Well, here is one of the relevant parts of the report. Interpret it how you like:
The Committee also examined the design and development
of Orion. Many concepts are possible for crew-exploration
vehicles, and NASA clearly needs a new spacecraft for
travel beyond low-Earth orbit. The Committee found no
compelling evidence that the current design will not be acceptable for its wide variety of tasks in the exploration pro-
gram. However, the Committee is concerned about Orion’s
recurring costs. The capsule is considerably larger and more
massive than previous capsules (e.g., the Apollo capsule),
and there is some indication that a smaller and lighter four-person Orion could reduce operational costs. However, a
redesign of this magnitude would likely result in more than
a year of additional development time and a significant increase in development cost, so such a redesign should be
considered carefully before being implemented.
As far as I understand, the Boeing capsule is not the (Lockheed Martin) Orion scaled back. We are replacing a giant prime contractor by one other. And this capsule is still said to be bigger than the Apollo capsule. So I think you can understand why I am a little skeptical about gains in time or money. Of course, only time will tell.
There are parts of this plan that really sound fishy to me. But of course, we do not have yet the full information about it.
Charles Boden says they are taking the "flexible path" drafted in the Augustine Report and not by any stretch bailing out of human spaceflight. Yet, they are cancelling the whole Constellation Project, consisting in the launchers (Ares I and V) and the capsule (Orion), while the Augustine panel had specifically kept the Orion capsule in all the flexible path options. Actually, they thought any redesign of the capsule would cause an unwanted setback of more than a year.
So now, we are redesigning again a capsule from scratch. I do not see how this implementation of the "flexible path" approach is going to give us any time (or money) benefits regarding the capsule. Are we supposed to put the astronauts directly on the top of the rockets ?
Actually, it can be sold for less than before. According to the terms of sale: Upon purchasing the Artwork, Collector may establish a new value for the Artwork. The new value may not exceed current market expectations for the Artwork based on the current value of work by the Artist. This value may be reassessed quarterly. This value will be set as the minimum bid of the auction. Any bid meeting or exceeding this amount will result in a legitimate sale via the Auction Venue and the Policies of the Auction Venue must be followed regarding this matter.
There is similar turmoil in many countries. I find it a bit... opportunistic. At the time the governments ordered the vaccines, the threat wasn't well assessed. Even now, we will probably not know the big picture until the medical data is carefully analyzed. Imagine the kind of reactions we would see if the situation was the opposite, a pandemic still going strong with not enough vaccines.
Something like open design ? Or anything else ? Coining in the word "source" for things that aren't really related (i.e.: blueprints) only causes confusion. When I think of "open source hardware", I might think about VHDL or Verilog, but not really blueprints.
Typhoon class submarines (the Dmitri Donskoi belongs to this class) are not supposed to fire missiles from underwater. They are supposed to break the ice pack to launch their payload. So, this is either a very interesting evolution, or bad reporting.
If you want to know where you are coming from, a bus interface commonly used right now on satellites in U.S. and Europe is MIL-STD-1553B. This is basically a dual-redundant differential 1 Mb/s bus over a wire pair. There's a single bus controller which initiates all the transactions, and up to 31 remote terminals which respond to the bus controller.
What is a bit surprising is that for military aircraft, current designs have been moving from 1553 to Firewire (which is plug and play). So that may suggest that Firewire would be unsuitable for satellites.
It might very well be a local peak (temporally speaking). For instance, see the shape of the flu progression in France, which was characterized by a peak in September. Now, it is rising again.
It is just a beautiful product of nature. As most of the luxury items (jewels, roadsters, SLI video cards), you do not need them by definition. Fortunately, most diamonds do not cost the same as a house.
Have they forgotten about www.photoshop.com ?
Of course, it's a very light version of photoshop, but Adobe is also moving towards online version of its software.
Well, in Germany, you do not have that right. End of the story.
Laws are only a reflection of the will of the society. The German society seems to be okay with forgetting such things. A large part of the slashdot community (a significant part of it living in the US) seems not to be okay with this. Different places, different minds. After you've said this, it just comes down to know how such laws are handled between countries. It kind of reminds me the "Yahoo nazi items" controversy, in which the U.S. site of Yahoo was accused to sell nazi items to French people (selling such items is prohibited in this country). Yahoo was ultimately required to prevent the sale of such items to French people. In the story case, I suspect a ruling would not be as clear cut - as there is no financial motive involved for wikipedia.
Indeed, a menuing system makes a ton of sense.
However, what may be more discutable is the way DVD/Blu-rays boot straight to the menu. Personally, I would have preferred if they started the movie right away (the menu would be still accessible from a keypress). I don't really need a menu to set up the audio track or the subtitle track - most hardware of software players allow to do this without interrupting the movie.
