Let me be the first to let you in on a secret... Rocket science is hard. Last time I checked, the Falcon9 is racking up an impressive reliability record. Yeah, he wants to launch lots of them... which would you rather have, a ramshackle build an launch as fast as you can damn the torpedoes, oh well if a couple blow up or a systematic engineering driven approach to build a simple, ultra reliable, reuseable launch system.
I don't know of a single launch system that's <i>ever</i> been on time. When managers sit down with powerpoint and make up launch schedules and total tons lofted, they're just blowing smoke.
The only evidence they've provided is the fact that they've been modifying the stannis testing facility to test their mega rocket engine. Oh and that they've been building parts and testing them... you know doing engineering things.
This is a natural progression. They started with the Falcon1, then the Falcon9, now this. Yeah, it's going to be a long road, but Musk has proven himself capable of getting shit done. Not at your unrealistic speed.
Do I think SpaceX will launch a HLV? Yes. Will it be on schedule. Yes, because SpaceX won't commit to a schedule until they've got something tested. Will it require some serious engineering? Yes.
Now, how will this effect the thing Nasa is working on? Who knows. I wish NASA would get out of the business of launching things and focus more on the things being launched.
I can only imagine in some weird way, Google/Android would be against this though. I think Android wants to think of its self as an equal or better to iOS not a VHS.
Don't forget that before this whole mess, the Ukrainian president was going to the EU hat in hand asking for 15 Billion Euros to pay off debts paid to Russia and to fix its infrastructure. Speaking of which, their infrastructure is in complete shambles. When Russia first took Crimea a couple days later the Russian minister of fiance was bitching about how much is was going to cost to fix Crimea (something like 15 Billion over 3 years).
So by all means, if Russia wants to take over Ukraine an incur the expense of actually fixing Ukraine... excellent, I suspect very quickly the whole thing will be a pyrrhic victory.
Also, while they're expending their military forces trying to keep the Ukrainians from engaging in an insurgency against them, we're going to keep putting the screws to them on the global market, causing their currency to go into an inflationary spiral.
As of right now, the Europeans have been hesitant about criticizing Russia too heavy because of fears about their gas supply. However, I can't imagine the Europeans will say nothing if Russia rolls in the tanks. Possibly we'll start shipping NG to the Europeans to further undercut the Russians? Who knows.
However, now that Russia has banned food imports from the EU and the US. How long before the standard of living starts spiraling downwards? I don't imagine that Putin would starve his own people, but who knows?
So you wrote this post on a mobile device or desktop? Exactly... The desktop is so "dead" except for the fact that everybody you know including yourself has a desktop at home and at work... Yeah, you've got a mobile device, but honestly how many people do you know who only have a mobile device?
I've handled one of these phones and holy crap... Until I dug down into it, I *thought* it was running iOS. It's a straight up, shameless copying on the entire interface, down to the configuration menus. Even then, unless you knew what you were looking for, an end user would just assume it was iOS.
I can't imagine Apple not going to the WTO and waving their hands ineffectively as the Chinese make a mockery of international copyrights.
That's great that you believe your own bullshit as well. Imagine you build two power plants, one nuclear and one that's a solar farm and they both cost $1bn. Which of those plants over its lifespan is going to have a higher cost? How much security is your solar farm going to need? The bigger question is... in 20 or 30 years when the nuclear power plant has reached it's effective lifespan, how much is it going to cost to decommission that plant? Vermont Yankee which Entergy said they'd be closing on 2014, they're talking about it costing more than a billion to decommission it. Even those costs don't include the long term storage costs of all the spent fuel that'll end up who knows where.
So great, you get your electricity for a couple cents cheaper per kwh now... at what cost later on? Both in environmental and in remediation.
Though ultimately, I see centralized power companies in the same light as I see newspapers. They will evolve or they will die. As the market economics for consumer power change and the TCO for solar combined with better storage options make going off grid more and more feasible, power companies are going to grasp harder and harder onto their dwindling customers, or come up a better model. Those companies who do, will end up eating those who don't.
Obligatory Uncle Ben quote here.. As someone who has access to everything, you need to exercise a certain level of discretion. However, at the same time you need to have some common sense.
If wiki is to believed this system will be able to launch heavier payloads to LEO then the Falcon 9 Heavy. However, SpaceX is currently building a reliable track record with the Falcon9. If the Merlin 2 engine concepts were to come to fruition and the Falcon XX was to become a real launch vehicle, Space X would have a system that would completely eclipse the SLS. The original posters argument is incoherent. There's no "deep space." Once in orbit you either have the capacity to increase your velocity to raise your orbit or escape orbit or you don't.
