Nothing ever really changes, it's reset button city. There's precious little story progression, and really only the first and last episodes, and the Kes / 7of9 change, change the story really, and that's mostly introducing and writing out characters.
I agree wholeheartedly, with one exception-- the only character who had any real continuous character development on Voyager was The Doctor. After the pilot, you could pretty much write character sketches for all the other characters and they'd still be accurate for the final episode. But the Doctor-as-deliverer-of-snarky-one-liners developed into opera-loving shutterbug with interesting depths and a great capacity for compassion, while still remaining pretty snarky. He was a far more interesting character than that other Star Trek artifical being, Data, primarily because The Doctor had flaws: he could be selfish, boring, arrogant and impatient.
Then again, the TOS didn't feature much in the way of character development either, but once you've seen Buffy, Angel or B5, you're kinda spoiled for it.:)
Yes it happened -- you can read about it in Wolfe's The Right Stuff (the book, unlike the movie, is serious, if irreverent, journalism). If you're more hard core you can buy the Freedom 7 volume in Apogee Books' excellent "NASA Mission Reports" series, and read the transcript of Shepard's debriefing where he talks about it.
What demise? Orac was in the final episode, last seen as the crew flew towards Blake's base on Gauda Prime. Along with Avon, he is the only character who's fate is uncertain.
did s/he compile the lastest custom kernel for their hardware? Did they tune ATA I/O performance with hdparm? Did he disable non-essential daemons running in the background? I doubt it.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but if you aren't, the point is that he didn't have to do any of these things for XP. It just ran faster out of the box.
Compiling kernels, tuning ATA performance and so on are beyond either the ability or inclination of most users, even reasonably technically savvy ones. And the more likely someone is to want to use a computer as a tool for non-computer-related tasks -- word processing, email, IM, games, booking plane tickets, etc[1] -- the less likely they're going to be willing to spend time "tuning" their system (let alone spend hours and hours building an entire system from source code).
Microsoft and Apple invest a huge amount of time and money into making the end-user desktop experience as painless as possible for a reason.
[1] It may seem strange to class email or games as "non-computer-related tasks" but these are tasks where the object of activity has to do with something (communication, entertainment) that happens to use the computer as a medium. Computer-related tasks are those which use the computer as an end in itself -- system administration, programming and so on.
the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple...i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).
I was intrigued enough by your idea of a bell weather term for Apple's health to check it out and see if there really was a correllation between it and Jobs' arrival. I ran a 10 year search on Nexis for US Newspaper and Wire articles that mention "beleaguered, Apple Computer." I didn't check the content of the articles because, hey, I have a job, so their joint appearance in any given article could be coincidental, but with that caveat the counts are:
1993: 3 1994: 0 1995: 0 1996: 11 1997: 12 (The year Jobs rejoins Apple) 1998: 3 1999: 1 2000: 0 2001: 1 2002: 0 2003: 1
Thanks for the tip: I have been able to get WEP to work (with the $ trick) ok in that I can get my macs talking to the internet just fine: it's then trying to use rendevous with my other machines on the same subnet that's the problem!
standardized my whole network on Linksys products.
I'm a linksys house too : except that turing WEP on with my Linksys router breaks Apple's rendevous. (No printer sharing, remote volume mounting, etc) Until Linksys starts making Macs, I can never standardize my whole network.
Either Apple or Linksys are playng merry buggers with the WEP standard, (of course rendevous works fine with WEP enabled on an Apple Airport AP): the point is that the user shouldn't have to standardize on Linksys or Apple any single vendor, but the vendors should standardize on the bloody standard.
When will this old chestnut die? You should read Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, where the notion that John Brown was insane is exposed as a myth, constructed afterward to explain away John Brown's action in a socially palatable manner,
In general Loewen's book is a searing indictment of what most people accept as 'history': it points out that someone in the U.S. who goes on to study history at College level pretty much has to spend their first year unlearning all the distortions, omissions, and outright falsehoods that pervade U.S. high school history curriculums.
If this game is geared at high school students, chances are it just perpetuates the same historical mistakes as their textbooks. Even if the makers are aware of these defiencies, they aren't going to try and buck local school boards when they're struggling for acceptance and adoption.
Honestly? I rather someone learnt no history than the wrong history. Then they'd at least know that they didn't know what happened!
You want to get misty eyed? Think of the Pioneer and Voyager probes, straining to be heard over the static of millions of miles of space, eeking out their existences on a tiny fraction of the power they knew when they were young and on a one way ticket to nowhere...
