My father evaluated strips in the Pacific rim for most of his FAA career, so I'll put in my two cents. They (used to?) have some FAA inspections to do, including landing by instruments. The size didn't matter, because most of the place my dad looked into were tiny islands like Guam, Bali, and the Marshall Islands.
When I lived on Maui, there were TWO gates, and that was international. 747s landed all the time, though.
Thanks for the update on all that. It's definitely NOT my area of expertise, but I was relaying my feelings from thirty years ago compared to what I read now. I'm glad to hear so much is coming up soon.
I never really left, though my posting is sometimes more than others. I moved my journal off of Slashdot, so you won't see me post to it often. The sex stuff went on my AFF blog, where it probably belonged in the first place. I think the sexy Slash journal cost me that job with the Thai LinuxTLE team (though in retrospect, I'm glad, since FLOSS in Thailand is dead now). The Linux stuff went onto my Ubuntu blog, and the weightlifting stuff went on another Blogspot blog.
Still in Asia, and about to hit eight years here. Some days are good. Korea (3/12 years now) sucks compared to Thailand, but I don't know how I'd live with less than 10Mb/s to the house if I left here. (I was just offered fiber with 100Mb/s for 30K won = US$35).
I wasn't comparing it to the Soyuz: I was comparing it to where we'd be now if we hadn't used it.
The NASA Chief Administrator Michael Griffin has recently suggested the decision to develop the Space Shuttle and International Space Station was a mistake by saying, "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path. We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can."[1]
and
While the Shuttle has been a reasonably successful launch vehicle, it has not met the goal of greatly reducing launch costs. There are various ways to measure per-launch costs. One way is dividing the total cost over the life of the program (including buildings, facilities, training, salaries, etc) by the number of launches. This method gives about $1.3 billion per launch[1]. Another method is calculating the incremental (or marginal) cost differential to add or subtract one flight -- just the immediate resources expended/saved involved in that one flight. This is about $55 million. Neither figure is right or wrong; they are simply different ways to examine the picture.
The total cost of the program has been $145 billion as of early 2005, and is estimated to be $174 billion when the Shuttle retires in 2010. NASA's budget for 2005 allocates 30%, or $5 billion, to Space Shuttle operations.
Original goals of the Shuttle included operating at a fairly high flight rate (roughly 12 flights per year, at low cost, and with high reliability. Improving in these areas over the previous generation of single-use and unmanned launchers was a motivation. Although it did operate as the world's first reusable crew-carrying spacecraft, it did not greatly improve on those parameters, and is considered by some to have failed in its original purpose.
Although the final design differs from the original concept, the project was still supposed to meet USAF goals and be much cheaper to fly in general. One reason behind this apparent failure is inflation. During the 1970s the U.S. suffered from severe inflation. Between when the program began in 1972, and first flight in April 1981, inflation increased prices over 200%. When evaluating shuttle development costs in later-year dollars, this superficially appeared to be a large cost overrun in the program. In fact when discounting inflation, the shuttle development program was within the initial cost estimate given to President Richard M. Nixon in 1971.
The high shuttle operational costs have been much more than anticipated, if counting all associated support resources (total expenditures, including development costs, divided by number of flights). Some of this can be attributed to a lower flight rate, operating beyond the 10-year anticipated lifespan of each Shuttle, and higher than anticipated maintenance costs. The marginal or incremental per launch costs have been about 50% more than early projections.
Some reasons for higher than expected operational costs can be ascribed to:
Maintenance of thermal protection tiles turned out to be very labour intensive, averaging about 1 personweek to replace a tile, with hundreds damaged with each launch.
The main engines were highly complex and maintenance intensive, necessitating removal and extensive inspection after each flight. Before the current "Block II" engines, the turbopumps (a primary engine component) had to be removed, dissembled, and totally overhauled after each flight.
Launch rate is significantly lower than initially expected. This does not reduce actual operating costs, but if dividing total program costs by number of launches, more launches per year produces a lower per-launch cost figure. Some early hypothetical studies examined 55 launches per year, but the maximum possible launch rate was limited to 24 per year, based on manufacturing capacity of the external tank. Early in the shuttle development, the expected la
It can only be used once, but costs just $25 million. The newest Endeavor space shuttle cost $2 billion, but is reusable.
When I was a little boy, I sat in on one of my father's presentations on the (then future) space shuttle to interested people in the aviation community (he was with the FAA). The talk was glowing and emphasized how much we'd save by re-using this material. As a sci-fi enthusiast like my father, I remember being so excited about what I was hearing.
Sadly, that cost savings never came. I have read numerous reports about how much more that shuttle system costs than a traditional system. In my not-so-educated opinion, focus on the shuttle has left our space program behind where it would have been had we kept going with the tech we had at the time.
