about JBoss, but Tomcat is a breeze; untar and start it up; you can start drop in webapps straight away.
Now, if you're talking about a secure, robust Tomcat installation, using apache httpd to serve static content, well, that's another matter.
Tomcat is for one of the examples of the success of Java code married to the Open Source model; Sun likes Tomcat becuase they farm out RI work for the Servlet and JSP specs, leaving engineers to concentrate on, well, coming up with more convoluted specs. Sun and its ISVs neither can or want to make any money on a pure Servlet container + JSP implementation.
J2EE, on the other hand; well, Sun hates JBoss, as it is eating to ISV revenue and Sun can't create a monoculture around Java (as Microsoft has very successfully with Win32) if someone is going to give implementations away for free
SCO announces $1bn (that's 10 times current market cap.) dollar law suit against IBM; you think there aren't a few traders who think it is worth a punt?
I think the easy* people have midjudged what people want from a cinema experience.
easyJet works because, for the large majority of people (i.e. everybody who has been on a plane at least once before and aren't in >= Business Class), flights are an enormous pain in the ass and only serve as a means to an end (get to where they want to go). Their pricing model is reasonably transparent and you know what you're getting in terms of service (not a lot).
Whereas the traditional carriers have hideously arcane and obscure pricing models and clearly are charing way over the odds for flights. The cats out of the bag on that one.
Transpose this to the cinema industry and you find that it doesn't work. People *like* the cinema experience; the upturn in cinema attendance after the collapse in the late 80s (at least in the UK) was due in part to the far higher quality of cinema experience (pleasant environment, better seats etc etc). Going to the cinema is not just a means to an end, it's an end in itself.
In any case, 'going to the cinema' is right up there in the top 5% of 'impulse activities'. No one is going to book 10 days in advance for a film. Personally speaking, I can seldom decide which film I'm going to see until 10 minutes before it starts.:)
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All the big players have their own space agencies to fund too. If the NASA had to compete with the California Space Agency you bet they'd be flying less missions too.
As someone watching the selection process with curiousity, one thing struck me; where's Darwin?
It's interesting that Plato was selected (instead?). Clearly from a ESA perspective it's more in line with current thinking; reuse either the Herschel or Gaia bus and build on Corot. I imagine that the French delegation were pushing hard too. But ESA has invested quite a lot of time on the Darwin concept and I would have though that it would have made it at to at least the study phase.
Was Darwin too far out on the cutting edge compared to Plato? Was it too closely mingled with TPF? Too expensive?
Also 3M+3L = 8 or 9 missions? Too much choice, it seems. Hope there are enough study scientists to go round.
Seeing as Inferno is shipped as a HW/SW package for SGI boxes only. I guess that's a niche product though.
OK OK, here's another link.
And *poof* goes the bandwidth for the Geocities site.
So you'll be cancelling your subscription then :)
I think you're mistaking them for Forbes, maybe.
Actually, they're pretty moderate and reasonable with their analyses, they advocate market solutions for problems that a market can solve i.e. most things.
They go with the least-worst economic system (free-market with a small dash of government regulation to stop the worse excesses of capitalism) since that appears to have won the argument so far. So they obsess about what Greenspan says, but isn't that their job? That's the "Economist" bit in "The Economist".
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
I don't think the report argues for this at all, it merely says that the overall managerial strength has to rise in proportion to the overall complexity of the thing you are building.
I would not say that Beagle2 management was incompent, just did not have time or money soon enough to do things as they should have been done or how they would have wanted to do them.
Skynet is, amongst other things, the name of a major satellite communications network used by the UK MoD, about to reach the fifth generation.
I think they choose these names deliberately.
Doesn't even exist I believe; at least not in the context of making copies for personal use, at least according to this Register article. At least in the US there is at least some legal protection (currently under attack, admittedly)
Damn, where are my mod points when I need them. :)
Mike Batt is one of those, um, quirky composers that springs up in the UK from time to time. Undoubtably a serious musician, however probably his best known work is is theme tune to The Wombles, a song which is lodged in the collective unconscious of anybody who grew up in the UK during the 70s and 80s. He had a band called The Wombles and dressed up as a Womble and well, you get the idea. Could only have happened in the 70s.
He also wrote and produced 'Bright Eyes' (from Watership Down) for Art Garfunkel, which I didn't know until 5 minutes ago.
That's part of the distribution of costs agreement between NASA and ESA; NASA is paying the majority of the costs (and so American astronomers get the majority of observing time). ESA contributes an instrument and the launch vehicle and ESA member states gets a corresponding amount of science time, through a European Coordinating Facility.
It's not a bad agreement and not all that uncommon.
Defiantly? You mean someone is trying to sabotage GCC performance on Win32? Is there no end to dirty tricks of those evil OSS programmers? :)
Which is true, but missing the point somewhat. Given an half decent optimizing compiler, C/C++ should almost always be faster than Java, but not so much faster that the speed becomes a deciding factor over the advantages that Java has compared to C/C++.
