Re:Ed was not the first
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 1
Heh, there goes my rant... Of course it's a natural thing to happen, spaceflight getting a bit more routine, so the people up there are a bit less restricted in what they do and say, it's only natural, once you are a member of a permanent crew, to kinda organise your free time the way you want to. If i remember correctly, that was the biggest problem for crew one, people on the ground wanted to control almost literally every single minute of the crews life, and it led to some irritated remarks from Shepherd. It's not like those short spacejumps, where every second counts, and i think that's good. Gives the astronauts a chance to sit back and reflect, come up with novel ideas, just because they're There, and not on the ground. It's a shame they have a minimal crew, now, i think with more people up there, so everybody has some more free time, they'd do a lot more of 'crazy stuff' grass roots experiments, that could actually lead to some new insights, techniques, that nobody in their right mind would've come up with down here, because we're not adapted to think and feel... how it is in zero-g.
Re:Is Ed Lu running lunix?
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 1
yeah; It's strange, using an OS 'for the masses' thus not optimzed for ISS, i guess they just went for the most 'obvious' solutinon, thinkin 'everybody knows how to work with windows'
Stupid question probably.... How does it come i still sometimes see those kind of popups? Another compagny? are they doing something illegal after the ruling, or have they to be tried separatly to make them stop?
Re:Is Ed Lu running lunix?
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oh yeah, the Russian guys apparently run Sun and Windows.... making it a mixed systems, for they have separate computers to run their part of the station.
Re:Is Ed Lu running lunix?
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 4, Interesting
They run Windows. Actually; the first crew, under command of Bill Shepherd had some problems with it initially, what didn't help was the fact that shepherd was a Mac user, some funny entries in his -extensive and really interesting- mission log on that topic. like, he being very proud to have installed a harddisk on a windowssystem, being a Mac head. http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/ex1l ogs.html
Mixed feelings
on
Space Blog
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· Score: 4, Insightful
To be sure: Since ed's logs appeared on spaceref , I've been looking out for each new installment, they are good, really.
but... since the Colombia 'mishap' (what a stupid word, why don't they call a disaster a disaster, for that what is it, for NASA, at least)
NASA seems to do everything to polish up their public image, in a way that's great, but they're sometimes too obvious, and start looking ridiculous.
Nasa's newsletter used to be informative, but since Colombia it's just one 'come over to the party' rag; no hard info anymore, only things like kids at nasa, nasa ont tv blablabla.
I'm afraid they actually pressed lu to publish these things, because he has a good pen. I can imagine those 2 guys have a hard time up there, and nasa nagging 'hey Lu, when's the next article coming down, you can sleep if you're back on earth!
Ok a bit exaggerated, i guess, but still...
Mom and dad won't be able to tell the kids it's too expensive, for the price of a regular game, you get a reasonable videocam, that you can use on your VCR to boot, can't see how this could go wrong.
Also, 'Windows cleaning emulator", Hmmm... Won't Bill Gates be just a little bit pissed off when he reads that?
not the same thing, but related: A lot of cheap computerboxes resonate, due to the spinning of the drives, fans, cd/dvd drives. An inexpensive solution is to go to your local upmarket hifi store, where they sell bitumen mats, used to deaden-stiffen the walls of speaker cabinets. These things are thin but heavy, and reduce the 'rattling' a lot by increasing the mass of the walls. Just apply a (small) patch to the insides of the case et voila Or you could try a cartuner shop, same material is used to dampen resonance soundproblems in cars
Anybody knows what happened to Star of Tolerance? It was to be a demonstraton model for solar sailing, planned to be launched ahead of other experiments by various governmental agencies, the guy behind it was on the front page of Scientific American or New Scientist, a while ago...
They launched a test vehicule, but something went wrong. Their webpage has been pulled.
Coastguard reported a dead humpback floating near it, before it ashed ashore. These toothed whales often engage in battle with giant squids, Squids being very yummy for those whales, although fierce combatants, and big to boost! Looks like both parties didn't survive the clash. Should explain the missing tentacles.