It's a miracle that we haven't had more accidents over the years.
Yes it is a miracle, not because of the inherent risks of spaceflight, but because of NASA's dysfunctional safety culture.
When NASA engineers had to prove that a situation was unsafe before cautionary action could be taken, instead of simply showing that no-one had proved the system to be safe, shuttle launches became a glorified form of Russian roulette. It was true when the Rogers commission investigated Challanger, and it was true when the CAIB investigated Columbia, even if those involved were decent, conscientious, people who honestly believed they were doing the right things for the safety of the crews.
NASA takes every precaution that it can to prevent a mishap, but accidents happen.
I hope that is the case today, but I want to see independant evidence of it. NASA has lost the benefit of the doubt. The sad, terrible, fact is that the CAIB showed that even though sincere, brilliant, and dedicated NASA employees and contractors believed that they and NASA as a whole were taking "every precaution", they were not.
I know it is difficult for those in and close to NASA to accept and internalise this horrible conclusion, but internalize they must, or as the CAIB reprised the Roger's Commission, another investigation will be probing the deaths of more astronauts in a few years and coming to much the same conclusions.
Remember how so many in the shuttle program flatly refused to believe that foam could be the proximate cause of Columbia's demise? A lot of them maintained that belief right up until the moment the CAIB shot a hole in an RCC panel (in a test the Board had to directly administer itself after getting NASA to perform an "unnecessary" test became so much hassle). It's hard to admit you're wrong about something that cost the lives of friends and and co-workers, but it has to be done if more lives are not to be lost. Just as Gene Kranz stood up before his controllers after the Apollo 1 fire and declared "we are the cause," before leading them on the road to the Sea of Tranquility, everybody connected to today's NASA human spaceflight program must accept a similar burden.
If you have read the CAIB, how can you disgree with these findings?
a) That the loss of Columbia was not a unforseable "accident", but a preventable event that had many precursors.
b) NASA had a dysfunctional to non-existant safety culture that meant that many of the precautions that could have saved the lives of the crew simply didn't happen. One example: the ground camera network that documented launches was allowed to degrade.
c) That bureaucracy triumphed over engineering: requests for additional photography to assess the foam strike damage after the ground camera results were inconclusive were denied, for example.
d) Even the engineering had lapses: in particular the CAIB faulted NASA for an over-reliance on simulation over testing, and griped about "engineering by viewgraphs."
e) That hostility and derision greeted any external criticisms of the program or program safety. This insularity contributed to the collapse of the safety culture and so to the loss of the Columbia. It's for this reason that I will not accept on faith alone that NASA is taking "every precaution", because if it did Columbia would still be in one piece and it's crew alive.
Finally, let me say that I'm sorry for your loss and that nothing can detract from the fact that this was an incredible crew of brave and brilliant people.
Yes, atmospheric conditions are important, but they are not usually the cause of Mars probe failures, which suggets that if its a managable problem on Mars, it's a non-issue on Europa. Notice my deliberate caveat about the Europan atmosphere (no more so that our own moon): it is possible to detect gas molecules in the space around Europa just as with the Moon, but that doesn't mean that a barometer on the surface would read anything but zero unless you had a really, really, really good barometer and looked really, really, really closely: the atmospheric pressure at the surface is scarely one hundreth billionth of that of Earth. For landing navigation purposes this is as close to zero as makes no difference. Even if you could get enough of the atoms in this incredibly dispersed atomosphere to move together at the same time in the same direction to produce a Europan wind, I doubt it could deflect an incoming probe by even a millimeter. (It's been estimated that if you gathered up the entire Europan atmosphere and compressed it to Earth atmospheric pressures, it would fill only about a dozen Houston Astrodomes).
Hey, you want the good writing, pay me! I read about Connemara; I don't have the book to hand, but I'll look it up when I get home tonight and give you the reference.
Re:But the point is...?
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 5, Informative
we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions
Actually, we have very good knowledge of Europa's atmospheric conditions, i.e. it doesn't have one (well, no more so than our own moon). On a side note, the vast majority of failed Mars missions were lost not because of the difficulties of navigating the atmosphere but because of things like a rocket motor blowing up, or an incorrect course adjustment, these problems occuring well before any martian atmosphere was encountered.
Estimates for the thickness of the ice on Europa vary, but think kilometers, not meters, except for a few areas, like the so-called Conemara cliffs region, were it could be much thiner, possibly due to a local hot spot.
