What you're describing is pretty much the difference between sales and marketing.
Sales is getting out (by whatever means) and getting people to open their wallet for you in response to your ads/pleas/whatever.
Marketing is creating an awareness, and hopefully "need" for whatever you're selling, but not trying to close the sale right there, or even in the near future. This is especially true for high dollar items like cars.
Tracking clicks is in a sense trying to track sales (usually the seller probably only gets some time from the clicker, not money, though) even though a lot of ads are clearly intended to create a marketing presence. You don't have to click on them for them to be effective-- you just have to see them (over and over) out of the corner of your eye while reading something else. Tracking views is what happens in the rest of advertising (how many people watch that show x how many times the ad appears). Eventually internet advertising will use a hybrid of clicks and views to track.
I do like the idea of one poster who suggested using flourescent for day-to-day living, and switching to incandescent when using the audio equipment.
To go a step further-- get some incandescent lights that run off 12V DC. There are fixtures that use wires or tapes that you screw small lamps into (with MR16 spot or flood bulbs). They have a transformer unit and a bunch of wire that you run where you wan to put the lights, and you can put bright light right where you want it. The 12VDC won't cause any interference, and you just need to keep the transformer away from anything that will pick up from it. You can get them at ikea (but some are a PITA to install) or probably a lot of other places at relatively low cost. Much better mood lighting for music than using fluorescents anyway.
(much like the OP, I have fluorescents installed in most fixtures in my house, too. The main thing I use incandescents for is keeping plants warm on really cold nights).
I think we're talking about different L2 points-- Earth-Sun L2 is popular for missions other than radio (JWST, Herschel/Planck) and doesn't have comm problems-- it's actually ideal for comm, since the earth is more or less always in the same spot (spacecraft actually fly quasi-halo orbits that aren't right on the lagrange point. I think you're referring to Earth-Moon L2.
As far as I can tell, all costs of the shuttle program that aren't payload are "hidden" in the shuttle program costs and don't get bookkept against the total cost of the payload.
you're right about HST-- I just did a double check and couldn't find any propellant tanks. I had guessed they would be there for maintaining orbit, but shuttle probably does that during servicing.
Propellants (esp hydrazine) does leave icky stuff on optics, but they get put on board some telescopes anyway and managed very carefully on some missions. If you're out at L2 you need them to maintain the orbit, and probably to desaturate reaction wheels.
The problem with putting a telescope (or any other facility, for that matter) at L2, or any of the other Lagrange points, is that their location puts them out of the orbits reachable by the Shuttle for repair purposes.
I haven't really seen any convincing arguments for repair over replacement of any mission-- the shuttle missions to repair Hubble are not cheap, and the way NASA accounts for cost seems to generally neglect launch cost if it's using the shuttle, but include it if you're using expendables.
The Lagrange points and Earth-trailing orbit are both becoming popular for space telescopes because they provide very good observing environments compared to LEO.
If it costs as much as another hubble up there , why are we not building another one and send it up again ?
Politics.
It's probably less expensive to replace than to repair, but replacement seems to have been pretty low on the radar. Part of that is because repair money could come out of the manned/exploration program, while a replacement would probably come out of the space science budget.
If there's a real desire to have a Hubble class visible-wavelength telescope in space, it's probably cheaper and lower risk to build a new one. As it is, the Hubble repair is going to eat into the budgets of other missions that are already well into development, delaying them and increasing their costs. The money to fix Hubble is going to come out of other astronomy missions (at least in part).
Repairing Hubble is fairly high risk-- not all the technology is in hand, there are unknowns on Hubble (will the robot arm have to have a hand free to bang on the door?) and there is a very real possibility that Hubble will suffer a fatal failure (battery or gyro) before the mission is launched, but after a great deal of money is sunk.
If you were to build a replacemant today, it would probably have a much lower mass mirror, possibly with a better surface quality, and there would likely be some kind of deformable mirror downstream to improve the image even more. It could also be at L2, where it would have much higher throughput than HST, and very likely could cost quite a bit less than servicing, depending on the set of instruments on board.
(and as mentioned elsewhere, JWST is infrared, not radio)
I'd like to understand why they must crash it down into the ocean?
