Actually Ariane is the most reliable launch vehicle available today. Ariane 5 started off a bit shaky though. Not bad for a company doing 15 to 25 launches a year, possibly more by now (although with the double-satellite launches this might be reduced). To say that Ariane 4 is less proven is a bit off!
I'm sure that if the new rockets work well enough, then they will do well. Cost predictions don't usually turn out to be final costs though, but even at double the price they will undercut their competitors significantly.
Hmm, if you have a small device to launch, an Ariane-4 ASAP looks to be the best option. If I am reading http://centaur.sstl.co.uk/SSHP/launcher/launch_asa p.html correctly, you can put a 50kg object into orbit for $1.2m (actually up to 4 50kg objects into orbit). Looks like excess capacity in scheduled launches is utilised.
An Ariane 5 launch will be expensive though... they have to recoup $8b in development costs, although the rocket is powerful enough to launch space planes (The Hermes, cancelled). I don't see a launch under $100m for this launcher, of course they would be for massive devices anyway, 1000kg - 10000kg, or dual-launch of smaller devices. http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvs/ariane5.htm ah, $180m a launch... or $120m a launch http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/project/launchers/ariane/ ariane.html
Ariane 44P apparently can launch at a cost of $10m and do 3000kg devices... that must be a mistype, the other Ariane 4 launches are around $80m a flight.
I'd bet the insurance on an untested launch vehicle with so-far 50% failure rate would be a fair portion of the cost of the launch+device! Insurance appears to take up a large portion of space-launch costs.
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/267:: "That competition is caused by an oversupply of launch vehicles in a soft market according to a recent report by Booz-Allen and Hamilton mentioned in Spacelift Washington. That report notes that the "excess capacity" in the launch vehicle market is currently at 35 percent of the market and growing, creating a downward pressure on prices. That excess capacity may not deter new entrants into the launch vehicle market, such as Japan's H-2A and India's GSLV, but it will prevent them from gaining more than a small piece of the overall market."
It will have to go up against a lot of established players, most notably Ariane with their 12,000 tonne payload launch system, Ariane 5. I don't know what a launch on Ariane 5 costs at the moment though.
Indeed, thanks for reminding me. I wonder how much profit that area makes? They also sell material to UK-TV don't they (UK Gold and the like), although they might be part-owners.
Although I do think that as a Brit I should be able to get BBC material at cost + shipping... hey, we paid for it already!
As it is, a large black brick with a large green X is not coming inside my house. Someone bring the MS XBox division into the new millennium regarding console design, please!
Odd isn't it... the small, professional looking GameCube plays colourful kiddie games (excellent games, don't get me wrong) in the main. The large, colourful Duplo-style console is the one with the more adult games.
Well there is fuck all they can do about it, they can either get some money in for relicencing the software (and gain more customers to use as examples) or not get any money ever. It would be in the interest of the company to licence the correct number of developers of course because you don't suddenly release software and that is it - you'll want to improve it, rework it based on feedback, etc, and that takes developers.
Anyway, if the application was decently designed, you'd only need a bare minimum of QT licences - just for the people who work on the GUI, surely? You wouldn't need to licence the other programmers who don't work on the GUI in any way.
Use the GPL then, if you all like each other and you are sharing the software between each other, what is the problem? You can still sell software under the GPL! You just have to provide the source to the people that get the software from you. As all the companies have earned favour, then probably also means that they have earned some trust.
The GPL doesn't mean that you have to have to suddenly make the source downloadable to all! Only the people you give/sell the program to. i.e., the best way would be on the CD that the program comes on.
Oh, but you'll complain you can't use the GPL because you integrate some proprietary stuff into the code or something. Well f*cking pay the money for the developer licence then! Damn, if the developer saves a reasonable amount of time programming the GUI because you are using QT, then you have no extra costs anyway so you won't have to raise your end software price. If that is still a no-no, then use LGPL GTK and spend the extra time fighting it to do something, or use Windows and learn the meaning of the word "loathe".
