So whats my point? Me, a lifelong geek, no longer gives a flying rats ass about the future of "digital media". I'll keep my analog cable, FM radio, and CD player for as long as they continue to work.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Congress has mandated the sunset of analog radio and TV. I watch so little TV it seems a shame to spend any money on a new one, but in a couple of years (who knows when, exactly) my set is gonna stop working when they stop broadcasting analog. I don't want to spend gobs of money and I don't want to get stuck with another Betamax. Hopefully the FCC will get its act together enough that I can buy something that lasts a few years.
The thing that really pisses me off is it seems none of the broadcasters is really interested in high definition. They want digital so they can cram more channels into the same band. So I'm gonna trade my analog set for a lower quality digital picture and the choice of 10 reality shows instead of 5. Great.
While I recognize that the STS has issues, most of which stem from politics, it's very important to note that anything that replaces the STS, be it the CXV or something else, won't really be any safer.
I think you could pretty convincingly make the point a vertical stack is much safer than the STS design. A vertical stack would definitely have prevented the Columbia's destruction and would have given Challenger a fighting chance.
If a drop of some other liquid (that is lighter than the oil) accidently falls into the resevoir it will quickly be coated by the mineral oil and slowly fall to the bottom and can be sucked out (phew!)
I'm tryin' to figure out why a drop of anything ligher than mineral oil would sink to the bottom instead of floating on the top.
Rei, Jerry Pournelle is most decidedly not an idiot. He's been at this space stuff a long time, and not just in SF. If you're interested in a practical (operational) strategy for CATS, read Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. You may not agree with everything, but I've read enough of your posts to believe you'll agree with most of it, or at least acknowledge the possibilities.
Orbital Sciences Corp would get 2 billion dollars just for strapping a heat shield to one of their Pegasus rockets instead of a payload - congrats we just wasted 1/3 of a CEV's development cost to accomplish nothing. Or did you not already know that private companies, using private funds, have already launched orbital rockets? It's not a very profitable business - that's why there aren't too many companies doing it.
I'm not sure you read the prize specification as intended. By "spacecraft" he's not talking about a missile, but rather a manned ship. Also, assuming you weren't talking about manned craft, if you attached a heat shield to Pegasus you're still a long way from having a spaceship you can land and reuse in two weeks. I don't think two billion dollars is out of line for a manned, reusable, orbital spacecraft. We don't have the capability, and given the past history of NASA projects, you're making quite an assumption to say 2 billion is 1/3 of CEV's development. It'll probably end up being more like 1/20th. The great thing about a prize-type contract is it doesn't cost anything if they don't deliver, and it never goes over budget.
Number 3 would never be done without subsidy. The costs are way off. I can do a breakdown if you'd like on what construction and supply costs would be during that period.
Well then, it wouldn't cost anything to put the prize out there, would it? Even if you and I can't see a way to do it, perhaps it could still be done. I'm not convinced it's impossible if the emphasis was on operational costs.
Number 4 makes no sense - why offer a prize for a *specific* clean power technology? The numbers are also way off on this one. Here, do the math: 1,367 W/m^2 (optimal), 35% conversion efficiency (very good), 5% beaming efficiency (far better than currently available). 800MW = 334 million square meters. Assuming 0.1 kg per square meter (light for high efficiency cells), that's 34 million kilograms (ignoring support eq., such as heliostats, orbit correction, transmission, etc). At a launch price of 7,000$/kg (cheap), that's 233 billion dollars.
The reason for having a specific technology is the power generating capability is only half the goal. The other half is to develop an infrastructure for cheap access to space. There's no reason to assume launch costs of $7000/kg. Yes, that's cheap today because every mission is a one-off. Think about this, though: If the prizes were done in order, you would conceivably have a reusable spacecraft before you went to tackle this one. There's no reason I can see you couldn't build an SSTO craft which could be flown often enough that the major component of the operational cost was fuel.
It's possible you could only get the cost down to $6999/kg, in which case you're right, the numbers won't work. The reality is we just don't know what could be done because nobody's tried it. Fuel is you're only absolute operational cost - the others could conceivably be attacked with great success under the right conditions.