Because the stuff on it that's not expected to totally disintegrate has too large of a footprint and is statistically dangerous. The primary is going to come down as a big hunk of hot glass, propellant tanks will probably survive, as well as some other bits.
It's also cheaper to build a new telescope than it is to try to figure out a way to get the existing HST into a station in some other orbit.
that's a great point-- I even saw a similar thing in a presentation by Colin Powell that my boss a couple levels up had put on our section web site-- "Informed troops fight better"
Everyone involved in a project should have a picture of the overall goal of the project (who the end customer is and why they want it), as well as be given insight into why their boss is making the decisions they're making, and as much as possible some insight into why the boss's boss is making whatever decisions are going on at that level. Things that look silly or futile from down at the bottom can make a lot more sense in the context of the larger project, (or at least the bigger picture can expose that the silliness and futility are caused at a level beyond the project manager's control.)
Sometimes you do have to steam-roll over people with legit ideas in order to get anything done, but don't do it arbitrarily, just because you have the power to
In my experience it's better not to steamroll, but to actually get the relevant people together (everyone affected by the decision) and be very explicit about the fact that you don't know whether it's the best decision (and that it probably isn't), but that some decision has to be made in order for the project to move forward, and there isn't enough information to make a better decision. Ideally you then document that decision in a design file, along with notes about alternatives, and as much as possible (but without making things so general that it drives the cost up) continue in such a way that you can revisit the decision later and possibly make a different choice without having to redo too much work.
The situations where this seems to happen is when the problem is underdetermined, and you need to select a couple of the free parameters and make them public to the team so that everything is self-consistent, even if it's not optimal everywhere. At some point you figure out enough to make a better decision and can then go back and propagate the change without too much pain.
Pay attention to what people are actually producing and how it's advancing the project-- some of your best workers will quietly go about doing a great job, and often go unrecognized as a result. People who pull off heroic efforts to recover from near distaster often get rewarded even when the disaster was essentially of their own making. The people who plan well and do things on time and correctly prevent disasters, too, but they do it so well that nobody even notices. Make sure they know that their work is valued and rewarded.
Water damage is certainly the leading cause of faults like this, especially in the summer when people take their phones wind surfing and poor beer all over it.
Seems like an opportunity to have yet another model-- sealed against water and charged inductively like an electric toothbrush. You can even use it in the shower, but whoever you're talking to will hear only rushing water...
Lower is definitely better for resolution, and down at 300 km you'll come down really fast if you don't spend propellant on stationkeeping. There's a bunch of civil stuff (the A-train) in the 700 km range, which gives you a long time before you come in. You lose some spatial resolution at that altitude, but you still can do pretty well, and you get a longer mission life and longer time over your target. I haven't checked lately where the spy sats are, but did a quick look of where some old ones were, and they had some *really* low periapses.
The optics are generally reflective, rather than transmissive, and while they might suffer micrometeoroid dings, they can last quite a long time. Spy telescopes also don't need to be as precise as astronomical telescopes, since they're looking back through the atmosphere, which fuzzes out things on the ground.
Earth observing sats commonly have a design lifetime of 3-5 years, but also commonly are expected by their users to last closer to 10, as long as they don't rely on consumables (cryogens or propellant) to do their jobs.
I do agree that GEO is probably too far, especially considering they probably don't have capability to make very large optics that would be needed. A polar orbit is much more likely, and for that you probably need quite a lot less than a hundred -- Iridium flies low and gets good coverage with 66 sats (I know, it's RF, but they are counting on being more or less overhead, rather than just somewhere above the horizon like GPS, which has 24 sats).
but it could still be a lot better
on
Killer Ozone?
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· Score: 1
The air in LA is a lot better than it used to be, but it still sucks a lot of the time (particularly inland). It could be a lot better, and if we don't continue to pay attention to it and control pollution sources it will get worse again.
I bet the air in LA was a lot cleaner in 1580 than it is now.
Re:Not very scientific
on
Killer Ozone?