An in-house application, i.e., not released to the outside world, would not have to abide by the GPL even if using a GPL library! So QT (free), KDevelop (free)... oh wait, no upfront cost at all. Now if you decided to release your internal application to the rest of the world, that would be an issue. I bet you'd relicense it and then pay the fee to Trolltech - if you think you can make money off of your product, then paying the small fees is not an issue.
I mean, who could request the source! Oh, an internal developer - no issue there.
It would be an amazingly cheap price for twice that, especially if you already know how to program it. I really should spend some time getting familiar with it when I get some time...
If using this will save 20 hours of development time for a commercial application, it has paid for itself. If this makes porting an application between windows, MacOS and Linux/Unix much much easier, then it is earning a company money just to use it instead of native Windows GUI controls.
BBC1 costs 860m a year to run BBC2 costs 370m BBC3 costs 76m BBC4 costs 42m CBeebies and CBBC cost 40m BBC News 24 costs 24m BBC Parliament costs 3m
All the Radio Stations combined cost 205m All the rest costs around 630m
A total of 2.25b
"There are over 23 million households and businesses in the UK with a TV licence" (source: http://money.msn.co.uk/MyMoney/Insight/SpecialFeat ures/Pennywise/WhatnoTVlicence/default.asp)
TV license costs 116 per household.
So the TV license fee brings in 2.6b
Therefore, the BBC is entirely funded by the TV license and no other taxpayer money
Damn, Sky TV in the UK looks expensive, but at 40/month ($65 adjusted for tax and exchange rate) for the top end package of around 200 channels including all the sports, movies, music, etc it looks like a veritable bargain! Yeah, Sky is satellite... I don't know how a cable company that charges $170 a month stays in business though.
$2.00 a month for always-available cable channels. $0.50 per day for other channels that you can request as and when you want to watch them. Billed at the end of the month.
Reading the thread, it looks like the US government:
1) has to force the TV channels themselves to offer channels individually or as a package to the cable companies
2) force the cable companies to offer either a package solution (as now), or a "Pick Your Own" selection, with per-channel pricing dropping as you get more channels, and possibly more specialised channels being more expensive so that they can afford to run still. Big companies thinking that people will pay $5 a month for their mainstream TV channel might get a shock when they get 100 subscribers because of their greed. Assuming that people vote with their wallet if this happens of course.
$3 a month per channel eh? That's about 1.80 - certainly a nice price for a channel that you watch.
In the UK, 10 a month (forced, license fee) gets you ADVERTISEMENT FREE BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC News 24, 2 BBC Kids Channels (CBeebies and CBBC) and upteen radio stations and local radio stations. That's about the same price per channel... no more fees in addition either as they are all on the terrestrial digital FreeView system, and you get another 15 channels or so with advertising for free in addition. Shame that FreeView isn't available everywhere yet, and might require a new aerial.... maybe for $3 per month per channel in the US you should start to ask for advert free programming too, at least on the popular channels.
Yeah, it is a package still in concept, the 'BBC Channels package', but it isn't a "Kids Package" or an "Entertainment Package", "Music Package", "Sports Package", etc. It does encompass these all. The issue I have with packages (such as Satellite and Cable in the UK) is that they group by genre. How bloody useless! I want a nice range of channels, I wouldn't mind being able to pick 20 channels to watch that I would watch for the 18 a month I pay for cable with 30 channels that I don't pick and don't watch at the moment.
I agree totally - $400 is too much for something that appears to have a lot of DRM embedded inside it.
I thought that e-Ink displays were meant to be cheap! Considering that the rest of the device could be made from cheap components, like 3 year old Palm hardware running whatever eBook OS this device runs. $100 would be the high end of what I'd expect to pay for this.
Still, it is early days yet. Maybe the market will sustain a $300+ eBook device.
I think that the Atari ST had nice styling for the time (it looked nicer than the A500 for example). Shame about the innards though. And these are what counted in the end.
Mars' moons aren't spherical, they are captured asteroids. Very unimpressive things, lumpen.
