It's exactly this kind of argument that people need to make to their bosses when talking about using open source software. Your company should decide when the life of a piece of software is over, and they can make this decision on factors like "Do I want to patch this or install a new version?" And because some vulernable software like IIS is built right in, you can't just upgrade that one piece if the vendor decides they'll no longer fix it for your platform.
Microsoft's biggest problem really is all this integration that they do when it doesn't need to be done. Yes, it's nice that I can click on a link in an email and open a document in my browser. That's a good use of integration. But when much of the system depends on a couple of dlls that can't be upgraded without changing the whole system then that's not good at all. I think that there's a huge appeal to the F/OSS model and decoupling of software when it comes to this kind of thing.
It's the difference between a criminal and civil case. In a criminal case, it's "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", which means "99.999% sure". In a civil case, the standard is "a preponderance of the evidence", or in layman-speak, "better than 50% chance". You might think that this is wrong, but it's how many families get some retribution on those who escape true justice, like OJ Simpson. In this case, of course, I totally side with the game maker and I'm glad to see the courts call bullshit on the argument. Hopefully the same will happen in the civil case.
Do you have to say that you're using Linux? Just say something like "I use the Firefox web browser which currently holds 10% of the browser market. I feel that it's important the U.S. government support at least the top two web browsers on its web sites as this will promote free market competition in this area."
The problem with this idea is that the owner would actually have to be "long" in the shares in the house, meaning that they would be betting their own money instead of the bank's. So few people have any real equity any more that it would be hard to find a real market. If you were to short housing that was mortgaged, you'd probably lose most of your money in bankruptcy court when the "owner" bailed out of his obligations. I doubt that the bank would honor the debt.
That's totally untrue. Just ask people in Texas who bought houses during the oil boom and then lost their shirt. The thing that you're forgetting is that while it is true that people need to live somewhere, it's also true that housing isn't liquid and can't be unloaded as easily as stocks when things go bad. When the market starts to drop then all bets are off. About the only way to get out of some housing deals is bankruptcy, which almost happened to a neighbor of mine who lost his job and couldn't pay the outrageous mortgage that he got when he was contracting for high rates.
The GP is right - housing is a risk. If you want to mitigate the risk then spread your money across a few REITs. The whole idea of a REIT is to have some money invested in real estate but do not have to manage it. I've got one that's performed exceptionally well.
I can't believe that a great company like Nextel wants to merge with a crappy company like Sprint. It kind of reminds me when Sears merged with K-mart. The sad thing is that it's usually the weaker partner that wins out.
If we can find some new propulsion technologies that makes the mere act of getting to space a more realistic cost, then it might be worth going some places just because we can.
If we're ever really going to be successful in space, we need to get beyond the "new technologies" phase and start talking about the "right technologies". The shuttle was sold as a new, cheap technology, but it's obviously unsuited for most of the missions that it flies. We don't need it to launch supplies, or space probes, or satellites, or heavy pieces of equipment. We need a shuttle (or something like it) to launch people. If we had a Nova class booster as was in development in the 60's, we could have launched the ISS in just a few simple steps. The Russian Progress cargo ships have done a fine job of resupply to the ISS for the last few years, and the Russians have also ferried crews back back and forth. So why are we still flying the shuttle then? Well even NASA agrees that it needs replacement, but since we have no heavy lift capabilities then it's all we have.
What I don't get is that apart from the booster, unmanned systems use custom hardware. You wouldn't fly a rover to Jupiter, and while Huygens was really exciting landing on Titan, I doubt that anyone would care if we landed that exact same technology on Mars. Unmanned systems have a history of building the right tool for the job, so why don't we do that with manned systems and boosters? Building the ISS because someone might want to do something with it is a waste, which was exactly how it was sold. What happened to all the space manufacturing that was supposed to take place?
(Note: In my last two posts, it may sound like I hate manned space flight. I want to be very clear here - manned space flight it good and should be pursued vigorously. Let's just have a real purpose for the cash we spend.)
any meaningful research it and its partners can get out of it
Can you give me even one example of what we expect to learn spending several more billion keeping the ISS afloat? Would the learning we get come even close to what we'd learn by keeping our current unmanned projects alive that are getting their funding cut? It really burns me that we're dropping good science to build the ISS which has no tangible benefits apart from being a good jobs program. For what they spend on one main beam (about $600 million), we can fly multiple Mars missions, or visit the Kuiper belt, or do more study of the sun, or maybe, just maybe, do a little bit of research in the first "A" in NASA. (You know, the "aeronautics" part.)