Also, the prize doesn't specify the power station would have to be turned over to the government. So as a potential investor it wouldn't be out of line to consider the post-prize profit from power generation.
(checking back to my original post) Nope, I never said it was a prohibition.
Sorry. I was so used to people coming back with something like "It really is prohibition if there's no money..." I jumped the gun trying to forestall it.
Wouldn't it be better, if you prefer to have the research conducted in an ethical or responsible manner, to have it advanced in a nation where you have a legal and fiscal framework to control it?
If we put any limits on research at all the temptation will be to move to China. I don't understand how we can have a "legal and fiscal framework to control it" without having restrictions on what can be done. The stem cell stuff is childs play compared to what's being contemplated - if that's enough to send it offshore we can give up on having any control at all.
You lost the argument. Nothing I have written advocates doing research with the brutal ends that the Nazis advanced.
I didn't mean to imply that you had. I was just trying to say the ethics of the research are really independent of the promised benefits (except in really very rare circumstances that don't apply here). In my mind the ethical considerations trump 1) potential benefits and 2) concerns about the "scientific position" of the US in the world.
Now that Bush has made the political (rather than scientific) decision to limit stem cell lines, this activity will most certainly occur outside of the US and beyond any jurisdiction of American ethics organizations.
Of course it's political. Science only answers "what can be done?", not "what should be done?" I don't have any problem with the idea there should be limits on what my tax dollars pay for. In any event, Bush doesn't have the power to unilaterally make stem cell research illegal, he just changed the rules under which scientists get money for the research. And no, that's a long way from a prohibition.
Furthermore, the argument that we should allow something unethical to happen in the US so it doesn't happen somewhere else is specious. The Nazis conducted numerous medical experiments on people. Should we have done the same so as not to fall behind?
Forced busing? My, I never thought that there's still be jim-crow racists alive today, and on slashdot?
That's pretty inflamatory, but I don't see a logical connection between my comment and yours. The effect of forced busing on cities is well documented. However well intentioned, it was an absolute disaster for all concerned. Local tax bases were devestated, and schools are now more segregated than they were in the 1960's. You don't have to be racist to know stupidity when you see it.
And speaking of stupidity - busing didn't have anything to do with Jim-Crow. It started as judicial lawmaking by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1973. As far as I'm aware Massachusetts never had Jim Crow. It's one thing to be offensive, but at least you can try to get your facts straight.
Rails are more fuel efficent for moving freight than paying tons of money on an interstate highway system, and then have 16 wheelers burn all that diesel without significantly subsidizing the roadway. If the rails were more robust in operation, instead of truckers driving across the country, they could move freight from major rail stops, and cut down on the interstate driving. In NYC alone, getting a freight line into Long Island would significantly reduce the volume of trucks across the bridges & highways.
You're mixing apples and oranges. There's no reason freight needs to be high speed. What you're arguing is a more efficient version of the freight system we have already. I'm not a train expert, but I'm pretty sure the freight companies (which aren't government agencies) are operating as efficiently as they can. If the freight line doesn't go to Long Island it's probably not worth the money.
The reason why this will not happen in the near future is threefold. 1) The stupidity (psychology) of the average American citizen (SUV driver). 2) Special interests such as the airlines and trucking industry, and 3) politicians.
That's pretty cynical. I think the real problem is some of the negative impacts from cars aren't paid for by the drivers - pollution, noise, etc.
Here in the San Francisco bay area we have a great light rail system called BART. It's high on my list of reasons to be here. But financially it's a loser - taxpayers at various levels are subsidizing the system, because if they didn't nobody could afford a ticket.
Now, normally, as a libertarianish kinda person I abhor the government subsidizing individuals' voluntary activities through tax money. But in this case you could make the argument cars would be much more expensive if drivers actually paid all the costs associated with their driving, so the train subsidy balances the ledger.
Passenger rail could easily be cost effective.
It always is, on paper, but somehow when they actually build it only areas with extremely high density can support a self-sustaining rail service. I think passenger rail would have a hard time competing even in Europe if gas taxes weren't prohibitively high.
You can blame it on them because they decided they needed a train with a brand new, untested design (for no reason I can see) instead of just having an existing European design modified for American guage tracks.
