>$62 million
That is three times the cost of a Soyuz launch
While I've been curious to see SpaceX's progress and the evolution of their technology, the one thing I have always been highly skeptical of are their launch costs. I simply don't believe them. They have to be covering them through an accounting trick via an investor scam or government subsidies.
The reusable thing has been a pipe dream for many decades, but I can't see it being done by standard rockets. The recovery of the vehicle, checking and the shear violence and wear and tear of the process just make it a dead-end IMO.
....and this load of objectivist and dualistic bollocks is exactly the problem. You can come up with any load of tripe, and observations *after the event*, to fit the narrative. It's amazing what you can do with means;-).
If it were to happen now, then it would not be part of a prolonged cooling trend that had been going on for around 200 years at that point and was just reaching its peak, before starting to warm again. The global temperature then passed the peak of the previous warm period (the Medieval Warm Period) in the last century and kept climbing. But you knew all of that, right?
Alas, it's a shame that it doesn't mean anything. The point here is that the Earth has undergone many shifts in its climate, sometimes in a startlingly short period of time. To suggest that people like you know what is actually going on, and then try and predict and say why it's happening is absolutely laughable, but that's the charlatans and PT Barnams fucking about with statistics that we have.
If that's how you view it, that's fine, but don't pretend you're taking a scientific approach to the problem.
Fine, but don't pretend that what is going on right now with 'consensus' views has anything to do with 'science'. People are looking at where their next grant payment is coming from.
And yet that's precisely what the original poster was complaining about. Climate scientists have progressively refined their models....
Some would call it refining, others would call it flip-flopping as reality doesn't match up to models. It's why we had a change in language from global warming to climate change and then to stuff like 'global weirding', which became all about 'extreme weather' events. In the 1600s the Thames used to freeze over so that you could safely walk from one side to the other. If that were to happen now climate 'scientists' would be up in arms.
My belief is that there's an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists who are experts in this field that man-made climate change is real and worth taking action to mitigate.
You certainly can get consensus when you have a large pile of grant money to dole out. On the other side of the coin you've got fossil fuel burners with their own self-interest who would love to have those subsidies for themselves. We, the public are surrounded by charlatans and it's no wonder people are distrustful of 'science'. Is global warming, climate change or global weirding (or whatever they call it this week) happening and is it caused by man? Entirely possible, but sadly we're not going to find out with this load of hocus pocus claptrap.
I worked at one of the NASA research centers when this contract was awarded. During the Due Diligence phase, HPE didn't even send a representative to our facility...
Because they knew it was a done deal. Palms greased, rounds of golf done, prostitutes paid.
Not surprised at all. I interviewed with them, and they really wanted me mainly because I got the impression they desperately needed someone who knew what he was talking about for something they really needed. However, HPE already have a massive reputation for casting employees aside and I wisely backed out. They are a company that simply don't do anything useful at all but get cash thrown at them for some reason. That's the result.
Hilarious, but that response is not untypical as they thrash around trying to justify their own stupid decisions. You can't inform me of the 'wrong' in my post.....because you simply can't.
It does cost a bit more but you can do more.
Everything I did in AWS I could do elsewhere - and more flexibly too, and at an ever decreasing monthly cost.
But yeah dumbarses can really screw it up if they still keep thinking In terms of tin
KDE4 sucked. It sucked so hard and the developers wouldn't admit to it. They first blamed the distributions for shipping 4.0, which was supposed to be "Beta quality," except that there were a whole 2 years of 3.9-BETAs and 4.0 had a big release party from KDE themselves when it went gold. It was a bullshit excuse. Then they kept saying "4.2 will have feature parity with KDE3", followed by "4.3" then "4.4" etc...
KDE 4.0 was released because it achieved the base platform that the developers wanted. If you and others wanted to apply different standards to that then that is your problem. Way back when I used a Linux desktop I simply stayed on KDE 3 until I read about and tried a KDE 4 release that worked for me.
Finally, when KDE4 was still a pile of shit 2 years after release, they started blaming the users for not having standard configuration hardware (never-mind that only KDE struggled with graphics, and no other environment).
KDE used graphics features that should have worked but didn't everywhere. It was single handedly responsible for pulling up graphical support on Linux desktops and resulted in Compiz and all the other comparable Windows and OS X stuff that came about. Without KDE 4 Linux desktops would still have looked like bloody Motif.
When they continued to bleed users, the developers renamed the project about half a dozen times so that the remaining users wouldn't even know where to complain about the krashes.
No they didn't. Oh, and renaming words beginning with a C to begin with a K. I remember this trolling well;-).
The top five distributions, according to distrowatch, and their default DEs (others may be available as extras or in special editions/spins) are:
This went on for most of the last decade. Even with defaults, most large installations in Barcelona I think and Munich for example chose KDE. It was a far easier desktop to centrally manage.
