More usable than Microsoft, I agree. That was a very low hurdle. Windows Phone 5 and 6 were debacles, speaking as a (forced by my company) user. If your phone pops up "the audio driver has caused an error and will now close" and the phone WON'T RING until it's rebooted, then you've clearly picked the wrong phone OS.
But more usable than Blackberry? As a former Crackberry addict who was forced onto an iphone at another company, I have to humbly disagree. Apple had better graphics, but you could actually do work on your Crackberry. Admittedly, this was in part due to being able to get on the company intranet via BES, and there are other solutions for that now. But even then, nothing beat the BB keyboard for banging out emails.
It takes courage to cancel a known defective product that fanbois would buy without even think about it. I mean, Apple never balked selling junk before... maybe finally Apple is giving a flying fuck about their consumers?
Or maybe, this one fails so spectacularly that it would be on the news. With videos taken via iphone.
Hm. I have a Note 9 and an induction charger. It's a flat, coaster-looking disc. I drop the phone on the charger at night and pick it up in the morning fully charged. Neither the phone nor the charging device get hot to the touch. My only complaint, in fact, is the bright blue LED on the charger that lights up the room to my dark-adjusted eyes. I'm thinking of putting a piece of electrician's tape over it. But other than that, the setup works absolutely as advertised.
Point is, this is a known technology. Competitors are doing it well. I have to wonder what happened to Apple. Did they discover something we don't know about? Like, these things randomly explode? Or the generated field kills bees or something? Attracts aliens? Causes mutation in pets?
But but but.... this is not rocket surgery. It's very straightforward. I mean, you have a point about promising and then under delivering. But this should have been a low hanging fruit. Put a coil of wires in a mat and sell it at an outrageous markup. A no-brainer.
The Chinese are planning it. I'd guess they're about equivalent to around 1965, US. The Russians are talking about it, too... and on just who's rockets have we been sending people to the Station since the Shuttle was retired.
The GOP don't give a shit, other than to talk, but won't put their money where their mouth is; never have, never will.
I'm aware that both the Chinese and Russians are planning it.
I confess I don't have much visibility into the Chinese space program. I do observe that supply chains from China are considered high risk. People who don't have direct experience of this can simply google "chinese supply chain" and read about scams, fraud and other types of corruption.
What makes this important is that a space craft intending to take off from the surface of the earth, reach the moon, and then return to earth while keeping its astronauts alive depends on a bazillion parts working absolutely perfectly.
Now, maybe the Chinese government has a separate supply chain for human-rated space travel that doesn't have problems. Since it's so endemic elsewhere, it's difficult to visualize how every little screw and gasket and human consumable and circuit in the Chinese space program could be clean. This isn't an Andy Weir novel, it's real life. But who knows, maybe they've figured out how to consistently get quality materials. Threat of execution is not by itself enough, as demonstrated by, for instance, the 2008 milk scandal. And then there's pet food, electronics, toys (still! despite draconian laws) cosmetics, food, extremely high levels of formaldehyde in clothing (!) and I'm sure a bunch of things I haven't run across yet. Because, I try to pay attention, but I don't exactly make this my life's work.
A few things about the Soyuz rocket -- it's an incredible piece of engineering, no question, and has a remarkable safety record, for 1960's technology. They've had a few recent prangs, but no recent loss of life as far as I know, which means the safety systems work very well. The Soyuz arguably has a better overall safety record than the shuttle, and the Russians have decades of experience building and flying them.
The latest Soyuz FG will lift about 7,000 KG to low earth orbit. In comparison, the Saturn V had a lifting capacity of greater than 48,000 KG to the moon. The Soyuz is a reliable workhorse, but it's insufficient for a moon shot by nearly an order of magnitude. Clearly, the Russians need to (a) have a plan (do it all in one stack? Ferry up parts and build it in space?) and (b) a lot of testing, and probably many failures, before they're ready to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth. (Personally, I favor the ferry up and build in space technique, specifically because they already have a reliable LEO-capable spacecraft and a crapload of experience using it to transport cargo. But it's not up to me, of course.)
My suspicion, though, is that any large government entity who undertakes such a project will discover that there's so much overbilling, sweetheart deals, and other types of fraud with the processes they have to deal with, that the project will inevitably go so overbudget that it gets canceled. As was Constellation. In other words, unless and until the process changes, no nation on earth has enough money, in this day and age, to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth.
And again, I believe that if it could be done at all, a private company, with a small, dedicated team acting as overwatch, might have a better chance of getting it done.
I'm wondering if it's possible for any government to go to the moon anymore.
I mean, I know it's *technically* possible, but I suspect the design and deploy process is so messed up that any such attempt will inevitably go over budget and get canceled.