Now, there are always a certain class of programmer who must always have the absolute fastest performance possible. For them, C/C++ is the weapon of choice, if they don't have the time to hand-craft assembler.
For everyone else, it becomes a decision based on personal perference, technical imperative, management decision or dogma.
Beagle 2 wasn't an ESA mission; it was a U.K. mission piggy-backing on Mars Express, which _is_ an ESA mission. MArs Express is working fine, give or take a lower-than-designed power budget.
I think that the U.N. as an entire organization gets a bad rap due to the going-nowhere and doing-nothing nature of the General Assembly (a talking shop, par excellence) and the Security Council (almost always veto-deadlocked, and impotent even when it does agree on something). However, the ITU, along with other organisations under the U.N. umbrella (like the UNHCR), doesn't actually do a bad job as such.
If it wasn't for some obtuse decisions and the opaque decision-making process which ICANN has specialised in, and the commercialisation of the Internet at a core level (Hi VeriSign!); I doubt very much if anyone would care who ran the Internet. Unfortunately, the running of the Internet does have the look of an elite club about it (for good historical reasons), and those on the outside feel disenfranchised by the process through which decisions are made for them.
In the end, this isn't about who's better at running the Internet, but rather a case of who has the power.
Yes, but I think this scheme has led to, or been required by, a lowering of, well for want of better phrase, gentlemanly conduct.
Not so long ago; if there was an element of doubt in a decision, but the batsmen knew that he was out; he'd walk, before the umpire made a decision.
I guess it sounds a bit twee in these days of the multi-billion euro/dollar/whatever machine that the sports industry has become, but I guess it was very much the spirit of the game. However, as the stakes were raised, fewer and fewer batsmen would do this; and the third umpire became necessary, which just encouraged more and more batsmen to stick around until the third umpire made the decision; everybody ends up looking at the red/green light that they use, rather than at the officials on the pitch.
This may not sound like a big deal, but it can really cut down on the cost
The use of the U.K. Blue Streak launcher by the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) was probably a mistake, but as the basis for developing launcher tech it wasn't a bad start; remember Europe didn't have the experience the US had through the Gemini program and effectively was starting from scratch, since the native expertise was whisked off to the US after WWII to work of the US space program.
I think you'll find that Ariane 4 was actually one of the most successful launchers around.
Had the Cluster project not chosen take to get a free ride on an unqualified launcher, no one would have given a rat's ass about Ariane 501. Unfortunately Arianespace started to believe their own PR...
ESA have always had a small fraction of the budget available to NASA; on that basis they've rather well really.
Yes, but all this 20/20 hindsight stuff is very interesting if you're only interested in retrofitting today's technology onto that developed more than 10 years ago. Where was DBC and Eiffel then? Stuck in academia, no doubt. I wouldn't be surprised to see of the innovations in Eiffel make their way into other environments (except Java, of course, where the recommended solution to adding DBC to Java was of course, to program in Eiffel. Gee, thanks.)
Don't know about JBoss, but Tomcat is a breeze; untar and start it up; you can start drop in webapps straight away.
Now, if you're talking about a secure, robust Tomcat installation, using apache httpd to serve static content, well, that's another matter.
Tomcat is for one of the examples of the success of Java code married to the Open Source model; Sun likes Tomcat becuase they farm out RI work for the Servlet and JSP specs, leaving engineers to concentrate on, well, coming up with more convoluted specs. Sun and its ISVs neither can or want to make any money on a pure Servlet container + JSP implementation.
J2EE, on the other hand; well, Sun hates JBoss, as it is eating to ISV revenue and Sun can't create a monoculture around Java (as Microsoft has very successfully with Win32) if someone is going to give implementations away for free
Surely ADA, not Eiffel? I've never heard of anyone using Eiffel for On-Board Software.
Why?
SCO announces $1bn (that's 10 times current market cap.) dollar law suit against IBM; you think there aren't a few traders who think it is worth a punt?
easyJet works because, for the large majority of people (i.e. everybody who has been on a plane at least once before and aren't in >= Business Class), flights are an enormous pain in the ass and only serve as a means to an end (get to where they want to go). Their pricing model is reasonably transparent and you know what you're getting in terms of service (not a lot).
Whereas the traditional carriers have hideously arcane and obscure pricing models and clearly are charing way over the odds for flights. The cats out of the bag on that one.
Transpose this to the cinema industry and you find that it doesn't work. People *like* the cinema experience; the upturn in cinema attendance after the collapse in the late 80s (at least in the UK) was due in part to the far higher quality of cinema experience (pleasant environment, better seats etc etc). Going to the cinema is not just a means to an end, it's an end in itself.
In any case, 'going to the cinema' is right up there in the top 5% of 'impulse activities'. No one is going to book 10 days in advance for a film. Personally speaking, I can seldom decide which film I'm going to see until 10 minutes before it starts. :)