For businesses that use Linux on the desktop, most use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its varieties like CentOS and Scientific Linux. These all default to Gnome (2 or 3).
No businesses use Linux on the desktop, and those that do don't use Red Hat. It's dead and died a long time ago.
I've often felt that the licensing hissy-fit (which may have been a valid argument in the past, though not anymore) was actually a cover story or excuse for a bunch of C programmers who really just hated C++ and didn't want to allow the Linux desktop to use an environment written in it.
Close. It was de Icaza and Stallman throwing a hissy fit because they thought they weren't going to be in control of the 'Linux desktop', and good God, most of the KDE developers weren't Americans!
Perhaps the users have spoken and most prefer the Gnome2/MATE/Cinnamon style interface. The rest of us are on Awesome, Xfce or something else.
ROTFL. Most people are still on Windows, on OS X or maybe are simply using a mobile device. Gnome, or any derivative you want to have of it, is dogshit and its underlying toolkit GTK is totally dead.
If Zen is in the ballpark of Intel then people are going to buy it. Intel chips and especially chipsets have become too expensive and frankly, we need some competition. If the Athlon64 hadn't come along goodness knows where we'd be.
There is only useful air for breathing for about about 10 miles up, 15 miles max. The rest of the 200 miles or so to low orbit you have to carry your own oxidizer. And as long is there is air then there is air resistance and aerodynamic heating. That's why orbital rockets (the machines that actually work and get to orbit) all try to get up and out of the air as quickly as possible.
That's why you have to accelerate it to mach 5+, but, the theory has been done and it can work. The work done during and since the HOTOL project has proved that. The rest is just money.
This is completely ignorant. A fully-reusable multi-stage system (which is essentially the goal of SpaceX) expends nothing but fuel and oxidizer... and your SSTO is better than that HOW?
You haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about..........as most don't. Multi-stages are always going to require more maintenance and complexity.......and carrying around heavy oxygen is expensive, which I'd explained........if you'd bothered to read and comprehend. You just aren't going to hack it with rockets I'm afraid, and anyone faffing about with them still after fifty plus years just isn't doing anything interesting I'm afraid, despite the whooping and hollering.
Functional SSTO will probably eventually happen, but for anyone who knows anything, the most likely scenario is that improvements in engineering
and materials science will render most use cases for SSTO moot.
As soon as you start running servers 24x7 the cloud gets very, very expensive....each and every month. When you have control over your own infrastructure that progressively gets cheaper. over time
I can also rent a server or a VPS from a decent service provider cheaper, get more performance out of it and have proper support as opposed to AWS's "You might get your EBS snapshots back in a couple of days".
The only ones that prefer it in house are the IT folks that sit on their asses all day ignoring the phone.
Get used to being ignored by your cloud provider. You were stupid enough to give your company to an external provider and they have your arse over a barrel. Also, don't get into any payment difficulties each month or it just won't be there. An external provider will ignore you because they know they can get away with it.
Cloud services tend to be kept up to date and patched better than the set it up and forget it in-house ones.
ROTFL. Fuck are they. *You* will be responsible for patching and maintaining your own servers in the cloud. If you want a provider to do that for you they will take a pound of flesh off you.......with no accountability. Good luck. I really don't know where people get the idea from that running to the cloud cuts down on system administration.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. Getting into space isn't going to move forwards meaningfully until we get a single stage to orbit vehicle.
To qualify this a bit further, any vehicle that tries to continue to carry expensively heavy liquid oxygen around when there is an abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere just isn't going to be viable for single stage to orbit. It has to breathe air for as long as it can.
Once SpaceX starts flying those "used" cores it will push the whole industry of space flight to the same level of reuse. We are going to see some great advances in engineering coming from all over the world as others start to catch up to SpaceX.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. Getting into space isn't going to move forwards meaningfully until we get a single stage to orbit vehicle. SpaceX don't even have the closed cycle rocket engines the Russians have had for years, and are trying to get banned by the way, but this isn't going to be done with rockets in the form we have had for decades.
Indeed. Superficially going all cloud looks great to accountants when there's less of an upfront cost...and then the bills come in...every...single...month. The whole point in investing in infrastructure is that you're responsible for your own security and that investment pays off over time. I've lost count of the number of startups who've gone bust because they couldn't pay their AWS bill - and they still don't learn, or where the money is to be made. More high-profile outfits like Netflix will find that out as the investor cash is less forthcoming.
Slashdot Mirror
Given all the government funding SpaceX is sucking up, that's quite funny.
