I once managed a junior programmer who would insist that the compiler had a bug in it when she couldn't get her program to work.
Compiler bugs aren't exactly unknown: I've come across at least half a dozen bugs in my time where C/C++ code was doing "impossible" things and we eventually discovered that was because the compiler wasn't generating correct machine code.
My first assumption would be that they are not seeing what they think they were seeing, rather than there is a flaw in the theory of orbital dynamics.
I'm not being accusatory here, just skeptical.
But yes, I agree on that: it's a bit early to be questioning orbital mechanics when our methods of finding planets and determining their orbits are still so primitive.
got some news from you the socialist EU is 1000x worse
That's odd: I work in a company where employees can be sent all over the world with laptops, and the only country where we've received specific instructions on the carriage of sensitive information while crossing the border is America.
It's possible that you're correct and the EUSSR is actually 1000x worse, but from foreign companies' standpoints travel to America is becoming a serious liability; your policies are going to harm your economy far more than EVIL LAPTOP TERRORISTS ever will.
There's lots of things that a properly implemented world government could do that would be fantastic and in the long run would benefit everyone on the planet.
There are a lot of things that Santa Claus could do that would be fantastic and in the long run would benefit everyone on the planet too... they're about as likely to happen as a 'properly implemented world government'.
You seem to be under the impression that a 'world government' would be something other than a collection of psychopaths desperate to prey on the rest of us.
The odd thing is that I find the people who most promote 'world government' are also normally big promoters of 'diversity', and don't even see the blatant inconsistency between those position.
Re:Maybe the Dem's Should Follow Nasa's Lead...
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 1
If you don't like Obama's health plan fine, what's your better idea?
Get the government out of the healthcare business.
The majority of problems with healthcare in America are due to government interference in healthcare: for example, deliberately restricting the supply of doctors, requiring hospitals to treat people who won't pay, and preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance.
But, hey, screwing things up and then demanding that 'something must be done' is the way the left have always expanded their power base; why stop now and actually fix the problems they've already caused?
Commercial companies won't be offering to run spaceships to mars - they'll be offering to launch satellites and common things like that which happen much more frequently.
Plenty of commercial companies would be happy to offer flights to Mars if the US government was to pay them to do so; after all, the spaceships which flew to the Moon were all built by commercial companies.
And they'd probably find cheaper methods of doing it than NASA would, if they weren't offered open-ended cost-plus contracts.
Re:Job #1 should be tracking asteroids
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 1
Just from a species survival standpoint, it will be a LONG time before we have a self-sustaining base off-earth.
And it will happen way before we see an extinction-level impact threat; even a city-buster only happens maybe once a century, and then they hit the sea 75% of the time and low-population areas most of the rest.
There is no reasonable cost-benefit analysis where spending vast billions of dollars looking for asteroids which might hit us makes any sense.
Re:How is this different than now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If the government can't figure out when they're being screwed, then that's a problem with government, not with business; if the government is willing to pay ten times as much as any other customer, why would any sane business not charge that?
Well, for example: Forget hardware like the Spirit Mars Rover (build to last few months, but still working after two years) if you outsorce the manufacture.
We're not talking about the unmanned side of NASA, which actually does provide decent value for money; this is the manned side, which is spending a hundred billion dollars putting up a space station which will have to be deorbited shortly after it's completed.
Re:How is this different than now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is different because instead of paying around $100 an hour for a GS-14, the govt will be paying $150-$250 an hour for the same individuals, via a giant contractor ( Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed ).
Uh, no. They'd be paying for someone to launch their cargo into orbit, rather than employing people directly to do so... there's a huge difference between buying launch services like any other customer and hiring thousands of contractors to launch your own rocket on a cost-plus contract.
Anyone can buy a Delta launch and the rates are well known; if Boeing start trying to charge NASA ten times as much as they charge any other customer, even the US government might realise they're being screwed.
Re:How is this different than now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How is this different? It eliminates 10,000+ government-funded jobs in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, etc.