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· Score: 1
I didn't read the study, but did read a version of the article in the LA Times. The study looked at temporal correlations-- high ozone levels for a few days increased the excess deaths for several days. The correlation held even at levels below the federal limit. The study was comparing densly populated areas to themselves as a function of time and ozone level. Ozone is already known to be bad for you to breathe-- if you want a demonstration, go into a small copy room, close the door, and run a thousand copies or so.
This isn't really big news, especially if you live in LA. In the areas where smog accumulates you can definitely tell when the ozone is higher, even when it's well below the federal limit. At least if you're fairly healthy you can tell. At about half the federal ozone limit, walking a few hundred feet up a steep hill is a lot more effort than when it's at about a quarter the limit (I walk up and down a pretty long steep hill several times a day most days at work). When it's at the limit (or worse, 1.5 to 2 times) it feels like you can barely breathe. And that's if you don't have asthma. If you do have asthma you can end up in the ER. People who aren't very aerobically fit may not notice it as much, or may just think they're in worse shape than they are, but if you are fairly fit it's pretty easy to tell when the ozone is high (and you can then check on the AQMD web page-it's reported hourly for various places in the LA basin).
I'm actually an american, living in Los Angeles, but I'm a low temperature physicist, and we occasionally like to point out that we can achieve temperatures substantially lower than you can find in nature.
If you really want to see Finns in action, check out a wargame forum...
Lots of artists self-produce/self publish. Some of them even make money at it, or at least don't lose money, and retain a lot more control over their work.
There were some articles in the LA Weekly a month or two ago about how CD sales are starting back upward, but the top selling stuff is selling less than ever, while the number of things way down the charts that's selling well is increasing, much of it going to people on "boutique" or indy labels.
I'd say most people that are smart enough to use various p2p systems in the first place are probably going to go for an open and free network instead...Never going to happen.
That's exactly what all the tech geeks (me among them) said about AOL-- "why would you use that expensive, crippled service that directs you to the content they want to sell you. There are all these great, open BBS's that are free and gushing with cool stuff". People who want it to be an appliance that they don't have to think about in order to get some entertainment from it.
Enough with the 'its all copyright piracy' arguments already..
Yeah-- there are plenty of legally downloadable and tradeable things.
There are a reasonable number (and probably increasing) of bands that put downloads on their sites and don't put restrictions, or if they're enlightened put a creative commons "some rights reserved" notice. They're counting on you liking their music and being willing to pay later to get more (and plenty of people will if it's any good).
The point is that right now, most P2P companies aren't middle-men, because they're not paying the artists whose music they're distributing.
And neither are the major labels. Most artists don't get jack from the CD sales (and many end up "owing" the labels money). If they get anything it's from publishing royalties (paid through ASCAP/BMI).
Do a quick search using "Steve Albini Problem with music".
Also, watch "Bands Reunited"-- look at what all those people are doing. Most of them are actually pretty responsible adults in regular jobs, who sometimes continue to play music as a hobby, but few of them are rich, despite having been quite popular at one point and being part of the back-catalog of the record labels. I doubt that most of them squandered their money from their hits-- they just didn't get paid all that much.
How dare they come up with an innovative business model that directly competes with established companies.
It's not that innovative-- it takes an established business model (radio) and brings P2P one step closer to it.
Radio (and TV) sends content for "free" out to anyone with a receiver. The price is that you have to pay in units of time by listening to (or seeing) ads. The buyers of the ads are the real customers, and the listeners are the product.
In the P2P world, users broadcast stuff to each other. Advertisers buy time/space from the makers of the P2P tools. Now all that's needed is to improve the signal to noise ratio so that you pretty much get the thing you were looking for every time (or nearly so). (It could be already there, I haven't gotten around to trying P2P music). Then have systems in place (e.g. Big Champagne) to track what tracks get moved, report that to ASCAP/BMI and pay the artists from the ad revenues.
Sounds like radio to me, but even more powerful, with the possibility of accurately directed micro ad campaigns...It could also track music use more accurately, so small artists with a steady following might get some return.
Hey, I better patent that and anything related to it so I can serve the RIAA with legal notices once they start doing it...
Slashdot Mirror
What you're describing is pretty much the difference between sales and marketing.
Sales is getting out (by whatever means) and getting people to open their wallet for you in response to your ads/pleas/whatever.