And of course, as you said, booting straight to the movie doesn't make a lot of sense for TV programs. But we do not have a to have a single rule for every kind of content.
They probably want to drive up the sales... of their games. I don't really see anybody to be more inclined to shell money out because of a game demo. In the other way however, it might be more effective, as a distribution channel. If the game demo is already available on a disk you own, you might be more tempted to try out the demo, especially if it's from a game you have never heard about.
Forgive the hyperbole, but imagine for a moment that Monsanto suddenly decided you could only cook their food in pots they made and sold for ludicrous prices.
That will be less GMO's in my diet. Which might not be a bad thing.
Which PDF converters do that ? Because they must be really crap.
Most PDF converters I have used rely on Ghostscript on a way or another (after all, it's free!), and Ghostscript definitely doesn't do like this.
Most images-embedded-as-PDF files come from Xerox printers. Which, of course, have trouble knowing whatever was typed in the document in the first place.
You have to look at the typical accuracy of time references. Military crystal oscillators are usually accurate down to 0.5 or 1 ppm, but that's about the best you can usually get. For instance, look at Q-Tech offerings, which is standard technology for avionics. So let's check... 100 hours * 3600 seconds * 1 ppm = 0.36 seconds. Even without rounding errors, the error would have been the same if the system was running from a 1 ppm crystal oscillator. It seems to me that the real problem is that the time references of the different radars were not synchronized more often.
For "simple" games, I think the main point is flash support. If these ARM/Linux combo computer support flash with good performance, then it will cater to the gaming needs of most people on such a low-end machine.
Actually, I'm surprised the authors stopped so early in their quest of comparing apples to oranges (with meaningless criteria, as it has been pointed out by others slashdot users). The next logical step would have been to put into perspective the energy footprint of children. Think of the children - and of how many 4WD vehicles you could drive for the same energetic price ! Well, they probably saved this metric for their next scientific article.
This is a satellite that reported in a lot of good scientific data, but that still had critical design flaws - it failed after less than a year in orbit, when it was supposed to live on a two-year mission.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here is one of the relevant parts of the report. Interpret it how you like:
The Committee also examined the design and development of Orion. Many concepts are possible for crew-exploration vehicles, and NASA clearly needs a new spacecraft for travel beyond low-Earth orbit. The Committee found no compelling evidence that the current design will not be acceptable for its wide variety of tasks in the exploration pro- gram. However, the Committee is concerned about Orion’s recurring costs. The capsule is considerably larger and more massive than previous capsules (e.g., the Apollo capsule), and there is some indication that a smaller and lighter four-person Orion could reduce operational costs. However, a redesign of this magnitude would likely result in more than a year of additional development time and a significant increase in development cost, so such a redesign should be considered carefully before being implemented.
As far as I understand, the Boeing capsule is not the (Lockheed Martin) Orion scaled back. We are replacing a giant prime contractor by one other. And this capsule is still said to be bigger than the Apollo capsule. So I think you can understand why I am a little skeptical about gains in time or money. Of course, only time will tell.
There are parts of this plan that really sound fishy to me. But of course, we do not have yet the full information about it.
Charles Boden says they are taking the "flexible path" drafted in the Augustine Report and not by any stretch bailing out of human spaceflight. Yet, they are cancelling the whole Constellation Project, consisting in the launchers (Ares I and V) and the capsule (Orion), while the Augustine panel had specifically kept the Orion capsule in all the flexible path options. Actually, they thought any redesign of the capsule would cause an unwanted setback of more than a year.
So now, we are redesigning again a capsule from scratch. I do not see how this implementation of the "flexible path" approach is going to give us any time (or money) benefits regarding the capsule. Are we supposed to put the astronauts directly on the top of the rockets ?
Can you really sue someone for dizziness, where you live ? I can't wait to go to the theatre, and have a lawsuit because I have sore eye.
Actually, it can be sold for less than before. According to the terms of sale:
Upon purchasing the Artwork, Collector may establish a new value for the Artwork. The new value may not exceed current market expectations for the Artwork based on the current value of work by the Artist. This value may be reassessed quarterly. This value will be set as the minimum bid of the auction. Any bid meeting or exceeding this amount will result in a legitimate sale via the Auction Venue and the Policies of the Auction Venue must be followed regarding this matter.
There is similar turmoil in many countries. I find it a bit... opportunistic. At the time the governments ordered the vaccines, the threat wasn't well assessed. Even now, we will probably not know the big picture until the medical data is carefully analyzed. Imagine the kind of reactions we would see if the situation was the opposite, a pandemic still going strong with not enough vaccines.
They probably feel very unlucky because of the smell.