Ares was always more about keeping people employed than building a useful spacecraft; commercial launch companies won't employ 10,000 people just to stack a rocket and roll it out to the launch pad.
Would be difficult to provide a worse 'service' than NASA does; they're looking at taking longer to put a spam-can on top of a shuttle SRB than they did to go from early unmanned satellites to walking on the moon.
However, I do wonder whether the idea of 'outsourcing to competing systems' is at all viable: how many companies are going to spend billions of dollars developing a manned launcher which NASA will fly three times a year? The only way I could see it working is if NASA built the spam-can and designed it to be compatible with multiple launchers (e.g. Delta, Atlas, Falcon etc) so they could easily switch from one to the other for each launch.
This policy works for everybody except the greedy CEO's. Any manufacturing industry could be converted to this setup.
No, such a policy works for no-one other than greedy auto workers; everyone else has to pay higher prices for lower-quality cars, since without competition the auto companies will just sell expensive crap.
"...and cancel social security, medicare and medicaid."
Yeah, because eliminating the last bit of any notion that we actually live in a society of more than "I got mine, now you worry about yourself with no hope if you fail" is just exactly what we need right now.
Demanding that the government steal other people's money to subsidise your pension and healthcare is about as selfish as it gets.
And the simple fact is that the US government has pushed the costs of doing business in America so high that no sensible company would set up there if there's another viable alternative; either you can fix that or you can whine as you fade into irrelevance.
That was my first thought, though perhaps they're doing something new. Seems one generation has to forget what the previous generation did before the next generation comes along to reinvent it...
The fact that Microsoft is shipping Win7 and also shipping Vista SPs shows the continued support for the existing OS i.e. Vista and also a new OS - Win7.
No, it shows they've discovered that they can sell people a service pack for $100.
Or perhaps that should be 'they can still sell people a service pack for $100', because Win 98 wasn't much more than a service pack on top of Win 95. XP has really been an abberation, selling people minor upgrades every few years has been Microsoft's business plan for most of the last twenty years.
People who keep asking this are ill informed. DRM exists in whatever it is protecting not in the OS (besides a decoder).
Bollocks. Microsoft have been trying to get DRM into hardware (e.g. encrypted framebuffers for graphics chips) and the low level of the operating system for years... the only reason we don't have it is because it's a retarded idea that would trash the market share of any hardware company who implemented it.
It's not so much that Windows 7 is great it's the absense of people saying it's crap, and the fact that people are herd animals and will follow if everyone else looks like they're supporting it.
I think it's more that Vista was so bad that anything has to look better in comparison. Vista was such a disaster that it made even Windows Me look good.
Microsoft's developers are generally smart people who know their job.
This is something that's often puzzled me: the Microsoft developers I've come across seem to be smart and perfectly capable of producing a high-quality product. Yet the company perpetually churns out steaming donkey shit.
Believe it or not, but that "$1200" gaming PC is low-end. (for a gaming PC)
$250 for a graphics card, $250 for a CPU, $200 for a motherboard, $100 for a terabyte hard drive, $100 for a case, some RAM, a DVD drive and a few other odds and ends; that will play any modern game with decent performance. $1200 may even leave you enough to buy a monitor on top.
'Low-end' is an Athlon X2 with integrated graphics or a cheap graphics card; that won't cost you much more than $500.
Ok, I'd forgotten the Windows tax in both cases, so add whatever Windows costs on top... it's a long time since I've built a PC where I had to pay for the operating system.
Maybe, but I've only ever seen one person who was set up to play multi-player games on one console with multiple controllers, and that guy was more than rich enough to buy multiple PCs without even noticing the cost; typically the console is for their kid and they play games by themselves.
Now, maybe the console-owners I know are a completely non-representative sample, but I suspect that, in reality, people who go out buying multiple controllers so four people can play a game at one time on a single TV aren't much more common than those who spend $7,000 on a PC.
You also ignore the fact that PCs can be used for many purposes other than games; of the five PCs we have in the house (average cost around $600) only one is used for more than occasional gaming.
