This criticism is based on a naive look at $/kg aka you sacrifice 30% of payload for re-use and it costs 30% more. But that ignores the fact that many launches are already well within the capabilities of the launcher so there isn't a 30% additional payload that anyone wants to send.
It's a bit like the old trope "An SUV uses less fuel per passenger than a car!" while ignoring the regular use cases where a bus operates at half or quarter capacity.
It also only assumes a 30% reduction in cost/kg which is where SpaceX is *starting* at with re-use and will undoubtedly improve as they apply the lessons learned from returned stages.
I think once you reach 98%+ reliability the most expensive part of the failure: grounding the fleet, no longer occurs. Once the Falcon 9 design stabilizes this year if they lose one after 50 successful launches they'll probably take a few weeks off but not months on end. There was even a substantially shorter down-time in 2016 with the most recent failure than in 2015.
And the other thing they have going for them now is re-usability and re-use. That could hypothetically result in new failure modes but it also should catch any obvious manufacturing flaws. Rapid re-use also means loads of more data and experience. If they can prove that their design is 98% reliable it just becomes "Welp, insurance will cover that. Sorry about the inconvenience."
Even if that were true, which it's not, that is the user's problem.
No, it causes an ecosystem problems. It prevents the vast vast vast vast majority of users from being able to get new features because a few Luddites want to go unpatched.
At some point fragmentation causes serious issues. This wasn't a problem when they would release a major release every 5 years and a couple service packs inbetween. Now they're making substantial changes and feature improvements on a bi-annual basis. If most people are 2 years behind developers will have to target 10 different OS configurations instead of 2 (those who are on the latest and those who are deferred for a few months).
It's unlimited right up to the moment where they no longer want you as a customer. It is truly unlimited. But they're letting you know that you only get one month unlimited before you'll be kicked to the curb.
If you offer "free electricity!" but someone comes and plugs in a hybrid car through an extension cord you can ban them and it doesn't make the electricity they used any more or less free.
And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.
I don't see many people developing, deploying and maintaining a video chat service for less than the occasional hassle of changing providers who use a sane API. Integration should be incredibly simple and inexpensive. You could have many dozen Google Hangout type services shutter and still save time and money over developing it and hosting it in-house.
As a side note, I'm really uncomfortable with their plan to make IPS entirely out of carbon fibre. As they're finding out (and has others have found out in the past), it's really difficult to use LOX with composites.
Well for one thing the pressure in a COPV is several orders of magnitude higher than in a LOX tank so it seems foolish to over react to a failure of composites under extreme pressure and exotic conditioned when future applications will be different in nearly every way. Secondly, you could always work exactly the same as a COPV and line the interior of the composite structure with a thin layer of aluminum to prevent any contact at all. In fact we don't even know if that's not already the plan. In this instance SpaceX simply didn't think it was necessary to prevent contact of LOX and carbon and they were arguably right until they pushed the conditions slightly too far, it's telling that they are returning to flight with the exact same hardware.
You can't radically upset the economics of space flight by doing the exact same things the exact same way everybody else has always done it. You'll end up with the same thing at the same price.
There's also the issue of two competitors for Federal launch, Boeing and Lockheed, forming a Trust and not being blocked from doing so.
While I applaud your anti-monopolistic inclination this wasn't a merger born out of anti competitive acquisitions or even a "we will lower prices by removing redundancy" this was a case where one Company won the contract and then it was found out that the other company had stolen designs through industrial sabotage.
The birth of ULA was the result of a very messed up and disastrous legal scandal. Effectively a shotgun wedding nobody really wanted to pave over the whole affair.
Every seeder can carry metadata. If you want upvotes etc then you could distribute it through the peers. You could also build a simple trust system where a magnet could be signed with a trusted key. If you like one uploader you could whitelist other content by that uploader. "Only download music uploaded and signed by key XYZ". We already do that for legal content, I would expect the illegal content providers would do the same. With public/private keys as long as a provider keeps their keys safe their uploads, votes, comments etc would be blockable and promotable. Of course people would lose their keys but isn't that what happened to Kickass Torrents under the current system.