...SpaceShipOne isn't supposed to be one, only 100km. Perhaps NotQuiteSpaceShip would have been a better name..
So Alan Shepard wasn't the first American in space, and the Mercury capsule wasn't a spaceship? That was a suborbital flight too.
even at 100km I would think that re-entry like conditions would be encountered
The conditions on re-entry are governed primarily by the re-entry speed. Sub-orbital speeds are less than orbital speeds, therefore the conditions are different, although both cases (sub-orbital and orbital) involve a re-rentry. It seems as if you're focusing on symptoms, rather than the underlying causes in your orbital mechanics analysis. Just thinking about the overall K.E. and P.E. involved can often save a lot of work before you try to consider second-order things like angles of attack.
Don't forget that Rutan's vehicle is suborbital (as are all the X-Prize contendors). The speeds of suborbital vehicles are much lower than orbital speeds: the shuttle has to dump a lot of energy in a short time when coming back from orbit and needs much more thermal protection as a result. For contrast to the shuttle, consider the X-15, which could just reach beyond the 50 mile boundary that marked whether or not you got to add U.S. astronaut to your resume: it didn't require tiles, or an ablative shield, just the careful application of iconel and other high temperature alloys.
The article notes that he works for a real estate management company: he was probably able to land a sweet deal in one of their buildings, or just a sweet deal in general, being a real estate insider.
You and the parent should try reading the bloody article, in particular where it says:
"Part of what matters to me about this is that it makes it possible for people with limited bandwidth to supply very popular files," Mr. Gilmore said in a telephone interview. "It means that if you are a small software developer you can put up a package, and if it turns out that millions of people want it, they can get it from each other in an automated way."
It is utmost hyprocrisy to complain that journalists are lazy and ignorant in the writing of articles, when you can't even be bothered to pay attention to the actual words on the page.
Slashdot Mirror
Mea Culpa. That's what you get for only reading the body text on the submission page and not the subject line as well.
Nothing ever really changes, it's reset button city. There's precious little story progression, and really only the first and last episodes, and the Kes / 7of9 change, change the story really, and that's mostly introducing and writing out characters.
:)
I agree wholeheartedly, with one exception-- the only character who had any real continuous character development on Voyager was The Doctor. After the pilot, you could pretty much write character sketches for all the other characters and they'd still be accurate for the final episode. But the Doctor-as-deliverer-of-snarky-one-liners developed into opera-loving shutterbug with interesting depths and a great capacity for compassion, while still remaining pretty snarky. He was a far more interesting character than that other Star Trek artifical being, Data, primarily because The Doctor had flaws: he could be selfish, boring, arrogant and impatient.
Then again, the TOS didn't feature much in the way of character development either, but once you've seen Buffy, Angel or B5, you're kinda spoiled for it.
Yes it happened -- you can read about it in Wolfe's The Right Stuff (the book, unlike the movie, is serious, if irreverent, journalism). If you're more hard core you can buy the Freedom 7 volume in Apogee Books' excellent "NASA Mission Reports" series, and read the transcript of Shepard's debriefing where he talks about it.
Orac met his demise
What demise? Orac was in the final episode, last seen as the crew flew towards Blake's base on Gauda Prime. Along with Avon, he is the only character who's fate is uncertain.
did s/he compile the lastest custom kernel for their hardware? Did they tune ATA I/O performance with hdparm? Did he disable non-essential daemons running in the background? I doubt it.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but if you aren't, the point is that he didn't have to do any of these things for XP. It just ran faster out of the box.
Compiling kernels, tuning ATA performance and so on are beyond either the ability or inclination of most users, even reasonably technically savvy ones. And the more likely someone is to want to use a computer as a tool for non-computer-related tasks -- word processing, email, IM, games, booking plane tickets, etc[1] -- the less likely they're going to be willing to spend time "tuning" their system (let alone spend hours and hours building an entire system from source code).
Microsoft and Apple invest a huge amount of time and money into making the end-user desktop experience as painless as possible for a reason.
[1] It may seem strange to class email or games as "non-computer-related tasks" but these are tasks where the object of activity has to do with something (communication, entertainment) that happens to use the computer as a medium. Computer-related tasks are those which use the computer as an end in itself -- system administration, programming and so on.
Jean Kumagai has a nice article (with pictures) on the 2004 race in this month's IEEE Spectrum Magazine
the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple...i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).
