"I wouldn't be suprised if the external tank is insulated just because of how the shuttle is mounted on the assembly."
It's more complicated than that. It is needed to stop ice forming that would trash the shuttle, but it also reduces fuel boiloff, protects the tank from aerodynamic heating, and keeps the metal cold... the metal in the tank gets stronger as it cools down, and that means they've been able to cut back on the amount they use. Since the tank goes most of the way to orbit, saving a pound of mass in the tank gives you close to a pound of extra payload in the shuttle.
Springs and pyrotechnics, I believe. When it is ordered to lower the NASA engineers went all out to make sure it _would_ come down and lock in the very short time available, even if the hydraulics failed.
"After the first S-turn on STS-1, the entire re-entry was hand-flown through STS-4, at which point the FCS was rewritten (and the e-seats removed). John Young took over the flying when the sideslip meter pegged and stayed pegged for several seconds, meaning that the limit had been exceeded. This happened because L_YJ was about half the size predicted and the wrong sign and not even the extremely robust FCS could deal with that much error. Cf Iliff & Shafer, "Extraction of Stability and Control Derivatives From Orbiter Flight Data", NASA TM-4500, June, 1993."
Yes. I believe it's discussed in some detail in the post-flight briefing, and I think Mary Shafer wrote a report about it on the NTRS web site explaining why it happened.
"Sounds mighty mighty fishy."
Only to someone not acquainted with shuttle history. An awful lot of things went wrong on the first shuttle flight, and that should hardly be surprising given that everything was new.
In fact, John Young said afterwards that if he'd known about the problems with the body flap during the launch he'd have ejected rather than fly to orbit and risk being unable to re-enter.
"Managing re-entry is trivial for a computerized autopilot."
Not when it's programmed with the wrong aerodynamic data.
"All those well-known systems have much better reliability, than say, having several people, somewhat disoriented by space nausea and changing time-zones, pushing elbows all around the cabin, and being instructed to flip many switches, many of them identical looking."
That's why there's one very obvious button right on the center console which lowers the landing gear. Lift the cover, press the button (or is it a switch, I forget?) and away it goes.
And as someone else pointed out, all your wonderful safety systems do is dramatically increase the chances of the landing gear _not_ coming down and killing you as the shuttle breaks apart and the crew cabin rolls down the runway: it's nowhere near strong enough to survive a wheels-up landing intact.
"But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required."
It's more down to the fact that they hated the idea of dying because the computer lowered the landing gear in orbit. There's no way to raise the landing gear on the shuttle from inside: the hydraulic systems to do so don't exist and the landing gear doors have some heat-protection added after they're closed on the ground.
And the lack of trust of the autopilot was somewhat well founded: John Young had to fly part of Columbia's first re-entry manually because the real aerodynamics at hypersonic speed turned out to differ enough from the models that the shuttle would probably have been destroyed if there were no people on board.
Now, of course, they've done more than enough re-entries to trust the computer to fly most of the way, but you're still dead if the computer has a brain-fart and lowers the gear in space. Similarly, the Apollo command module had a switch to completely disable the system that opened the parachutes until just before landing.
"I received this worm email "from" one of my friends... so it's not just coming from random accounts, it's coming from people who have you in their contact list."
Ditto. I got hit by this because it came from someone I know and had a reasonably plausible subject line.
As I understand it, this doesn't infect the computer it runs on, it just uses the evils of Javascript to grap addresses from your contacts list and forward a copy to everyone in there while passing them on to a spammer site. There should be nothing left behind to 'infect' the computer it runs on, and it will run on anything that supports Javascript... which is needed to use Yahoo mail in the first place.
Just another reason why Javascript is evil.
Re:GTA is one of the worst offenders
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 1
"There is so much repetition and boredom hidden in this game it's a real wonder I finished the game twice."
Indeed. To me most of the missions in the GTA games are just a tedious grind that I have to work through to open up the fun stuff... so I'm surprised that anyone would use it as an example of a game which doesn't make you 'work'.
