Guess which is the highest-payload rocket in the market right now? That is right, the 10 ton Ariane 5 ECA.
As for Clipper, while it looks interesting, Russia's past experience with Buran TPS was allegedly less than stellar, with the thing returning with a lot of tiles blown off and the chassis warped from the temperatures at reentry. What Russia is great at is designing capsules. To me this seems to be basically a waste of money for political goodwill reasons. ESA should have just got the data from ARD off the drawer and made a cheap capsule.
This will most likely need a new rocket, possibly new or requalified engines, new launch facilities, and then you will have to put a winged vehicle on top of a rocket, which to the best of my knowledge no one has got working yet.
However, I'm not so clear about his proposed alternatives.
Griffin was very vocal about what he wanted to do with NASA before we was administrator. Here is a PDF.
Basically it is back to the Moon using Apollo style architectures but with todays off the shelf technology. The objective being permanent Human presence at the Moon.
Re:Will Civ 1-3 ever be open sourced?
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Thanks for the heads up! I was wondering what happened to DMA.
Re:Will Civ 1-3 ever be open sourced?
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Firaxis does not own the copyright of the old Civilization games. The copyright is, to the best of my knowledge, held by Take 2. Who among other games make GTA.
Re:What sort of "original" game do you propose?
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We used to expect this from early Sid Meier games: polish, great gameplay and a fun combat system. From F-15 Strike Eagle, passing by Pirates! and later Civilization.
The only ones breaking this mold were Railroad Tycoon and Sim Golf.
The combat simulator genre seems to have been mostly neglected as of late with some notable exceptions (Battlefield 2). As the man behind F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Silent Service, M1 Tank Platoon, and Gunship, do you feel this genre is due for a renaissance, or is the current glut of WW2 games just a bubble?
Yes, it is true that they had logistical problems distributing goods to the places which needed them most. That is one problem with centralized control.
From what I have read, in the USSR they managed to produce large quantities of food, clothing, steel and other base products. They mostly suffered in production of electronics, automobiles or other so called luxury goods.
The system started to crumble when the USSR had an energy crisis (oil shortages) just before Gorbachev came to power. Then it all went downhill. The Far Eastern regions might have been poor, but in other countries such isolated regions are seldom rich either.
Their space sector was very prolific because they simply had more design experience for building rocket engines and there was plenty of competition pushing them forward, while research was shared. The Russians used liquid rocket engines for a lot longer. Their military rockets were huge (e.g. Proton) and there was constant and sanguine competition between Korolev, Chelomei, and Yangel, among others. They made competing designs for every proposal and the best was picked by the scientific commitee.
You could actually argue that NASA was less competitive and more centralized. Basically Werner made the top level design decisions, and then they farmed off the actual work to individual subcontractors.
The USA actually has a military airplane in that weight class with a similar configuration to the An-124: the C-5 Galaxy.
It is just that the US military added so much useless fluff to the requirements, it made the cost of a C-5 Galaxy ludicrously expensive compared to the much more cost effective An-124. The result is that the An-124 gets used for civilian cargo transport, and the C-5 Galaxy is for the military only.
Another problem is cut and paste. It is quite common to copy a block of code from a section to another. If you do this in Python, you usually need to re-indent by hand. If you copy it from something someone posted on IRC, then you are SOL.
There's user inteface design, documentation, and consistent professional support to be considered in any enterprise implementation. Saying that Bob's XYZ Library of Useful Widgets can do it all just as well as Bill & Steve's Really Expensive Library of Useful Widgets is only part of this equation. Just writing the damned software and slapping it in an RPM does not finish the project!
Sure. But if the project is in continual development by distributed teams, with constant releases, it is somewhat hard to ensure perfect consistency. Most consistent OSS software has a slow release cycle. The tradeoff is slower fixes for bugs and new features. As software matures, the rate of releases tends to decrease.
It's hard enough getting stodgy company boards to accept that there's something out there besides Windows. It doesn't help when the application you're trying to sell them on is maintained by some 18-year-old geek with a ponytail and Cheetos dust all over his keyboard. I don't care if he is a genius, his product is generally unmarketable to a board because you can't convince The Powers That Be that his software is a serious contender.
If they cannot get past looking at how someone dresses to appreciate their worth, the solution is quite obvious. Make someone else with suits be the middleman. This is what, for example, corporations like Redhat and Novell do. People who cannot stomach risks and want insurances must pay more as usual.