Something like open design ? Or anything else ? Coining in the word "source" for things that aren't really related (i.e.: blueprints) only causes confusion. When I think of "open source hardware", I might think about VHDL or Verilog, but not really blueprints.
Typhoon class submarines (the Dmitri Donskoi belongs to this class) are not supposed to fire missiles from underwater. They are supposed to break the ice pack to launch their payload. So, this is either a very interesting evolution, or bad reporting.
If you want to know where you are coming from, a bus interface commonly used right now on satellites in U.S. and Europe is MIL-STD-1553B. This is basically a dual-redundant differential 1 Mb/s bus over a wire pair. There's a single bus controller which initiates all the transactions, and up to 31 remote terminals which respond to the bus controller.
What is a bit surprising is that for military aircraft, current designs have been moving from 1553 to Firewire (which is plug and play). So that may suggest that Firewire would be unsuitable for satellites.
It might very well be a local peak (temporally speaking). For instance, see the shape of the flu progression in France, which was characterized by a peak in September. Now, it is rising again.
It is just a beautiful product of nature. As most of the luxury items (jewels, roadsters, SLI video cards), you do not need them by definition. Fortunately, most diamonds do not cost the same as a house.
Have they forgotten about www.photoshop.com ?
Of course, it's a very light version of photoshop, but Adobe is also moving towards online version of its software.
Well, in Germany, you do not have that right. End of the story.
Laws are only a reflection of the will of the society. The German society seems to be okay with forgetting such things. A large part of the slashdot community (a significant part of it living in the US) seems not to be okay with this. Different places, different minds. After you've said this, it just comes down to know how such laws are handled between countries. It kind of reminds me the "Yahoo nazi items" controversy, in which the U.S. site of Yahoo was accused to sell nazi items to French people (selling such items is prohibited in this country). Yahoo was ultimately required to prevent the sale of such items to French people. In the story case, I suspect a ruling would not be as clear cut - as there is no financial motive involved for wikipedia.
Indeed, a menuing system makes a ton of sense.
However, what may be more discutable is the way DVD/Blu-rays boot straight to the menu. Personally, I would have preferred if they started the movie right away (the menu would be still accessible from a keypress). I don't really need a menu to set up the audio track or the subtitle track - most hardware of software players allow to do this without interrupting the movie.
And of course, as you said, booting straight to the movie doesn't make a lot of sense for TV programs. But we do not have a to have a single rule for every kind of content.
They probably want to drive up the sales... of their games. I don't really see anybody to be more inclined to shell money out because of a game demo. In the other way however, it might be more effective, as a distribution channel. If the game demo is already available on a disk you own, you might be more tempted to try out the demo, especially if it's from a game you have never heard about.
They've sold about 360 million of games. Compare this with 166 million of games for PS3, and 288 million of games for the Xbox 360.
Forgive the hyperbole, but imagine for a moment that Monsanto suddenly decided you could only cook their food in pots they made and sold for ludicrous prices.
That will be less GMO's in my diet. Which might not be a bad thing.
Which PDF converters do that ? Because they must be really crap.
Most PDF converters I have used rely on Ghostscript on a way or another (after all, it's free!), and Ghostscript definitely doesn't do like this.
Most images-embedded-as-PDF files come from Xerox printers. Which, of course, have trouble knowing whatever was typed in the document in the first place.
You have to look at the typical accuracy of time references. Military crystal oscillators are usually accurate down to 0.5 or 1 ppm, but that's about the best you can usually get. For instance, look at Q-Tech offerings, which is standard technology for avionics. So let's check... 100 hours * 3600 seconds * 1 ppm = 0.36 seconds. Even without rounding errors, the error would have been the same if the system was running from a 1 ppm crystal oscillator. It seems to me that the real problem is that the time references of the different radars were not synchronized more often.
Right...
:D
In order to read a document, what I really need to replace the heavyweight Adobe Reader, is a bloated modern browser !
For "simple" games, I think the main point is flash support. If these ARM/Linux combo computer support flash with good performance, then it will cater to the gaming needs of most people on such a low-end machine.
Actually, I'm surprised the authors stopped so early in their quest of comparing apples to oranges (with meaningless criteria, as it has been pointed out by others slashdot users). The next logical step would have been to put into perspective the energy footprint of children. Think of the children - and of how many 4WD vehicles you could drive for the same energetic price ! Well, they probably saved this metric for their next scientific article.
Thanks for the link !
Is the link to the Augustine report expected to be a joke ? It appears to be a link to Windows 7 from here.
This is a satellite that reported in a lot of good scientific data, but that still had critical design flaws - it failed after less than a year in orbit, when it was supposed to live on a two-year mission.