Marketing is creating an awareness, and hopefully "need" for whatever you're selling, but not trying to close the sale right there, or even in the near future. This is especially true for high dollar items like cars.
Tracking clicks is in a sense trying to track sales (usually the seller probably only gets some time from the clicker, not money, though) even though a lot of ads are clearly intended to create a marketing presence. You don't have to click on them for them to be effective-- you just have to see them (over and over) out of the corner of your eye while reading something else. Tracking views is what happens in the rest of advertising (how many people watch that show x how many times the ad appears). Eventually internet advertising will use a hybrid of clicks and views to track.
Seriously though, an implant that could do this would make telepathy somewhat of a reality. How cool is that?
Yeah, until your neighbor's cordless phone starts sending strange thoughts into your head.
I do like the idea of one poster who suggested using flourescent for day-to-day living, and switching to incandescent when using the audio equipment.
To go a step further-- get some incandescent lights that run off 12V DC. There are fixtures that use wires or tapes that you screw small lamps into (with MR16 spot or flood bulbs). They have a transformer unit and a bunch of wire that you run where you wan to put the lights, and you can put bright light right where you want it. The 12VDC won't cause any interference, and you just need to keep the transformer away from anything that will pick up from it. You can get them at ikea (but some are a PITA to install) or probably a lot of other places at relatively low cost. Much better mood lighting for music than using fluorescents anyway.
(much like the OP, I have fluorescents installed in most fixtures in my house, too. The main thing I use incandescents for is keeping plants warm on really cold nights).
I think we're talking about different L2 points-- Earth-Sun L2 is popular for missions other than radio (JWST, Herschel/Planck) and doesn't have comm problems-- it's actually ideal for comm, since the earth is more or less always in the same spot (spacecraft actually fly quasi-halo orbits that aren't right on the lagrange point. I think you're referring to Earth-Moon L2.
As far as I can tell, all costs of the shuttle program that aren't payload are "hidden" in the shuttle program costs and don't get bookkept against the total cost of the payload.
you're right about HST-- I just did a double check and couldn't find any propellant tanks. I had guessed they would be there for maintaining orbit, but shuttle probably does that during servicing.
Propellants (esp hydrazine) does leave icky stuff on optics, but they get put on board some telescopes anyway and managed very carefully on some missions. If you're out at L2 you need them to maintain the orbit, and probably to desaturate reaction wheels.
Usually you can't get a couple billion dollars for the technology missions though. Even a few hundred million for those can be stretching it.
The problem with putting a telescope (or any other facility, for that matter) at L2, or any of the other Lagrange points, is that their location puts them out of the orbits reachable by the Shuttle for repair purposes.
I haven't really seen any convincing arguments for repair over replacement of any mission-- the shuttle missions to repair Hubble are not cheap, and the way NASA accounts for cost seems to generally neglect launch cost if it's using the shuttle, but include it if you're using expendables.
The Lagrange points and Earth-trailing orbit are both becoming popular for space telescopes because they provide very good observing environments compared to LEO.
If it costs as much as another hubble up there , why are we not building another one and send it up again ?
Politics.
It's probably less expensive to replace than to repair, but replacement seems to have been pretty low on the radar. Part of that is because repair money could come out of the manned/exploration program, while a replacement would probably come out of the space science budget.
If there's a real desire to have a Hubble class visible-wavelength telescope in space, it's probably cheaper and lower risk to build a new one. As it is, the Hubble repair is going to eat into the budgets of other missions that are already well into development, delaying them and increasing their costs. The money to fix Hubble is going to come out of other astronomy missions (at least in part).
Repairing Hubble is fairly high risk-- not all the technology is in hand, there are unknowns on Hubble (will the robot arm have to have a hand free to bang on the door?) and there is a very real possibility that Hubble will suffer a fatal failure (battery or gyro) before the mission is launched, but after a great deal of money is sunk.
If you were to build a replacemant today, it would probably have a much lower mass mirror, possibly with a better surface quality, and there would likely be some kind of deformable mirror downstream to improve the image even more. It could also be at L2, where it would have much higher throughput than HST, and very likely could cost quite a bit less than servicing, depending on the set of instruments on board.