The sixties were a special time -- the US had the cash, and the process hadn't been corrupted yet. Or corrupted enough yet.
Perhaps a private company could manage it. But it probably wouldn't be a single stack ground-to-Luna solution like the Saturn V, as magnificent as that was.
Inscribed on the wire, yes. My understanding is that wire voice recorders preceded tape recorders....I just now looked it up, and wire recorders were invented just before the 20th century and were used up to 1960, primarily for dictation.
In many of Norton's early stories navigation was completely automatic, with the route encoded on tiny spools of wire. In Galactic Derelict (1959) humans accidentally launch a derelict alien space ship. Once they get to their destination, they have to use tiny precision tools to rewind the wire spool in order to get back home. This is apparently how we thought of storage back in the fifties.
The eponymous Schlock is from a race of carbosilicate life forms descendant from data storage devices. Apparently the idea was that organic memory could repair itself and regenerate as necessary. That it could evolve into a self-aware life form was apparently a side-effect.
As usual, Comcast wants you to rent something you could buy cheap. For a low, low introductory price which will inevitably increase as time goes on. In a year you will have spent enough to buy the hardware at least twice.
The hardware is intentionally feature-limited to avoid competing with Comcast legacy services.
As a bonus, you get to call Comcast technical support if there's a problem.
And, if at some later time you come to your senses, you'll discover just how difficult it is to return the hardware and stop Comcast from charging your credit card.
Seriously, just another example of the cable industry trying to apply an obsolete business model to current times. Cable is dead. Streaming is not like cable, unless we (the consumers) let it be. Let's not do that, ok?
For the past several weeks I (along with many other people) have been getting these scam emails saying that my password is a certain word and they're obviously logged into my account because they're sending me email from my own email address. (Which is stupid -- sender address has been trivial to spoof since email was invented, and that was neither the password for my email account nor ever the password to log into my workstation.). The spam then threatens to send all my contacts photos from my webcam (I don't have one) of me, um, enjoying myself to pr0n.
The password they always say they've captured was my very first facebook password. It's rather unique and I recognized it immediately.
So this pr0n scam... Is it an outsider scooping cleartext passwords and using them for spam, or is it someone at Facebook running a side business? Inquiring minds want to know.
Hm. Ultimately, you are correct, but I think knowing the root of the design decisions points up another failing -- the company's tendency (or perhaps industry's tendency) to reuse old airframes for new designs. I suspect it's hugely more expensive to design a new airframe (Boeing's "new" dreamliner design is now 15 years old) rather than retrofit an existing one, and there's way too much financial temptation to leverage existing designs, even (this is the important part) where inappropriate.
But whatever, it all leads to the same conclusion -- they shoulda designed a new airframe, regardless of the cost, because choices made have bitten them in the butt now.
> Yet black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.
Jesus, what a nightmare. And, I'm sure, no way of turning off the MCAS even though it was clearly malfunctioning. That has to be the worst last moments for a pilot, ever.
I read in a different article that the reason for the airframe design has its roots in the way airports were designed decades ago. Before they had those mobile tunnels that connected between the terminal and the plane, passengers had to walk out to the plane and ascend on a portable stairway. To make boarding easier, the original 737 was designed to be lower to the ground, so there wouldn't be as many steps to board. That part of the 737 design was never changed, and it made the airframe changes for the Max very awkward to implement. Hence the necessity for something like the MCAS, and hence the current mess.
It's true that better programmers than Bill Gates never became rich. I think passing it off as "luck" is oversimplifying. Being at the right place in the right time may be a matter of luck, but recognizing that, and having the sense and the drive to take advantage of it, are quite different things.
Passing other's success off as "luck", even if true in some cases, becomes an excuse to stop trying. And then what? As Cake said, is it you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
Putting yourself in positions where "being in the right place at the right time" increase the probability of success. The right place is probably not in the living room playing Warcraft.
Having a skill, being good at something, increases your chances of success. (It helps if the skill is something in demand.) So does Showing Up. Learning to work with people. And working hard. Do you think Bill [1] sat on the couch and waited for the money to come to him?
[1] I'm uncomfortable using Gates as an example as I don't like the guy and I don't like his company. But that's the example TFA used.
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More usable than Microsoft, I agree. That was a very low hurdle. Windows Phone 5 and 6 were debacles, speaking as a (forced by my company) user. If your phone pops up "the audio driver has caused an error and will now close" and the phone WON'T RING until it's rebooted, then you've clearly picked the wrong phone OS.
But more usable than Blackberry? As a former Crackberry addict who was forced onto an iphone at another company, I have to humbly disagree. Apple had better graphics, but you could actually do work on your Crackberry. Admittedly, this was in part due to being able to get on the company intranet via BES, and there are other solutions for that now. But even then, nothing beat the BB keyboard for banging out emails.
