My day job is Linux. My home systems are Linux, other than one new Windows PC for high-end gaming and an old one for iTunes. I can see four Linux systems from where I'm sitting on the sofa, not counting the Android tablet and four to six embedded Linux devices (I'm not sure exactly which of my Blu-Ray/DVD players are running Linux).
Because I'm willing to bet that whatever it is you're doing on Linux could be done just as easily on OS X without fucking about maintaining the operating system.
Wow, yes, because running apt-get upgrade or the upgrade manager every few days is just _SO_ demanding.
That would totally have been worth paying 2.5x as much to buy an Apple laptop with less powerful hardware than this one running Linux.
And it wasn't an attempt to ditch x86. The Itanium was a server product from the ground up, and only partially a technology vehicle for VLIW because HP (the partner at the time) largely drove that aspect of the ISA.
Itanium only became 'a server product from the ground up' when it turned out to suck everywhere else. Before that the media was full of 'Itanium is going to replace x86 everywhere' articles.
Mmmm.. how about to test out technology that hasn't been tried before?
Again, there's no real point when you can test it in high orbit instead and be able to return to Earth in a couple of days. You can't test a new engine there easily, but if you're testing a new engine you'd be sending it on an unmanned mission anyway in case it failed.
The Venus flyby plan allowed an abort in the first few days to return to Earth, but after that you were on your own. I presume the Mars flyby would be similar.
If you look back in history, few real voyages of exploration had an 'escape plan'. If you're not willing to lose a few crews, you shouldn't be sending them out there.
The problem with flybys is that they have most of the complexity of a real Mars mission but don't actually achieve much of anything. You have to survive in deep space for a year or more, but all you see of Mars is a fleeting glimpse over the course of a few hours as you zoom past. Venus is even worse, because there's really nothing to see other than clouds.
They made a very limited amount of sense when unmanned spacecraft were really dumb, but they make just about no sense today. At best you'd be testing deep space tech for human spaceflight, but you can test it about as well and much more safely in high Earth orbit.
It's a crying shame that the US Constitution forgot to list privacy as a basic right to be guaranteed by the government, right next to life and liberty.
The Constitution doesn't say what government isn't allowed to do, it says what government is allowed to do. And I think anyone other than a lawyer would have a hard time finding authority in there for this kind of boondoggle.
But over the last few decades people have been happy to ignore the Constitution when they're getting things they want, and then act surprised when they're getting unconstitutional things they don't want.
No, it's one of the dumbest ideas I've seen spread across the Internet lately.
and modern capitalism's worst fear (how can you enslave those who have choice?), giving me two reasons to love it.
How are you going to give a 'universal basic income' to everyone without enslaving those who produce that wealth in the first place? They have a choice: until you send them to the inevitable gulags, they can say 'screw you' and stay at home instead of working.
Yes, CRS-1 had an engine failure and couldn't deploy its secondary payload, but the Dragon itself still got to the ISS in good shape.
Even that is a bit of an exagerration: they could have deployed the secondary payload in approximately the correct orbit, but NASA wouldn't let them because there was a tiny risk of colliding with ISS if they did so.
Pressurisation would normally use gaseous helium, not liquid. You only need enough to keep the fuel tanks pressurised, so there's no great benefit to using liquid helium and lots of downsides.
I don't know the details of this system, but pressurisation valves probably open once and... that's it. Typically you want the thruster tanks unpressurised until orbit and pressurised from there until the end of the mission.
The good news is that, because they'll get the Dragon back, they should be able to dismantle the thrusters on Earth and find out why they didn't work properly.
Could you "vote with your wallet' vs "Standard Oil Co."?
Standard Oil had a ton of competitors. That's why they were losing money buying up all the competition, who would just turn around and start a new business that Standard Oil then had to buy up.
Big Business had to convince the government to pass laws and regulations to make startup costs prohibitive in order to prevent that in future.
...who looked at that illustration and instantly thought of what would happen if it got punctured by a micrometeor or similar fast moving small object.
Uh, no. O'Neill covered that in his book.
If I remember correctly, losing a single window panel would leave several hours to fix it before pressure dropped to dangerous levels. These things have to be built with huge amounts of shielding against radiation, so they would have little to fear from a passing small object; I think the shielding would have been around 90% of the mass of the habitat.
Yet his comment are true, Musk has ramped the price up, failed to keep his promises, delivered late, causes NASA problems by failing to deliver. He has a track record, but its not a good one.
When has SpaceX 'caused NASA problems by failing to deliver'?
Falcon/Dragon is still the cheapest US option for ISS resupply and has a better recent reliability record than Russian launchers.
I like this. It makes the game more challenging. You can't just safe at your own opportune moment.
Good for you. Get a game with save anywhere... and don't use it.
For the rest of us, who have actual lives, being forced to replay ten minutes of the game because it wouldn't let us save when we had to deal with something in that real life fscking sucks donkey ass and is one of the reasons why I play less and less games these days.