I agree with your last line. That's part of what MY last line was about. MS has huge amounts of talent at their campuses. I know some people here like to insinuate that the developers there don't know what they're doing, but I never think that at all. They've got some super minds there (though more and more, the smartest are working for others like Google).
Never having worked at MS and only having listened to insiders talking about it, I get the feeling the culture just doesn't support agile development. By agile, I mean it in the generic sense, not in the development model sense. They'll have to make a change eventually. They have tons of money and time, so that change could take a while and still not kill them, though.
Project management is a tough skill, and getting a bunch of geniuses with extremely high egos to all go in the same direction is even worse, but let's look at this objectively. Why would MS have 2000 developers working on the same codebase? That's the problem right there. The code is obviously not modular enough with well-enough defined APIs to break the development up.
OSX is pretty similar to Windows in size and scope, yet Apple has few problems developing.
The Linux kernel guys don't even communicate with the X.org, Mozilla, or Apache guys as far as I can tell. Everyone in that camp moves forward pretty much however they want to, just sticking to the API.
Microsoft has the money and the intrigue to get the best project managers in the world working for them. I just don't think they have the culture to do it.
Just yesterday I was on some site (CNET, I think) and was going to flame someone who posted that "OSX is not LIKE Unix, it IS Unix." Sure, it has BSD wedged in there over Mach, I thought, but that's not Unix. It's POSIX compliant, but not Unix. It wasn't actually based on BSD.
Then I went to check my facts. I found this visual history, and OSX was nowhere on there. Great, I thought. I just need one more link to cement my position. Then I found the Open Group's list, and damn, I was wrong again. OSX 10.5 is Unix 03. Sucks to be me.
Not a big issue, but it's 25,000 for four months, not a year, putting the yearly estimate at 75,000. This is small beans for Dell, but no one should sneeze at 75,000 computers in a niche market using only three SKUs. They probably count for an extra US$60M in revenue.
I've got no argument about whether XFCE is lighter or not -- I used it from Hoary up through Dapper because Gnome just wasn't snappy on my hardware then. Things have improved a lot, though. I find stuff loads a lot faster now than it used to, even on the same hardware. Although people complain about bloat, under 300MB for a full, modern desktop doesn't seem like that much. Five years ago, I was running IceWM and Rox on a terminal server, trying to get the clients under 32MB of use each, but that was then. My server had half the RAM at my laptop does now. I expect more from a desktop now. I like Deskbar, Tracker, Epiphany, F-Spot, and Rhythmbox. I don't want to go back to minimal software.
I think that stock Ubuntu should run decently on any equipment up to 2-3 years old. Anything older than that should probably get a lighter distro.
I just fired up my Gutsy Beta VM with everything on default (used for screencasts) to check. There are the following applets loaded by default:
Fast User Switcher
Deskbar
Volume Control, and
Clock
The only new one in gutsy is the fast user switcher, which I can't imagine uses much of anything at all. The notification area has a couple of daemons showing, though:
Network Manager and
Update Notifier
I don't see the major difference from Feisty. Maybe that's just me...
Ubuntu Gutsy is using 270MB with full Gnome, Tomboy Notes (requiring Mono), Epiphany (5 tabs), Ekiga, Pidgin, sbackup running, and doing an update. I don't find this particularly heavy. All this on a two year old, bargain laptop upgraded to 1GB RAM.
I read the entirety of the Wiki article before posting, thank you.
The only possible ambiguity mentioned is one where a comma can make an item appear to be an indeterminate clause. The issue is easily fixed by not omitting the optional who/which/that is. In reality, the ambiguity is caused by taking a shortcut in the indeterminate clause, not by the choice of using the comma, therefore the situation mentioned is not the comma's introduction of ambiguity, but the shortcut's.
In fact, almost all American style references suggest its use, except for newspapers and journals, who delete it specifically to save space in narrow columns.1&2
That, too. I was following the lead of the GP, using his terminology. Either will do for me, or I'll just accept "the comma before and in a list of stuff." I don't really care.
Yeah. And I'm the one who gets stuck saying "proven," when all the EFL lists list it as a regular verb (see The Purdue ESL Pages for an example). See "prove" in there? No? I didn't think so. I look like an idiot every other week at work.
I'm a big fan of the Harvard comma. Standard use of it makes parsing sentences like the following easy on the first try (as long as you expect it) --
"The three of us ordered steak, fish and chips, and ribs." You immediately know that "fish and chips" are not separate elements of the list, even before reaching the next comma. You know that ribs is separate from chips.