(and as mentioned elsewhere, JWST is infrared, not radio)
I'd like to understand why they must crash it down into the ocean?
Because the stuff on it that's not expected to totally disintegrate has too large of a footprint and is statistically dangerous. The primary is going to come down as a big hunk of hot glass, propellant tanks will probably survive, as well as some other bits.
It's also cheaper to build a new telescope than it is to try to figure out a way to get the existing HST into a station in some other orbit.
that's a great point-- I even saw a similar thing in a presentation by Colin Powell that my boss a couple levels up had put on our section web site-- "Informed troops fight better"
Everyone involved in a project should have a picture of the overall goal of the project (who the end customer is and why they want it), as well as be given insight into why their boss is making the decisions they're making, and as much as possible some insight into why the boss's boss is making whatever decisions are going on at that level. Things that look silly or futile from down at the bottom can make a lot more sense in the context of the larger project, (or at least the bigger picture can expose that the silliness and futility are caused at a level beyond the project manager's control.)
Sometimes you do have to steam-roll over people with legit ideas in order to get anything done, but don't do it arbitrarily, just because you have the power to
In my experience it's better not to steamroll, but to actually get the relevant people together (everyone affected by the decision) and be very explicit about the fact that you don't know whether it's the best decision (and that it probably isn't), but that some decision has to be made in order for the project to move forward, and there isn't enough information to make a better decision. Ideally you then document that decision in a design file, along with notes about alternatives, and as much as possible (but without making things so general that it drives the cost up) continue in such a way that you can revisit the decision later and possibly make a different choice without having to redo too much work.
The situations where this seems to happen is when the problem is underdetermined, and you need to select a couple of the free parameters and make them public to the team so that everything is self-consistent, even if it's not optimal everywhere. At some point you figure out enough to make a better decision and can then go back and propagate the change without too much pain.
And one that goes with this is:
Pay attention to what people are actually producing and how it's advancing the project-- some of your best workers will quietly go about doing a great job, and often go unrecognized as a result. People who pull off heroic efforts to recover from near distaster often get rewarded even when the disaster was essentially of their own making. The people who plan well and do things on time and correctly prevent disasters, too, but they do it so well that nobody even notices. Make sure they know that their work is valued and rewarded.
Water damage is certainly the leading cause of faults like this, especially in the summer when people take their phones wind surfing and poor beer all over it.
Seems like an opportunity to have yet another model-- sealed against water and charged inductively like an electric toothbrush. You can even use it in the shower, but whoever you're talking to will hear only rushing water...
Lower is definitely better for resolution, and down at 300 km you'll come down really fast if you don't spend propellant on stationkeeping. There's a bunch of civil stuff (the A-train) in the 700 km range, which gives you a long time before you come in. You lose some spatial resolution at that altitude, but you still can do pretty well, and you get a longer mission life and longer time over your target. I haven't checked lately where the spy sats are, but did a quick look of where some old ones were, and they had some *really* low periapses.
HST has been in LEO for how long?
The optics are generally reflective, rather than transmissive, and while they might suffer micrometeoroid dings, they can last quite a long time. Spy telescopes also don't need to be as precise as astronomical telescopes, since they're looking back through the atmosphere, which fuzzes out things on the ground.
Earth observing sats commonly have a design lifetime of 3-5 years, but also commonly are expected by their users to last closer to 10, as long as they don't rely on consumables (cryogens or propellant) to do their jobs.
I do agree that GEO is probably too far, especially considering they probably don't have capability to make very large optics that would be needed. A polar orbit is much more likely, and for that you probably need quite a lot less than a hundred -- Iridium flies low and gets good coverage with 66 sats (I know, it's RF, but they are counting on being more or less overhead, rather than just somewhere above the horizon like GPS, which has 24 sats).
The air in LA is a lot better than it used to be, but it still sucks a lot of the time (particularly inland). It could be a lot better, and if we don't continue to pay attention to it and control pollution sources it will get worse again.
I bet the air in LA was a lot cleaner in 1580 than it is now.