Whereas Ceres appears to be spherical from all reports I've read about it. No good pictures seem to exist of it though. It is nearly 1000km in diameter though, so big enough to sphericalise itself under self-gravity.
"The first problem is moons. No one wants to call luna a planet."
I do!
I quite like his self-gravity argument. It is simple, it is consistent.
The only problem is that it means there are an awful lot of planets.
Still doesn't mean that we can't create a 'pomeranian' class of planets, i.e., planets that also happen to orbit the sun, and aren't sharing their orbit with a bazillion other rocks. So that would get rid of moons, asteroids and other similar debris fields (Oort cloud, Kuiper Belt, etc) and leave us with 8 'pomeranian' planets.
"Why isn't the United Kingdom considered a continent by anyone except the Brits?"
As a Brit living in Britain, after 26 years of life, I have yet to meet a single person that thought that the UK was a continent.
There is a good solid definition of continent, and Europe and Asia are merely two continents that are deeply in love with each other and they are currently spooning. All the continents agree that Antartica smells.
"he just argues that just because something is small doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered a planet. Well, I hate to burst his bubble, but there are tons of small things out there that we don't call planets precisely because they are smaller: Asteroids!"
You clearly didn't read the article then.
His reasoning is solid. It becomes spherical because of its mass and resultant self gravity. This fits in well with stars (which start fusion under their self gravity). It doesn't depend on an arbitrary planet size.
Asteroid aren't round under self-gravity, except Ceres. So Ceres becomes a planet. Oh no. It's the end of the world. Maybe Ceres will now get the attention it deserves! heh.
The classification you want is the emotional and lazy one... the "what I've been taught is it, I don't want to have to spend 2 minutes relearning the classification" reason, cloaked up as "We'll let pluto stay a planet for historical reasons"...
No, it is the 6th, because the moon is shaped into a sphere by gravity, and thus is a planet also.
Unless you add in the "orbits a star" limitation of course, heh. Otherwise for 14 days in 28 Earth will be the 4th planet from the sun, and the 3rd for the other 14 days.
Of course, the Earth is a master planet in our bi-planetary system. Jupiter is the master planet in its quite large planetary system.
Great, a thread about planets and space, and a large portion of the discussion is taken up by talking about frickin' plants.
Anyway, there should be two definitions of fruit - the scientific term, which you supplied and which is correct, and the term that the average person uses.
Oddly enough, in the layman's definition of fruit, a fruit is not a vegetable. This is because shops are "Fruit and Veg" sections, which hints that the two things are separate beings, and not that fruit is a subset of vegetable. Fruit is a sweeter tasting thing that also has seeds. I.e., for the average person, the most important fact about fruit is that it is sweet. They also happen to have seeds. Vegetables aren't sweet, and you generally cook them. Salad isn't sweet and you don't cook them. Some things are transgender (e.g., red peppers are salad and vegetable although scientifically they are a fruit).
As with planets, the cold harsh logical view is the one that should be used for scientific classification. I.e., all self-rounded by their own gravity bodies in space are planets, and the Solar System currently has at least 40 of these. Moons are also planets, like Fruit are also vegetables (as long as they meet the "self gravity" definition of course. So Sedna, Quaoar, Ceres, Io and Charon are also planets.
So within 20 years textbooks will either be written by those ruled by emotion... "THERE ARE NINE PLANETS I TELL YOU" which will be sold in Kansas, and the rest by cold harsh logic "There are 50 planets in the solar system that have been discovered to date. The term 'planet' is..."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Ariane is the most reliable launch vehicle available today. Ariane 5 started off a bit shaky though. Not bad for a company doing 15 to 25 launches a year, possibly more by now (although with the double-satellite launches this might be reduced). To say that Ariane 4 is less proven is a bit off!
I'm sure that if the new rockets work well enough, then they will do well. Cost predictions don't usually turn out to be final costs though, but even at double the price they will undercut their competitors significantly.