As such graphics drivers needed major modifications from the XP versions, and DX10 was built on top of that driver model. Porting and maintaining that port would not be trivial.
No, they didn't. The only part of our graphics drivers that needed major modifications was the kernel driver, which was already a small fraction of the code.
There was no reason for DX10 to be Vista-specific other than a lame attempt to push people onto an OS they didn't want.
Uh, that article shows single-core Atoms generally beating the ARM by 50+%. The ARM did well to match or beat it in a couple of cases, but I don't see any evidence that the Atom 'hard a hard time keeping up' with an ARM CPU that it soundly beat in most of those benchmarks.
And that's the point. Opening a window today is no more complex a task than opening a window 15 years ago.
Fifteen years ago your app didn't pull in three hundred multi-megabyte DLLs, and require managed code to be compiled to host code before it could display a window. The faster hardware becomes, the less people bother optimising.
A 'great car' so long as you don't want to drive long distances or turn the heater on in the winter.
They are selling them faster than they can make them and it has received spectacular reviews from the automotive press--or at least any automotive press that hadn't already made up their minds that "electric cars suck".
That's what they said about the Volt. Then GM had to slash production because no-one was buying them and it pretty much disappeared.
This is a car which is more than competitive within its segment (luxury sports sedan).
You think most 'luxury' car drivers don't expect to drive more than 200 miles or turn the heater on when it's cold outside?
You sound like the sad, pathetic curmudgeons who crap on any trans-formative new technology--I'm sure some jackass said the same things about "horseless carriages" at the time. Someday soon you will be just as wrong and just as irrelevant.
Except our electric-car-driving ancestors dumped them almost immediately when the ICE car came along, because they realised how much better it was. And you, of course, won't be coming back here in ten years to admit that you were wrong.
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Is your city called 'Stockholm' by any chance?
I had to give up really useful Mac tools like Scrivener, Tinderbox and Screen Flow (I still boot the Mac when I need to do a screencast).
Uh, the Windows version of Scrivener works fine in Wine, and there's a Beta of a native Linux version.
Q: what do you actually "get done" with Linux?
Pretty much everything.
My day job is Linux. My home systems are Linux, other than one new Windows PC for high-end gaming and an old one for iTunes. I can see four Linux systems from where I'm sitting on the sofa, not counting the Android tablet and four to six embedded Linux devices (I'm not sure exactly which of my Blu-Ray/DVD players are running Linux).
Because I'm willing to bet that whatever it is you're doing on Linux could be done just as easily on OS X without fucking about maintaining the operating system.
Wow, yes, because running apt-get upgrade or the upgrade manager every few days is just _SO_ demanding.
That would totally have been worth paying 2.5x as much to buy an Apple laptop with less powerful hardware than this one running Linux.
And it wasn't an attempt to ditch x86. The Itanium was a server product from the ground up, and only partially a technology vehicle for VLIW because HP (the partner at the time) largely drove that aspect of the ISA.
Itanium only became 'a server product from the ground up' when it turned out to suck everywhere else. Before that the media was full of 'Itanium is going to replace x86 everywhere' articles.
Mmmm .. how about to test out technology that hasn't been tried before?
Again, there's no real point when you can test it in high orbit instead and be able to return to Earth in a couple of days. You can't test a new engine there easily, but if you're testing a new engine you'd be sending it on an unmanned mission anyway in case it failed.
Is there any "escape plan" built in ?
The Venus flyby plan allowed an abort in the first few days to return to Earth, but after that you were on your own. I presume the Mars flyby would be similar.
If you look back in history, few real voyages of exploration had an 'escape plan'. If you're not willing to lose a few crews, you shouldn't be sending them out there.
The problem with flybys is that they have most of the complexity of a real Mars mission but don't actually achieve much of anything. You have to survive in deep space for a year or more, but all you see of Mars is a fleeting glimpse over the course of a few hours as you zoom past. Venus is even worse, because there's really nothing to see other than clouds.
They made a very limited amount of sense when unmanned spacecraft were really dumb, but they make just about no sense today. At best you'd be testing deep space tech for human spaceflight, but you can test it about as well and much more safely in high Earth orbit.
It's a crying shame that the US Constitution forgot to list privacy as a basic right to be guaranteed by the government, right next to life and liberty.
The Constitution doesn't say what government isn't allowed to do, it says what government is allowed to do. And I think anyone other than a lawyer would have a hard time finding authority in there for this kind of boondoggle.
But over the last few decades people have been happy to ignore the Constitution when they're getting things they want, and then act surprised when they're getting unconstitutional things they don't want.
But universal basic income is a sound idea,
No, it's one of the dumbest ideas I've seen spread across the Internet lately.
and modern capitalism's worst fear (how can you enslave those who have choice?), giving me two reasons to love it.
