You got a +2 Interesting for complete bullshit. Must be Slashdot.
Your dad's full of shit, or you are.
The Lunar Lander was built by Rockwell, not TRW as you elude with your comment about credit reporting agencies.
Rockwell sent North American a towing bill as a joke for Apollo 13, when the Lunar Lander "towed" the broken Command Module back to earth. Engineers worked exceedingly hard on both systems, with a number of published biographies that show most of the heads of these projects chose not to have much of a life outside of working problems. And those problems at the time of working them were almost always things that had NEVER been done before. They also had a sense of humor back then.
Anyway, the Lander used hypergolic fuels in the engine. Specifically because it had to light, every time. Hypergolics ignite as soon as you mix them.
The only worry was one valve in the system that couldn't/didn't have a secondary system... if that valve didn't open, the Apollo astronauts on the moon would never come home. They knew this and took the risks. Today, we scrub launches for a redundant sensor (1 of 4) in a redundant fuel level warning system. We're becoming a nation of pansies who won't let these scientists and pioneers do their jobs they VOLUNTEER to do. If the Astronauts are concerned about their safety, that's one thing... as were a number of NASA Astronauts who visited MIR as it got older. But these people understand the risks and our society won't allow them to take those risks anymore and we're not proud of the people who built the machine they go up in anymore. This sucks.
Anyway, the Lander information and other information I've mentioned here are all readily available via Google searches and documented in various very good books. I recommend "Failure Is Not An Option", by Gene Kranz if you want to learn how to make safety decisions. The job "Flight Director" didn't exist before NASA started it. These guys had to create their original safety procedures out of thin air, showing their true grit.
In fact, after reading all the B.S. around here about the Shuttle systems and people too lazy to look up the information online (how much easier can it get? It's not like you have to go down to a local library and check out a book or anything...), I'm totally amazed that the Slashdot generation is so clueless about amazing Engineering feats like Apollo.
There's stuff to be learned from these guys, no matter if the popular thing of today is to bash them for supposedly bad Engineering/Management practice or not.
There once was a time when the country was in complete awe that Shuttle even flew, let alone did it safely.
It's just a fad of the politically correct times we live in to berate and belittle the hard work NASA employees and sub-contractors have done over the years to pull off things no other country could. And the sad part is, they have to cowtow to it and act like they're giant screwups in every press meeting so they don't get caught in a simple misstatement about something.
Russia had their Shuttle but it never flew with humans on board... and never will. History will show whether or not China gets their Shuttle to fly.
U.S. Engineers can rightly point to the STS and say, "We did that!" We should be proud. Do we need a replacement for manned spaceflight? Hell yes. But should we beat the horse that isn't dead yet? No.
A bit of an event is fine. Have a nice afternoon book release. Midnight? For kids? Come on, that's hype and bullshit at it's finest.
Excited about a ficticious story. It'd be like saying we held midnight book releases for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in my generation.
Yeah, the TV comment was probably not appropriate to this discussion. I guess what I was saying is that same set of parents also wouldn't be caught dead driving their kids out to a midnight book release because they've already taught their kids that there are more important things in life than a release of a fiction book, and you put those priorities first -- you sleep at night.
And you buy the fiction book later in paperback or borrow it from the library. Because it just isn't that important.
But these are probably the same moms and dads that have their priorities so screwed up that they owe tens of thousands in credit card debt to banks, and have "interest only" loans on houses far too big for their paychecks, because they don't have the self-control to spend only what they truly have.
And they shouldn't be. The only reason these "young people" are all amped up to go to a bookstore at midnight is because their parents spoil them.
Mom and Dad don't have the balls to say, "We'll get the book later this week, it's just a book, now go to bed, you have school tomorrow."
Instead they teach the kids that this type of marketing hype is how they should set their priorities and live their lives, up to and including dressing up in costumes for the event?
Wow. No wonder the people I know that limit their kid's TV time to one hour MAXIMUM a day (and that includes video games) have normal, well-adjusted, intelligent kids who perform above average in all of their studies. They definitely wouldn't be at the store at midnight in costume buying a Harry Potter book.