Perhaps it looks that way because the still-wet-behind-the-ears developers are still thinking about developing it in that way. More's the pity.
You cannot expect the whole scene to evolve at the same rate. While this problem has essentially been fixed for things like the OS, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, by adding a corporate suit around the developer community, other communities simply do not have the mindshare to do it yet. When they do (perhaps because the software finally has matured to be ubiquous?) they will.
Digital flopped for technical reasons as well. They took a long time to get a UNIX solution out (some people wanted to not be totally stuck on proprietary VMS). Then when RISC took off and had much improved performance with less transistors, they were still stuck on VAX.
They tried to use MIPS to compensate the gap, then made Alpha, which came out pretty late (one of the last RISC architectures to come to be). They never recovered their share. They could not afford to pay the manufacturing plant. Plus their machines were too expensive and they had no decent workstation solutions.
They also missed oportunities in the personal computer market, etc. Ever checked out their IBM compatible PCs? They sucked.
Which advertising budget did Google have? Yet they succeeded.
This would not have happened under European/American dominance. Bear in mind that China and India were the most enlightened and advanced civilizations in the old world until the western powers came. Our standard of living was
Overrated. India was indeed advanced and had cities before Egypt (the primordial source of Minoan, hence Greek, hence Western civilization and culture), but they were stalled by the time the Greek civilization (the first great Western civilization) came to be and never got back on their feet. China's primordial history is mostly folktales and legend, unsubstanciated by arqueology. You can only say China was more advanced technologically from around the time of the Warring States period to the Mongol invasion.
considerably higher in the first millenium of the Christian era than any country in Europe. We were
You conveniently forgot the Byzantine Empire and the Republic of Venice, which were doing just fine at that time.
building empires and writing philosophy when they were burning witches and fighting absurd religious crusades. All this is verifable truth. Ask
The Dark Ages were less dark than some people seem to believe. Around that time came the Agricultural Revolution, with the invention of the enhanced steel plow which allowed to use horses instead of bovines, increasing productivity. Enhanced crop rotation and improved windmills, etc also came to be around this time. The Agricultural Revolution set the stage for the later Renaissance period by freeing people from the work in the fields (the Romans had slaves to do that).
yourself then, why is it that Asian countries suffer from such abjectpoverty today?
Most of it is self-inflicted. Ask your dead Emperor which ordered the burning down of fleets like the one Zheng He used. He wanted control over the populace, and did not intend the rise of a rich and independent merchant class to come to be.
The answer to this question is complex, and many factors contribute, but the one that stands out above all else in relative priority is the Caucasian horde. It is the white man that is primarily responsible, by strip-mining our lands, stealing our crops, defaming our culture and heritage, raping our women, spreading their savage religion among us like a disease and generally imposing regimes based on brigandage and horror.
What a lot of bull. Why is it that people always try to pin the blame for their own problems on someone else? Here in Europe we had continual wars against each other, and yet we managed to push forward, picking up the pieces and surpassing the previous height everytime.
If you contrast the atrocities committed by the British, Germans,French, and Americans in Asia over the period of 300 years versus the people killed by the Japanese over a few years, you will see that what the Japanese have done is very little in comparison to the systematic organized persecution by the white man.
What makes you think that the Japanese would have left it there? There is no proof they did, quite the opposite.
I guess their problem is that existing clients have satellites which are too big for their current launchers, so they cannot capture that market. Their new designs at 9650kg to GTO max put them right there with the big boys, including Ariane 5 ECA and most EELVs. The 3400kg for the smallest Falcon 9 is respectable, although it could be better. I suppose they tried to make the Falcon 9 base smaller because, as announced, they intend to reuse its first stage for Falcon 5 with less engines.
I will hold my breath until they have a successful Falcon I launch however.
The incident with liquid sodium killing a few people during decommissioning of a nuclear plant in France got some press at the time.
That would have been Superphoenix, the sodium cooled fast breeder reactor. It was an experimental reactor, not a production unit. Besides, no one died in any of the leaks. Compare that to the number of people dying thanks to coal dust every day. Bet you do not see those in the news.
It is like Stalin said: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. (compare nuclear accident news reports vs road fatalities).
France generates its nuclear power using reliable liquid water reactors.
The fact that in the USA there are often zoning laws which prevent mixing commercial and residential functions in the same building is often the cause of crap like this.