"The three of us ordered steak, fish and chips and ribs." You don't know (except through convention) whether "fish and chips" is the second element or "chips and steak" is the third element. Longer lists with more complicated syntax get even more confusing, requiring rereading two or three times to clarify. Some sentences will never be clear without the Harvard comma.
The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances. If you could choose one of the rules, which would you choose? I'd go with the one that makes the language clearer and easier to understand. Consistent use of the comma makes things immediately clear which wouldn't be in casual, required-only use of it.
Hilarious. Reminds me of my own story:
I was a freshman in WUSTL and my best buddy Mark was from Boston. We were hitting on a couple of other freshmen, and I was pouring on the smooth (this is my recollection, so go with it, OK?). After a couple of good quips, I introduced myself, they introduced themselves, and my friend said "I'm Mahk."
"What?" was their reply.
"Mahhk," said Mark.
"Come again?" they asked.
Then he let out the most terrific sound. "Mahrrruurk." He sounded like he was retarded.
I mean that seriously. My sister is severely mentally handicapped, and Mark sounded like he was heavily downs or something.
The girls said nothing, turned around, and walked away.
I'm pretty sure I punched him a couple of times over screwing that up.
Now that I live in Korea, any fast food restaurant I go into requires me to say things like "Hembohgoh, prenchee praisu & Coku --lahgee." Language is what it is.
What's sick? The evolution of language? I suppose you would prefer to speak Esperanto since it's "Intelligently Designed?" Go ahead. I won't stop you.;)
Slashdot Mirror
My father evaluated strips in the Pacific rim for most of his FAA career, so I'll put in my two cents. They (used to?) have some FAA inspections to do, including landing by instruments. The size didn't matter, because most of the place my dad looked into were tiny islands like Guam, Bali, and the Marshall Islands.
When I lived on Maui, there were TWO gates, and that was international. 747s landed all the time, though.
Thanks for the update on all that. It's definitely NOT my area of expertise, but I was relaying my feelings from thirty years ago compared to what I read now. I'm glad to hear so much is coming up soon.
I never really left, though my posting is sometimes more than others. I moved my journal off of Slashdot, so you won't see me post to it often. The sex stuff went on my AFF blog, where it probably belonged in the first place. I think the sexy Slash journal cost me that job with the Thai LinuxTLE team (though in retrospect, I'm glad, since FLOSS in Thailand is dead now). The Linux stuff went onto my Ubuntu blog, and the weightlifting stuff went on another Blogspot blog.
Still in Asia, and about to hit eight years here. Some days are good. Korea (3/12 years now) sucks compared to Thailand, but I don't know how I'd live with less than 10Mb/s to the house if I left here. (I was just offered fiber with 100Mb/s for 30K won = US$35).
Cheers
The second quote should be attributed, but it's not. See here. No time to preview. Meh.
and
It can only be used once, but costs just $25 million. The newest Endeavor space shuttle cost $2 billion, but is reusable.
When I was a little boy, I sat in on one of my father's presentations on the (then future) space shuttle to interested people in the aviation community (he was with the FAA). The talk was glowing and emphasized how much we'd save by re-using this material. As a sci-fi enthusiast like my father, I remember being so excited about what I was hearing.
Sadly, that cost savings never came. I have read numerous reports about how much more that shuttle system costs than a traditional system. In my not-so-educated opinion, focus on the shuttle has left our space program behind where it would have been had we kept going with the tech we had at the time.
What's the next-gen shuttle going to cost us?
I agree with your last line. That's part of what MY last line was about. MS has huge amounts of talent at their campuses. I know some people here like to insinuate that the developers there don't know what they're doing, but I never think that at all. They've got some super minds there (though more and more, the smartest are working for others like Google).
Never having worked at MS and only having listened to insiders talking about it, I get the feeling the culture just doesn't support agile development. By agile, I mean it in the generic sense, not in the development model sense. They'll have to make a change eventually. They have tons of money and time, so that change could take a while and still not kill them, though.
Project management is a tough skill, and getting a bunch of geniuses with extremely high egos to all go in the same direction is even worse, but let's look at this objectively. Why would MS have 2000 developers working on the same codebase? That's the problem right there. The code is obviously not modular enough with well-enough defined APIs to break the development up.
OSX is pretty similar to Windows in size and scope, yet Apple has few problems developing.
The Linux kernel guys don't even communicate with the X.org, Mozilla, or Apache guys as far as I can tell. Everyone in that camp moves forward pretty much however they want to, just sticking to the API.
Microsoft has the money and the intrigue to get the best project managers in the world working for them. I just don't think they have the culture to do it.
Menuet is an operating system written entirely in assembly. It's free. You can't quite call it Open Source, though.