If the books are that good (and generally they're good fun reads, yes...) they'll stand up to the test of time. You can read it a year from now from a used paperback and it'll still be the same story and still as much fun as it was at the "big release". Teach the kids some willpower, for goodness sake.
I'm both amazed and saddened that the ARRL is publishing better electronics information than the IEEE these days. Wow. Go Amateurs! Bad Engineer, no donut!
So you're saying that you buy the book to learn OO if you still haven't caught on yet how to do it from the vertiable trash heap of articles, books, and crap written on OO?
Here in Colorado, all switches expect ten digits and all calls are 10-digit calls. We have one of those abomniations called an "overlay"... the 303 and 720 area-codes are the same physical area. The whiney cell companies complained that Qwest wouldn't give them 303 numbers and that people wouldn't call new cell carrier's numbers if they had to dial what appeeared to the uneducated to be a long-distance call.
I am always weirded out when I travel now that people can actually still make seven digit calls in most major cities. After a number of years of dialing ten digits for everything, you get used to it.
On my residential Qwest line, a "1" is REQUIRED to call any long-distance area codes, and ten-digits for local calls within 303 and 720. My cell phone's dialing plan at the switch is set up much smarter (Verizon)... it doesn't care if you dial the "1" or not, it knows it has enough information to place the call either way.
Status: Closed Priority: CRITICAL Downtime: 2 Days
Summary: Fixed ticket system again.
Adding complexity to every problem is my goal. We must keep the ticket system running at all costs, because my pen and notebook and brain don't provide as much "management value".
Follow-up: Remember to make pretty Excel spreadsheet of ticket system downtime to show the boss, so he'll buy the new version that's even more complex! We'll have a department of ten sysadmins in NO time with this system! Huzzah!
A better way to put this is that "Sysadmins protect your ability to make revenue."
Some sysadmins have a god-like complex where they think they actually cause the revenue to be created on their server farms, but I think the above quote captures the true nature of good sysadmins better.
It's called a "pinnacle landing" and in most helicopter pilot manuals it's described as being quite a bit harder to do than a full skid landing, especially if high winds are involved.
HQ, big building with lots of suits, huge datacenter, whatever...
It's just that they're situated right next to each other out here, and both the Sun facility and the StorageTek facility are within a couple of miles of each other - line of sight.
Both companies have an excellent reputation for hiring thousands at a time out here and laying them all off again a few years later. Neither is a shining example of corporate/community stewardship. They're made for each other.
Most folks aren't noticing that Sun's HQ and StorageTek's HQ's are right across the road from each other, literally.
Sun is in the Interlocken business park in Denver and just west of there on US-36, StorageTek sits.
It is a marriage of convenience.
Being that they're that close physically, they might actually be able to get something done and shuffle human knowledge around a little better than the "typical" merger of two companies nowhere near each other.
Sun doesn't need to choose between hardware and software, IBM certainly doesn't.
Sun simply needs to drop any division or group that's not profitable.
I'd guess that somewhere in that sea of red, there's probably a single group doing something inane that's probably creating 50% of the overall red ink. And that it's a pet project of someone very high up.
Better have VERY strong anti-age-discrimination laws for that idea as a balance, or you've created a situation where it's in the company's best interest to trim away all of its experienced, older, long-term workers and replace them with temps. And to do it only when they will get the least financial benefit, hire when the stock's on a known down-hill path, price-wise... fire when it goes up to lower the number of shareholders.
Oh wait... that's called "outsourcing" and the Dot Bomb boom and then crash.
I forgot, we already have that going on.
Additionally it would encourage bands of super-smart employees to decend on a place, pump it up with great tech and management for a short time, get their cash and run, leaving lots of chaos and instabilty.
Oh wait, we already have that too.
Oh well, carry on. Great idea. We'll all figure out how to exploit it, just give us time.
Well, true... but I was thinking about when they don't launch correctly and blow up at the launching end of things! Heh.
(GRIN)
Technically, most missile systems don't target people. People are collateral damage within their blast radius, in most cases. People are hard to target with missiles.
Tanks, airplanes, buildings, runways, and other larger objects are the actual targets... but most of the time there are people inside.
Ah well, the Civil Engineers keep building us other Engineers and technicians targets to shoot at... God Bless those guys.