Better yet, just use a little black Rustoleum to cover it up. What they can't see won't hurt them, just like when you sell that rusty, used car with the new, high-polish finish. Of course you'll still need a little tape for masking off the windows that you don't want painted over, but it takes a whole lot less tape to cover those tiny little windows on the front of the shuttle than to wrap all the way around. Really the only time you need to wrap the shuttle completely is when the cargo bay doors won't lock.
Wrong! The increased disturbance in the plasma flow over the gap fillers will cause additional heating downstream from the material. For once the main media has is right - it's like a blow torch effect of the tiles aft of the filler. Any rough edge is not good in these conditions, although the risk of modifying the filler may outweigh the possibility of damaging a tile, so this isn't an easy decision to make. I highly doubt that there would be much of an ablative effect on the gap fillers themselves beyond what is normally seen in the tiles. The fillers have to accept the same thermal heat loads on reentry as the tiles.
I've got my own list of stuff that I turn off right after a fresh install. Everything runs just great. Remember, this is a list of stuff to turn OFF:
Alerter Automatic Updates COM+ Event System Distributed Link Tracking Client Error Reporting Service Help and Support IIS Admin Infrared monitor IPSEC Services Logical Disk Manager Machine Debug Manager Messenger Network Location Awareness (NLA) Remote Registry Simple Mail Transport Protocol System Event Notification System Restore Service Task Scheduler Themes Upload Manager WebClient World Wide Web Publishing
Because Windows services support dependencies, some stuff will turn itself back on when needed. But at least you don't take the hit at boot time.
The problem with moderation as I see it is that it's anonymous. I can crap on you all I want without any repercussion. Of course I can post a negative comment as an Anonymous Coward too, but moderation has more impact. Last time I meta-moderated, I flipped the switch on three in ten, for exactly the reason that you mention. Just because someone takes an opposing view doesn't make them flamebait. My metric for flamebait is something like "you're an asshole" or "your mother wears army boots" or some other comment that doesn't add value to the discussion. Saying "I like Windows because it's more secure and robust" isn't flamebait, no matter how untrue we all believe the comment to be. Although I'd never defend the comment, I defend the right to make the comment. Just don't expect me to waste mod points pumping up your opinion.
Moderation is becoming more and more useless for the n00bs because of the slant in moderation. At minimum, I'd like to see the default at "0 nested" or "1 nested" instead of "1 threaded". It generates more noise, but gets some of the contrarian opinions a little more out in the open. If we're really gunning for smart folks on the site then I'm sure they can figure out how to turn moderation on if they want it. The same argument could be made the other way, but I prefer to give people the raw facts and then let them decide what filters to add.
Re:Didn't they say this ten years ago?
on
The Future of the Net
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Or the marketing guys. Seriously, isn't this how Microsoft works? Paint a rosy picture of the future and then tell everybody to hang onto their cash and avoid buying competing products until you can get one from "someone you trust" who obviously has enough foresight to predict the future years in advance. I had to laugh when I saw the recent pictures of Microsoft execs pumping up a room full of people while showing off Vista. You'd think that they'd just cured cancer. Now just wait until sometime late in 2006 and you too can live in a better world.
If Von Braun 'personally man rated' something - that means he personally signed a piece of paper.
Nope, he performed the actual test. That shouldn't come as a surprise given his hands-on approach to building rockets. I wish I had a reference for you, but I'm sorry that I don't. It may have been in this book but I'm not totally sure about that.
Von Braun had nothing to do with the Apollo spacecraft (That was Max Faget and his merry band).
Faget didn't design the LEM either, so does that mean that Faget wasn't really a part of the Moon landing program either? The LEM was designed and built by Grumman. For what it's worth, I believe that Faget was by far the most influential member of the program and that we wouldn't be where we are at today without his talents. When I heard that he died a while back I was very sad.
... but you demonstrate clearly you haven't understood them.
I guess that different people are going to read stuff differently. What surprises me is that you don't have more respect for the Apollo program. Even NASA fills much of it's dead air time on NASA TV with footage from previous missions.
No, the mission rules allowed a brute force docking in lunar orbit when the LEM was returning - and the lives of the landing crew were on the line and potential damage to the docking system didn't matter.