This decision ranks pretty far up there as the dumbest decision ever made at Amtrak. Congress has given the pseudo-corporation lots of slack in recent years, and they don't need this kind of black eye. At this point Congress is seriously considering breaking it up and selling off the peices.
Also, there is an anglo-saxon cultural trait that sees the city as something sinful, bad, evil that should be fled at all cost, hence the popularity of suburbia.
I don't think so. What sent Americans to the suburbs is social engineering run amok in the form of forced bussing. Of course American cities are lousy - local tax bases still haven't recovered from that blow.
By the way, wouldn't you consider Great Britain to be "anglo-saxon"? And don't they have a different attitude toward cities?
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'.
and translated it
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry', so it's been 20 years since he's done anything but produce fluffy white papers for non-technical management.
Limiting components (in total count) and limiting components (by type of component) means you can increase and simply your QA and testing - which inherently simplifies and increases the reliability of your overall system.
Yeah. My experience with redundent systems is the point of failure moves around without dissappearing. We had a cluster go belly up last month due to a software failure that wouldn't have been there in a single system.
This same experiment has been run over and over in academia using people. With the same results. But surely by now everybody knows an ultra-PC couple who tried to raise their children without any sexual socialization and were horrified to discover little Johnny tear of Barbie's head, point her body at Sally and say "bang".
Boys and Girls are different, even if socialized in exacltly the same way. The abject refusal to face this fact resulted in the virtual destruction of modern feminism in the '90s. It seems only in academia do they still stubbornly cling to the notion men and women are exactly the same except for the genitalia. But that's religion, not science.
But the "consent" argument is pretty slippery, as in "halfway down the slippery slope". If it's OK for two men to get married because it's consentual, why isn't it OK for twenty? One hundred? Clearly not all consentual unions are "marriages". Traditionalists want to draw the line at a man and a woman, and clearly you would like to see it expanded to include two men or two women. But where do you say it ends, and why?
Let's say a brother and sister want to get married. Now, traditionally this is frowned upon, not just because most people find it icky, but also it's not a good idea for two closely related people to have children. Under the "consent" logic, I suppose it's OK as long as one of them is sterile. And what about a man and his brother? His son?
Even people who support gay marriage start to squirm here, but if one responds "it's all good," then at least it's logically consistent (if impractical. Would a company be required to put 20 people on the health plan as a result of one new hire?). But that's not what I usually hear.
The response I always get when I ask this question is "well, it's not about that. It's about two unrelated people that love each other." Maybe so. But surely laws must be based on logic at some level. Where is the logical endpoint of this argument? If the response is "it stops at two people because that's the way it is" then you don't have a response to people who say marriage should be only for heterosexuals because "that's the way it is".
By the way, I'm not against gay marriage, provided it's done at the state level through state legislatures. But there are some logical inconsistencies that need to be resolved for me before this is a "civil rights" issue to be addressed by federal law or (especially) courts.
Yeah, that's really the takeaway lesson from this article. It's really quite insideous when you think about it - reporters like to knock off early and hit the pub just like anyone else, and this way they can get someone else to do the work.
Following his "suits are back" example, you can see the calculation:
"Well, even if people aren't really dressing up more, what's it gonna hurt? In any event, there really isn't any way you could prove it isn't true, short of spending a million bucks on research (and who would pay for that?). So this is never gonna come back to bite me. I can just rearrange a sentence or two here and there and I'll be out of the office by noon."
I'm convinced much of the evil in the world results from simple sloth.
Regardless of TFA says, what I think happened is that there is a some major customer of Microsoft software is strongly anti-gay rights (like the Bush run federal government or a large corporation or a major customer who allies itself with the religious right extremists mentioned in TFA) told Microsoft that they wouldn't purchase X 10s of thousands of copies of Office if Microsoft undermined their anti-gay political policies / laws.
Do you have any basis at all for this, or is it just the tinfoil talking? I realize lots of people have legitimate disagreements with the Bush administration, but how can you blame Bush for something you have no reason to believe actually occurred?
Surely no one here would be surprised that Microsoft went for the money before social responsibility. Heck most companies would do the same thing if enough money was at stake.