>$62 million That is three times the cost of a Soyuz launch
While I've been curious to see SpaceX's progress and the evolution of their technology, the one thing I have always been highly skeptical of are their launch costs. I simply don't believe them. They have to be covering them through an accounting trick via an investor scam or government subsidies.
The reusable thing has been a pipe dream for many decades, but I can't see it being done by standard rockets. The recovery of the vehicle, checking and the shear violence and wear and tear of the process just make it a dead-end IMO.
Yup, it's his [incorrect] opinion of how I think about my code. :)
ROTFL. That's your opinion.
People who call it 'flip-flopping' have a specific term reserved for them, they're called 'Politicians'.
.....and that is exactly what scientists getting their papers published is about these days. Politics.
If it were to happen now, then it would not be part of a prolonged cooling trend that had been going on for around 200 years at that point and was just reaching its peak, before starting to warm again. The global temperature then passed the peak of the previous warm period (the Medieval Warm Period) in the last century and kept climbing. But you knew all of that, right?
Alas, it's a shame that it doesn't mean anything. The point here is that the Earth has undergone many shifts in its climate, sometimes in a startlingly short period of time. To suggest that people like you know what is actually going on, and then try and predict and say why it's happening is absolutely laughable, but that's the charlatans and PT Barnams fucking about with statistics that we have.
If that's how you view it, that's fine, but don't pretend you're taking a scientific approach to the problem.
Fine, but don't pretend that what is going on right now with 'consensus' views has anything to do with 'science'. People are looking at where their next grant payment is coming from.
And yet that's precisely what the original poster was complaining about. Climate scientists have progressively refined their models....
Some would call it refining, others would call it flip-flopping as reality doesn't match up to models. It's why we had a change in language from global warming to climate change and then to stuff like 'global weirding', which became all about 'extreme weather' events. In the 1600s the Thames used to freeze over so that you could safely walk from one side to the other. If that were to happen now climate 'scientists' would be up in arms.
My belief is that there's an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists who are experts in this field that man-made climate change is real and worth taking action to mitigate.
You certainly can get consensus when you have a large pile of grant money to dole out. On the other side of the coin you've got fossil fuel burners with their own self-interest who would love to have those subsidies for themselves. We, the public are surrounded by charlatans and it's no wonder people are distrustful of 'science'. Is global warming, climate change or global weirding (or whatever they call it this week) happening and is it caused by man? Entirely possible, but sadly we're not going to find out with this load of hocus pocus claptrap.
I worked at one of the NASA research centers when this contract was awarded. During the Due Diligence phase, HPE didn't even send a representative to our facility...
Because they knew it was a done deal. Palms greased, rounds of golf done, prostitutes paid.
Not surprised at all. I interviewed with them, and they really wanted me mainly because I got the impression they desperately needed someone who knew what he was talking about for something they really needed. However, HPE already have a massive reputation for casting employees aside and I wisely backed out. They are a company that simply don't do anything useful at all but get cash thrown at them for some reason. That's the result.
It does cost a bit more but you can do more.
Everything I did in AWS I could do elsewhere - and more flexibly too, and at an ever decreasing monthly cost.
But yeah dumbarses can really screw it up if they still keep thinking In terms of tin
Yer, tin has always been a problem for me!
KDE4 sucked. It sucked so hard and the developers wouldn't admit to it. They first blamed the distributions for shipping 4.0, which was supposed to be "Beta quality," except that there were a whole 2 years of 3.9-BETAs and 4.0 had a big release party from KDE themselves when it went gold. It was a bullshit excuse. Then they kept saying "4.2 will have feature parity with KDE3", followed by "4.3" then "4.4" etc...
KDE 4.0 was released because it achieved the base platform that the developers wanted. If you and others wanted to apply different standards to that then that is your problem. Way back when I used a Linux desktop I simply stayed on KDE 3 until I read about and tried a KDE 4 release that worked for me.
Finally, when KDE4 was still a pile of shit 2 years after release, they started blaming the users for not having standard configuration hardware (never-mind that only KDE struggled with graphics, and no other environment).
KDE used graphics features that should have worked but didn't everywhere. It was single handedly responsible for pulling up graphical support on Linux desktops and resulted in Compiz and all the other comparable Windows and OS X stuff that came about. Without KDE 4 Linux desktops would still have looked like bloody Motif.
When they continued to bleed users, the developers renamed the project about half a dozen times so that the remaining users wouldn't even know where to complain about the krashes.
No they didn't. Oh, and renaming words beginning with a C to begin with a K. I remember this trolling well ;-).
plugins for file managers??!!
It's called having a development platform. You know, that thing Ballmer banged on about and largely how Windows got to be so dominant?
In what world?
