The other goals of the 'vision' Bush had have not been accomplished (the ISS is finished construction, but that was in the cards without his 'vision'), so his plan basically amounted to cancelling the shuttle without anything domestic to replace it with.
Only because NASA couldn't develop a capsule in four years; which SpaceX are doing for far less than the amount of money that NASA were given.
Since I have been working at KSC during this whole mess I'll give my perspectIve. Bush did set the end date for the last shuttle launch. He then outlined the VSE and Griffen came up with the Constellation program. The problem is Bush's lack of leadership in getting the funding to get it done.
Uh, no.
The problem is that NASA designed a program that would cost far more than the government was willing to give them.
If they'd built a Dragon-style capsule and put it on top of an Atlas or Delta, they'd probably have it in operation by now. Instead they wanted to build a capsule the size of a hotel and two new launchers of their own to launch it. Since the Apollo era NASA has often acted as though they have an infinite budget and then whined when their expensive plans get cancelled because there's no money for them.
Every technical field has its jargon that's incomprehensible to outsiders. It doesn't mean the people who use it are crazy. Complex problems require complex descriptions; not everything can be reduced to a sound bite.
But particle physics in particular seems to have vanished up its own asshole in the last couple of decades Every problem seems to be solved by inventing a new particle which will show up if only we spend ten times as much on the next machine.
No, that's the left. Hence your attempt to claim that Hitler was right-wing, and deny that the 'progressives' were firm believers in eugenics and the murder of 'undesirables' before Hitler's attempt to put that into practice made them embarrassed to talk about such things in public.
They still, of course, believe it in private; just look at the 'Greens' wank fantasies about eliminating billions of people so they can live 'naturally'.
Hitler was only doing what the 'intelligentsia' on the left had been recommending for decades beforehand. Many of them were in favor of murdering those who had 'crap DNA'.
This is only any use if at the same time, they can cure all the other diseases that are truly debilitating - Alzheimer's being a prime example.
Last I read the mechanism behind Alzheimers was becoming fairly well understood. I suspect that the vast majority of disease will be curable by the end of this century and probably before.
But for the money, $50 or $100 more buys you a crappy laptop that's still 10 times better than the netbook, includes an optical drive, and usually more memory and disk space, and certainly more computing power.
Many of us netbook owners bought them because they're small and light and decently powerful and have a usable keyboard and we can just throw them in a bag without worrying about the extra weight or worrying too much about the replacement cost if we lose it.
And the build quality of my EeePC is vastly superior to any cheap laptop I've used. Heck, it feels more robust than my Toshiba, which cost three times as much and it's certainly lasted better than the Acer laptop I used to have.
The problem with the netbook market is that there's no real reason to buy a 2011 netbook to replace a 2009 netbook, because it won't be significantly more powerful or lighter or less power-hungry. So there's essentially no upgrade market there.
They use the basic web, they email, and maybe share photos, that's if not doing that on facebook. THey look up movie times, they read news, etc.
I'm trying to imagine my girlfriend writing her resume on a tablet, or her mother doing the taxes on one.
Sure, they could buy a keyboard to plug into it for the things that require typing, but then they've just spent the best part of $1000 to get a poor simulation of a $300 laptop.
$600 laptops are cheap laptops, but not inexpensive laptops.
Uh, no they're not. $300 laptops are cheap laptops; $600 is more like the $1000 laptop of three years ago.
As for $1000 laptops from three years ago, mine was an Acer and I had to replace it last year because the keys started falling off the keyboard. Needless to say, I got a Toshiba this time.
So Acer is likely right, the tablet PC market has passed it fad moment and the big fight will be on for a more functional and colourful table eReader, subsidised by content distribution.
I doubt that many people want a 'more functional ereader'; color perhaps, but I suspect what most people want in an ereader is something cheap that they can read anywhere which they only have to recharge every few weeks. The Kindle does that with its e-ink screen, while no LCD-based tablet can come close because the screens don't work well in sunlight and they require recharging after a few hours of use.
And tablets were never designed for things that require a lot of typing. My computer is worthless for anything that requires a touchscreen.
Nothing requires a touchscreen; they're almost exclusively used in situations where you can't provide a better interface because there are few things they can do better than a keyboard and mouse. Lots of things require typing.