You make this sound like it was cavalier. The astronauts wouldn't have allowed it if they thought they were in danger. The CDR had the last say in the matter, and it wouldn't have happened without his approval.
That aside, let's look at the danger involved. In the worst case scenario, they would not have been able to achieve hard dock again while in lunar orbit. A backup system was available and well tested (on Apollo 9) whereby the astronauts would have exited the LEM in space suits and come aboard the CSM through the main hatch. I guess you could argue that opening the CSM main hatch was an added danger, but they did it on each return flight to recover film canisters from the side of the SM.
You claim to have read them...
You don't prove your points by claiming that other people are liars. You do it with facts. If you want to throw around insults then take it to Washington, D.C.
BTW: I did find
a reference to the landing radar problem on Apollo 14 that you spoke about. According to the article, it was at 30,000 feet that they discovered the problem and they fixed it at 22,000 feet. Mission rules called for a mandatory abort at 10,000 feet. Hardly a nail biter.
Canadarm is indeed a great piece of equipment. I'm only saying that for all the pissing and moaning that Canadians do about what other countries do or do not do, they sure haven't done much about creating something of their own.
I could see how you could read that in my comment, but that wasn't my intention. What I was trying to say is that we learned a lot from the Saturn and then threw away most of the technology for a new, mostly unproven system. We also had the human component - a lot of very smart guys with a ton of experience who didn't have a home in the new program. If you worked with cryogenic systems then you could work on the shuttle, but if you were a kerosene/LOX guy then you were SOL.
My biggest problem with the shuttle was that it was too much new stuff all at once. Part of that was technology, and part was politics. If we'd not put all our eggs in one basket then at least half of our missions would fly on an unmanned booster similar to Saturn or Nova. Flying parts for the ISS up on a shuttle just seems really silly to me, but I understand the need to justify the shuttle system.
Here's a partial list of books that I've read on the matter. I've got some more that I need to add to the site that I've read recently. I've also poured over several web sites, my favorite being the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. I don't have cable or satellite TV and don't watch the Discovery Channel.
Loss of power in spacecraft [Apollo 12] due to lightning strike
Do you know what "SCE to AUX" means? If not then I'd suggest that you know nothing of the story and that you should go look it up on Google. You could argue that the launch shouldn't have happened with thunderstorms in the area, and I don't disagree. I guess that Kurt DeBus had more confidence in the craft than he should have.
Reading the abovementioned dense thick books, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of diving catches and near misses that characterized the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. Once you grasp that, the origins of the Shuttle era attitudes become abundantly clear.
The thick, dense books will also tell you that they did nothing by accident. A brute force dock with the LEM wasn't a diving catch or a near miss. It was a calculated risk that still fell within mission rules. The difference between the Apollo era mission rules and the Shuttle era mission rules are that the Shuttle rules are insanely tight. The launch of Discovery yesterday proved it. They had four fuel sensors in the tank of which two were backups. If you watched the news conference on Monday you would have heard them say something like, "We'll still launch if the fourth sensor is bad". If that's the case then why even have the extra sensor?
The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.
Absolutely. And so is the shuttle. Don't get me wrong, the shuttle is a great system, but if I had to put my ass on the line then I'd fly on Apollo any day. The reason why is simple - There's an old story (yes, I wax nostalgic) about Werner Von Braun personally man-rating a system so that they could get it out the door. I don't know about you, but it says a lot to me that instead of sending an expendible flunky to do the job, Von Braun did it himself. The fact that a director of an entire flight center is willing to trust his engineers enough to put his own butt on the line tells me he was confident.
Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)
This one is new to me, although I wouldn't claim to be the foremost expert on Apollo. Could you have confused this with the 1201 and 1202 program alarms during the final stages of landing on Apollo 11? The reason that I bring this up is that this was one of NASA's finest hours. The landing, sure, but before that in how they handled the alarm. About a week prior to the launch of Apollo 11, someone in the test group noticed that they had not done a very good job of simulating the program alarms, so they ran a some simulations. When the actual program alarms happened, they knew immediately what they meant and how to handle them, which ultimately saved the mission.
My problem with Wine is that what little does install doesn't run. I've tried several packages and haven't found anything yet that works well enough to want to use it. I don't want to do anything too fancy. If I could get Quickbooks running then I'd be happy.