The reality is that there isn't much of a game in the GTA missions so they make you fail numerous times before you complete them in order to make it feel long, and when you fail you have to drive back to the mission start, sit through a cutscene, drive from the mission start to where the actual mission is and then fail it after thirty seconds when you just spent ten minutes getting back to where you were before you failed last time.
I mean, seriously, it's a club for sad old socialists and communists who are still dreaming that they'll one day run the world. Why didn't we close it down years ago?
You'd think that Bush would at least have the balls to kick them out of New York.
Personally I thought it was an awful scene, and can understand exactly why it was cut. The original movie wasn't exactly the best acted or best-written ever made, but the Biggs scene was even worse.
"I'm as close to a 2nd Amendment purist as one is likely to find"
No you're not.
"But even for me, there are limits. Should people be allowed to own fully automatic weapons? RPGs? Artillary? Landmines?"
Do you really think that the founders would have been worried about individuals owning RPGs when they were quite happy for individuals to own warships?
Hint: read Article 1 section 8 sometime, and look up 'letters of marque and reprisal', if you don't know what that means.
"It seems though that they don't even know how to make a compelling pitch to customers, business or retail."
It's hard to make a compelling pitch when there's nothing compelling about your product. Windows 95, for example, pretty much sold itself: it was a huge upgrade over 3.1. XP over 95 was a tougher sell but provided enough reasons to upgrade in the long run. Vista over XP? 'Look at these fancy icons! They're 3D! Vista gives you a whole extra dimension than XP!'
Yeah, right.
Microsoft lost it years ago, the delays and removal of features from Vista are just making it a laughing stock.
Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop?
on
The Story of Tron
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Tron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?"
Because you generally need to make several times the cost of the movie at the box office to break even. Theaters take a cut, distributors take a cut, then there's the advertising costs to pay on top... which can be massive: in the extreme case of low-budget movies, they can be many times the cost of the movie itself.
$33,000,000 gross for a $17,000,000 movie probably just about paid for the advertising and the coke and hookers budget.
"Blade Runner was 27th that year."
If I remember correctly, 'Blade Runner' was considered a disaster when it was released: hence the voiceover and happy ending tacked on to try to raise revenue with Joe Sixpack.
"They need me more than I need new entertainment."
Indeed, that's what the MPAA and RIAA don't seem to get. Without customers, both organisations would die, whereas without mass-market music and movies, we'd just find something else to do with our time.
For that matter, the computer game industry has been heading in the same direction lately, with more and more invasive 'copy protection' scams required to play the games that customers have purchased. The idea seems to be that you can make more money by forcing customers to stick a red-hot poker up their ass before they're allowed to use your product... which would seem bizarre to any company that made real things, where 'the customer is always right'.
"Because lots of companies are going to throw millions of dollars into R&D when the company next door can just wait for them to produce something, then produce an exact copy."
Companies do that all the time.
Company A has a dozen patents on manufacturing widgets. Company B has a dozen patents on manufacturing widgets. Neither Company A or Company B can manufacture widgets without infringing, so they cross-license their patents to each other.
So patents don't prevent Company B from 'copying' Company A's products. They're just a government-mandated monopoly to prevent Company C from entering the market, because they have no patents to trade. Patents then become a subsidy to company profits and a major cost to consumers who have to pay higher prices than they would in a free market, nothing more.
"The challange of making apollos on-board computer directly influenced the development of ICs, and later the CPU"
Influenced, perhaps, but if I remember correctly it used off-the-shelf ICs. It's a pretty neat piece of hardware and software for its time, but is hardly responsible for bringing us Pentium chips.
Perhaps I'm retarded, but if they wanted to know who had what, why not just... do a search on the servers? Obviously having the entire database available would allow faster searches, but if you're trying to find people downloading 'Death Wish 15', then the P2P app will do the search for you. Or put up the file yourself and track who downloads it.
Seems to me that this siezure is far more useful for disrupting the network and scaring away users than tracking pirates... there are easier ways to do that, and you can monitor the network for a long period rather than just the state at the time the server was siezed.
"In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy."