Hmm, if you have a small device to launch, an Ariane-4 ASAP looks to be the best option. If I am reading http://centaur.sstl.co.uk/SSHP/launcher/launch_asa p.html correctly, you can put a 50kg object into orbit for $1.2m (actually up to 4 50kg objects into orbit). Looks like excess capacity in scheduled launches is utilised.
... they have to recoup $8b in development costs, although the rocket is powerful enough to launch space planes (The Hermes, cancelled). I don't see a launch under $100m for this launcher, of course they would be for massive devices anyway, 1000kg - 10000kg, or dual-launch of smaller devices. http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvs /ariane5.htm ah, $180m a launch ... or $120m a launch http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/project/launchers/ariane/ ariane.html
l vf am/ariane.htm
... that must be a mistype, the other Ariane 4 launches are around $80m a flight.
An Ariane 5 launch will be expensive though
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/
Ariane 44P apparently can launch at a cost of $10m and do 3000kg devices
I'd bet the insurance on an untested launch vehicle with so-far 50% failure rate would be a fair portion of the cost of the launch+device! Insurance appears to take up a large portion of space-launch costs.
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/267 ::
"That competition is caused by an oversupply of launch vehicles in a soft market according to a recent report by Booz-Allen and Hamilton mentioned in Spacelift Washington. That report notes that the "excess capacity" in the launch vehicle market is currently at 35 percent of the market and growing, creating a downward pressure on prices. That excess capacity may not deter new entrants into the launch vehicle market, such as Japan's H-2A and India's GSLV, but it will prevent them from gaining more than a small piece of the overall market."
It will have to go up against a lot of established players, most notably Ariane with their 12,000 tonne payload launch system, Ariane 5. I don't know what a launch on Ariane 5 costs at the moment though.
Indeed, thanks for reminding me. I wonder how much profit that area makes? They also sell material to UK-TV don't they (UK Gold and the like), although they might be part-owners.
... hey, we paid for it already!
Although I do think that as a Brit I should be able to get BBC material at cost + shipping
... then I'd get one.
... the small, professional looking GameCube plays colourful kiddie games (excellent games, don't get me wrong) in the main. The large, colourful Duplo-style console is the one with the more adult games.
As it is, a large black brick with a large green X is not coming inside my house. Someone bring the MS XBox division into the new millennium regarding console design, please!
Odd isn't it
Well there is fuck all they can do about it, they can either get some money in for relicencing the software (and gain more customers to use as examples) or not get any money ever. It would be in the interest of the company to licence the correct number of developers of course because you don't suddenly release software and that is it - you'll want to improve it, rework it based on feedback, etc, and that takes developers.
Anyway, if the application was decently designed, you'd only need a bare minimum of QT licences - just for the people who work on the GUI, surely? You wouldn't need to licence the other programmers who don't work on the GUI in any way.
Use the GPL then, if you all like each other and you are sharing the software between each other, what is the problem? You can still sell software under the GPL! You just have to provide the source to the people that get the software from you. As all the companies have earned favour, then probably also means that they have earned some trust.
The GPL doesn't mean that you have to have to suddenly make the source downloadable to all! Only the people you give/sell the program to. i.e., the best way would be on the CD that the program comes on.
Oh, but you'll complain you can't use the GPL because you integrate some proprietary stuff into the code or something. Well f*cking pay the money for the developer licence then! Damn, if the developer saves a reasonable amount of time programming the GUI because you are using QT, then you have no extra costs anyway so you won't have to raise your end software price. If that is still a no-no, then use LGPL GTK and spend the extra time fighting it to do something, or use Windows and learn the meaning of the word "loathe".
An in-house application, i.e., not released to the outside world, would not have to abide by the GPL even if using a GPL library! So QT (free), KDevelop (free) ... oh wait, no upfront cost at all. Now if you decided to release your internal application to the rest of the world, that would be an issue. I bet you'd relicense it and then pay the fee to Trolltech - if you think you can make money off of your product, then paying the small fees is not an issue.
I mean, who could request the source! Oh, an internal developer - no issue there.
