In today's dollars, NASA average budget from 1961-1973 was about $17 billion per year. This is only 10% more than NASA's current budget.
I like many of the points raised here, but this one is perhaps a little misleading. The window chosen, 1961-1973, does correspond to the Apollo Era (from Kennedy's mandate to Apollo 17's departure from the lunar surface), but it does not correspond to the funding associated with the Apollo Mode described.
Funding rapidly increased in the early 1960's to support the R&D and infrastructure needed for Apollo, peaking in 1965 at about 4% of the federal budget. By then it looked the elements needed to compete in the space race were in place, so developing new hardware for e.g. Mars expeditions became a tough sell. Apollo 8's orbit of the moon also established that the US was likely to win, further reducing the pressure for funding. By 1974 NASA's funding had been slashed to about 1% of the federal budget.
By including the years after funding collapsed, when the agency was coasting on already developed and purchased hardware (which, as well as spacecraft, included ground equipment and facilities, such as the Vehicle Assemby Building, today literally falling down around engineers' ears), the cost of an Apollo Mode NASA is artificially lowered, and hence you wind up with your "only 10% more than NASA's current budget" conclusion. In reality, to sustain an Apollo Mode NASA, funding has to be significantly more than 110% of NASA's current level.
I do not think this word means what you think it means:).
The fact is that you are not paying "full price" (I assume by "full price", you mean the price of the corresponding CD.) Most albums on iTunes cost $9.99, significantly less (about 33% for most albums) than most CDs.
You might counter that CD's give higher quality for that money, so some pro-rated accounting would close the gap between $9.99 and the CD price, and hence your "relatively." But I think having a high-quality (if not technically CD quality) pre-ripped track, delivered by (normally) zippy servers with good bandwidth, and reasonable DRM is enough added-value to open the gap up again. If even if you don't think these things are valuable, there are clearly differences between CD's and iTMS tracks, both in how they are purchased and what you do with them after purchase: more than enough to prevent any such pro rated accounting based purely on the bit sizes of a CD track vs an AAC. Which leads us back to the actual price and $9.99 !~ $14.99.
The iTMS selection, quality, or browsing mechanism, may not be to your taste, but I think implying that the albums are overpriced isn't supportable.
Well, as the rest of this thread demonstrates, your mileage may vary. Different rules seem to apply in different parts of the industry, so what you're writing will probably determine what you format you need. It seems that for literary publishers or production companies that demand hard copy submissions courier is the way to go. News organizations, or those that accept electronic submissions don't care, so you may as well send your work in a font you're comfortable with.
Still, just because you have to print it in courier doesn't mean you have to write it in courier. If you're happier working over drafts in Times New Roman stick with it till you have to dump a copy for the fedex envelope.
And for the record, Arial is tap water. Times Roman is Diet Coke.
I think you're missing the important element of alchohol that makes playing The Font Game seem like a good idea in the first place.:) (I should have mentioned the game was created in a pub).
Actually it was Ribena and Wingdings. If you don't know, Ribena is a blackberry juice concentrate (just add water to taste!), generally targetted at children in the UK and Ireland. It seemed to fit.
Check your domain. Not every "major publishing house and professional magazine" publishes literary material.
For example, all the major scientific and technical publishers -- your Elseviers, your IEEEs, even your Natures either current heavily promote electronic submission (Nature even provides a MS Word template as its preferred format for submissions, with, guess what, body text in 12 point Times New Roman) or in the throes of moving to such a system. Certainly, even when I was working for a science publisher in the 1990's prior to their push for web-based submission, hundreds of manuscripts a month would come into the office, and I don't recall ever seeing more than one or two in Courier.
Also most news print organizations (the universe I inhabit now) don't demand double spaced Courier and they sure as hell accept copy electronically -- some journo following the campaign trail in Iowa isn't going to stop and fedex a 12 point courier hard copy manuscript back to New York. In news organizations, the need for speed pushed everyone to filing electronically a long time ago.
Word probably does the job you need, but for requirements specifications where you have to not only know what changed between the version you're looking at and two or three revisions back, but also keep track for all time of who changed what, when and why, CVS is a much better solution.
Exactly -- except in very rare circumstances I really don't care what was written two or three iterations back. Normally all I care about is the current iteration and getting it to through the next step, until it's finally out the door to the printers.