I'm still trying to understand whose going to grow all the food once all these rural peasants (you know the ones who've been on their land for generations farming) get moved into the city.
Honestly, I have no doubt that China can pull this off, but at what cost?
Frankly, I think NASA should be working with SpaceX to get the DragonRider off the ground as fast as possible and work on the Falcon Heavylift. This is basically a pork project to keep the people who where making the solid rocket boosters in business.
The reply is actually excellent. I was about to hate all over the page but actually read it first. Frankly, this is an individual states issue... Which only an act of congress can change, or have our local politicians change.
However, the auto dealership lobby is a serious nut to crack. With elections coming, I'm not sure many politicians are going to put their necks out so they can be labeled as against local businesses.
How big is your house that it costs several million Euros? A buddy of mine (I'm the US fyi) bought a used fork lift battery. His system consists of panels on the roof, the battery(s) and a propane generator as an ultimate fallback. I'd like to say the battery cost him $2400 dollars. The way he uses it, it'll last indefinitely.
If I have to write a tool, I create a new buffer in emacs and have at it. If I'm standing in front of a machine fixing it, I'll reach for vi, only because it's on every platform.
I work in almost a 100% UNIX environment and what I generally see on people's desktops are: emacs, Eclipse (some flavor) and IntelliJ.
Firstly, I'd forgotten that Dell had gone private. So replace stockholders with enterprise customers who buy dells higher end servers. That's where the high margin stuff is. The beauty of the UNIX operating systems is the simple idea that everything is a file, period. Knocking down the wall between the filesystem which is just a file and memory which is just a file is a matter of semantics and drivers. So you've got an in memory file system, this filesystem instead of inodes has memory offsets. Getting the kernel to schedule a program now merely takes out the "open the binary file, and read it into memory" part and jumps directly to the schedule it to run. Yes, I'm making a straw man and knocking it down, yes I'm ignoring some sharp corners. However, none of this is like getting wolfenstein 3d that was designed to run on a 386 to run an i7. The whole idea behind unix is that the primitives are straightforward. Provided the kernel knows how to run binaries in such a machine, frankly the average unix command will work just like it did before, treating things like files and doing open/close/read/write/seek operations. It won't give a flying fuck it's running on a giant memsister machine, nor will it matter.
HP is their competitor. HP just announced that they're working on something that even if the entire thing doesn't come to fruition, likely some part will and it will change the computing landscape. Understand, this announcement is pointed directly at Dell's share holders.
Best case scenario HP actually pulls it off and they've got some radically fast system running something that looks like Linux. Mid case scenario, they figure out how to make memsistors at scale and then sell licences for everybody to make blisteringly fast SSD's, etc. Then others come along and figure out how to put the pieces together. HP makes out like a bandit in royalties, etc. Worse case, nothing comes out of this. HP shrugs, files a whole pile of patent applications. Someone else takes bits and pieces of it (like IBM) and does cool things with it. In all three cases HP is going to be enhance their IP portfolio and possibly make their stock worth more.
All of those scenarios are bad for Dell. Dell doesn't do fundamental science. They design motherboards that use components supplied by everybody else and crank out cheap computers. If scenario #1 comes true... HP is NOT going to sell any of this to Dell, cutting them out of the market. If scenario #2 comes true, HP is going to get these components at a price that Dell can't compete with. If the last scenario comes true, Dell still ends up being a VAR like everybody else and HP racks in royalties.
The CEO of Dell is almost obligated to thrown cold water all over this, otherwise Dell shareholders are naturally going to ask if this announcement is going to make Dells stock worth less and/or worthless.
I hope Chevy pounces as well. A Volt with ultra charging technology sounds awesome! Mind you, this isn't the battery technology, this is their charging tech.
As a driver of a range extended electric vehicle, I'd be perfectly happy to pay to quick charge my car at one of his charging stations. If anything it could encourage me to switch to a Tesla. Ultimately, what I want is for the battery technology to really take off. I'd rather have fewer charging stations and more robust battery technology...
I have a new car... 2014 Chevy Volt and I've found the thing pretty darn intuitive. I can do all of those functions from the steering wheel. The only exception would be if I'm at some FM radio station and I want to tune to some other FM radio station I have to use the tune scroll wheel... but I had to do the same thing on my 14 year old car I just sold.
Setting favorites is as easy as merely pressing and holding the spot on the favorites for 3 seconds... then it's set.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me be the first to let you in on a secret... Rocket science is hard. Last time I checked, the Falcon9 is racking up an impressive reliability record. Yeah, he wants to launch lots of them... which would you rather have, a ramshackle build an launch as fast as you can damn the torpedoes, oh well if a couple blow up or a systematic engineering driven approach to build a simple, ultra reliable, reuseable launch system.