You forgot to mention the Boost Protective Cover, or BPC. The BPC was part of the Launch Escape System (LES) which included the jettison motors. The BPC protected against heat buildup during launch and also protected the crew during a launch abort. They jettisoned the whole assembly around 270K feet. There's some really great footage kicking around of Apollo 6 losing its BPC as viewed from the inside of the cabin.
In the early design phases of the shuttle, the designers decided to go with solid fuel rather than liquid fuel to help keep the costs down. It seems to me in retrospect that if we'd launched both Challenger and Columbia on top of their boosters rather than strapped to the side then we'd still have a full complement of shuttles, saved a whole ton of money, and been four years further down the road than we are today. The Saturn/Apollo stack was exceptionally robust, and its a shame we abandoned them so quickly.
According to this page, the dialing computer was built with Flash version 4. Download the dialing program from the mirror site since it seems to be the only gate currently in operation. Don't forget to close the iris on incoming wormholes.
Its funny you should say this. I think my Zaurus is really cool, but not very usable. Sync was a huge problem, so I could carry around this neat little Linux gadget but couldn't do anything real with it other than a little email and surf the web. In all seriousness, I found it great for reading CNN.com while taking a crap, but that's about it. I'd love to see this thing revived without Qtopia and with X, and a real sync solution to stuff like Yahoo Calendar.
For the record, I still own my Z. Waiting for OZ on the 2.6 kernel to come out before I flash it again.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's biggest problem really is all this integration that they do when it doesn't need to be done. Yes, it's nice that I can click on a link in an email and open a document in my browser. That's a good use of integration. But when much of the system depends on a couple of dlls that can't be upgraded without changing the whole system then that's not good at all. I think that there's a huge appeal to the F/OSS model and decoupling of software when it comes to this kind of thing.
It's the difference between a criminal and civil case. In a criminal case, it's "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", which means "99.999% sure". In a civil case, the standard is "a preponderance of the evidence", or in layman-speak, "better than 50% chance". You might think that this is wrong, but it's how many families get some retribution on those who escape true justice, like OJ Simpson. In this case, of course, I totally side with the game maker and I'm glad to see the courts call bullshit on the argument. Hopefully the same will happen in the civil case.
Do you have to say that you're using Linux? Just say something like "I use the Firefox web browser which currently holds 10% of the browser market. I feel that it's important the U.S. government support at least the top two web browsers on its web sites as this will promote free market competition in this area."
The problem with this idea is that the owner would actually have to be "long" in the shares in the house, meaning that they would be betting their own money instead of the bank's. So few people have any real equity any more that it would be hard to find a real market. If you were to short housing that was mortgaged, you'd probably lose most of your money in bankruptcy court when the "owner" bailed out of his obligations. I doubt that the bank would honor the debt.
The GP is right - housing is a risk. If you want to mitigate the risk then spread your money across a few REITs. The whole idea of a REIT is to have some money invested in real estate but do not have to manage it. I've got one that's performed exceptionally well.
I can't believe that a great company like Nextel wants to merge with a crappy company like Sprint. It kind of reminds me when Sears merged with K-mart. The sad thing is that it's usually the weaker partner that wins out.
It dries on reentry when the heat shield warms up. Makes for a real nice "baked on" finish.
If we're ever really going to be successful in space, we need to get beyond the "new technologies" phase and start talking about the "right technologies". The shuttle was sold as a new, cheap technology, but it's obviously unsuited for most of the missions that it flies. We don't need it to launch supplies, or space probes, or satellites, or heavy pieces of equipment. We need a shuttle (or something like it) to launch people. If we had a Nova class booster as was in development in the 60's, we could have launched the ISS in just a few simple steps. The Russian Progress cargo ships have done a fine job of resupply to the ISS for the last few years, and the Russians have also ferried crews back back and forth. So why are we still flying the shuttle then? Well even NASA agrees that it needs replacement, but since we have no heavy lift capabilities then it's all we have.
What I don't get is that apart from the booster, unmanned systems use custom hardware. You wouldn't fly a rover to Jupiter, and while Huygens was really exciting landing on Titan, I doubt that anyone would care if we landed that exact same technology on Mars. Unmanned systems have a history of building the right tool for the job, so why don't we do that with manned systems and boosters? Building the ISS because someone might want to do something with it is a waste, which was exactly how it was sold. What happened to all the space manufacturing that was supposed to take place?