People can and will start making movies outside the studio. Most people are tired of the endless effects and total lack of story or content that the studios churn out and low budget good stories will start arriving in just the same way that the music industry is changing.
A gross misunderstanding of what it takes to produce a film. At its very most basic level a film is a play with a camera and a microphone. Simply producing a play is a tremendous amount of work and pretty expensive. And that ignores the fact that you need talented actors which is harder to manage than you would think... Just go to your local community play.
Piracy has always been a story of decentralization. In fact nearly all crime will inevitably rely on a decentralized process. In order to build a large, powerful organization you can't have a larger, more powerful organization trying stop you.
We saw this from the beginning. It started with streaming sites and warez sites, but those were trivial to target and eliminate. So people moved on to p2p in order to decentralize the crime. That worked until the law adapted to target the defacto pirates (the application developers). So it moved to even further distributed services: torrents. Without an application developer to pursue the new central authorities which could be attacked were the torrent hosting sites, so the community also developed magnet links to further remove themselves from the process of hosting.
The inevitable outcome is just that the list of magnet links will also become distributed much like the DNS system.
Yeah, the only part of this lawsuit that I disagree with is this statement by the attorney general "unconscionable loss of privacy through his deception".
I think what he meant to say was "His unconscionable failure to violate their privacy through his deception."
If he had actually followed through and gotten their nude photos and sex tapes public he wouldn't have been committing fraud.
It is confusing that Slashdot seems to fetishize the Chromebook: a touchscreen centric, cloud only, spyware ridden, closed ecosystem with 0 dev tools that can only run lightweight web apps, while constantly hating Windows 10 for being a touchscreen centric cloud friendly os, which occasionally phones home, has a full blown Linux subsystem accessible through bash and has one of the best suites of development tools available.
Pretty sure they had an interview recently where the developer said he was tempted to do that sort of thing but concluded that it wasn't the right direction. He wanted to focus on being the best legacy os possible for maximum compatibility, not to be a dos box competitor with new features.
Last time I was able to be flexible I got $500, left early on a different route first class and arrived home 2 hours ahead of schedule. I'm surprised as well at all if this "screwing customers" talk. I've only ever seen unhappy flyers once for getting bumped and that was forced bumping due to a smaller plane being necessary after mechanical failure and a whole high school team getting bumped. I'm sure they were taken care of generously but students don't care about cheaper flights when the school/parents are paying. Forced bumps are almost nonexistent.
Everybody who whines about Steam outages clearly never played valve games prior to Steam. What used to happen was every time a new Counterstrike patch was dropped, every gaming site on the internet would crash from the load as everyone overloaded every hosting site on the internet. It would be hours sometimes before you could get a download and even then connection drops were common.
Steam is a 1,000x more reliable and was a direct response to that sort of inconvenience and lack of reliability by third party hosting companies.
Also, your alternative to online downloads of some variety is to drive to a store. I would say that it's impossibly inconvenient to get to a game store more often than Steam is down. So yes, the cloud is *more* reliable, and it is *safer* than the alternatives. Nobody is saying the cloud is invincible. They're just saying it's better than the alternative.
I think it's safe to say it's slower, but as I used to remind the engineers when they pushed back against releasing slow solutions when I was working as a liason between customers and engineering: "not working is infinitely slow".
It's easy to see how Microsoft wants this for the Surface Phone since it will allow customers to run x86 applications on their phone. If your choice is between not running an application and running it slowly, most people will always choose "slowly". Most Win32 software isn't high performance software. And a lot of the really computationally hard stuff is getting moved to GPU anyway. So for instance photoshop has shifted much of its filtering and canvas rendering to OpenCL/CUDA. The Snapdragon should have a perfectly adequate if not superior OpenCL benchmark compared to a low-end intel built in GPU. Same with games. Even if you take a pretty large performance hit on CPU cycles, usually it's the GPU bottlenecking not the CPU. So their magic emulator should natively execute all DirectX/OpenGL calls on the GPU anyway.
The Xbox team has done a great job of this on the Xbox One backwards compatibility for PowerPC RISC support on the Xbox One.
To achieve a one million - to - one ratio, requires 20 bits.