You do not need for the fuel to have the same exact energy density as gasoline. Because fuel cells have basically double the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, that could as well be good enough.
What I find extremelly suspicious is the lack of mention of the gravimetric energy density figure. Many of the hydrides have good volumetric energy density, but then weigh like a ton of bricks.
If it is vandalism or minor property damage, people often do not even go to the police to report it. Even less if they feel the police is usually innefectual.
You can drink beer and smoke in your own house in here. As about letting the dog run around, that is what the nice park with real trees (rather than some scruffy looking, irregularly mown lawn) is for. You can also drink beer and smoke in a public park around here. As for barbequeue, it is overrated.
Regarding crime, I fear more the isolated places, living in the middle of nowhere, than the middle of the most bustling town in the planet.
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Which new features are you implementing? Were they user-requested? How did you come to the feature list?
As for Clipper, while it looks interesting, Russia's past experience with Buran TPS was allegedly less than stellar, with the thing returning with a lot of tiles blown off and the chassis warped from the temperatures at reentry. What Russia is great at is designing capsules. To me this seems to be basically a waste of money for political goodwill reasons. ESA should have just got the data from ARD off the drawer and made a cheap capsule.
This will most likely need a new rocket, possibly new or requalified engines, new launch facilities, and then you will have to put a winged vehicle on top of a rocket, which to the best of my knowledge no one has got working yet.
Griffin was very vocal about what he wanted to do with NASA before we was administrator. Here is a PDF.
Basically it is back to the Moon using Apollo style architectures but with todays off the shelf technology. The objective being permanent Human presence at the Moon.
Thanks for the heads up! I was wondering what happened to DMA.
Firaxis does not own the copyright of the old Civilization games. The copyright is, to the best of my knowledge, held by Take 2. Who among other games make GTA.
I'll have one super-sized "Monkey World" please.
We used to expect this from early Sid Meier games: polish, great gameplay and a fun combat system. From F-15 Strike Eagle, passing by Pirates! and later Civilization.
The only ones breaking this mold were Railroad Tycoon and Sim Golf.
The combat simulator genre seems to have been mostly neglected as of late with some notable exceptions (Battlefield 2). As the man behind F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Silent Service, M1 Tank Platoon, and Gunship, do you feel this genre is due for a renaissance, or is the current glut of WW2 games just a bubble?
Civilization was a fine strategy wargame. Which reasons led you to deemphasize wargaming in Civilization III? Was it a good choice in retrospect?
Yes, it is true that they had logistical problems distributing goods to the places which needed them most. That is one problem with centralized control.
The system started to crumble when the USSR had an energy crisis (oil shortages) just before Gorbachev came to power. Then it all went downhill. The Far Eastern regions might have been poor, but in other countries such isolated regions are seldom rich either.
Their space sector was very prolific because they simply had more design experience for building rocket engines and there was plenty of competition pushing them forward, while research was shared. The Russians used liquid rocket engines for a lot longer. Their military rockets were huge (e.g. Proton) and there was constant and sanguine competition between Korolev, Chelomei, and Yangel, among others. They made competing designs for every proposal and the best was picked by the scientific commitee.
You could actually argue that NASA was less competitive and more centralized. Basically Werner made the top level design decisions, and then they farmed off the actual work to individual subcontractors.
It is just that the US military added so much useless fluff to the requirements, it made the cost of a C-5 Galaxy ludicrously expensive compared to the much more cost effective An-124. The result is that the An-124 gets used for civilian cargo transport, and the C-5 Galaxy is for the military only.
Another problem is cut and paste. It is quite common to copy a block of code from a section to another. If you do this in Python, you usually need to re-indent by hand. If you copy it from something someone posted on IRC, then you are SOL.
Sure. But if the project is in continual development by distributed teams, with constant releases, it is somewhat hard to ensure perfect consistency. Most consistent OSS software has a slow release cycle. The tradeoff is slower fixes for bugs and new features. As software matures, the rate of releases tends to decrease.
It's hard enough getting stodgy company boards to accept that there's something out there besides Windows. It doesn't help when the application you're trying to sell them on is maintained by some 18-year-old geek with a ponytail and Cheetos dust all over his keyboard. I don't care if he is a genius, his product is generally unmarketable to a board because you can't convince The Powers That Be that his software is a serious contender.