I didn't read the study, but did read a version of the article in the LA Times. The study looked at temporal correlations-- high ozone levels for a few days increased the excess deaths for several days. The correlation held even at levels below the federal limit. The study was comparing densly populated areas to themselves as a function of time and ozone level. Ozone is already known to be bad for you to breathe-- if you want a demonstration, go into a small copy room, close the door, and run a thousand copies or so.
This isn't really big news, especially if you live in LA. In the areas where smog accumulates you can definitely tell when the ozone is higher, even when it's well below the federal limit. At least if you're fairly healthy you can tell. At about half the federal ozone limit, walking a few hundred feet up a steep hill is a lot more effort than when it's at about a quarter the limit (I walk up and down a pretty long steep hill several times a day most days at work). When it's at the limit (or worse, 1.5 to 2 times) it feels like you can barely breathe. And that's if you don't have asthma. If you do have asthma you can end up in the ER. People who aren't very aerobically fit may not notice it as much, or may just think they're in worse shape than they are, but if you are fairly fit it's pretty easy to tell when the ozone is high (and you can then check on the AQMD web page-it's reported hourly for various places in the LA basin).
I'm actually an american, living in Los Angeles, but I'm a low temperature physicist, and we occasionally like to point out that we can achieve temperatures substantially lower than you can find in nature.
If you really want to see Finns in action, check out a wargame forum...
The coldest spot on earth is in a laboratory in Finland:
http://boojum.hut.fi/Low-Temp-Record.html
Dome A is the coldest naturally occuring spot.
So the artists are better off releasing via P2P?
Maybe. Only time will tell.
Lots of artists self-produce/self publish. Some of them even make money at it, or at least don't lose money, and retain a lot more control over their work.
There were some articles in the LA Weekly a month or two ago about how CD sales are starting back upward, but the top selling stuff is selling less than ever, while the number of things way down the charts that's selling well is increasing, much of it going to people on "boutique" or indy labels.
I'd say most people that are smart enough to use various p2p systems in the first place are probably going to go for an open and free network instead...Never going to happen.
That's exactly what all the tech geeks (me among them) said about AOL-- "why would you use that expensive, crippled service that directs you to the content they want to sell you. There are all these great, open BBS's that are free and gushing with cool stuff". People who want it to be an appliance that they don't have to think about in order to get some entertainment from it.
Enough with the 'its all copyright piracy' arguments already..
Yeah-- there are plenty of legally downloadable and tradeable things.
There are a reasonable number (and probably increasing) of bands that put downloads on their sites and don't put restrictions, or if they're enlightened put a creative commons "some rights reserved" notice. They're counting on you liking their music and being willing to pay later to get more (and plenty of people will if it's any good).
The point is that right now, most P2P companies aren't middle-men, because they're not paying the artists whose music they're distributing.
And neither are the major labels. Most artists don't get jack from the CD sales (and many end up "owing" the labels money). If they get anything it's from publishing royalties (paid through ASCAP/BMI).
Do a quick search using "Steve Albini Problem with music".
Also, watch "Bands Reunited"-- look at what all those people are doing. Most of them are actually pretty responsible adults in regular jobs, who sometimes continue to play music as a hobby, but few of them are rich, despite having been quite popular at one point and being part of the back-catalog of the record labels. I doubt that most of them squandered their money from their hits-- they just didn't get paid all that much.
How dare they come up with an innovative business model that directly competes with established companies.
It's not that innovative-- it takes an established business model (radio) and brings P2P one step closer to it.
Radio (and TV) sends content for "free" out to anyone with a receiver. The price is that you have to pay in units of time by listening to (or seeing) ads. The buyers of the ads are the real customers, and the listeners are the product.
In the P2P world, users broadcast stuff to each other. Advertisers buy time/space from the makers of the P2P tools. Now all that's needed is to improve the signal to noise ratio so that you pretty much get the thing you were looking for every time (or nearly so). (It could be already there, I haven't gotten around to trying P2P music). Then have systems in place (e.g. Big Champagne) to track what tracks get moved, report that to ASCAP/BMI and pay the artists from the ad revenues.
Sounds like radio to me, but even more powerful, with the possibility of accurately directed micro ad campaigns...It could also track music use more accurately, so small artists with a steady following might get some return.
Hey, I better patent that and anything related to it so I can serve the RIAA with legal notices once they start doing it...