Corporations have no business trying to insert themselves into social politics. As a Microsoft shareholder I want management at Microsoft to refrain from spending my money persuing their personal convictions and get back to making me money. That's what corporations are for.
Oh, hell yes. My clients pay more than the acquisition cost of each copy of Office in support costs.
Sure. But some of the support costs are fixed. Remember, I was comparing the current product at the current price with a product that has half the bugs for twice the price. You still need support, just less of it. Lots of small and medium companies have one person dedicated to this task, so they won't be able to realize much in the way of cost savings if Office. And companies pay some non-trivial cost just to have a capability.
I guess that's a long-winded way of saying half the work doesn't necessarily translate to half the cost.
It is rather amazing that there appears to be a consensus among industry experts that there has not been any improvement in code quality over the past 30 years or so despite the development of a vast number of new tools and languages.
I've always assumed this was a variation of "In my day, we had to walk 10 miles through the snow just to get the mail..." I've been in this business for 18 years or so, and while I don't think the actual code is any more clever than it used to be, the expectation in terms of time-to-market and quality have definitely changed.
When I started slinging code you could release business software with no GUI and still compete. You could release software that didn't "play nice" with other applications. You could require users to load special drivers and put arcane commands in their OS configuration. There is simply a larger set of features that have become mandatory, i.e., things you have to have to pass the laugh-test. You may call it bloat, but the fact is I can't remember the last time I cracked a manual - my expectation is the sofware is lousy if I can't install and operate it without a manual.
I don't see the quality changing any time soon. You can never completely test a non-trivial application, and finding those last couple of esoteric bugs incur an enormous cost. Would you really be willing to pay double the price for, say, MS Office if they removed half the remaining bugs? I wouldn't, especially if I can work around the problems.
I'm sick of this shit. Why does every discussion on slashdot have to include infantile political blatherings? Can we have one thread that doesn't tie back to some moron's BushIsHitler fixations?
I love airships, and I really, really want them to return to the skies, since it's a technology that has a lot of room to develop if someone can get it off the ground. But this outfit has the feel of a fly-by-night stock scam. Listen to what the CEO has to say:
"In my opinion, the media is reporting on the progress of Sanswire One as they recognize the potential of our airship and the potential of causing what I always refer to as a paradigm shift in the telecommunications industry."
and here:
"This shows his belief in what we are trying to achieve at Sanswire. His innovative approach and out-of- the-box thinking is enabling us to successfully execute the program."
This is buzzword bullshit completely devoid of meaning, the kind of stuff you tell potential investors when you realize your scheme is gonna cost a whole lot more than you'll ever make. I'm thinking if they actually had a viable business plan you would hear something with a little more content from the CEO.
I don't think your trolling and honestly think you believe what you wrote...
Yes, indeed. That's why you should go and read the link so you can see all the other statistics. Or do you believe Europeans would rather not have TVs or washing machines?
Certainly not complete success: the Russians almost lost MIR due to a problem with a Progress resupply spacraft in 1997.
That's not fair to the Russians. They had a working system and were testing a new video system which would have been cheaper to operate, had it worked out. If they'd stuck with the original system everything would have been fine.
In the future, if a successful DART 2 mission occurs, it may be possible to launch a spacecraft and forget about it until it docks or performs its mission (like a computer program). This could reduce costs for automated spacecraft (logisitics costs).
I don't see how that can actually work out. The people you have standing around at launch aren't there to guide the spacecraft. You could hire one retired porn star for that. All those guys are there in case something goes wrong. You'll still need them even if the computer controlls the flight, for the same reason.
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But that's the problem, isn't it? Congress has mandated the sunset of analog radio and TV. I watch so little TV it seems a shame to spend any money on a new one, but in a couple of years (who knows when, exactly) my set is gonna stop working when they stop broadcasting analog. I don't want to spend gobs of money and I don't want to get stuck with another Betamax. Hopefully the FCC will get its act together enough that I can buy something that lasts a few years.
The thing that really pisses me off is it seems none of the broadcasters is really interested in high definition. They want digital so they can cram more channels into the same band. So I'm gonna trade my analog set for a lower quality digital picture and the choice of 10 reality shows instead of 5. Great.