PC gamers purchased that PC. Often at thousands of dollars -- mine's just over $7K including the 30" LCD.
How many people pay $7,000 for a PC? I'm not even sure how you can spend $7,000 on a PC unless you get it gold-plated or insist on a terabyte of 15k SCSI disks.
Even a decent gaming PC shouldn't cost you much more than $1200 these days.
Consoles are a closed system where the owners have little choice about where they get content (sure, you can hack the firmware, but only a small fraction of owners will), PCs are an open system where owners can get content from all over. It's hardly surprising that users of closed systems get screwed.
This is why every tech company wants to own a closed system.
Or does x86 inherently consume more power at the same performance level?
Difficult: ARM has traditionally had a very clean instruction set which eliminates a lot of the junk that an x86 requires in order to function, and it's much easier to take a chip designed for low power and increase the performance than to take a 100+W monster like an x86 and scale it down for low-power use. The modern 'x86', at least from Intel, is basically an x86 emulator wrapped around a RISC core.... the ARM effectively eliminates the emulator and just runs the RISC core.
If I remember correctly, the dual-core ARM chips I was working on a couple of years ago used about 1W of power to play 720p HD... an Atom has trouble doing that even with several times that power usage.
My prediction is that there will not be a human outside of low Earth orbit for at least the next 50 years, with the possible (unlikely) exception of the Chinese attempting a lunar orbit or landing.
The Russians have already offered flights around the Moon for $300,000,000. Maybe NASA could buy a few.
The cost of human spaceflight is going up.
$300,000,000 is a lot less than Apollo 8 cost, and non-government prices are only going down from here as private companies take over the manned spaceflight business.
Nobody has identified a compelling economic, scientific, political, or military rationale for sending people into space.
Yes they have; it's called tourism. Get the price of a week in orbit down to a couple of hundred thousand dollars and you'll have more customers than you can handle... that won't happen overnight, but it's quite feasible in a couple of decades.
My guess is that the first people to walk on Mars will be rich tourists, not government bureaucrats.
Slashdot Mirror
I once managed a junior programmer who would insist that the compiler had a bug in it when she couldn't get her program to work.
Compiler bugs aren't exactly unknown: I've come across at least half a dozen bugs in my time where C/C++ code was doing "impossible" things and we eventually discovered that was because the compiler wasn't generating correct machine code.
My first assumption would be that they are not seeing what they think they were seeing, rather than there is a flaw in the theory of orbital dynamics.
I'm not being accusatory here, just skeptical.
But yes, I agree on that: it's a bit early to be questioning orbital mechanics when our methods of finding planets and determining their orbits are still so primitive.
What is "military format"?
Thermite and a couple of magazines from an M-16, if I remember correctly.
got some news from you the socialist EU is 1000x worse
That's odd: I work in a company where employees can be sent all over the world with laptops, and the only country where we've received specific instructions on the carriage of sensitive information while crossing the border is America.
It's possible that you're correct and the EUSSR is actually 1000x worse, but from foreign companies' standpoints travel to America is becoming a serious liability; your policies are going to harm your economy far more than EVIL LAPTOP TERRORISTS ever will.
There's lots of things that a properly implemented world government could do that would be fantastic and in the long run would benefit everyone on the planet.
There are a lot of things that Santa Claus could do that would be fantastic and in the long run would benefit everyone on the planet too... they're about as likely to happen as a 'properly implemented world government'.
You seem to be under the impression that a 'world government' would be something other than a collection of psychopaths desperate to prey on the rest of us.
The odd thing is that I find the people who most promote 'world government' are also normally big promoters of 'diversity', and don't even see the blatant inconsistency between those position.
If you don't like Obama's health plan fine, what's your better idea?
Get the government out of the healthcare business.
The majority of problems with healthcare in America are due to government interference in healthcare: for example, deliberately restricting the supply of doctors, requiring hospitals to treat people who won't pay, and preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance.