I don't know of a single launch system that's <i>ever</i> been on time. When managers sit down with powerpoint and make up launch schedules and total tons lofted, they're just blowing smoke.
The only evidence they've provided is the fact that they've been modifying the stannis testing facility to test their mega rocket engine. Oh and that they've been building parts and testing them... you know doing engineering things.
This is a natural progression. They started with the Falcon1, then the Falcon9, now this. Yeah, it's going to be a long road, but Musk has proven himself capable of getting shit done. Not at your unrealistic speed.
Do I think SpaceX will launch a HLV? Yes. Will it be on schedule. Yes, because SpaceX won't commit to a schedule until they've got something tested. Will it require some serious engineering? Yes.
Now, how will this effect the thing Nasa is working on? Who knows. I wish NASA would get out of the business of launching things and focus more on the things being launched.
I can only imagine in some weird way, Google/Android would be against this though. I think Android wants to think of its self as an equal or better to iOS not a VHS.
Don't forget that before this whole mess, the Ukrainian president was going to the EU hat in hand asking for 15 Billion Euros to pay off debts paid to Russia and to fix its infrastructure. Speaking of which, their infrastructure is in complete shambles. When Russia first took Crimea a couple days later the Russian minister of fiance was bitching about how much is was going to cost to fix Crimea (something like 15 Billion over 3 years).
So by all means, if Russia wants to take over Ukraine an incur the expense of actually fixing Ukraine... excellent, I suspect very quickly the whole thing will be a pyrrhic victory.
Also, while they're expending their military forces trying to keep the Ukrainians from engaging in an insurgency against them, we're going to keep putting the screws to them on the global market, causing their currency to go into an inflationary spiral.
As of right now, the Europeans have been hesitant about criticizing Russia too heavy because of fears about their gas supply. However, I can't imagine the Europeans will say nothing if Russia rolls in the tanks. Possibly we'll start shipping NG to the Europeans to further undercut the Russians? Who knows.
However, now that Russia has banned food imports from the EU and the US. How long before the standard of living starts spiraling downwards? I don't imagine that Putin would starve his own people, but who knows?
I saw what you did there...
I like Minneapolis as a city... except for the winter. Around the end of Nov. it becomes a really brutal place to live.
So you wrote this post on a mobile device or desktop? Exactly... The desktop is so "dead" except for the fact that everybody you know including yourself has a desktop at home and at work... Yeah, you've got a mobile device, but honestly how many people do you know who only have a mobile device?
I've handled one of these phones and holy crap... Until I dug down into it, I *thought* it was running iOS. It's a straight up, shameless copying on the entire interface, down to the configuration menus. Even then, unless you knew what you were looking for, an end user would just assume it was iOS.
I can't imagine Apple not going to the WTO and waving their hands ineffectively as the Chinese make a mockery of international copyrights.
That's great that you believe your own bullshit as well. Imagine you build two power plants, one nuclear and one that's a solar farm and they both cost $1bn. Which of those plants over its lifespan is going to have a higher cost? How much security is your solar farm going to need? The bigger question is... in 20 or 30 years when the nuclear power plant has reached it's effective lifespan, how much is it going to cost to decommission that plant? Vermont Yankee which Entergy said they'd be closing on 2014, they're talking about it costing more than a billion to decommission it. Even those costs don't include the long term storage costs of all the spent fuel that'll end up who knows where.
So great, you get your electricity for a couple cents cheaper per kwh now... at what cost later on? Both in environmental and in remediation.
Though ultimately, I see centralized power companies in the same light as I see newspapers. They will evolve or they will die. As the market economics for consumer power change and the TCO for solar combined with better storage options make going off grid more and more feasible, power companies are going to grasp harder and harder onto their dwindling customers, or come up a better model. Those companies who do, will end up eating those who don't.
Obligatory Uncle Ben quote here.. As someone who has access to everything, you need to exercise a certain level of discretion. However, at the same time you need to have some common sense.
If wiki is to believed this system will be able to launch heavier payloads to LEO then the Falcon 9 Heavy. However, SpaceX is currently building a reliable track record with the Falcon9. If the Merlin 2 engine concepts were to come to fruition and the Falcon XX was to become a real launch vehicle, Space X would have a system that would completely eclipse the SLS. The original posters argument is incoherent. There's no "deep space." Once in orbit you either have the capacity to increase your velocity to raise your orbit or escape orbit or you don't.
I'm still trying to understand whose going to grow all the food once all these rural peasants (you know the ones who've been on their land for generations farming) get moved into the city.
Honestly, I have no doubt that China can pull this off, but at what cost?