Yay, just what we need, another idiot utopia.
The reality is that in such a world the government would have privacy and the rest of us would have none: politicians are never going to allow the proles to spy on them.
Brin is incredibly naive if he thinks such a society is workable.
"But the important thing is that: no one died despite all of that."
Two Soyuz crews have died, if I remember correctly, just like the shuttle.
The difference is that the last Soyuz crew death was over thirty years ago, when it was still a new launcher. It's had problems since, but they've all been survivable because it's a capsule, not a brick with wings (or without wings, in the case of Challenger and Columbia post-accident). It's vastly easier to design a high-survivability capsule than a high-survivability 'space-plane' because it can take much higher stresses and still be able to land.
Reward failure, punish success: that's the way big government works... which is why it's always such a screwup and even when it does something useful it costs more and is less efficient than having private business do so. Well, unless it's a big business that's fallen into the same mindset.
"Here in the real world, we've already had two launch failures - one destroyed the vehicle, and the other resulted in an Abort-to-Orbit."
No, you've had three. Two destroyed the vehicle, one would have destroyed it, if the crew hadn't overridden the computers that wanted to shut down two of the three engines.
Columbia was a _launch vehicle_ failure.
"The bald fact is that Soyuz, in 87 flights, has racked up a worse record in every single category you can name when you compare it to the Shuttle's record in 114 flights."
The bald fact is that Soyuz hasn't killed a crew member since the 70s. The shuttle has killed fourteen people in that time.
Slashdot Mirror
"I wouldn't be suprised if the external tank is insulated just because of how the shuttle is mounted on the assembly."
It's more complicated than that. It is needed to stop ice forming that would trash the shuttle, but it also reduces fuel boiloff, protects the tank from aerodynamic heating, and keeps the metal cold... the metal in the tank gets stronger as it cools down, and that means they've been able to cut back on the amount they use. Since the tank goes most of the way to orbit, saving a pound of mass in the tank gives you close to a pound of extra payload in the shuttle.
Oh, and as for that one:
"BTW how can the gear "fall" in space?"
Springs and pyrotechnics, I believe. When it is ordered to lower the NASA engineers went all out to make sure it _would_ come down and lock in the very short time available, even if the hydraulics failed.
Aha, Google eventually found something:
. html
http://yarchive.net/space/shuttle/shuttle_control
According to Mary Shafer herself:
"After the first S-turn on STS-1, the entire re-entry was hand-flown through STS-4, at which point the FCS was rewritten (and the e-seats removed). John Young took over the flying when the sideslip meter pegged and stayed pegged for several seconds, meaning that the limit had been exceeded. This happened because L_YJ was about half the size predicted and the wrong sign and not even the extremely robust FCS could deal with that much error. Cf Iliff & Shafer, "Extraction of Stability and Control Derivatives From Orbiter Flight Data", NASA TM-4500, June, 1993."
"Do you have a reference for this?"
Yes. I believe it's discussed in some detail in the post-flight briefing, and I think Mary Shafer wrote a report about it on the NTRS web site explaining why it happened.
"Sounds mighty mighty fishy."
Only to someone not acquainted with shuttle history. An awful lot of things went wrong on the first shuttle flight, and that should hardly be surprising given that everything was new.
In fact, John Young said afterwards that if he'd known about the problems with the body flap during the launch he'd have ejected rather than fly to orbit and risk being unable to re-enter.
"Managing re-entry is trivial for a computerized autopilot."
Not when it's programmed with the wrong aerodynamic data.
"All those well-known systems have much better reliability, than say, having several people, somewhat disoriented by space nausea and changing time-zones, pushing elbows all around the cabin, and being instructed to flip many switches, many of them identical looking."
That's why there's one very obvious button right on the center console which lowers the landing gear. Lift the cover, press the button (or is it a switch, I forget?) and away it goes.
And as someone else pointed out, all your wonderful safety systems do is dramatically increase the chances of the landing gear _not_ coming down and killing you as the shuttle breaks apart and the crew cabin rolls down the runway: it's nowhere near strong enough to survive a wheels-up landing intact.