But, hey, screwing things up and then demanding that 'something must be done' is the way the left have always expanded their power base; why stop now and actually fix the problems they've already caused?
Commercial companies won't be offering to run spaceships to mars - they'll be offering to launch satellites and common things like that which happen much more frequently.
Plenty of commercial companies would be happy to offer flights to Mars if the US government was to pay them to do so; after all, the spaceships which flew to the Moon were all built by commercial companies.
And they'd probably find cheaper methods of doing it than NASA would, if they weren't offered open-ended cost-plus contracts.
Just from a species survival standpoint, it will be a LONG time before we have a self-sustaining base off-earth.
And it will happen way before we see an extinction-level impact threat; even a city-buster only happens maybe once a century, and then they hit the sea 75% of the time and low-population areas most of the rest.
There is no reasonable cost-benefit analysis where spending vast billions of dollars looking for asteroids which might hit us makes any sense.
If the government can't figure out when they're being screwed, then that's a problem with government, not with business; if the government is willing to pay ten times as much as any other customer, why would any sane business not charge that?
Well, for example: Forget hardware like the Spirit Mars Rover (build to last few months, but still working after two years) if you outsorce the manufacture.
We're not talking about the unmanned side of NASA, which actually does provide decent value for money; this is the manned side, which is spending a hundred billion dollars putting up a space station which will have to be deorbited shortly after it's completed.
It is different because instead of paying around $100 an hour for a GS-14, the govt will be paying $150-$250 an hour for the same individuals, via a giant contractor ( Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed ).
Uh, no. They'd be paying for someone to launch their cargo into orbit, rather than employing people directly to do so... there's a huge difference between buying launch services like any other customer and hiring thousands of contractors to launch your own rocket on a cost-plus contract.
Anyone can buy a Delta launch and the rates are well known; if Boeing start trying to charge NASA ten times as much as they charge any other customer, even the US government might realise they're being screwed.
How is this different? It eliminates 10,000+ government-funded jobs in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, etc.
Ares was always more about keeping people employed than building a useful spacecraft; commercial launch companies won't employ 10,000 people just to stack a rocket and roll it out to the launch pad.
You pay the same for a poor service.
Would be difficult to provide a worse 'service' than NASA does; they're looking at taking longer to put a spam-can on top of a shuttle SRB than they did to go from early unmanned satellites to walking on the moon.
However, I do wonder whether the idea of 'outsourcing to competing systems' is at all viable: how many companies are going to spend billions of dollars developing a manned launcher which NASA will fly three times a year? The only way I could see it working is if NASA built the spam-can and designed it to be compatible with multiple launchers (e.g. Delta, Atlas, Falcon etc) so they could easily switch from one to the other for each launch.
This policy works for everybody except the greedy CEO's. Any manufacturing industry could be converted to this setup.
No, such a policy works for no-one other than greedy auto workers; everyone else has to pay higher prices for lower-quality cars, since without competition the auto companies will just sell expensive crap.
"...and cancel social security, medicare and medicaid."
Yeah, because eliminating the last bit of any notion that we actually live in a society of more than "I got mine, now you worry about yourself with no hope if you fail" is just exactly what we need right now.
Demanding that the government steal other people's money to subsidise your pension and healthcare is about as selfish as it gets.
And the simple fact is that the US government has pushed the costs of doing business in America so high that no sensible company would set up there if there's another viable alternative; either you can fix that or you can whine as you fade into irrelevance.
That was my first thought, though perhaps they're doing something new. Seems one generation has to forget what the previous generation did before the next generation comes along to reinvent it...
The fact that Microsoft is shipping Win7 and also shipping Vista SPs shows the continued support for the existing OS i.e. Vista and also a new OS - Win7.
No, it shows they've discovered that they can sell people a service pack for $100.
Or perhaps that should be 'they can still sell people a service pack for $100', because Win 98 wasn't much more than a service pack on top of Win 95. XP has really been an abberation, selling people minor upgrades every few years has been Microsoft's business plan for most of the last twenty years.