I didn't really finish that list... there's lots of places RTOS's are used to run the world.;-)
There's something to be said for your "vehicular addiction" comments.
People have marketed cars and the "fun" of driving them to other people for so long now, that it's not about getting from one place to another.
It's so tied to our idea of "Freedom" to drive cars that we have our collective dicks caught in the meat grinder of the Middle East.
In a country where a middle-class couple can purchase a moderately sized house on a moderately sized plot of land, there's definitely enough monetary resources to move the vast majority of people from homes to workplaces with mass transit. It's just not how we choose to live.
Sadly, much of that is driven by the very marketing that sells us on "beautiful" cars.
The average American knows more about the performance of various models of car than they know about personal finance and balancing a checkbook, and it shows in our reflection -- what we ask our government to do in terms of transportation policy and eventually as the oil becomes harder to get, foreign policy.
Ever look at the statistics on credit card abuse and bankruptcy?
As best as I can tell, you're ahead of at least 50% of the idiots out there if you actually have a budget and try to stick to it.
Any finanancial extra-credit above and beyond that like actually having savings and investments, is pretty impressive by today's U.S. standards of financial enlightenment.
Remember, there ARE people out there who graduated high school in the U.S. who can not balance a checkbook. Some of them even claim to be proud of this fact.
Yeah, we know. Don't tell anyone the alternative OS for the CoCo, OS/9 is still used in massive numbers of computers worldwide.
We wouldn't want everyone to know that RTOS's really run the world and PeeCees are still a big joke to those that write code for things like avionics, missile systems... you know, software that has to work first time out or people get hurt?
It's nice to know it's still out there chugging away...
Slashdot Mirror
His was essentially free and yours costs $309. He got the aluminum for free.
You got a +2 Interesting for complete bullshit. Must be Slashdot.
Your dad's full of shit, or you are.
The Lunar Lander was built by Rockwell, not TRW as you elude with your comment about credit reporting agencies.
Rockwell sent North American a towing bill as a joke for Apollo 13, when the Lunar Lander "towed" the broken Command Module back to earth. Engineers worked exceedingly hard on both systems, with a number of published biographies that show most of the heads of these projects chose not to have much of a life outside of working problems. And those problems at the time of working them were almost always things that had NEVER been done before. They also had a sense of humor back then.
Anyway, the Lander used hypergolic fuels in the engine. Specifically because it had to light, every time. Hypergolics ignite as soon as you mix them.
The only worry was one valve in the system that couldn't/didn't have a secondary system... if that valve didn't open, the Apollo astronauts on the moon would never come home. They knew this and took the risks. Today, we scrub launches for a redundant sensor (1 of 4) in a redundant fuel level warning system. We're becoming a nation of pansies who won't let these scientists and pioneers do their jobs they VOLUNTEER to do. If the Astronauts are concerned about their safety, that's one thing... as were a number of NASA Astronauts who visited MIR as it got older. But these people understand the risks and our society won't allow them to take those risks anymore and we're not proud of the people who built the machine they go up in anymore. This sucks.
Anyway, the Lander information and other information I've mentioned here are all readily available via Google searches and documented in various very good books. I recommend "Failure Is Not An Option", by Gene Kranz if you want to learn how to make safety decisions. The job "Flight Director" didn't exist before NASA started it. These guys had to create their original safety procedures out of thin air, showing their true grit.
In fact, after reading all the B.S. around here about the Shuttle systems and people too lazy to look up the information online (how much easier can it get? It's not like you have to go down to a local library and check out a book or anything...), I'm totally amazed that the Slashdot generation is so clueless about amazing Engineering feats like Apollo.
There's stuff to be learned from these guys, no matter if the popular thing of today is to bash them for supposedly bad Engineering/Management practice or not.
There once was a time when the country was in complete awe that Shuttle even flew, let alone did it safely.
It's just a fad of the politically correct times we live in to berate and belittle the hard work NASA employees and sub-contractors have done over the years to pull off things no other country could. And the sad part is, they have to cowtow to it and act like they're giant screwups in every press meeting so they don't get caught in a simple misstatement about something.
Russia had their Shuttle but it never flew with humans on board... and never will. History will show whether or not China gets their Shuttle to fly.