How are you going to give a 'universal basic income' to everyone without enslaving those who produce that wealth in the first place? They have a choice: until you send them to the inevitable gulags, they can say 'screw you' and stay at home instead of working.
Yes, CRS-1 had an engine failure and couldn't deploy its secondary payload, but the Dragon itself still got to the ISS in good shape.
Even that is a bit of an exagerration: they could have deployed the secondary payload in approximately the correct orbit, but NASA wouldn't let them because there was a tiny risk of colliding with ISS if they did so.
Pressurisation would normally use gaseous helium, not liquid. You only need enough to keep the fuel tanks pressurised, so there's no great benefit to using liquid helium and lots of downsides.
I don't know the details of this system, but pressurisation valves probably open once and... that's it. Typically you want the thruster tanks unpressurised until orbit and pressurised from there until the end of the mission.
The good news is that, because they'll get the Dragon back, they should be able to dismantle the thrusters on Earth and find out why they didn't work properly.
Hey, it's the Anti-Space Nutter nutter.
Haven't seen you here for a while. Been on vacation?
Could you "vote with your wallet' vs "Standard Oil Co."?
Standard Oil had a ton of competitors. That's why they were losing money buying up all the competition, who would just turn around and start a new business that Standard Oil then had to buy up.
Big Business had to convince the government to pass laws and regulations to make startup costs prohibitive in order to prevent that in future.
...who looked at that illustration and instantly thought of what would happen if it got punctured by a micrometeor or similar fast moving small object.
Uh, no. O'Neill covered that in his book.
If I remember correctly, losing a single window panel would leave several hours to fix it before pressure dropped to dangerous levels. These things have to be built with huge amounts of shielding against radiation, so they would have little to fear from a passing small object; I think the shielding would have been around 90% of the mass of the habitat.
So it will be a day late. I guess all the astronauts are going to die because their pizza doesn't arrive on Saturday.
Yet his comment are true, Musk has ramped the price up, failed to keep his promises, delivered late, causes NASA problems by failing to deliver. He has a track record, but its not a good one.
When has SpaceX 'caused NASA problems by failing to deliver'?
Falcon/Dragon is still the cheapest US option for ISS resupply and has a better recent reliability record than Russian launchers.
I like this. It makes the game more challenging. You can't just safe at your own opportune moment.
Good for you. Get a game with save anywhere... and don't use it.
For the rest of us, who have actual lives, being forced to replay ten minutes of the game because it wouldn't let us save when we had to deal with something in that real life fscking sucks donkey ass and is one of the reasons why I play less and less games these days.
Everyone malleable enough to do something like that because of a Sci-Fi movie had already seen Johnny Mnemonic.
I've never met anyone who's seen Johnny Mnemonic.
As such graphics drivers needed major modifications from the XP versions, and DX10 was built on top of that driver model. Porting and maintaining that port would not be trivial.
No, they didn't. The only part of our graphics drivers that needed major modifications was the kernel driver, which was already a small fraction of the code.
There was no reason for DX10 to be Vista-specific other than a lame attempt to push people onto an OS they didn't want.
The military that has a bigger fleet of better-performing aircraft will win.
The military that can afford to launch a thousand $100,000 missiles at every $200,000,000 fighter will win.
For myth 1, I don't know how the cpu cores have evolved over time, but the older atoms had a hard time keeping up with the A9's, despite having a larger die and clockspeed advantage: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pandaboard_es&num=1.
Uh, that article shows single-core Atoms generally beating the ARM by 50+%. The ARM did well to match or beat it in a couple of cases, but I don't see any evidence that the Atom 'hard a hard time keeping up' with an ARM CPU that it soundly beat in most of those benchmarks.
Because when people do something retarded like give Microsoft control over booting Linux on PCs, that's the kind of response they deserve.
And that's the point. Opening a window today is no more complex a task than opening a window 15 years ago.
Fifteen years ago your app didn't pull in three hundred multi-megabyte DLLs, and require managed code to be compiled to host code before it could display a window. The faster hardware becomes, the less people bother optimising.
A 'great car' so long as you don't want to drive long distances or turn the heater on in the winter.
They are selling them faster than they can make them and it has received spectacular reviews from the automotive press--or at least any automotive press that hadn't already made up their minds that "electric cars suck".
That's what they said about the Volt. Then GM had to slash production because no-one was buying them and it pretty much disappeared.
This is a car which is more than competitive within its segment (luxury sports sedan).
You think most 'luxury' car drivers don't expect to drive more than 200 miles or turn the heater on when it's cold outside?
You sound like the sad, pathetic curmudgeons who crap on any trans-formative new technology--I'm sure some jackass said the same things about "horseless carriages" at the time. Someday soon you will be just as wrong and just as irrelevant.
Except our electric-car-driving ancestors dumped them almost immediately when the ICE car came along, because they realised how much better it was. And you, of course, won't be coming back here in ten years to admit that you were wrong.