If they cannot get past looking at how someone dresses to appreciate their worth, the solution is quite obvious. Make someone else with suits be the middleman. This is what, for example, corporations like Redhat and Novell do. People who cannot stomach risks and want insurances must pay more as usual.
Perhaps it looks that way because the still-wet-behind-the-ears developers are still thinking about developing it in that way. More's the pity.
You cannot expect the whole scene to evolve at the same rate. While this problem has essentially been fixed for things like the OS, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, by adding a corporate suit around the developer community, other communities simply do not have the mindshare to do it yet. When they do (perhaps because the software finally has matured to be ubiquous?) they will.
Again: Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel.
Once more: Harvard Graphics, Microsoft Powerpoint.
Need I go on?
They tried to use MIPS to compensate the gap, then made Alpha, which came out pretty late (one of the last RISC architectures to come to be). They never recovered their share. They could not afford to pay the manufacturing plant. Plus their machines were too expensive and they had no decent workstation solutions.
They also missed oportunities in the personal computer market, etc. Ever checked out their IBM compatible PCs? They sucked.
Which advertising budget did Google have? Yet they succeeded.
Overrated. India was indeed advanced and had cities before Egypt (the primordial source of Minoan, hence Greek, hence Western civilization and culture), but they were stalled by the time the Greek civilization (the first great Western civilization) came to be and never got back on their feet. China's primordial history is mostly folktales and legend, unsubstanciated by arqueology. You can only say China was more advanced technologically from around the time of the Warring States period to the Mongol invasion.
considerably higher in the first millenium of the Christian era than any country in Europe. We were
You conveniently forgot the Byzantine Empire and the Republic of Venice, which were doing just fine at that time.
building empires and writing philosophy when they were burning witches and fighting absurd religious crusades. All this is verifable truth. Ask
The Dark Ages were less dark than some people seem to believe. Around that time came the Agricultural Revolution, with the invention of the enhanced steel plow which allowed to use horses instead of bovines, increasing productivity. Enhanced crop rotation and improved windmills, etc also came to be around this time. The Agricultural Revolution set the stage for the later Renaissance period by freeing people from the work in the fields (the Romans had slaves to do that).
yourself then, why is it that Asian countries suffer from such abjectpoverty today?
Most of it is self-inflicted. Ask your dead Emperor which ordered the burning down of fleets like the one Zheng He used. He wanted control over the populace, and did not intend the rise of a rich and independent merchant class to come to be.
The answer to this question is complex, and many factors contribute, but the one that stands out above all else in relative priority is the Caucasian horde. It is the white man that is primarily responsible, by strip-mining our lands, stealing our crops, defaming our culture and heritage, raping our women, spreading their savage religion among us like a disease and generally imposing regimes based on brigandage and horror.
What a lot of bull. Why is it that people always try to pin the blame for their own problems on someone else? Here in Europe we had continual wars against each other, and yet we managed to push forward, picking up the pieces and surpassing the previous height everytime.
If you contrast the atrocities committed by the British, Germans,French, and Americans in Asia over the period of 300 years versus the people killed by the Japanese over a few years, you will see that what the Japanese have done is very little in comparison to the systematic organized persecution by the white man.
What makes you think that the Japanese would have left it there? There is no proof they did, quite the opposite.
I will hold my breath until they have a successful Falcon I launch however.
I certainly hope they have a successful launch this year, otherwise I wonder for how long they can keep bleeding money like this.
The reason we are storing the so called "waste" is that most of it is actually precious unburned fuel, in the form of plutonium and uranium.
That would have been Superphoenix, the sodium cooled fast breeder reactor. It was an experimental reactor, not a production unit. Besides, no one died in any of the leaks. Compare that to the number of people dying thanks to coal dust every day. Bet you do not see those in the news.
It is like Stalin said: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. (compare nuclear accident news reports vs road fatalities).
France generates its nuclear power using reliable liquid water reactors.
The fact that in the USA there are often zoning laws which prevent mixing commercial and residential functions in the same building is often the cause of crap like this.
What I find extremelly suspicious is the lack of mention of the gravimetric energy density figure. Many of the hydrides have good volumetric energy density, but then weigh like a ton of bricks.
Solar *is* nuclear. :-)
The only difference is that huge nuclear fusion reactor was free.
Murder on the other hand, is always investigated.
Regarding crime, I fear more the isolated places, living in the middle of nowhere, than the middle of the most bustling town in the planet.