(Note: In my last two posts, it may sound like I hate manned space flight. I want to be very clear here - manned space flight it good and should be pursued vigorously. Let's just have a real purpose for the cash we spend.)
Can you give me even one example of what we expect to learn spending several more billion keeping the ISS afloat? Would the learning we get come even close to what we'd learn by keeping our current unmanned projects alive that are getting their funding cut? It really burns me that we're dropping good science to build the ISS which has no tangible benefits apart from being a good jobs program. For what they spend on one main beam (about $600 million), we can fly multiple Mars missions, or visit the Kuiper belt, or do more study of the sun, or maybe, just maybe, do a little bit of research in the first "A" in NASA. (You know, the "aeronautics" part.)
Better yet, just use a little black Rustoleum to cover it up. What they can't see won't hurt them, just like when you sell that rusty, used car with the new, high-polish finish. Of course you'll still need a little tape for masking off the windows that you don't want painted over, but it takes a whole lot less tape to cover those tiny little windows on the front of the shuttle than to wrap all the way around. Really the only time you need to wrap the shuttle completely is when the cargo bay doors won't lock.
Wrong! The increased disturbance in the plasma flow over the gap fillers will cause additional heating downstream from the material. For once the main media has is right - it's like a blow torch effect of the tiles aft of the filler. Any rough edge is not good in these conditions, although the risk of modifying the filler may outweigh the possibility of damaging a tile, so this isn't an easy decision to make. I highly doubt that there would be much of an ablative effect on the gap fillers themselves beyond what is normally seen in the tiles. The fillers have to accept the same thermal heat loads on reentry as the tiles.
Because Windows services support dependencies, some stuff will turn itself back on when needed. But at least you don't take the hit at boot time.
Moderation is becoming more and more useless for the n00bs because of the slant in moderation. At minimum, I'd like to see the default at "0 nested" or "1 nested" instead of "1 threaded". It generates more noise, but gets some of the contrarian opinions a little more out in the open. If we're really gunning for smart folks on the site then I'm sure they can figure out how to turn moderation on if they want it. The same argument could be made the other way, but I prefer to give people the raw facts and then let them decide what filters to add.
Or the marketing guys. Seriously, isn't this how Microsoft works? Paint a rosy picture of the future and then tell everybody to hang onto their cash and avoid buying competing products until you can get one from "someone you trust" who obviously has enough foresight to predict the future years in advance. I had to laugh when I saw the recent pictures of Microsoft execs pumping up a room full of people while showing off Vista. You'd think that they'd just cured cancer. Now just wait until sometime late in 2006 and you too can live in a better world.
Nope, he performed the actual test. That shouldn't come as a surprise given his hands-on approach to building rockets. I wish I had a reference for you, but I'm sorry that I don't. It may have been in this book but I'm not totally sure about that.
Von Braun had nothing to do with the Apollo spacecraft (That was Max Faget and his merry band).
Faget didn't design the LEM either, so does that mean that Faget wasn't really a part of the Moon landing program either? The LEM was designed and built by Grumman. For what it's worth, I believe that Faget was by far the most influential member of the program and that we wouldn't be where we are at today without his talents. When I heard that he died a while back I was very sad.
I guess that different people are going to read stuff differently. What surprises me is that you don't have more respect for the Apollo program. Even NASA fills much of it's dead air time on NASA TV with footage from previous missions.
No, the mission rules allowed a brute force docking in lunar orbit when the LEM was returning - and the lives of the landing crew were on the line and potential damage to the docking system didn't matter.
You make this sound like it was cavalier. The astronauts wouldn't have allowed it if they thought they were in danger. The CDR had the last say in the matter, and it wouldn't have happened without his approval.
That aside, let's look at the danger involved. In the worst case scenario, they would not have been able to achieve hard dock again while in lunar orbit. A backup system was available and well tested (on Apollo 9) whereby the astronauts would have exited the LEM in space suits and come aboard the CSM through the main hatch. I guess you could argue that opening the CSM main hatch was an added danger, but they did it on each return flight to recover film canisters from the side of the SM.
You claim to have read them...
You don't prove your points by claiming that other people are liars. You do it with facts. If you want to throw around insults then take it to Washington, D.C.