I think you could pretty convincingly make the point a vertical stack is much safer than the STS design. A vertical stack would definitely have prevented the Columbia's destruction and would have given Challenger a fighting chance.
I'm tryin' to figure out why a drop of anything ligher than mineral oil would sink to the bottom instead of floating on the top.
Rei, Jerry Pournelle is most decidedly not an idiot. He's been at this space stuff a long time, and not just in SF. If you're interested in a practical (operational) strategy for CATS, read Getting To Space and The SSX Concept. You may not agree with everything, but I've read enough of your posts to believe you'll agree with most of it, or at least acknowledge the possibilities.
Orbital Sciences Corp would get 2 billion dollars just for strapping a heat shield to one of their Pegasus rockets instead of a payload - congrats we just wasted 1/3 of a CEV's development cost to accomplish nothing. Or did you not already know that private companies, using private funds, have already launched orbital rockets? It's not a very profitable business - that's why there aren't too many companies doing it.
I'm not sure you read the prize specification as intended. By "spacecraft" he's not talking about a missile, but rather a manned ship. Also, assuming you weren't talking about manned craft, if you attached a heat shield to Pegasus you're still a long way from having a spaceship you can land and reuse in two weeks. I don't think two billion dollars is out of line for a manned, reusable, orbital spacecraft. We don't have the capability, and given the past history of NASA projects, you're making quite an assumption to say 2 billion is 1/3 of CEV's development. It'll probably end up being more like 1/20th. The great thing about a prize-type contract is it doesn't cost anything if they don't deliver, and it never goes over budget.
Number 3 would never be done without subsidy. The costs are way off. I can do a breakdown if you'd like on what construction and supply costs would be during that period.
Well then, it wouldn't cost anything to put the prize out there, would it? Even if you and I can't see a way to do it, perhaps it could still be done. I'm not convinced it's impossible if the emphasis was on operational costs.
Number 4 makes no sense - why offer a prize for a *specific* clean power technology? The numbers are also way off on this one. Here, do the math: 1,367 W/m^2 (optimal), 35% conversion efficiency (very good), 5% beaming efficiency (far better than currently available). 800MW = 334 million square meters. Assuming 0.1 kg per square meter (light for high efficiency cells), that's 34 million kilograms (ignoring support eq., such as heliostats, orbit correction, transmission, etc). At a launch price of 7,000$/kg (cheap), that's 233 billion dollars.
The reason for having a specific technology is the power generating capability is only half the goal. The other half is to develop an infrastructure for cheap access to space. There's no reason to assume launch costs of $7000/kg. Yes, that's cheap today because every mission is a one-off. Think about this, though: If the prizes were done in order, you would conceivably have a reusable spacecraft before you went to tackle this one. There's no reason I can see you couldn't build an SSTO craft which could be flown often enough that the major component of the operational cost was fuel.
It's possible you could only get the cost down to $6999/kg, in which case you're right, the numbers won't work. The reality is we just don't know what could be done because nobody's tried it. Fuel is you're only absolute operational cost - the others could conceivably be attacked with great success under the right conditions.
Also, the prize doesn't specify the power station would have to be turned over to the government. So as a potential investor it wouldn't be out of line to consider the post-prize profit from power generation.
p.s. What the hell is a "duelist of Dios?"
Sorry. I was so used to people coming back with something like "It really is prohibition if there's no money..." I jumped the gun trying to forestall it.
Wouldn't it be better, if you prefer to have the research conducted in an ethical or responsible manner, to have it advanced in a nation where you have a legal and fiscal framework to control it?
If we put any limits on research at all the temptation will be to move to China. I don't understand how we can have a "legal and fiscal framework to control it" without having restrictions on what can be done. The stem cell stuff is childs play compared to what's being contemplated - if that's enough to send it offshore we can give up on having any control at all.
You lost the argument. Nothing I have written advocates doing research with the brutal ends that the Nazis advanced.
I didn't mean to imply that you had. I was just trying to say the ethics of the research are really independent of the promised benefits (except in really very rare circumstances that don't apply here). In my mind the ethical considerations trump 1) potential benefits and 2) concerns about the "scientific position" of the US in the world.