I'm sure people said the same thing about the mouse, the trackpad, etc. etc.
Maybe retards did, but I remember when the company I worked for got one of the earliest Macs. No-one could figure out anything useful to do with other than draw pictures when the real computers were busy compiling, but everyone thought the mouse was a great idea.
You see, the mouse added new capabilities that the computer didn't previously have, whereas for most uses touchscreens are a shitty alternative to a keyboard and mouse.
Actually, looks like Air France 447 is mainly due to pilot error.
'Pilot error' in the sense that the computer ran into conditions it was unable to handle and dumped the problem back in the hands of the pilots, who -- surprisingly -- couldn't handle it either.
As with another airliner crash some years ago the aircraft seems to have been giving the pilots contradictory readings, and only someone well trained on how to deal with that was likely to be able to keep it in the air.
763 launches of active Soyuz rocket models and 20 lost rockets give us a 2.62% loss rate, or worse than Shuttle.
So no, getting on a Soyuz-U, FG, or 2.1x is not safer than a Shuttle was.
Except that the shuttle killed two crews and Soyuz over the same time period killed none. That's the wonder of building an actual escape system into your design so the crew don't die as soon as something goes wrong.
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives.
Happened to me one day in the 90s, I think it was NT3.5? From what I remember I booted up the machine, it said 'Oh crap I deleted the registry. Sucks to be you' and that machine was dead until we reinstalled.
But a bad block in the middle of the registry is a far more likely occurence; that seems to screw it up real bad too.
Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
I back up the configuration files from my Linux machines into an SVN repository so I can trivially rebuild them (and I have rebuilt them; when I put an SSD in my netbook installing Linux and just copying over the updated config files was faster than trying to copy over the old OS install). That's typically about two dozen small text files rather than some enormous binary blob that contains all kinds of information that can't be restored onto a new system. Nor did I have to reinstall every program because it kept all its configuration information in said enormous binary blob'o'crap.
Don't forget that Windows (at least XP) will also be busy swapping out the applications you're using so that it can cache the files you're copying in memory.
Ah, the joy of moving 2GB files from one drive to another on an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and watching your web browser thrashing the disk as it desperately tries to swap itself back in while Windows is desperately trying to swap it out. I miss that so much.
Linux also has lock switch for files - do you also blame Linux distros for that, or do you blame the badly designed programs?
The difference is that almost every Windows program locks files even though there's no reason to do so, whereas almost no Unix programs lock files because there's no reason to do so. If you have two programs writing to the same file simultaneously, you're probably doing something wrong.
And that means something why? Because you're the sole arbiter of what is good and what is not? Oh wait, your opinion means jack and shit.
So, give us a good reason why a program should be locking a file so no other program can access it. And by good reason, it has to be something that isn't better solved by having one process arbitrating access to that file (e.g. dumb database vs some kind of SQL server).
You do realize that any time you open a file for writing you are almost always given an exclusive write lock on it, correct? Behavior that pretty much all OSes have had for 30+ years?
No wonder you think file locking is a good thing if you know so little about how file accesses work. I don't remember even Windows being that retarded, and the numerous Unix variants certainly weren't.
Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file).
My favorite was the way that I couldn't delete a file in Explorer because Explorer was trying to generate a thumbnail for the file. And usually that would cause some thread in Explorer to vanish up its own backside so the file remained locked until I killed Explorer or rebooted.
Ah, I so miss the excitement of running Windows and never knowing what is going to spectacularly fail next.
The bigger problem is that the first thing the GUI does when you want to copy the files is to go and see how many files there are and how large they are so it can estimate the amount of time it's going to take, and by the time it's done that it could just have copied the damn files in the first place unless they're enormous.
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They made the choice when they committed the crime that put them in prison.
So did the prisoners in the gulags.
Of course their crime was probably saying 'You know, some days I wonder whether Comrade Stalin is really quite as nice as everyone says he is'.
The other goals of the 'vision' Bush had have not been accomplished (the ISS is finished construction, but that was in the cards without his 'vision'), so his plan basically amounted to cancelling the shuttle without anything domestic to replace it with.
Only because NASA couldn't develop a capsule in four years; which SpaceX are doing for far less than the amount of money that NASA were given.