Frankly, I think NASA should be working with SpaceX to get the DragonRider off the ground as fast as possible and work on the Falcon Heavylift. This is basically a pork project to keep the people who where making the solid rocket boosters in business.
The reply is actually excellent. I was about to hate all over the page but actually read it first. Frankly, this is an individual states issue... Which only an act of congress can change, or have our local politicians change.
However, the auto dealership lobby is a serious nut to crack. With elections coming, I'm not sure many politicians are going to put their necks out so they can be labeled as against local businesses.
This is far more common then you would imagine... The fact it's being applied to a subway system in this manner is pretty novel.
How big is your house that it costs several million Euros? A buddy of mine (I'm the US fyi) bought a used fork lift battery. His system consists of panels on the roof, the battery(s) and a propane generator as an ultimate fallback. I'd like to say the battery cost him $2400 dollars. The way he uses it, it'll last indefinitely.
If I have to write a tool, I create a new buffer in emacs and have at it. If I'm standing in front of a machine fixing it, I'll reach for vi, only because it's on every platform.
I work in almost a 100% UNIX environment and what I generally see on people's desktops are: emacs, Eclipse (some flavor) and IntelliJ.
Replace "Stock Holders" with large corporate customers who buy Dell's server hardware.
Firstly, I'd forgotten that Dell had gone private. So replace stockholders with enterprise customers who buy dells higher end servers. That's where the high margin stuff is.
The beauty of the UNIX operating systems is the simple idea that everything is a file, period. Knocking down the wall between the filesystem which is just a file and memory which is just a file is a matter of semantics and drivers. So you've got an in memory file system, this filesystem instead of inodes has memory offsets. Getting the kernel to schedule a program now merely takes out the "open the binary file, and read it into memory" part and jumps directly to the schedule it to run. Yes, I'm making a straw man and knocking it down, yes I'm ignoring some sharp corners. However, none of this is like getting wolfenstein 3d that was designed to run on a 386 to run an i7. The whole idea behind unix is that the primitives are straightforward. Provided the kernel knows how to run binaries in such a machine, frankly the average unix command will work just like it did before, treating things like files and doing open/close/read/write/seek operations. It won't give a flying fuck it's running on a giant memsister machine, nor will it matter.
HP is their competitor. HP just announced that they're working on something that even if the entire thing doesn't come to fruition, likely some part will and it will change the computing landscape. Understand, this announcement is pointed directly at Dell's share holders.
Best case scenario HP actually pulls it off and they've got some radically fast system running something that looks like Linux.
Mid case scenario, they figure out how to make memsistors at scale and then sell licences for everybody to make blisteringly fast SSD's, etc. Then others come along and figure out how to put the pieces together. HP makes out like a bandit in royalties, etc.
Worse case, nothing comes out of this. HP shrugs, files a whole pile of patent applications. Someone else takes bits and pieces of it (like IBM) and does cool things with it. In all three cases HP is going to be enhance their IP portfolio and possibly make their stock worth more.
All of those scenarios are bad for Dell. Dell doesn't do fundamental science. They design motherboards that use components supplied by everybody else and crank out cheap computers. If scenario #1 comes true... HP is NOT going to sell any of this to Dell, cutting them out of the market. If scenario #2 comes true, HP is going to get these components at a price that Dell can't compete with. If the last scenario comes true, Dell still ends up being a VAR like everybody else and HP racks in royalties.
The CEO of Dell is almost obligated to thrown cold water all over this, otherwise Dell shareholders are naturally going to ask if this announcement is going to make Dells stock worth less and/or worthless.
I think it's because they're on the hunt for the record.
I hope Chevy pounces as well. A Volt with ultra charging technology sounds awesome! Mind you, this isn't the battery technology, this is their charging tech.
As a driver of a range extended electric vehicle, I'd be perfectly happy to pay to quick charge my car at one of his charging stations. If anything it could encourage me to switch to a Tesla. Ultimately, what I want is for the battery technology to really take off. I'd rather have fewer charging stations and more robust battery technology...
I have a new car... 2014 Chevy Volt and I've found the thing pretty darn intuitive. I can do all of those functions from the steering wheel. The only exception would be if I'm at some FM radio station and I want to tune to some other FM radio station I have to use the tune scroll wheel... but I had to do the same thing on my 14 year old car I just sold.
Setting favorites is as easy as merely pressing and holding the spot on the favorites for 3 seconds... then it's set.
It makes complete sense. Why add weight and complexity when you've got a perfectly good propulsion system already on your capsule.
Let's get this baby loaded, do a couple unmanned tests, including the crew escape system and lets roll.
I have to imagine if you're the Russian Space Agency this has to be very unwelcome news.