The top five distributions, according to distrowatch, and their default DEs (others may be available as extras or in special editions/spins) are:
This went on for most of the last decade. Even with defaults, most large installations in Barcelona I think and Munich for example chose KDE. It was a far easier desktop to centrally manage.
For businesses that use Linux on the desktop, most use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its varieties like CentOS and Scientific Linux. These all default to Gnome (2 or 3).
No businesses use Linux on the desktop, and those that do don't use Red Hat. It's dead and died a long time ago.
I've often felt that the licensing hissy-fit (which may have been a valid argument in the past, though not anymore) was actually a cover story or excuse for a bunch of C programmers who really just hated C++ and didn't want to allow the Linux desktop to use an environment written in it.
Close. It was de Icaza and Stallman throwing a hissy fit because they thought they weren't going to be in control of the 'Linux desktop', and good God, most of the KDE developers weren't Americans!
Perhaps the users have spoken and most prefer the Gnome2/MATE/Cinnamon style interface. The rest of us are on Awesome, Xfce or something else.
ROTFL. Most people are still on Windows, on OS X or maybe are simply using a mobile device. Gnome, or any derivative you want to have of it, is dogshit and its underlying toolkit GTK is totally dead.
If Zen is in the ballpark of Intel then people are going to buy it. Intel chips and especially chipsets have become too expensive and frankly, we need some competition. If the Athlon64 hadn't come along goodness knows where we'd be.
There is only useful air for breathing for about about 10 miles up, 15 miles max. The rest of the 200 miles or so to low orbit you have to carry your own oxidizer. And as long is there is air then there is air resistance and aerodynamic heating. That's why orbital rockets (the machines that actually work and get to orbit) all try to get up and out of the air as quickly as possible.
That's why you have to accelerate it to mach 5+, but, the theory has been done and it can work. The work done during and since the HOTOL project has proved that. The rest is just money.
This is completely ignorant. A fully-reusable multi-stage system (which is essentially the goal of SpaceX) expends nothing but fuel and oxidizer ... and your SSTO is better than that HOW?
You haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about..........as most don't. Multi-stages are always going to require more maintenance and complexity.......and carrying around heavy oxygen is expensive, which I'd explained........if you'd bothered to read and comprehend. You just aren't going to hack it with rockets I'm afraid, and anyone faffing about with them still after fifty plus years just isn't doing anything interesting I'm afraid, despite the whooping and hollering.
Functional SSTO will probably eventually happen, but for anyone who knows anything, the most likely scenario is that improvements in engineering and materials science will render most use cases for SSTO moot.
Wow.
I can also rent a server or a VPS from a decent service provider cheaper, get more performance out of it and have proper support as opposed to AWS's "You might get your EBS snapshots back in a couple of days".
The only ones that prefer it in house are the IT folks that sit on their asses all day ignoring the phone.
Get used to being ignored by your cloud provider. You were stupid enough to give your company to an external provider and they have your arse over a barrel. Also, don't get into any payment difficulties each month or it just won't be there. An external provider will ignore you because they know they can get away with it.
Cloud services tend to be kept up to date and patched better than the set it up and forget it in-house ones.
ROTFL. Fuck are they. *You* will be responsible for patching and maintaining your own servers in the cloud. If you want a provider to do that for you they will take a pound of flesh off you.......with no accountability. Good luck. I really don't know where people get the idea from that running to the cloud cuts down on system administration.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. Getting into space isn't going to move forwards meaningfully until we get a single stage to orbit vehicle.
To qualify this a bit further, any vehicle that tries to continue to carry expensively heavy liquid oxygen around when there is an abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere just isn't going to be viable for single stage to orbit. It has to breathe air for as long as it can.
Once SpaceX starts flying those "used" cores it will push the whole industry of space flight to the same level of reuse. We are going to see some great advances in engineering coming from all over the world as others start to catch up to SpaceX.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. Getting into space isn't going to move forwards meaningfully until we get a single stage to orbit vehicle. SpaceX don't even have the closed cycle rocket engines the Russians have had for years, and are trying to get banned by the way, but this isn't going to be done with rockets in the form we have had for decades.
That is probably the funniest thing I've ever read.
Indeed. Superficially going all cloud looks great to accountants when there's less of an upfront cost...and then the bills come in...every...single...month. The whole point in investing in infrastructure is that you're responsible for your own security and that investment pays off over time. I've lost count of the number of startups who've gone bust because they couldn't pay their AWS bill - and they still don't learn, or where the money is to be made. More high-profile outfits like Netflix will find that out as the investor cash is less forthcoming.
Hinkley will not produce reliable, or more to the point, affordable power, nor is it likely to be safe at all with all the competing responsibilities.
I'm fine with nuclear power stations, and 'renewables' simply aren't going to provide the shear amount of power required, but not like this.