U.S. Engineers can rightly point to the STS and say, "We did that!" We should be proud. Do we need a replacement for manned spaceflight? Hell yes. But should we beat the horse that isn't dead yet? No.
A bit of an event is fine. Have a nice afternoon book release. Midnight? For kids? Come on, that's hype and bullshit at it's finest.
Excited about a ficticious story. It'd be like saying we held midnight book releases for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in my generation.
Yeah, the TV comment was probably not appropriate to this discussion. I guess what I was saying is that same set of parents also wouldn't be caught dead driving their kids out to a midnight book release because they've already taught their kids that there are more important things in life than a release of a fiction book, and you put those priorities first -- you sleep at night.
And you buy the fiction book later in paperback or borrow it from the library. Because it just isn't that important.
But these are probably the same moms and dads that have their priorities so screwed up that they owe tens of thousands in credit card debt to banks, and have "interest only" loans on houses far too big for their paychecks, because they don't have the self-control to spend only what they truly have.
And they shouldn't be. The only reason these "young people" are all amped up to go to a bookstore at midnight is because their parents spoil them.
Mom and Dad don't have the balls to say, "We'll get the book later this week, it's just a book, now go to bed, you have school tomorrow."
Instead they teach the kids that this type of marketing hype is how they should set their priorities and live their lives, up to and including dressing up in costumes for the event?
Wow. No wonder the people I know that limit their kid's TV time to one hour MAXIMUM a day (and that includes video games) have normal, well-adjusted, intelligent kids who perform above average in all of their studies. They definitely wouldn't be at the store at midnight in costume buying a Harry Potter book.
If the books are that good (and generally they're good fun reads, yes...) they'll stand up to the test of time. You can read it a year from now from a used paperback and it'll still be the same story and still as much fun as it was at the "big release". Teach the kids some willpower, for goodness sake.
I'm both amazed and saddened that the ARRL is publishing better electronics information than the IEEE these days. Wow. Go Amateurs! Bad Engineer, no donut!
Some people might consider it a plus that cows and chickens don't require "team building" events to get their jobs done.
So you're saying that you buy the book to learn OO if you still haven't caught on yet how to do it from the vertiable trash heap of articles, books, and crap written on OO?
Oh yeah, and that Ruby is an OO language.
Yawn.
Here in Colorado, all switches expect ten digits and all calls are 10-digit calls. We have one of those abomniations called an "overlay"... the 303 and 720 area-codes are the same physical area. The whiney cell companies complained that Qwest wouldn't give them 303 numbers and that people wouldn't call new cell carrier's numbers if they had to dial what appeeared to the uneducated to be a long-distance call.
I am always weirded out when I travel now that people can actually still make seven digit calls in most major cities. After a number of years of dialing ten digits for everything, you get used to it.
On my residential Qwest line, a "1" is REQUIRED to call any long-distance area codes, and ten-digits for local calls within 303 and 720. My cell phone's dialing plan at the switch is set up much smarter (Verizon)... it doesn't care if you dial the "1" or not, it knows it has enough information to place the call either way.
Ticket #10576-1
Status: Closed
Priority: CRITICAL
Downtime: 2 Days
Summary: Fixed ticket system again.
Adding complexity to every problem is my goal. We must keep the ticket system running at all costs, because my pen and notebook and brain don't provide as much "management value".
Follow-up: Remember to make pretty Excel spreadsheet of ticket system downtime to show the boss, so he'll buy the new version that's even more complex! We'll have a department of ten sysadmins in NO time with this system! Huzzah!
This will only backfire into the boss saying, "Thanks for the estimate on your real time that will be spent. Back to work."
The boss is clueless about what it takes. This employee needs to flatly refuse to take on the sysadmin role and then NEGOTIATE from there.
A better way to put this is that "Sysadmins protect your ability to make revenue."
Some sysadmins have a god-like complex where they think they actually cause the revenue to be created on their server farms, but I think the above quote captures the true nature of good sysadmins better.
It's called a "pinnacle landing" and in most helicopter pilot manuals it's described as being quite a bit harder to do than a full skid landing, especially if high winds are involved.
HQ, big building with lots of suits, huge datacenter, whatever...