Of course it's political. Science only answers "what can be done?", not "what should be done?" I don't have any problem with the idea there should be limits on what my tax dollars pay for. In any event, Bush doesn't have the power to unilaterally make stem cell research illegal, he just changed the rules under which scientists get money for the research. And no, that's a long way from a prohibition.
Furthermore, the argument that we should allow something unethical to happen in the US so it doesn't happen somewhere else is specious. The Nazis conducted numerous medical experiments on people. Should we have done the same so as not to fall behind?
That's pretty inflamatory, but I don't see a logical connection between my comment and yours. The effect of forced busing on cities is well documented. However well intentioned, it was an absolute disaster for all concerned. Local tax bases were devestated, and schools are now more segregated than they were in the 1960's. You don't have to be racist to know stupidity when you see it.
And speaking of stupidity - busing didn't have anything to do with Jim-Crow. It started as judicial lawmaking by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1973. As far as I'm aware Massachusetts never had Jim Crow. It's one thing to be offensive, but at least you can try to get your facts straight.
You're mixing apples and oranges. There's no reason freight needs to be high speed. What you're arguing is a more efficient version of the freight system we have already. I'm not a train expert, but I'm pretty sure the freight companies (which aren't government agencies) are operating as efficiently as they can. If the freight line doesn't go to Long Island it's probably not worth the money.
The reason why this will not happen in the near future is threefold. 1) The stupidity (psychology) of the average American citizen (SUV driver). 2) Special interests such as the airlines and trucking industry, and 3) politicians.
That's pretty cynical. I think the real problem is some of the negative impacts from cars aren't paid for by the drivers - pollution, noise, etc.
Here in the San Francisco bay area we have a great light rail system called BART. It's high on my list of reasons to be here. But financially it's a loser - taxpayers at various levels are subsidizing the system, because if they didn't nobody could afford a ticket.
Now, normally, as a libertarianish kinda person I abhor the government subsidizing individuals' voluntary activities through tax money. But in this case you could make the argument cars would be much more expensive if drivers actually paid all the costs associated with their driving, so the train subsidy balances the ledger.
Passenger rail could easily be cost effective.
It always is, on paper, but somehow when they actually build it only areas with extremely high density can support a self-sustaining rail service. I think passenger rail would have a hard time competing even in Europe if gas taxes weren't prohibitively high.
This decision ranks pretty far up there as the dumbest decision ever made at Amtrak. Congress has given the pseudo-corporation lots of slack in recent years, and they don't need this kind of black eye. At this point Congress is seriously considering breaking it up and selling off the peices.
I don't think so. What sent Americans to the suburbs is social engineering run amok in the form of forced bussing. Of course American cities are lousy - local tax bases still haven't recovered from that blow.
By the way, wouldn't you consider Great Britain to be "anglo-saxon"? And don't they have a different attitude toward cities?
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues'.
and translated it
Murphy claims to be 'a 20-year veteran of the I.T. consulting industry', so it's been 20 years since he's done anything but produce fluffy white papers for non-technical management.
Yeah. My experience with redundent systems is the point of failure moves around without dissappearing. We had a cluster go belly up last month due to a software failure that wouldn't have been there in a single system.
That's the reason you won't catch me in a hospital. People die in there...
Great. Now I can live a long, sexless life!
Boys and Girls are different, even if socialized in exacltly the same way. The abject refusal to face this fact resulted in the virtual destruction of modern feminism in the '90s. It seems only in academia do they still stubbornly cling to the notion men and women are exactly the same except for the genitalia. But that's religion, not science.
Let's say a brother and sister want to get married. Now, traditionally this is frowned upon, not just because most people find it icky, but also it's not a good idea for two closely related people to have children. Under the "consent" logic, I suppose it's OK as long as one of them is sterile. And what about a man and his brother? His son?
Even people who support gay marriage start to squirm here, but if one responds "it's all good," then at least it's logically consistent (if impractical. Would a company be required to put 20 people on the health plan as a result of one new hire?). But that's not what I usually hear.