I was intrigued enough by your idea of a bell weather term for Apple's health to check it out and see if there really was a correllation between it and Jobs' arrival. I ran a 10 year search on Nexis for US Newspaper and Wire articles that mention "beleaguered, Apple Computer." I didn't check the content of the articles because, hey, I have a job, so their joint appearance in any given article could be coincidental, but with that caveat the counts are:
1993: 3
1994: 0
1995: 0
1996: 11
1997: 12 (The year Jobs rejoins Apple)
1998: 3
1999: 1
2000: 0
2001: 1
2002: 0
2003: 1
Thanks for the tip: I have been able to get WEP to work (with the $ trick) ok in that I can get my macs talking to the internet just fine: it's then trying to use rendevous with my other machines on the same subnet that's the problem!
standardized my whole network on Linksys products.
I'm a linksys house too : except that turing WEP on with my Linksys router breaks Apple's rendevous. (No printer sharing, remote volume mounting, etc) Until Linksys starts making Macs, I can never standardize my whole network.
Either Apple or Linksys are playng merry buggers with the WEP standard, (of course rendevous works fine with WEP enabled on an Apple Airport AP): the point is that the user shouldn't have to standardize on Linksys or Apple any single vendor, but the vendors should standardize on the bloody standard.
John Brown (the abolitionist and psychotic
When will this old chestnut die? You should read Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, where the notion that John Brown was insane is exposed as a myth, constructed afterward to explain away John Brown's action in a socially palatable manner,
In general Loewen's book is a searing indictment of what most people accept as 'history': it points out that someone in the U.S. who goes on to study history at College level pretty much has to spend their first year unlearning all the distortions, omissions, and outright falsehoods that pervade U.S. high school history curriculums.
If this game is geared at high school students, chances are it just perpetuates the same historical mistakes as their textbooks. Even if the makers are aware of these defiencies, they aren't going to try and buck local school boards when they're struggling for acceptance and adoption.
Honestly? I rather someone learnt no history than the wrong history. Then they'd at least know that they didn't know what happened!
a Web-based bulletin-board system? Who would'a thunk it?
You laugh now, but in ten years time you'll be venting on a Japanese-made bulletin-board: it'll be smaller, faster, cheaper and in stereo.
You want to get misty eyed? Think of the Pioneer and Voyager probes, straining to be heard over the static of millions of miles of space, eeking out their existences on a tiny fraction of the power they knew when they were young and on a one way ticket to nowhere...
It's a miracle that we haven't had more accidents over the years.
Yes it is a miracle, not because of the inherent risks of spaceflight, but because of NASA's dysfunctional safety culture.
When NASA engineers had to prove that a situation was unsafe before cautionary action could be taken, instead of simply showing that no-one had proved the system to be safe, shuttle launches became a glorified form of Russian roulette. It was true when the Rogers commission investigated Challanger, and it was true when the CAIB investigated Columbia, even if those involved were decent, conscientious, people who honestly believed they were doing the right things for the safety of the crews.
NASA takes every precaution that it can to prevent a mishap, but accidents happen.
I hope that is the case today, but I want to see independant evidence of it. NASA has lost the benefit of the doubt. The sad, terrible, fact is that the CAIB showed that even though sincere, brilliant, and dedicated NASA employees and contractors believed that they and NASA as a whole were taking "every precaution", they were not.
I know it is difficult for those in and close to NASA to accept and internalise this horrible conclusion, but internalize they must, or as the CAIB reprised the Roger's Commission, another investigation will be probing the deaths of more astronauts in a few years and coming to much the same conclusions.
Remember how so many in the shuttle program flatly refused to believe that foam could be the proximate cause of Columbia's demise? A lot of them maintained that belief right up until the moment the CAIB shot a hole in an RCC panel (in a test the Board had to directly administer itself after getting NASA to perform an "unnecessary" test became so much hassle). It's hard to admit you're wrong about something that cost the lives of friends and and co-workers, but it has to be done if more lives are not to be lost. Just as Gene Kranz stood up before his controllers after the Apollo 1 fire and declared "we are the cause," before leading them on the road to the Sea of Tranquility, everybody connected to today's NASA human spaceflight program must accept a similar burden.