Oh, i'm sure it'll happen. People keep saying there's no interest in manned exploration, 'look at sojourner,' they say, 'it had a massive interest, blahblahblah' and they use that as an argument that we don't need to set foot on mars, machines can do it more cheaply, safely...but the massive interest was not purely scientific, the netcongestion was caused by people who wanted to be on mars, themselves, i'm sure a lot of people would be willing to take the risk to go. All that teleoperated stuff is great, but it's just that... We're a species that thrives on exploration, and it's a sad mistake to think machines can do it for us, because it's safer. That spells extinction, or an evolution in cybercouchpotatoes.
No interest in manned exploration? Just look at the amount of comments ANY posting about manned spaceflight generates on/. compare that to articles about unmanned probes. The difference is telling. Yea, sure, this is/. a lot of techpeople, but also a lot of couchpotatoes (not trolling, really) AND EVEN THOSE PEOPLE SIT UP AND TAKE NOTICE.
We WILL go, some day, if we can convince the fainthearted scientists that are against manned exploration. It's imperative that we go. It's in our DNA. We MUST explore, to evolve.
That's exactly the point. It's been 30+ years since... All the know-how has been rotting on the shelves, resulting in one sad fact: NASA wouldn't be able to put a man on the moon in a sort timespan, it's even conceivable they would be hard pressed to beat China to land (again) on the moon even if they wanted to...
secondly: it's like if the brothers Wright flew around for a bit and call it a day; mothballing their plane and go home; 30+ years later some chinaman flies again, but everybody says: 'what's the point, we've done that before'
but THIS guy does not call it a day, heck no, he's dreaming of passengerplanes et.c...
You get the picture.
China seems pretty determined to go to the moon TO STAY THERE. Something NASA isn't even considering in their long term plannings, Mars being the more sexy target, at least in the eyes of the (funding guys of the) government.
the moon is relatively easy. Mars is Not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally positive towards space exploration/colonization, but i still think, using current tech. (wich China is using) it's a crazy idea.
Anyhow, if we send 1% off, how long would it take to 'replenish' that amount on earth? not long, i'm afraid.
Rockets are just too inefficient/expensive to reach the goal of siphoning off the 'excess population'...
The space elevators and lightships of tomorrow are another story, for sure, but till then, this discussion is moot.
Still, I hope China succeeds, and estabishes a PERMANENT presence on the moon. That's an achievement that's way overdue;
I don't understand why people keep saying this. Launching stuff into orbit is excesively expensive. there is no way to relieve a meaningful amount of the population pressure this way.
The only viable way would be with a space elevator/cable, but that's still far off; till then it's just not economically feasible.
(and... imagine the pollution it would cause, sending millions of rockets into orbit... nah.)
Funny!
slightly(?) offtopic, but this reminds me of a letter from a BIG company I once recieved in reply to my inquiry into their potentially harmful chloride production plant they were building.
The answer went something like this 'Not to worry...BLAHBLAHBLAH...chloride is safe, you know, it is even in your tablesalt ! (potassiumchloride)... BLAHBLAHBLAH..."
I cried with laughter....
Actually, Crew nr. 1, the guys who had the tough task to get ISS up and running for permanent occupation, had this movie onboard. They enjoyed it a lot, though Bill Shepard had to explain-translate a lot of the movie to his Russian crewmates, they thought it was an excellent movie.
tidal powers in the channel (between Englan and Europe are quite strong, a mass of water moving has a lot more power than wind, i'd think. great idea, why didn't they do this a lot earlier? Also, this would be great to power remote sensing equipment, even quite power hungry devices. Way to go guys!
um... The article is a bit more clearly worded than my mumblings, i'm afraid. I meant to parafrase: 1st manned orbital launch attempt by a country... (yuri Gagarin:1) (Glenn:1)
chinese willt ry for (mr X and Mr y (2)
well, it's nitpicking; but it would be a first...