Since I have been working at KSC during this whole mess I'll give my perspectIve. Bush did set the end date for the last shuttle launch. He then outlined the VSE and Griffen came up with the Constellation program. The problem is Bush's lack of leadership in getting the funding to get it done.
Uh, no.
The problem is that NASA designed a program that would cost far more than the government was willing to give them.
If they'd built a Dragon-style capsule and put it on top of an Atlas or Delta, they'd probably have it in operation by now. Instead they wanted to build a capsule the size of a hotel and two new launchers of their own to launch it. Since the Apollo era NASA has often acted as though they have an infinite budget and then whined when their expensive plans get cancelled because there's no money for them.
Every technical field has its jargon that's incomprehensible to outsiders. It doesn't mean the people who use it are crazy. Complex problems require complex descriptions; not everything can be reduced to a sound bite.
But particle physics in particular seems to have vanished up its own asshole in the last couple of decades Every problem seems to be solved by inventing a new particle which will show up if only we spend ten times as much on the next machine.
Ah, the Republican credo: Tell no SMALL lies.
No, that's the left. Hence your attempt to claim that Hitler was right-wing, and deny that the 'progressives' were firm believers in eugenics and the murder of 'undesirables' before Hitler's attempt to put that into practice made them embarrassed to talk about such things in public.
They still, of course, believe it in private; just look at the 'Greens' wank fantasies about eliminating billions of people so they can live 'naturally'.
I tend to wonder why they're introducing massive new features like weather when they haven't even solved basic bugs like the HUD rendering issues.
Because people who want a realistic flight simulator probably care more about weather simulation than HUD bugs?
Adolf, is that you?
Hitler was only doing what the 'intelligentsia' on the left had been recommending for decades beforehand. Many of them were in favor of murdering those who had 'crap DNA'.
This is only any use if at the same time, they can cure all the other diseases that are truly debilitating - Alzheimer's being a prime example.
Last I read the mechanism behind Alzheimers was becoming fairly well understood. I suspect that the vast majority of disease will be curable by the end of this century and probably before.
But for the money, $50 or $100 more buys you a crappy laptop that's still 10 times better than the netbook, includes an optical drive, and usually more memory and disk space, and certainly more computing power.
Many of us netbook owners bought them because they're small and light and decently powerful and have a usable keyboard and we can just throw them in a bag without worrying about the extra weight or worrying too much about the replacement cost if we lose it.
And the build quality of my EeePC is vastly superior to any cheap laptop I've used. Heck, it feels more robust than my Toshiba, which cost three times as much and it's certainly lasted better than the Acer laptop I used to have.
The problem with the netbook market is that there's no real reason to buy a 2011 netbook to replace a 2009 netbook, because it won't be significantly more powerful or lighter or less power-hungry. So there's essentially no upgrade market there.
They use the basic web, they email, and maybe share photos, that's if not doing that on facebook. THey look up movie times, they read news, etc.
I'm trying to imagine my girlfriend writing her resume on a tablet, or her mother doing the taxes on one.
Sure, they could buy a keyboard to plug into it for the things that require typing, but then they've just spent the best part of $1000 to get a poor simulation of a $300 laptop.
$600 laptops are cheap laptops, but not inexpensive laptops.
Uh, no they're not. $300 laptops are cheap laptops; $600 is more like the $1000 laptop of three years ago.
As for $1000 laptops from three years ago, mine was an Acer and I had to replace it last year because the keys started falling off the keyboard. Needless to say, I got a Toshiba this time.
So Acer is likely right, the tablet PC market has passed it fad moment and the big fight will be on for a more functional and colourful table eReader, subsidised by content distribution.
I doubt that many people want a 'more functional ereader'; color perhaps, but I suspect what most people want in an ereader is something cheap that they can read anywhere which they only have to recharge every few weeks. The Kindle does that with its e-ink screen, while no LCD-based tablet can come close because the screens don't work well in sunlight and they require recharging after a few hours of use.
And tablets were never designed for things that require a lot of typing. My computer is worthless for anything that requires a touchscreen.
Nothing requires a touchscreen; they're almost exclusively used in situations where you can't provide a better interface because there are few things they can do better than a keyboard and mouse. Lots of things require typing.