If you haven't read the CAIB cover to cover, you must. You should also read this excellent article in The Atlantic Monthly on the disaster and investigation itself
If you have read the CAIB, how can you disgree with these findings?
a) That the loss of Columbia was not a unforseable "accident", but a preventable event that had many precursors.
b) NASA had a dysfunctional to non-existant safety culture that meant that many of the precautions that could have saved the lives of the crew simply didn't happen. One example: the ground camera network that documented launches was allowed to degrade.
c) That bureaucracy triumphed over engineering: requests for additional photography to assess the foam strike damage after the ground camera results were inconclusive were denied, for example.
d) Even the engineering had lapses: in particular the CAIB faulted NASA for an over-reliance on simulation over testing, and griped about "engineering by viewgraphs."
e) That hostility and derision greeted any external criticisms of the program or program safety. This insularity contributed to the collapse of the safety culture and so to the loss of the Columbia. It's for this reason that I will not accept on faith alone that NASA is taking "every precaution", because if it did Columbia would still be in one piece and it's crew alive.
Finally, let me say that I'm sorry for your loss and that nothing can detract from the fact that this was an incredible crew of brave and brilliant people.
Yes, atmospheric conditions are important, but they are not usually the cause of Mars probe failures, which suggets that if its a managable problem on Mars, it's a non-issue on Europa. Notice my deliberate caveat about the Europan atmosphere (no more so that our own moon): it is possible to detect gas molecules in the space around Europa just as with the Moon, but that doesn't mean that a barometer on the surface would read anything but zero unless you had a really, really, really good barometer and looked really, really, really closely: the atmospheric pressure at the surface is scarely one hundreth billionth of that of Earth. For landing navigation purposes this is as close to zero as makes no difference. Even if you could get enough of the atoms in this incredibly dispersed atomosphere to move together at the same time in the same direction to produce a Europan wind, I doubt it could deflect an incoming probe by even a millimeter. (It's been estimated that if you gathered up the entire Europan atmosphere and compressed it to Earth atmospheric pressures, it would fill only about a dozen Houston Astrodomes).
Congratulations on your run-on sentence
Hey, you want the good writing, pay me! I read about Connemara; I don't have the book to hand, but I'll look it up when I get home tonight and give you the reference.
He was probably thinking of Venus.
:)
Your charitable interpretation becomes you.
we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions
Actually, we have very good knowledge of Europa's atmospheric conditions, i.e. it doesn't have one (well, no more so than our own moon). On a side note, the vast majority of failed Mars missions were lost not because of the difficulties of navigating the atmosphere but because of things like a rocket motor blowing up, or an incorrect course adjustment, these problems occuring well before any martian atmosphere was encountered.
Estimates for the thickness of the ice on Europa vary, but think kilometers, not meters, except for a few areas, like the so-called Conemara cliffs region, were it could be much thiner, possibly due to a local hot spot.
...SpaceShipOne isn't supposed to be one, only 100km. Perhaps NotQuiteSpaceShip would have been a better name..
So Alan Shepard wasn't the first American in space, and the Mercury capsule wasn't a spaceship? That was a suborbital flight too.
even at 100km I would think that re-entry like conditions would be encountered
The conditions on re-entry are governed primarily by the re-entry speed. Sub-orbital speeds are less than orbital speeds, therefore the conditions are different, although both cases (sub-orbital and orbital) involve a re-rentry. It seems as if you're focusing on symptoms, rather than the underlying causes in your orbital mechanics analysis. Just thinking about the overall K.E. and P.E. involved can often save a lot of work before you try to consider second-order things like angles of attack.
Which is exactly the same model that Burt Rutan is following.
Don't forget that Rutan's vehicle is suborbital (as are all the X-Prize contendors). The speeds of suborbital vehicles are much lower than orbital speeds: the shuttle has to dump a lot of energy in a short time when coming back from orbit and needs much more thermal protection as a result. For contrast to the shuttle, consider the X-15, which could just reach beyond the 50 mile boundary that marked whether or not you got to add U.S. astronaut to your resume: it didn't require tiles, or an ablative shield, just the careful application of iconel and other high temperature alloys.
The article notes that he works for a real estate management company: he was probably able to land a sweet deal in one of their buildings, or just a sweet deal in general, being a real estate insider.
You should send that in -- video games could well be a mine of early citations they haven't been looking at.
I cried when they took Ken the Screamer away to make him into horse glue.
You and the parent should try reading the bloody article, in particular where it says:
"Part of what matters to me about this is that it makes it possible for people with limited bandwidth to supply very popular files," Mr. Gilmore said in a telephone interview. "It means that if you are a small software developer you can put up a package, and if it turns out that millions of people want it, they can get it from each other in an automated way."
It is utmost hyprocrisy to complain that journalists are lazy and ignorant in the writing of articles, when you can't even be bothered to pay attention to the actual words on the page.