Things like the Treo had done this years before.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
It was. It was also a long time ago.
> Mostly because the Samsung charger has an annoying blue LED to show it is charging, which is bright and hard to sleep next to my bed,
I know right?? What the hell were they thinking?
It takes courage to cancel a known defective product that fanbois would buy without even think about it. I mean, Apple never balked selling junk before... maybe finally Apple is giving a flying fuck about their consumers?
Or maybe, this one fails so spectacularly that it would be on the news. With videos taken via iphone.
Oooh, now I wish they'd released it.
Hm. That's actually... an interesting idea. I'm sorry now they couldn't get it to work.
Hm. I have a Note 9 and an induction charger. It's a flat, coaster-looking disc. I drop the phone on the charger at night and pick it up in the morning fully charged. Neither the phone nor the charging device get hot to the touch. My only complaint, in fact, is the bright blue LED on the charger that lights up the room to my dark-adjusted eyes. I'm thinking of putting a piece of electrician's tape over it. But other than that, the setup works absolutely as advertised.
Point is, this is a known technology. Competitors are doing it well. I have to wonder what happened to Apple. Did they discover something we don't know about? Like, these things randomly explode? Or the generated field kills bees or something? Attracts aliens? Causes mutation in pets?
But but but.... this is not rocket surgery. It's very straightforward. I mean, you have a point about promising and then under delivering. But this should have been a low hanging fruit. Put a coil of wires in a mat and sell it at an outrageous markup. A no-brainer.
Just sayin'. It's not like Apple to miss an opportunity like this.
Not paying attention, are you?
The Chinese are planning it. I'd guess they're about equivalent to around 1965, US. The Russians are talking about it, too... and on just who's rockets have we been sending people to the Station since the Shuttle was retired.
The GOP don't give a shit, other than to talk, but won't put their money where their mouth is; never have, never will.
I'm aware that both the Chinese and Russians are planning it.
I confess I don't have much visibility into the Chinese space program. I do observe that supply chains from China are considered high risk. People who don't have direct experience of this can simply google "chinese supply chain" and read about scams, fraud and other types of corruption.
What makes this important is that a space craft intending to take off from the surface of the earth, reach the moon, and then return to earth while keeping its astronauts alive depends on a bazillion parts working absolutely perfectly.
Now, maybe the Chinese government has a separate supply chain for human-rated space travel that doesn't have problems. Since it's so endemic elsewhere, it's difficult to visualize how every little screw and gasket and human consumable and circuit in the Chinese space program could be clean. This isn't an Andy Weir novel, it's real life. But who knows, maybe they've figured out how to consistently get quality materials. Threat of execution is not by itself enough, as demonstrated by, for instance, the 2008 milk scandal. And then there's pet food, electronics, toys (still! despite draconian laws) cosmetics, food, extremely high levels of formaldehyde in clothing (!) and I'm sure a bunch of things I haven't run across yet. Because, I try to pay attention, but I don't exactly make this my life's work.
A few things about the Soyuz rocket -- it's an incredible piece of engineering, no question, and has a remarkable safety record, for 1960's technology. They've had a few recent prangs, but no recent loss of life as far as I know, which means the safety systems work very well. The Soyuz arguably has a better overall safety record than the shuttle, and the Russians have decades of experience building and flying them.
The latest Soyuz FG will lift about 7,000 KG to low earth orbit. In comparison, the Saturn V had a lifting capacity of greater than 48,000 KG to the moon. The Soyuz is a reliable workhorse, but it's insufficient for a moon shot by nearly an order of magnitude. Clearly, the Russians need to (a) have a plan (do it all in one stack? Ferry up parts and build it in space?) and (b) a lot of testing, and probably many failures, before they're ready to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth. (Personally, I favor the ferry up and build in space technique, specifically because they already have a reliable LEO-capable spacecraft and a crapload of experience using it to transport cargo. But it's not up to me, of course.)
My suspicion, though, is that any large government entity who undertakes such a project will discover that there's so much overbilling, sweetheart deals, and other types of fraud with the processes they have to deal with, that the project will inevitably go so overbudget that it gets canceled. As was Constellation. In other words, unless and until the process changes, no nation on earth has enough money, in this day and age, to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth.
And again, I believe that if it could be done at all, a private company, with a small, dedicated team acting as overwatch, might have a better chance of getting it done.
So yeah, I've been trying to pay attention.
I'm wondering if it's possible for any government to go to the moon anymore.
I mean, I know it's *technically* possible, but I suspect the design and deploy process is so messed up that any such attempt will inevitably go over budget and get canceled.
The sixties were a special time -- the US had the cash, and the process hadn't been corrupted yet. Or corrupted enough yet.