It's just that they're situated right next to each other out here, and both the Sun facility and the StorageTek facility are within a couple of miles of each other - line of sight.
Both companies have an excellent reputation for hiring thousands at a time out here and laying them all off again a few years later. Neither is a shining example of corporate/community stewardship. They're made for each other.
Mediocre company buys mediocre company. Yawn.
US-36, actually. I-36 is somewhere else.
Around here it's still called the "Boulder Turnpike"... and once long long ago, it was a toll-road.
Most folks aren't noticing that Sun's HQ and StorageTek's HQ's are right across the road from each other, literally.
Sun is in the Interlocken business park in Denver and just west of there on US-36, StorageTek sits.
It is a marriage of convenience.
Being that they're that close physically, they might actually be able to get something done and shuffle human knowledge around a little better than the "typical" merger of two companies nowhere near each other.
Time will tell.
Sun doesn't need to choose between hardware and software, IBM certainly doesn't.
Sun simply needs to drop any division or group that's not profitable.
I'd guess that somewhere in that sea of red, there's probably a single group doing something inane that's probably creating 50% of the overall red ink. And that it's a pet project of someone very high up.
Time for that portion of Sun to die, quickly.
Better have VERY strong anti-age-discrimination laws for that idea as a balance, or you've created a situation where it's in the company's best interest to trim away all of its experienced, older, long-term workers and replace them with temps. And to do it only when they will get the least financial benefit, hire when the stock's on a known down-hill path, price-wise... fire when it goes up to lower the number of shareholders.
Oh wait... that's called "outsourcing" and the Dot Bomb boom and then crash.
I forgot, we already have that going on.
Additionally it would encourage bands of super-smart employees to decend on a place, pump it up with great tech and management for a short time, get their cash and run, leaving lots of chaos and instabilty.
Oh wait, we already have that too.
Oh well, carry on. Great idea. We'll all figure out how to exploit it, just give us time.
A'ight.
Well, true... but I was thinking about when they don't launch correctly and blow up at the launching end of things! Heh.
;-)
(GRIN)
Technically, most missile systems don't target people. People are collateral damage within their blast radius, in most cases. People are hard to target with missiles.
Tanks, airplanes, buildings, runways, and other larger objects are the actual targets... but most of the time there are people inside.
Ah well, the Civil Engineers keep building us other Engineers and technicians targets to shoot at... God Bless those guys.
I didn't really finish that list... there's lots of places RTOS's are used to run the world.
There's something to be said for your "vehicular addiction" comments.
People have marketed cars and the "fun" of driving them to other people for so long now, that it's not about getting from one place to another.
It's so tied to our idea of "Freedom" to drive cars that we have our collective dicks caught in the meat grinder of the Middle East.
In a country where a middle-class couple can purchase a moderately sized house on a moderately sized plot of land, there's definitely enough monetary resources to move the vast majority of people from homes to workplaces with mass transit. It's just not how we choose to live.
Sadly, much of that is driven by the very marketing that sells us on "beautiful" cars.
The average American knows more about the performance of various models of car than they know about personal finance and balancing a checkbook, and it shows in our reflection -- what we ask our government to do in terms of transportation policy and eventually as the oil becomes harder to get, foreign policy.
So YOU'RE the person who's answering all that Viagra spam!
Knock it off, damnit.
Ever look at the statistics on credit card abuse and bankruptcy?
As best as I can tell, you're ahead of at least 50% of the idiots out there if you actually have a budget and try to stick to it.
Any finanancial extra-credit above and beyond that like actually having savings and investments, is pretty impressive by today's U.S. standards of financial enlightenment.
Remember, there ARE people out there who graduated high school in the U.S. who can not balance a checkbook. Some of them even claim to be proud of this fact.
That whole bills thing... one word: Budget.
PVR's fix that whole channel changing problem... you should check them out.
Yeah, we know. Don't tell anyone the alternative OS for the CoCo, OS/9 is still used in massive numbers of computers worldwide.
We wouldn't want everyone to know that RTOS's really run the world and PeeCees are still a big joke to those that write code for things like avionics, missile systems... you know, software that has to work first time out or people get hurt?
It's nice to know it's still out there chugging away...