I hope they put a way to turn all the fucking eye candy shit off otherwise Windows 8 will flop harder than Vista.
Windows 8 will be Vista++. I'm guessing that Windows 9 might be worth upgrading from Windows 7 for if you're still into Microsoft software.
I'm sure people said the same thing about the mouse, the trackpad, etc. etc.
Maybe retards did, but I remember when the company I worked for got one of the earliest Macs. No-one could figure out anything useful to do with other than draw pictures when the real computers were busy compiling, but everyone thought the mouse was a great idea.
You see, the mouse added new capabilities that the computer didn't previously have, whereas for most uses touchscreens are a shitty alternative to a keyboard and mouse.
It's almost like cars in America having to change the grille and cupholders every year so they can claim it's a new model.
Actually, looks like Air France 447 is mainly due to pilot error.
'Pilot error' in the sense that the computer ran into conditions it was unable to handle and dumped the problem back in the hands of the pilots, who -- surprisingly -- couldn't handle it either.
As with another airliner crash some years ago the aircraft seems to have been giving the pilots contradictory readings, and only someone well trained on how to deal with that was likely to be able to keep it in the air.
Soyuz-2.1b - 0 losses in 3 launches
763 launches of active Soyuz rocket models and 20 lost rockets give us a 2.62% loss rate, or worse than Shuttle.
So no, getting on a Soyuz-U, FG, or 2.1x is not safer than a Shuttle was.
Except that the shuttle killed two crews and Soyuz over the same time period killed none. That's the wonder of building an actual escape system into your design so the crew don't die as soon as something goes wrong.
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives.
Happened to me one day in the 90s, I think it was NT3.5? From what I remember I booted up the machine, it said 'Oh crap I deleted the registry. Sucks to be you' and that machine was dead until we reinstalled.
But a bad block in the middle of the registry is a far more likely occurence; that seems to screw it up real bad too.
Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
I back up the configuration files from my Linux machines into an SVN repository so I can trivially rebuild them (and I have rebuilt them; when I put an SSD in my netbook installing Linux and just copying over the updated config files was faster than trying to copy over the old OS install). That's typically about two dozen small text files rather than some enormous binary blob that contains all kinds of information that can't be restored onto a new system. Nor did I have to reinstall every program because it kept all its configuration information in said enormous binary blob'o'crap.
Don't forget that Windows (at least XP) will also be busy swapping out the applications you're using so that it can cache the files you're copying in memory.
Ah, the joy of moving 2GB files from one drive to another on an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and watching your web browser thrashing the disk as it desperately tries to swap itself back in while Windows is desperately trying to swap it out. I miss that so much.
Why don't they concentrate on helping me get actual work done?
Because then why would you buy a new version of Windows when XP was perfectly fine for doing actual useful work?
Linux also has lock switch for files - do you also blame Linux distros for that, or do you blame the badly designed programs?
The difference is that almost every Windows program locks files even though there's no reason to do so, whereas almost no Unix programs lock files because there's no reason to do so. If you have two programs writing to the same file simultaneously, you're probably doing something wrong.
And that means something why? Because you're the sole arbiter of what is good and what is not? Oh wait, your opinion means jack and shit.
So, give us a good reason why a program should be locking a file so no other program can access it. And by good reason, it has to be something that isn't better solved by having one process arbitrating access to that file (e.g. dumb database vs some kind of SQL server).
You do realize that any time you open a file for writing you are almost always given an exclusive write lock on it, correct? Behavior that pretty much all OSes have had for 30+ years?
No wonder you think file locking is a good thing if you know so little about how file accesses work. I don't remember even Windows being that retarded, and the numerous Unix variants certainly weren't.
Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file).
My favorite was the way that I couldn't delete a file in Explorer because Explorer was trying to generate a thumbnail for the file. And usually that would cause some thread in Explorer to vanish up its own backside so the file remained locked until I killed Explorer or rebooted.
Ah, I so miss the excitement of running Windows and never knowing what is going to spectacularly fail next.
The bigger problem is that the first thing the GUI does when you want to copy the files is to go and see how many files there are and how large they are so it can estimate the amount of time it's going to take, and by the time it's done that it could just have copied the damn files in the first place unless they're enormous.