Perhaps a private company could manage it. But it probably wouldn't be a single stack ground-to-Luna solution like the Saturn V, as magnificent as that was.
Sorry, I can't help thinking it'll go something like, "Hey kid. Wanna puppy? He's right in there, through that little door."
Inscribed on the wire, yes. My understanding is that wire voice recorders preceded tape recorders. ...I just now looked it up, and wire recorders were invented just before the 20th century and were used up to 1960, primarily for dictation.
In many of Norton's early stories navigation was completely automatic, with the route encoded on tiny spools of wire. In Galactic Derelict (1959) humans accidentally launch a derelict alien space ship. Once they get to their destination, they have to use tiny precision tools to rewind the wire spool in order to get back home. This is apparently how we thought of storage back in the fifties.
Andre Norton's space ships were like that, except they used wire spools instead of tape. (Which is an even older technology.)
The eponymous Schlock is from a race of carbosilicate life forms descendant from data storage devices. Apparently the idea was that organic memory could repair itself and regenerate as necessary. That it could evolve into a self-aware life form was apparently a side-effect.
Basically, Comcast will rent you a Roku box? Brilliant...
It *is* brilliant. Because some people *will* fall for it.
Good point, and a REALLY good reason not to have internet from Comcast.
A feature limited (from TFA) Roku or Apple TV.
As usual, Comcast wants you to rent something you could buy cheap. For a low, low introductory price which will inevitably increase as time goes on. In a year you will have spent enough to buy the hardware at least twice.
The hardware is intentionally feature-limited to avoid competing with Comcast legacy services.
As a bonus, you get to call Comcast technical support if there's a problem.
And, if at some later time you come to your senses, you'll discover just how difficult it is to return the hardware and stop Comcast from charging your credit card.
Seriously, just another example of the cable industry trying to apply an obsolete business model to current times. Cable is dead. Streaming is not like cable, unless we (the consumers) let it be. Let's not do that, ok?
Unique in this case meant I only ever used it for facebook.
For the past several weeks I (along with many other people) have been getting these scam emails saying that my password is a certain word and they're obviously logged into my account because they're sending me email from my own email address. (Which is stupid -- sender address has been trivial to spoof since email was invented, and that was neither the password for my email account nor ever the password to log into my workstation.). The spam then threatens to send all my contacts photos from my webcam (I don't have one) of me, um, enjoying myself to pr0n.
The password they always say they've captured was my very first facebook password. It's rather unique and I recognized it immediately.
So this pr0n scam... Is it an outsider scooping cleartext passwords and using them for spam, or is it someone at Facebook running a side business? Inquiring minds want to know.
The article mentioned baggage, but also included passengers as a reason for the design.
Hm. Ultimately, you are correct, but I think knowing the root of the design decisions points up another failing -- the company's tendency (or perhaps industry's tendency) to reuse old airframes for new designs. I suspect it's hugely more expensive to design a new airframe (Boeing's "new" dreamliner design is now 15 years old) rather than retrofit an existing one, and there's way too much financial temptation to leverage existing designs, even (this is the important part) where inappropriate.
But whatever, it all leads to the same conclusion -- they shoulda designed a new airframe, regardless of the cost, because choices made have bitten them in the butt now.
> Yet black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor -- a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane's "angle of attack," the angle between the airflow and the wing -- triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.
Jesus, what a nightmare. And, I'm sure, no way of turning off the MCAS even though it was clearly malfunctioning. That has to be the worst last moments for a pilot, ever.
I read in a different article that the reason for the airframe design has its roots in the way airports were designed decades ago. Before they had those mobile tunnels that connected between the terminal and the plane, passengers had to walk out to the plane and ascend on a portable stairway. To make boarding easier, the original 737 was designed to be lower to the ground, so there wouldn't be as many steps to board. That part of the 737 design was never changed, and it made the airframe changes for the Max very awkward to implement. Hence the necessity for something like the MCAS, and hence the current mess.
It's true that better programmers than Bill Gates never became rich. I think passing it off as "luck" is oversimplifying. Being at the right place in the right time may be a matter of luck, but recognizing that, and having the sense and the drive to take advantage of it, are quite different things.
Passing other's success off as "luck", even if true in some cases, becomes an excuse to stop trying. And then what? As Cake said, is it you or your parents in that income tax bracket?
Putting yourself in positions where "being in the right place at the right time" increase the probability of success. The right place is probably not in the living room playing Warcraft.
Having a skill, being good at something, increases your chances of success. (It helps if the skill is something in demand.) So does Showing Up. Learning to work with people. And working hard. Do you think Bill [1] sat on the couch and waited for the money to come to him?
[1] I'm uncomfortable using Gates as an example as I don't like the guy and I don't like his company. But that's the example TFA used.