Lol. Stop your Anonymous FUD campaign mister.
It would be an amazingly cheap price for twice that, especially if you already know how to program it. I really should spend some time getting familiar with it when I get some time...
If using this will save 20 hours of development time for a commercial application, it has paid for itself. If this makes porting an application between windows, MacOS and Linux/Unix much much easier, then it is earning a company money just to use it instead of native Windows GUI controls.
From: http://www.bbccharterreview.org.uk/consultation/an nexA.html
t ures/Pennywise/WhatnoTVlicence/default.asp)
BBC1 costs 860m a year to run
BBC2 costs 370m
BBC3 costs 76m
BBC4 costs 42m
CBeebies and CBBC cost 40m
BBC News 24 costs 24m
BBC Parliament costs 3m
All the Radio Stations combined cost 205m
All the rest costs around 630m
A total of 2.25b
"There are over 23 million households and businesses in the UK with a TV licence" (source: http://money.msn.co.uk/MyMoney/Insight/SpecialFea
TV license costs 116 per household.
So the TV license fee brings in 2.6b
Therefore, the BBC is entirely funded by the TV license and no other taxpayer money
Fucking Hell, $170 a month for 120 channels?
... I don't know how a cable company that charges $170 a month stays in business though.
Damn, Sky TV in the UK looks expensive, but at 40/month ($65 adjusted for tax and exchange rate) for the top end package of around 200 channels including all the sports, movies, music, etc it looks like a veritable bargain! Yeah, Sky is satellite
Sounds sensible to me.
$2.00 a month for always-available cable channels. $0.50 per day for other channels that you can request as and when you want to watch them. Billed at the end of the month.
Reading the thread, it looks like the US government:
1) has to force the TV channels themselves to offer channels individually or as a package to the cable companies
2) force the cable companies to offer either a package solution (as now), or a "Pick Your Own" selection, with per-channel pricing dropping as you get more channels, and possibly more specialised channels being more expensive so that they can afford to run still. Big companies thinking that people will pay $5 a month for their mainstream TV channel might get a shock when they get 100 subscribers because of their greed. Assuming that people vote with their wallet if this happens of course.
$3 a month per channel eh? That's about 1.80 - certainly a nice price for a channel that you watch.
... no more fees in addition either as they are all on the terrestrial digital FreeView system, and you get another 15 channels or so with advertising for free in addition. Shame that FreeView isn't available everywhere yet, and might require a new aerial. ... maybe for $3 per month per channel in the US you should start to ask for advert free programming too, at least on the popular channels.
In the UK, 10 a month (forced, license fee) gets you ADVERTISEMENT FREE BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC News 24, 2 BBC Kids Channels (CBeebies and CBBC) and upteen radio stations and local radio stations. That's about the same price per channel
Yeah, it is a package still in concept, the 'BBC Channels package', but it isn't a "Kids Package" or an "Entertainment Package", "Music Package", "Sports Package", etc. It does encompass these all. The issue I have with packages (such as Satellite and Cable in the UK) is that they group by genre. How bloody useless! I want a nice range of channels, I wouldn't mind being able to pick 20 channels to watch that I would watch for the 18 a month I pay for cable with 30 channels that I don't pick and don't watch at the moment.
The browser choice for the discerning balrog spider!
I agree totally - $400 is too much for something that appears to have a lot of DRM embedded inside it.
I thought that e-Ink displays were meant to be cheap! Considering that the rest of the device could be made from cheap components, like 3 year old Palm hardware running whatever eBook OS this device runs. $100 would be the high end of what I'd expect to pay for this.
Still, it is early days yet. Maybe the market will sustain a $300+ eBook device.
Does that 200% Zoom allow for refactoring the text so that it fits on the screen without the need to scroll left/right/up/down to see the whole page?
"At 30 Frames/sec, a battery life of 10,000 pages is less than 6 minutes."
Sucks if you are Data, but for most people who read one page a minute there shouldn't be a problem!
Anyway, it is probably because they use AAA batteries, which aren't that great.