The response I always get when I ask this question is "well, it's not about that. It's about two unrelated people that love each other." Maybe so. But surely laws must be based on logic at some level. Where is the logical endpoint of this argument? If the response is "it stops at two people because that's the way it is" then you don't have a response to people who say marriage should be only for heterosexuals because "that's the way it is".
By the way, I'm not against gay marriage, provided it's done at the state level through state legislatures. But there are some logical inconsistencies that need to be resolved for me before this is a "civil rights" issue to be addressed by federal law or (especially) courts.
Following his "suits are back" example, you can see the calculation:
"Well, even if people aren't really dressing up more, what's it gonna hurt? In any event, there really isn't any way you could prove it isn't true, short of spending a million bucks on research (and who would pay for that?). So this is never gonna come back to bite me. I can just rearrange a sentence or two here and there and I'll be out of the office by noon."
I'm convinced much of the evil in the world results from simple sloth.
Do you have any basis at all for this, or is it just the tinfoil talking? I realize lots of people have legitimate disagreements with the Bush administration, but how can you blame Bush for something you have no reason to believe actually occurred?
Surely no one here would be surprised that Microsoft went for the money before social responsibility. Heck most companies would do the same thing if enough money was at stake.
Corporations have no business trying to insert themselves into social politics. As a Microsoft shareholder I want management at Microsoft to refrain from spending my money persuing their personal convictions and get back to making me money. That's what corporations are for.
Sure. But some of the support costs are fixed. Remember, I was comparing the current product at the current price with a product that has half the bugs for twice the price. You still need support, just less of it. Lots of small and medium companies have one person dedicated to this task, so they won't be able to realize much in the way of cost savings if Office. And companies pay some non-trivial cost just to have a capability.
I guess that's a long-winded way of saying half the work doesn't necessarily translate to half the cost.
I've always assumed this was a variation of "In my day, we had to walk 10 miles through the snow just to get the mail..." I've been in this business for 18 years or so, and while I don't think the actual code is any more clever than it used to be, the expectation in terms of time-to-market and quality have definitely changed.
When I started slinging code you could release business software with no GUI and still compete. You could release software that didn't "play nice" with other applications. You could require users to load special drivers and put arcane commands in their OS configuration. There is simply a larger set of features that have become mandatory, i.e., things you have to have to pass the laugh-test. You may call it bloat, but the fact is I can't remember the last time I cracked a manual - my expectation is the sofware is lousy if I can't install and operate it without a manual.
I don't see the quality changing any time soon. You can never completely test a non-trivial application, and finding those last couple of esoteric bugs incur an enormous cost. Would you really be willing to pay double the price for, say, MS Office if they removed half the remaining bugs? I wouldn't, especially if I can work around the problems.
I'm sick of this shit. Why does every discussion on slashdot have to include infantile political blatherings? Can we have one thread that doesn't tie back to some moron's BushIsHitler fixations?
An intern, then.
"In my opinion, the media is reporting on the progress of Sanswire One as they recognize the potential of our airship and the potential of causing what I always refer to as a paradigm shift in the telecommunications industry."
and here:
"This shows his belief in what we are trying to achieve at Sanswire. His innovative approach and out-of- the-box thinking is enabling us to successfully execute the program."
This is buzzword bullshit completely devoid of meaning, the kind of stuff you tell potential investors when you realize your scheme is gonna cost a whole lot more than you'll ever make. I'm thinking if they actually had a viable business plan you would hear something with a little more content from the CEO.
Yes, indeed. That's why you should go and read the link so you can see all the other statistics. Or do you believe Europeans would rather not have TVs or washing machines?
That's not fair to the Russians. They had a working system and were testing a new video system which would have been cheaper to operate, had it worked out. If they'd stuck with the original system everything would have been fine.
In the future, if a successful DART 2 mission occurs, it may be possible to launch a spacecraft and forget about it until it docks or performs its mission (like a computer program). This could reduce costs for automated spacecraft (logisitics costs).
I don't see how that can actually work out. The people you have standing around at launch aren't there to guide the spacecraft. You could hire one retired porn star for that. All those guys are there in case something goes wrong. You'll still need them even if the computer controlls the flight, for the same reason.