"But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required."
It's more down to the fact that they hated the idea of dying because the computer lowered the landing gear in orbit. There's no way to raise the landing gear on the shuttle from inside: the hydraulic systems to do so don't exist and the landing gear doors have some heat-protection added after they're closed on the ground.
And the lack of trust of the autopilot was somewhat well founded: John Young had to fly part of Columbia's first re-entry manually because the real aerodynamics at hypersonic speed turned out to differ enough from the models that the shuttle would probably have been destroyed if there were no people on board.
Now, of course, they've done more than enough re-entries to trust the computer to fly most of the way, but you're still dead if the computer has a brain-fart and lowers the gear in space. Similarly, the Apollo command module had a switch to completely disable the system that opened the parachutes until just before landing.
"I received this worm email "from" one of my friends ... so it's not just coming from random accounts, it's coming from people who have you in their contact list."
Ditto. I got hit by this because it came from someone I know and had a reasonably plausible subject line.
As I understand it, this doesn't infect the computer it runs on, it just uses the evils of Javascript to grap addresses from your contacts list and forward a copy to everyone in there while passing them on to a spammer site. There should be nothing left behind to 'infect' the computer it runs on, and it will run on anything that supports Javascript... which is needed to use Yahoo mail in the first place.
Just another reason why Javascript is evil.
"There is so much repetition and boredom hidden in this game it's a real wonder I finished the game twice."
Indeed. To me most of the missions in the GTA games are just a tedious grind that I have to work through to open up the fun stuff... so I'm surprised that anyone would use it as an example of a game which doesn't make you 'work'.
The reality is that there isn't much of a game in the GTA missions so they make you fail numerous times before you complete them in order to make it feel long, and when you fail you have to drive back to the mission start, sit through a cutscene, drive from the mission start to where the actual mission is and then fail it after thirty seconds when you just spent ten minutes getting back to where you were before you failed last time.
I mean, seriously, it's a club for sad old socialists and communists who are still dreaming that they'll one day run the world. Why didn't we close it down years ago?
You'd think that Bush would at least have the balls to kick them out of New York.
Personally I thought it was an awful scene, and can understand exactly why it was cut. The original movie wasn't exactly the best acted or best-written ever made, but the Biggs scene was even worse.
"I'm as close to a 2nd Amendment purist as one is likely to find"
No you're not.
"But even for me, there are limits. Should people be allowed to own fully automatic weapons? RPGs? Artillary? Landmines?"
Do you really think that the founders would have been worried about individuals owning RPGs when they were quite happy for individuals to own warships?
Hint: read Article 1 section 8 sometime, and look up 'letters of marque and reprisal', if you don't know what that means.
"In 1999, world physics was a new technology that hadn't been integrated into the genre before."
That's odd, given that Trespasser was released in 1998.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespasser_(game)
Sadly, about all it was used for was naff box-stacking puzzles, with an interface that made stacking boxes extremely hard.
"It seems though that they don't even know how to make a compelling pitch to customers, business or retail."
It's hard to make a compelling pitch when there's nothing compelling about your product. Windows 95, for example, pretty much sold itself: it was a huge upgrade over 3.1. XP over 95 was a tougher sell but provided enough reasons to upgrade in the long run. Vista over XP? 'Look at these fancy icons! They're 3D! Vista gives you a whole extra dimension than XP!'
Yeah, right.
Microsoft lost it years ago, the delays and removal of features from Vista are just making it a laughing stock.
"Tron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?"
Because you generally need to make several times the cost of the movie at the box office to break even. Theaters take a cut, distributors take a cut, then there's the advertising costs to pay on top... which can be massive: in the extreme case of low-budget movies, they can be many times the cost of the movie itself.
$33,000,000 gross for a $17,000,000 movie probably just about paid for the advertising and the coke and hookers budget.
"Blade Runner was 27th that year."
If I remember correctly, 'Blade Runner' was considered a disaster when it was released: hence the voiceover and happy ending tacked on to try to raise revenue with Joe Sixpack.