No. Imagine you have a candle and an airplane's landing lights. You only need 1 bit.
0 == 1 lumen 1 == 1,000,000,000,000 lumens.
That's a trillion to one contrast ratio with one bit. If you want to be really pedantic contrast ratio isn't actually interesting because while 1:1,000,000,000,000 is a high contrast ratio, it's actually impressive because of the dynamic range not the ratio.
0 = 0 lumens 1 = 1 photon
That would be an infinite contrast ratio. And also expressed by one bit but not what most people think of when they think of high contrast ratios.
I think with modern technology the promise of an anonymous ballot being guaranteed is flat out dead. Unless you go through a metal detector like at the airport to screen out all electronics someone will easily bring a phone into the ballot box and with consumer go pros being able to be hidden in a shirt if someone is motivated they'll be able to attain proof that you voted as directed.
Also voter intimidation in this fashion is extremely risky and unsuccessful. It only takes one person giving an anonymous tip that they are being *offered* incentives to sell their vote and you're screwed. In order to sway an election you would inevitably solicit someone who will rat you out. If you are being blackmailed, then you'll be sufficiently motivated to conceal your tracks and with modern technology almost certainly find a way to succeed.
Technology for electronic voting confirmation is trivial but we exclude it because we inaccurately are defending an attribute that is dead and gone due to technological change. I can already track my mail-in ballot. What they should do is offer an independent random tracker to every ballot, then when the election is over you could confirm your ballot was counted properly. And many people could anonymously publish their vote and vote hash to news organizations for exit polling. And if you request enough random samples they should converge on the same result as the total. If Reuters samples 50k volunteers and the outcome of those samples is off from the official tally then you can investigate further. You would have to maintain two separate databases to both respond "correctly" to spot checks but also tally differently. And hashing the total vote database vs. the spot checks would guarantee the data had been tampered.
Slashdot Mirror
This criticism is based on a naive look at $/kg aka you sacrifice 30% of payload for re-use and it costs 30% more. But that ignores the fact that many launches are already well within the capabilities of the launcher so there isn't a 30% additional payload that anyone wants to send.
It's a bit like the old trope "An SUV uses less fuel per passenger than a car!" while ignoring the regular use cases where a bus operates at half or quarter capacity.
It also only assumes a 30% reduction in cost/kg which is where SpaceX is *starting* at with re-use and will undoubtedly improve as they apply the lessons learned from returned stages.
I think once you reach 98%+ reliability the most expensive part of the failure: grounding the fleet, no longer occurs. Once the Falcon 9 design stabilizes this year if they lose one after 50 successful launches they'll probably take a few weeks off but not months on end. There was even a substantially shorter down-time in 2016 with the most recent failure than in 2015.
And the other thing they have going for them now is re-usability and re-use. That could hypothetically result in new failure modes but it also should catch any obvious manufacturing flaws. Rapid re-use also means loads of more data and experience. If they can prove that their design is 98% reliable it just becomes "Welp, insurance will cover that. Sorry about the inconvenience."
Even if that were true, which it's not, that is the user's problem.
No, it causes an ecosystem problems. It prevents the vast vast vast vast majority of users from being able to get new features because a few Luddites want to go unpatched.
At some point fragmentation causes serious issues. This wasn't a problem when they would release a major release every 5 years and a couple service packs inbetween. Now they're making substantial changes and feature improvements on a bi-annual basis. If most people are 2 years behind developers will have to target 10 different OS configurations instead of 2 (those who are on the latest and those who are deferred for a few months).
It's unlimited right up to the moment where they no longer want you as a customer. It is truly unlimited. But they're letting you know that you only get one month unlimited before you'll be kicked to the curb.
If you offer "free electricity!" but someone comes and plugs in a hybrid car through an extension cord you can ban them and it doesn't make the electricity they used any more or less free.
And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.
I don't see many people developing, deploying and maintaining a video chat service for less than the occasional hassle of changing providers who use a sane API. Integration should be incredibly simple and inexpensive. You could have many dozen Google Hangout type services shutter and still save time and money over developing it and hosting it in-house.
Free to the state unless the operator spills and goes bankrupt without insurance. Just require insurance.