Ubuntu released today and OSX is releasing in about a week. The story seems to be timed quite well.
Just yesterday I was on some site (CNET, I think) and was going to flame someone who posted that "OSX is not LIKE Unix, it IS Unix." Sure, it has BSD wedged in there over Mach, I thought, but that's not Unix. It's POSIX compliant, but not Unix. It wasn't actually based on BSD.
Then I went to check my facts. I found this visual history, and OSX was nowhere on there. Great, I thought. I just need one more link to cement my position. Then I found the Open Group's list, and damn, I was wrong again. OSX 10.5 is Unix 03. Sucks to be me.
Yeahm then. Back to reading comprehension 101. You can mark me down -1 uninformative
Not a big issue, but it's 25,000 for four months, not a year, putting the yearly estimate at 75,000. This is small beans for Dell, but no one should sneeze at 75,000 computers in a niche market using only three SKUs. They probably count for an extra US$60M in revenue.
It was tongue-in-cheek, not a troll, neither rational nor serious. No need to get hyper about it. Look at my posting history and you'll know that.
I think that stock Ubuntu should run decently on any equipment up to 2-3 years old. Anything older than that should probably get a lighter distro.
Now, I only need to:
- Fast User Switcher
- Deskbar
- Volume Control, and
- Clock
The only new one in gutsy is the fast user switcher, which I can't imagine uses much of anything at all. The notification area has a couple of daemons showing, though:- Network Manager and
- Update Notifier
I don't see the major difference from Feisty. Maybe that's just meUbuntu Gutsy is using 270MB with full Gnome, Tomboy Notes (requiring Mono), Epiphany (5 tabs), Ekiga, Pidgin, sbackup running, and doing an update. I don't find this particularly heavy. All this on a two year old, bargain laptop upgraded to 1GB RAM.
;)
Just don't ask me to start up OO.o.
Scary for me -- CDs auto unmount when you press the eject button. When did that happen? Worried I'll start getting BSODs next ...
I read the entirety of the Wiki article before posting, thank you.
The only possible ambiguity mentioned is one where a comma can make an item appear to be an indeterminate clause. The issue is easily fixed by not omitting the optional who/which/that is. In reality, the ambiguity is caused by taking a shortcut in the indeterminate clause, not by the choice of using the comma, therefore the situation mentioned is not the comma's introduction of ambiguity, but the shortcut's.
In fact, almost all American style references suggest its use, except for newspapers and journals, who delete it specifically to save space in narrow columns.1&2
It was an evolution vs. intelligent design joke. Nevermind.
That, too. I was following the lead of the GP, using his terminology. Either will do for me, or I'll just accept "the comma before and in a list of stuff." I don't really care.
Yeah. And I'm the one who gets stuck saying "proven," when all the EFL lists list it as a regular verb (see The Purdue ESL Pages for an example). See "prove" in there? No? I didn't think so. I look like an idiot every other week at work.
- "The three of us ordered steak, fish and chips, and ribs." You immediately know that "fish and chips" are not separate elements of the list, even before reaching the next comma. You know that ribs is separate from chips.
- "The three of us ordered steak, fish and chips and ribs." You don't know (except through convention) whether "fish and chips" is the second element or "chips and steak" is the third element. Longer lists with more complicated syntax get even more confusing, requiring rereading two or three times to clarify. Some sentences will never be clear without the Harvard comma.
The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances. If you could choose one of the rules, which would you choose? I'd go with the one that makes the language clearer and easier to understand. Consistent use of the comma makes things immediately clear which wouldn't be in casual, required-only use of it.Hilarious. Reminds me of my own story:
I was a freshman in WUSTL and my best buddy Mark was from Boston. We were hitting on a couple of other freshmen, and I was pouring on the smooth (this is my recollection, so go with it, OK?). After a couple of good quips, I introduced myself, they introduced themselves, and my friend said "I'm Mahk."
"What?" was their reply.
"Mahhk," said Mark.
"Come again?" they asked. Then he let out the most terrific sound. "Mahrrruurk." He sounded like he was retarded.
I mean that seriously. My sister is severely mentally handicapped, and Mark sounded like he was heavily downs or something.
The girls said nothing, turned around, and walked away.
I'm pretty sure I punched him a couple of times over screwing that up.
Now that I live in Korea, any fast food restaurant I go into requires me to say things like "Hembohgoh, prenchee praisu & Coku --lahgee." Language is what it is.
What's sick? The evolution of language? I suppose you would prefer to speak Esperanto since it's "Intelligently Designed?" Go ahead. I won't stop you. ;)
Fuck! The use of "fuck" as an ejaculation. How appropriate!