Consider: Space Shuttle: concieved around 70's, built 80's
Soyuz: 60's, minor upgrades, still based on old model.
Shendzou: 90's, 00's?
Granted, it seems to be based on the soyuz, but Chinese say they built it themselves, and this seems to be the case: it's considerably bigger, more modern electronics et.c.
Who would ever have thought that the Chinese would be flying the most up to date spacethingy, it seems absurd, but it's a fact.
How the world has changed since the 80's...
Spacedaily.com claims sources say it will be later, somewhere in december, also rumours go that there's a big possibility for a 2 man crew, or even a 3 men crew, that would be a first in history: first launch attempt, and a 2 (or 3) men crew...
i wish them all the luck they'll need.
on spacedaily.com :
Arianespace, Boeing and Mitsubishi Heavy Plan alliance.
By the way, Arianespace is already planning to work with the russian Proton guys... Looks like this kind of cooperation could be interesting in the long run for bigger projects, if this works out, a multi business way of thinking for e.g. future Mars missions wouldn't be looked upon as farfetched as it used to be (today, that is)
Had the same thoughts, generally. But reading the various textsnippets, they seem honest (yea, who can tell) the reason for the 'extra handshake' might be their implementation of a calculation trick (smart) that calculates how to move in the opposite direction BEFORE movement is completed, some kind of seeing ahead, figuring out what to do after the thing it is actually doing (wow, sounds non sensical, i know)
Also, they use a virtual layer around objects, like if you have that cube, it calculates a virtual bigger cube around it, and follows that, after a while, it goes in for grasping, into the direction of the virtual cube, easier to follow i guess, and then it 'fine-tunes' for the real thing.
But still... that handshake looked really fishy, esp. the 90 degree rotation....
if you refer to the apollo 11 flag... it's not standing up anymore, Neil Amstrong himself saw it toppling over when they lifted off. I'm not kidding/trolling, you can go and look it up in the transcripts sections on the NASA website, so it must be true (if you believe they landed on the moon, you'll have to believe NASA on that account too;) )
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Heh, there goes my rant... Of course it's a natural thing to happen, spaceflight getting a bit more routine, so the people up there are a bit less restricted in what they do and say, it's only natural, once you are a member of a permanent crew, to kinda organise your free time the way you want to. If i remember correctly, that was the biggest problem for crew one, people on the ground wanted to control almost literally every single minute of the crews life, and it led to some irritated remarks from Shepherd. It's not like those short spacejumps, where every second counts, and i think that's good. Gives the astronauts a chance to sit back and reflect, come up with novel ideas, just because they're There, and not on the ground. It's a shame they have a minimal crew, now, i think with more people up there, so everybody has some more free time, they'd do a lot more of 'crazy stuff' grass roots experiments, that could actually lead to some new insights, techniques, that nobody in their right mind would've come up with down here, because we're not adapted to think and feel... how it is in zero-g.
yeah; It's strange, using an OS 'for the masses' thus not optimzed for ISS, i guess they just went for the most 'obvious' solutinon, thinkin 'everybody knows how to work with windows'
Stupid question probably.... How does it come i still sometimes see those kind of popups? Another compagny? are they doing something illegal after the ruling, or have they to be tried separatly to make them stop?
Oh yeah, the Russian guys apparently run Sun and Windows.... making it a mixed systems, for they have separate computers to run their part of the station.