BTW: I did find a reference to the landing radar problem on Apollo 14 that you spoke about. According to the article, it was at 30,000 feet that they discovered the problem and they fixed it at 22,000 feet. Mission rules called for a mandatory abort at 10,000 feet. Hardly a nail biter.
Canadarm is indeed a great piece of equipment. I'm only saying that for all the pissing and moaning that Canadians do about what other countries do or do not do, they sure haven't done much about creating something of their own.
And of course we all know how well the Canadian space program is doing these days.
My biggest problem with the shuttle was that it was too much new stuff all at once. Part of that was technology, and part was politics. If we'd not put all our eggs in one basket then at least half of our missions would fly on an unmanned booster similar to Saturn or Nova. Flying parts for the ISS up on a shuttle just seems really silly to me, but I understand the need to justify the shuttle system.
Here's a partial list of books that I've read on the matter. I've got some more that I need to add to the site that I've read recently. I've also poured over several web sites, my favorite being the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. I don't have cable or satellite TV and don't watch the Discovery Channel.
Loss of power in spacecraft [Apollo 12] due to lightning strike
Do you know what "SCE to AUX" means? If not then I'd suggest that you know nothing of the story and that you should go look it up on Google. You could argue that the launch shouldn't have happened with thunderstorms in the area, and I don't disagree. I guess that Kurt DeBus had more confidence in the craft than he should have.
Reading the abovementioned dense thick books, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of diving catches and near misses that characterized the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. Once you grasp that, the origins of the Shuttle era attitudes become abundantly clear.
The thick, dense books will also tell you that they did nothing by accident. A brute force dock with the LEM wasn't a diving catch or a near miss. It was a calculated risk that still fell within mission rules. The difference between the Apollo era mission rules and the Shuttle era mission rules are that the Shuttle rules are insanely tight. The launch of Discovery yesterday proved it. They had four fuel sensors in the tank of which two were backups. If you watched the news conference on Monday you would have heard them say something like, "We'll still launch if the fourth sensor is bad". If that's the case then why even have the extra sensor?
The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.
Absolutely. And so is the shuttle. Don't get me wrong, the shuttle is a great system, but if I had to put my ass on the line then I'd fly on Apollo any day. The reason why is simple - There's an old story (yes, I wax nostalgic) about Werner Von Braun personally man-rating a system so that they could get it out the door. I don't know about you, but it says a lot to me that instead of sending an expendible flunky to do the job, Von Braun did it himself. The fact that a director of an entire flight center is willing to trust his engineers enough to put his own butt on the line tells me he was confident.
Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)
This one is new to me, although I wouldn't claim to be the foremost expert on Apollo. Could you have confused this with the 1201 and 1202 program alarms during the final stages of landing on Apollo 11? The reason that I bring this up is that this was one of NASA's finest hours. The landing, sure, but before that in how they handled the alarm. About a week prior to the launch of Apollo 11, someone in the test group noticed that they had not done a very good job of simulating the program alarms, so they ran a some simulations. When the actual program alarms happened, they knew immediately what they meant and how to handle them, which ultimately saved the mission.
My problem with Wine is that what little does install doesn't run. I've tried several packages and haven't found anything yet that works well enough to want to use it. I don't want to do anything too fancy. If I could get Quickbooks running then I'd be happy.
You forgot to mention the Boost Protective Cover, or BPC. The BPC was part of the Launch Escape System (LES) which included the jettison motors. The BPC protected against heat buildup during launch and also protected the crew during a launch abort. They jettisoned the whole assembly around 270K feet. There's some really great footage kicking around of Apollo 6 losing its BPC as viewed from the inside of the cabin.
2005 Limited Edition is really stable. But I don't understand why they're building 2006 on an unstable kernel series. This is why 10.1 sucked.
In the early design phases of the shuttle, the designers decided to go with solid fuel rather than liquid fuel to help keep the costs down. It seems to me in retrospect that if we'd launched both Challenger and Columbia on top of their boosters rather than strapped to the side then we'd still have a full complement of shuttles, saved a whole ton of money, and been four years further down the road than we are today. The Saturn/Apollo stack was exceptionally robust, and its a shame we abandoned them so quickly.
According to this page, the dialing computer was built with Flash version 4. Download the dialing program from the mirror site since it seems to be the only gate currently in operation. Don't forget to close the iris on incoming wormholes.
For the record, I still own my Z. Waiting for OZ on the 2.6 kernel to come out before I flash it again.