I think that the Atari ST had nice styling for the time (it looked nicer than the A500 for example). Shame about the innards though. And these are what counted in the end.
Mars' moons aren't spherical, they are captured asteroids. Very unimpressive things, lumpen.
Whereas Ceres appears to be spherical from all reports I've read about it. No good pictures seem to exist of it though. It is nearly 1000km in diameter though, so big enough to sphericalise itself under self-gravity.
"The first problem is moons. No one wants to call luna a planet."
I do!
I quite like his self-gravity argument. It is simple, it is consistent.
The only problem is that it means there are an awful lot of planets.
Still doesn't mean that we can't create a 'pomeranian' class of planets, i.e., planets that also happen to orbit the sun, and aren't sharing their orbit with a bazillion other rocks. So that would get rid of moons, asteroids and other similar debris fields (Oort cloud, Kuiper Belt, etc) and leave us with 8 'pomeranian' planets.
What is a pomeranian anyway?
"Why isn't the United Kingdom considered a continent by anyone except the Brits?"
As a Brit living in Britain, after 26 years of life, I have yet to meet a single person that thought that the UK was a continent.
There is a good solid definition of continent, and Europe and Asia are merely two continents that are deeply in love with each other and they are currently spooning. All the continents agree that Antartica smells.
"he just argues that just because something is small doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered a planet. Well, I hate to burst his bubble, but there are tons of small things out there that we don't call planets precisely because they are smaller: Asteroids!"
... the "what I've been taught is it, I don't want to have to spend 2 minutes relearning the classification" reason, cloaked up as "We'll let pluto stay a planet for historical reasons" ...
You clearly didn't read the article then.
His reasoning is solid. It becomes spherical because of its mass and resultant self gravity. This fits in well with stars (which start fusion under their self gravity). It doesn't depend on an arbitrary planet size.
Asteroid aren't round under self-gravity, except Ceres. So Ceres becomes a planet. Oh no. It's the end of the world. Maybe Ceres will now get the attention it deserves! heh.
The classification you want is the emotional and lazy one
No, it is the 6th, because the moon is shaped into a sphere by gravity, and thus is a planet also.
Unless you add in the "orbits a star" limitation of course, heh. Otherwise for 14 days in 28 Earth will be the 4th planet from the sun, and the 3rd for the other 14 days.
Of course, the Earth is a master planet in our bi-planetary system. Jupiter is the master planet in its quite large planetary system.
Great, a thread about planets and space, and a large portion of the discussion is taken up by talking about frickin' plants.
... "THERE ARE NINE PLANETS I TELL YOU" which will be sold in Kansas, and the rest by cold harsh logic "There are 50 planets in the solar system that have been discovered to date. The term 'planet' is ..."
Anyway, there should be two definitions of fruit - the scientific term, which you supplied and which is correct, and the term that the average person uses.
Oddly enough, in the layman's definition of fruit, a fruit is not a vegetable. This is because shops are "Fruit and Veg" sections, which hints that the two things are separate beings, and not that fruit is a subset of vegetable. Fruit is a sweeter tasting thing that also has seeds. I.e., for the average person, the most important fact about fruit is that it is sweet. They also happen to have seeds. Vegetables aren't sweet, and you generally cook them. Salad isn't sweet and you don't cook them. Some things are transgender (e.g., red peppers are salad and vegetable although scientifically they are a fruit).
As with planets, the cold harsh logical view is the one that should be used for scientific classification. I.e., all self-rounded by their own gravity bodies in space are planets, and the Solar System currently has at least 40 of these. Moons are also planets, like Fruit are also vegetables (as long as they meet the "self gravity" definition of course. So Sedna, Quaoar, Ceres, Io and Charon are also planets.
So within 20 years textbooks will either be written by those ruled by emotion
I had to add a user "proxy" and the groups "proxy" and "authpf" in order to get make installworld to work.
They weren't configured by the standard install (5.2.1), yet were required for the installworld procedure. I think it has something to do with PF.