They run Windows. Actually; the first crew, under command of Bill Shepherd had some problems with it initially, what didn't help was the fact that shepherd was a Mac user, some funny entries in his -extensive and really interesting- mission log on that topic. like, he being very proud to have installed a harddisk on a windowssystem, being a Mac head. http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/ex1l ogs.html
To be sure: Since ed's logs appeared on spaceref , I've been looking out for each new installment, they are good, really. but... since the Colombia 'mishap' (what a stupid word, why don't they call a disaster a disaster, for that what is it, for NASA, at least) NASA seems to do everything to polish up their public image, in a way that's great, but they're sometimes too obvious, and start looking ridiculous. Nasa's newsletter used to be informative, but since Colombia it's just one 'come over to the party' rag; no hard info anymore, only things like kids at nasa, nasa ont tv blablabla. I'm afraid they actually pressed lu to publish these things, because he has a good pen. I can imagine those 2 guys have a hard time up there, and nasa nagging 'hey Lu, when's the next article coming down, you can sleep if you're back on earth! Ok a bit exaggerated, i guess, but still...
Mom and dad won't be able to tell the kids it's too expensive, for the price of a regular game, you get a reasonable videocam, that you can use on your VCR to boot, can't see how this could go wrong. Also, 'Windows cleaning emulator", Hmmm... Won't Bill Gates be just a little bit pissed off when he reads that?
not the same thing, but related: A lot of cheap computerboxes resonate, due to the spinning of the drives, fans, cd/dvd drives. An inexpensive solution is to go to your local upmarket hifi store, where they sell bitumen mats, used to deaden-stiffen the walls of speaker cabinets. These things are thin but heavy, and reduce the 'rattling' a lot by increasing the mass of the walls. Just apply a (small) patch to the insides of the case et voila Or you could try a cartuner shop, same material is used to dampen resonance soundproblems in cars
Anybody knows what happened to Star of Tolerance? It was to be a demonstraton model for solar sailing, planned to be launched ahead of other experiments by various governmental agencies, the guy behind it was on the front page of Scientific American or New Scientist, a while ago... They launched a test vehicule, but something went wrong. Their webpage has been pulled.
BBC online's got one....
Coastguard reported a dead humpback floating near it, before it ashed ashore. These toothed whales often engage in battle with giant squids, Squids being very yummy for those whales, although fierce combatants, and big to boost! Looks like both parties didn't survive the clash. Should explain the missing tentacles.
Oh, i'm sure it'll happen. People keep saying there's no interest in manned exploration, 'look at sojourner,' they say, 'it had a massive interest, blahblahblah' and they use that as an argument that we don't need to set foot on mars, machines can do it more cheaply, safely...but the massive interest was not purely scientific, the netcongestion was caused by people who wanted to be on mars, themselves, i'm sure a lot of people would be willing to take the risk to go. All that teleoperated stuff is great, but it's just that... We're a species that thrives on exploration, and it's a sad mistake to think machines can do it for us, because it's safer. That spells extinction, or an evolution in cybercouchpotatoes. No interest in manned exploration? Just look at the amount of comments ANY posting about manned spaceflight generates on /. compare that to articles about unmanned probes. The difference is telling. Yea, sure, this is /. a lot of techpeople, but also a lot of couchpotatoes (not trolling, really) AND EVEN THOSE PEOPLE SIT UP AND TAKE NOTICE.
We WILL go, some day, if we can convince the fainthearted scientists that are against manned exploration. It's imperative that we go. It's in our DNA. We MUST explore, to evolve.
That's exactly the point. It's been 30+ years since... All the know-how has been rotting on the shelves, resulting in one sad fact: NASA wouldn't be able to put a man on the moon in a sort timespan, it's even conceivable they would be hard pressed to beat China to land (again) on the moon even if they wanted to... secondly: it's like if the brothers Wright flew around for a bit and call it a day; mothballing their plane and go home; 30+ years later some chinaman flies again, but everybody says: 'what's the point, we've done that before' but THIS guy does not call it a day, heck no, he's dreaming of passengerplanes et.c... You get the picture. China seems pretty determined to go to the moon TO STAY THERE. Something NASA isn't even considering in their long term plannings, Mars being the more sexy target, at least in the eyes of the (funding guys of the) government. the moon is relatively easy. Mars is Not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally positive towards space exploration/colonization, but i still think, using current tech. (wich China is using) it's a crazy idea. Anyhow, if we send 1% off, how long would it take to 'replenish' that amount on earth? not long, i'm afraid. Rockets are just too inefficient/expensive to reach the goal of siphoning off the 'excess population'... The space elevators and lightships of tomorrow are another story, for sure, but till then, this discussion is moot. Still, I hope China succeeds, and estabishes a PERMANENT presence on the moon. That's an achievement that's way overdue;
I don't understand why people keep saying this. Launching stuff into orbit is excesively expensive. there is no way to relieve a meaningful amount of the population pressure this way. The only viable way would be with a space elevator/cable, but that's still far off; till then it's just not economically feasible. (and... imagine the pollution it would cause, sending millions of rockets into orbit... nah.)