"They need me more than I need new entertainment."
Indeed, that's what the MPAA and RIAA don't seem to get. Without customers, both organisations would die, whereas without mass-market music and movies, we'd just find something else to do with our time.
For that matter, the computer game industry has been heading in the same direction lately, with more and more invasive 'copy protection' scams required to play the games that customers have purchased. The idea seems to be that you can make more money by forcing customers to stick a red-hot poker up their ass before they're allowed to use your product... which would seem bizarre to any company that made real things, where 'the customer is always right'.
"Because lots of companies are going to throw millions of dollars into R&D when the company next door can just wait for them to produce something, then produce an exact copy."
Companies do that all the time.
Company A has a dozen patents on manufacturing widgets. Company B has a dozen patents on manufacturing widgets. Neither Company A or Company B can manufacture widgets without infringing, so they cross-license their patents to each other.
So patents don't prevent Company B from 'copying' Company A's products. They're just a government-mandated monopoly to prevent Company C from entering the market, because they have no patents to trade. Patents then become a subsidy to company profits and a major cost to consumers who have to pay higher prices than they would in a free market, nothing more.
"Guy Richie seems to make the same movie over and over again, too."
Not to mention that it was a rip-off of better movies in the first place.
"The challange of making apollos on-board computer directly influenced the development of ICs, and later the CPU"
Influenced, perhaps, but if I remember correctly it used off-the-shelf ICs. It's a pretty neat piece of hardware and software for its time, but is hardly responsible for bringing us Pentium chips.
Perhaps I'm retarded, but if they wanted to know who had what, why not just... do a search on the servers? Obviously having the entire database available would allow faster searches, but if you're trying to find people downloading 'Death Wish 15', then the P2P app will do the search for you. Or put up the file yourself and track who downloads it.
Seems to me that this siezure is far more useful for disrupting the network and scaring away users than tracking pirates... there are easier ways to do that, and you can monitor the network for a long period rather than just the state at the time the server was siezed.
"In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy."
Yay, just what we need, another idiot utopia.
The reality is that in such a world the government would have privacy and the rest of us would have none: politicians are never going to allow the proles to spy on them.
Brin is incredibly naive if he thinks such a society is workable.
"SS-1 pretty much a copy of the X-15, which is a dead-end as far as getting into orbit is concerned."
A bizarre claim, given that there were plans to turn the X-15 into an orbital spacecraft launched on an expendable booster (similar to the Dynasoar).
Odds are very high that Rutan will put people into orbit in the next decade in a spacecraft he's designed and built. I can't say the same about NASA.
"But the important thing is that: no one died despite all of that."
Two Soyuz crews have died, if I remember correctly, just like the shuttle.
The difference is that the last Soyuz crew death was over thirty years ago, when it was still a new launcher. It's had problems since, but they've all been survivable because it's a capsule, not a brick with wings (or without wings, in the case of Challenger and Columbia post-accident). It's vastly easier to design a high-survivability capsule than a high-survivability 'space-plane' because it can take much higher stresses and still be able to land.
Reward failure, punish success: that's the way big government works... which is why it's always such a screwup and even when it does something useful it costs more and is less efficient than having private business do so. Well, unless it's a big business that's fallen into the same mindset.
"Azureus already eats way too much CPU time without performing crypto at 50kB/s."
What are you running on? A 486?
Symmetric encryption at 50kB/second is utterly trivial for any modern desktop CPU.
"Here in the real world, we've already had two launch failures - one destroyed the vehicle, and the other resulted in an Abort-to-Orbit."
No, you've had three. Two destroyed the vehicle, one would have destroyed it, if the crew hadn't overridden the computers that wanted to shut down two of the three engines.
Columbia was a _launch vehicle_ failure.
"The bald fact is that Soyuz, in 87 flights, has racked up a worse record in every single category you can name when you compare it to the Shuttle's record in 114 flights."
The bald fact is that Soyuz hasn't killed a crew member since the 70s. The shuttle has killed fourteen people in that time.