People who keep asking this are ill informed. DRM exists in whatever it is protecting not in the OS (besides a decoder).
Bollocks. Microsoft have been trying to get DRM into hardware (e.g. encrypted framebuffers for graphics chips) and the low level of the operating system for years... the only reason we don't have it is because it's a retarded idea that would trash the market share of any hardware company who implemented it.
It's not so much that Windows 7 is great it's the absense of people saying it's crap, and the fact that people are herd animals and will follow if everyone else looks like they're supporting it.
I think it's more that Vista was so bad that anything has to look better in comparison. Vista was such a disaster that it made even Windows Me look good.
Microsoft's developers are generally smart people who know their job.
This is something that's often puzzled me: the Microsoft developers I've come across seem to be smart and perfectly capable of producing a high-quality product. Yet the company perpetually churns out steaming donkey shit.
Believe it or not, but that "$1200" gaming PC is low-end. (for a gaming PC)
$250 for a graphics card, $250 for a CPU, $200 for a motherboard, $100 for a terabyte hard drive, $100 for a case, some RAM, a DVD drive and a few other odds and ends; that will play any modern game with decent performance. $1200 may even leave you enough to buy a monitor on top.
'Low-end' is an Athlon X2 with integrated graphics or a cheap graphics card; that won't cost you much more than $500.
Ok, I'd forgotten the Windows tax in both cases, so add whatever Windows costs on top... it's a long time since I've built a PC where I had to pay for the operating system.
Maybe, but I've only ever seen one person who was set up to play multi-player games on one console with multiple controllers, and that guy was more than rich enough to buy multiple PCs without even noticing the cost; typically the console is for their kid and they play games by themselves.
Now, maybe the console-owners I know are a completely non-representative sample, but I suspect that, in reality, people who go out buying multiple controllers so four people can play a game at one time on a single TV aren't much more common than those who spend $7,000 on a PC.
You also ignore the fact that PCs can be used for many purposes other than games; of the five PCs we have in the house (average cost around $600) only one is used for more than occasional gaming.
PC gamers purchased that PC. Often at thousands of dollars -- mine's just over $7K including the 30" LCD.
How many people pay $7,000 for a PC? I'm not even sure how you can spend $7,000 on a PC unless you get it gold-plated or insist on a terabyte of 15k SCSI disks.
Even a decent gaming PC shouldn't cost you much more than $1200 these days.
Consoles are a closed system where the owners have little choice about where they get content (sure, you can hack the firmware, but only a small fraction of owners will), PCs are an open system where owners can get content from all over. It's hardly surprising that users of closed systems get screwed.
This is why every tech company wants to own a closed system.
Or does x86 inherently consume more power at the same performance level?
Difficult: ARM has traditionally had a very clean instruction set which eliminates a lot of the junk that an x86 requires in order to function, and it's much easier to take a chip designed for low power and increase the performance than to take a 100+W monster like an x86 and scale it down for low-power use. The modern 'x86', at least from Intel, is basically an x86 emulator wrapped around a RISC core.... the ARM effectively eliminates the emulator and just runs the RISC core.
If I remember correctly, the dual-core ARM chips I was working on a couple of years ago used about 1W of power to play 720p HD... an Atom has trouble doing that even with several times that power usage.
My prediction is that there will not be a human outside of low Earth orbit for at least the next 50 years, with the possible (unlikely) exception of the Chinese attempting a lunar orbit or landing.
The Russians have already offered flights around the Moon for $300,000,000. Maybe NASA could buy a few.
The cost of human spaceflight is going up.
$300,000,000 is a lot less than Apollo 8 cost, and non-government prices are only going down from here as private companies take over the manned spaceflight business.
Nobody has identified a compelling economic, scientific, political, or military rationale for sending people into space.
Yes they have; it's called tourism. Get the price of a week in orbit down to a couple of hundred thousand dollars and you'll have more customers than you can handle... that won't happen overnight, but it's quite feasible in a couple of decades.
My guess is that the first people to walk on Mars will be rich tourists, not government bureaucrats.