Funny! slightly(?) offtopic, but this reminds me of a letter from a BIG company I once recieved in reply to my inquiry into their potentially harmful chloride production plant they were building. The answer went something like this 'Not to worry...BLAHBLAHBLAH...chloride is safe, you know, it is even in your tablesalt ! (potassiumchloride)... BLAHBLAHBLAH..." I cried with laughter....
Actually, Crew nr. 1, the guys who had the tough task to get ISS up and running for permanent occupation, had this movie onboard. They enjoyed it a lot, though Bill Shepard had to explain-translate a lot of the movie to his Russian crewmates, they thought it was an excellent movie.
tidal powers in the channel (between Englan and Europe are quite strong, a mass of water moving has a lot more power than wind, i'd think. great idea, why didn't they do this a lot earlier? Also, this would be great to power remote sensing equipment, even quite power hungry devices. Way to go guys!
um... The article is a bit more clearly worded than my mumblings, i'm afraid. I meant to parafrase: 1st manned orbital launch attempt by a country... (yuri Gagarin:1) (Glenn:1) chinese willt ry for (mr X and Mr y (2) well, it's nitpicking; but it would be a first...
Consider: Space Shuttle: concieved around 70's, built 80's Soyuz: 60's, minor upgrades, still based on old model. Shendzou: 90's, 00's? Granted, it seems to be based on the soyuz, but Chinese say they built it themselves, and this seems to be the case: it's considerably bigger, more modern electronics et.c. Who would ever have thought that the Chinese would be flying the most up to date spacethingy, it seems absurd, but it's a fact. How the world has changed since the 80's...
Spacedaily.com claims sources say it will be later, somewhere in december, also rumours go that there's a big possibility for a 2 man crew, or even a 3 men crew, that would be a first in history: first launch attempt, and a 2 (or 3) men crew... i wish them all the luck they'll need.
on spacedaily.com : Arianespace, Boeing and Mitsubishi Heavy Plan alliance. By the way, Arianespace is already planning to work with the russian Proton guys... Looks like this kind of cooperation could be interesting in the long run for bigger projects, if this works out, a multi business way of thinking for e.g. future Mars missions wouldn't be looked upon as farfetched as it used to be (today, that is)
Had the same thoughts, generally. But reading the various textsnippets, they seem honest (yea, who can tell) the reason for the 'extra handshake' might be their implementation of a calculation trick (smart) that calculates how to move in the opposite direction BEFORE movement is completed, some kind of seeing ahead, figuring out what to do after the thing it is actually doing (wow, sounds non sensical, i know) Also, they use a virtual layer around objects, like if you have that cube, it calculates a virtual bigger cube around it, and follows that, after a while, it goes in for grasping, into the direction of the virtual cube, easier to follow i guess, and then it 'fine-tunes' for the real thing. But still... that handshake looked really fishy, esp. the 90 degree rotation....
Erhmmmm... exactly, me bad. /sips coffee/ 'n it's indeed the increased framerates that seem to be the major influence there.
if you refer to the apollo 11 flag... it's not standing up anymore, Neil Amstrong himself saw it toppling over when they lifted off. I'm not kidding/trolling, you can go and look it up in the transcripts sections on the NASA website, so it must be true (if you believe they landed on the moon, you'll have to believe NASA on that account too ;) )