As a side note, I'm really uncomfortable with their plan to make IPS entirely out of carbon fibre. As they're finding out (and has others have found out in the past), it's really difficult to use LOX with composites.
Well for one thing the pressure in a COPV is several orders of magnitude higher than in a LOX tank so it seems foolish to over react to a failure of composites under extreme pressure and exotic conditioned when future applications will be different in nearly every way. Secondly, you could always work exactly the same as a COPV and line the interior of the composite structure with a thin layer of aluminum to prevent any contact at all. In fact we don't even know if that's not already the plan. In this instance SpaceX simply didn't think it was necessary to prevent contact of LOX and carbon and they were arguably right until they pushed the conditions slightly too far, it's telling that they are returning to flight with the exact same hardware.
You can't radically upset the economics of space flight by doing the exact same things the exact same way everybody else has always done it. You'll end up with the same thing at the same price.
There's also the issue of two competitors for Federal launch, Boeing and Lockheed, forming a Trust and not being blocked from doing so.
While I applaud your anti-monopolistic inclination this wasn't a merger born out of anti competitive acquisitions or even a "we will lower prices by removing redundancy" this was a case where one Company won the contract and then it was found out that the other company had stolen designs through industrial sabotage.
The birth of ULA was the result of a very messed up and disastrous legal scandal. Effectively a shotgun wedding nobody really wanted to pave over the whole affair.
Or instead of running fiber through town you could just spend $5 a month for a legit streaming service...
Every seeder can carry metadata. If you want upvotes etc then you could distribute it through the peers. You could also build a simple trust system where a magnet could be signed with a trusted key. If you like one uploader you could whitelist other content by that uploader. "Only download music uploaded and signed by key XYZ". We already do that for legal content, I would expect the illegal content providers would do the same. With public/private keys as long as a provider keeps their keys safe their uploads, votes, comments etc would be blockable and promotable. Of course people would lose their keys but isn't that what happened to Kickass Torrents under the current system.
Woosh!
People can and will start making movies outside the studio. Most people are tired of the endless effects and total lack of story or content that the studios churn out and low budget good stories will start arriving in just the same way that the music industry is changing.
A gross misunderstanding of what it takes to produce a film. At its very most basic level a film is a play with a camera and a microphone. Simply producing a play is a tremendous amount of work and pretty expensive. And that ignores the fact that you need talented actors which is harder to manage than you would think... Just go to your local community play.
Piracy has always been a story of decentralization. In fact nearly all crime will inevitably rely on a decentralized process. In order to build a large, powerful organization you can't have a larger, more powerful organization trying stop you.
We saw this from the beginning. It started with streaming sites and warez sites, but those were trivial to target and eliminate. So people moved on to p2p in order to decentralize the crime. That worked until the law adapted to target the defacto pirates (the application developers). So it moved to even further distributed services: torrents. Without an application developer to pursue the new central authorities which could be attacked were the torrent hosting sites, so the community also developed magnet links to further remove themselves from the process of hosting.
The inevitable outcome is just that the list of magnet links will also become distributed much like the DNS system.
Yeah, the only part of this lawsuit that I disagree with is this statement by the attorney general "unconscionable loss of privacy through his deception".
I think what he meant to say was "His unconscionable failure to violate their privacy through his deception."
If he had actually followed through and gotten their nude photos and sex tapes public he wouldn't have been committing fraud.
It is confusing that Slashdot seems to fetishize the Chromebook: a touchscreen centric, cloud only, spyware ridden, closed ecosystem with 0 dev tools that can only run lightweight web apps, while constantly hating Windows 10 for being a touchscreen centric cloud friendly os, which occasionally phones home, has a full blown Linux subsystem accessible through bash and has one of the best suites of development tools available.
Pretty sure they had an interview recently where the developer said he was tempted to do that sort of thing but concluded that it wasn't the right direction. He wanted to focus on being the best legacy os possible for maximum compatibility, not to be a dos box competitor with new features.
Last time I was able to be flexible I got $500, left early on a different route first class and arrived home 2 hours ahead of schedule. I'm surprised as well at all if this "screwing customers" talk. I've only ever seen unhappy flyers once for getting bumped and that was forced bumping due to a smaller plane being necessary after mechanical failure and a whole high school team getting bumped. I'm sure they were taken care of generously but students don't care about cheaper flights when the school/parents are paying. Forced bumps are almost nonexistent.
Everybody who whines about Steam outages clearly never played valve games prior to Steam. What used to happen was every time a new Counterstrike patch was dropped, every gaming site on the internet would crash from the load as everyone overloaded every hosting site on the internet. It would be hours sometimes before you could get a download and even then connection drops were common.
Steam is a 1,000x more reliable and was a direct response to that sort of inconvenience and lack of reliability by third party hosting companies.
Also, your alternative to online downloads of some variety is to drive to a store. I would say that it's impossibly inconvenient to get to a game store more often than Steam is down. So yes, the cloud is *more* reliable, and it is *safer* than the alternatives. Nobody is saying the cloud is invincible. They're just saying it's better than the alternative.
Except it would no longer cost $10k/kg if someone was producing significant quantities.
It would also be great if people read the post which explicitly quotes Musk citing that feature already existing.
I think it's safe to say it's slower, but as I used to remind the engineers when they pushed back against releasing slow solutions when I was working as a liason between customers and engineering: "not working is infinitely slow".
It's easy to see how Microsoft wants this for the Surface Phone since it will allow customers to run x86 applications on their phone. If your choice is between not running an application and running it slowly, most people will always choose "slowly". Most Win32 software isn't high performance software. And a lot of the really computationally hard stuff is getting moved to GPU anyway. So for instance photoshop has shifted much of its filtering and canvas rendering to OpenCL/CUDA. The Snapdragon should have a perfectly adequate if not superior OpenCL benchmark compared to a low-end intel built in GPU. Same with games. Even if you take a pretty large performance hit on CPU cycles, usually it's the GPU bottlenecking not the CPU. So their magic emulator should natively execute all DirectX/OpenGL calls on the GPU anyway.
The Xbox team has done a great job of this on the Xbox One backwards compatibility for PowerPC RISC support on the Xbox One.
To achieve a one million - to - one ratio, requires 20 bits.
No. Imagine you have a candle and an airplane's landing lights. You only need 1 bit.
0 == 1 lumen
1 == 1,000,000,000,000 lumens.
That's a trillion to one contrast ratio with one bit. If you want to be really pedantic contrast ratio isn't actually interesting because while 1:1,000,000,000,000 is a high contrast ratio, it's actually impressive because of the dynamic range not the ratio.
0 = 0 lumens
1 = 1 photon
That would be an infinite contrast ratio. And also expressed by one bit but not what most people think of when they think of high contrast ratios.
Address the cause, not the symptoms.
Entitled whiners who think that they should have a candidate that perfectly matches every random opinion they have?
I think with modern technology the promise of an anonymous ballot being guaranteed is flat out dead. Unless you go through a metal detector like at the airport to screen out all electronics someone will easily bring a phone into the ballot box and with consumer go pros being able to be hidden in a shirt if someone is motivated they'll be able to attain proof that you voted as directed.
Also voter intimidation in this fashion is extremely risky and unsuccessful. It only takes one person giving an anonymous tip that they are being *offered* incentives to sell their vote and you're screwed. In order to sway an election you would inevitably solicit someone who will rat you out. If you are being blackmailed, then you'll be sufficiently motivated to conceal your tracks and with modern technology almost certainly find a way to succeed.
Technology for electronic voting confirmation is trivial but we exclude it because we inaccurately are defending an attribute that is dead and gone due to technological change. I can already track my mail-in ballot. What they should do is offer an independent random tracker to every ballot, then when the election is over you could confirm your ballot was counted properly. And many people could anonymously publish their vote and vote hash to news organizations for exit polling. And if you request enough random samples they should converge on the same result as the total. If Reuters samples 50k volunteers and the outcome of those samples is off from the official tally then you can investigate further. You would have to maintain two separate databases to both respond "correctly" to spot checks but also tally differently. And hashing the total vote database vs. the spot checks would guarantee the data had been tampered.