It might be different in my universe (print journalism) -- book publishing is its own universe (a la how legal offices still use Word Perfect). The discrepancy may be because where it's still common to submit actual reams of paper rather than, say, a CD-ROM, I could see how a fixed width font would be useful to determine word counts and double spacing for comments. But I pity the readers...
I'm willing to bet though, that as manuscripts in the form of raw bundles of paper becomes increasingly anachronistic, you'll see the font reqirement fade away -- after all, there's a reason they don't publish the books in Courier.
BTW, where I work we generally use MS Word, because it turns out that some of those pain-in-the-ass advanced features do have utility, specifically the ability to track changes. This is critical for us because the article wends its way back and forth several times in quick succession between authors and editors and most communication is electronic even within the office walls.
Dear God, no! I'm an editor in the U.S. and you just sent a shiver down my spine at the thought that I should try to read the next manuscript to cross my desk in courier, or any non-proportional sans serif font.
Serif proportional fonts are much more readable for bulk text, as found in the body of a manuscript (this applies to paper printouts, not neccesarily on-screen where the crappy resolution of most monitors compared to paper gives proportional, sans-serif fonts the edge). As for things like word counts, etc, manuscripts invariably appear with an accompanying electronic copy (and often only the electronic copy, e.g. when something is filed by email).
I don't know anyone who demands Courier 12/24. Actually, once upon a time, I was drinking with a bunch of publishing nerds, and we tried to work out what booze would go with what fonts, i.e. if Ariel was a drink, what drink would it be? (I did mention we were nerds right?). Anyhoo, Whiskey was the best match for Courier, and Guinness the best match for Times New Roman. The point is, disregarding price, which would most people rather drink a pint of? The longer the text, the more likely I am to want to see it in anything other than Courier.
His behaviour during the series indicated that, if offered a position of power and low risk (Servalan offered him power, but not safety) he would betray any principles he may have been using at the time.
And yet... and yet...at the last, Avon stands over the fallen corpse of the only man who understood him but trusted him anyway, and choses certain death to make a final, pyrrhic, defence...
Part of what was so cool about Avon was that he was genuinely at war with himself and so his motives where not always clear, even to him. After Blake left his darker side seemed to grow almost unchecked (remember him trying to throw Villa out the airlock late in the day, when in previous years he would often defend Villa against outsiders?) -- until that fateful ambush where the apparant triumph of his dark side in fact opened the door to his redemption...
What side will Avon be on? I suspect not even Avon will know... And that'll be worth watching.
Just edit your.rpmmacros and set macros like %{bindir}, %{libdir}, etc.
Yes, that's so much easier than just dragging an icon a la OS X.
The point is not that it's theoretically possible to move apps or RPM under linux, or it can be automated if you do some fiddling under the hood (and anything that involved touching a file that starts with a '.' is almost by definition under the hood), but that Linux should offer this functionality automagically. Installing or moving apps in Linux can be a nightmare. In OS X its just drag and drop. Why can't we improve?
Perhaps submitters could meet the editors half way and check if their story was already posted. Admittedly the/. "older stuff" search sucks, but using Google with a 'site:www.slashdot.org' qualifier usually works fine.
The important distinction isn't between reusable/non-reusable, it's between shuttle and capsule.
Exactly! In fact the US had designed a resuable vehicle before the shuttle: the Gemini capsule, which was originally supposed to use a parafoil and X-15 style skids to make runway landings too.
For various (shortsighted) reasons, Gemini was dropped, but one or two of capsules during the manned program were refurbished and used again as part of a unmanned test program for the Air Force's ill fated Manned Orbiting Laboratory. (The Capsules were designed to easily refurbished by doing things like moving as many components outside the astronauts pressure shell as possible, giving Gemini it's relatively long nose.
People who build " kiosks and building heating systems" are not driving the demand for hard real time Linuxes (for which soft real time is sufficient). So we can assume the companies described in the IEEE Spectrum articles have customers with needs that go beyond those of kiosks and heating systems.
You might be interested in the following descriptions of Lynuxworks embedded Linux based OS, use in mission critical, aerospace applications:
http://www.lynuxworks.com/solutions/milaero/mila er o.php3
http://java.sun.com/industry/news/story/40340.do
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000810S0027
As, say, fighter jets develop increasingly powerful self-monitoring capabilities, etc, the need for a network friendly embedded OS to run sub systems like engines, etc, will make Linux style OS's even more popular. I'd say it's just a matter of time before you get to sit in a commercial passanger jet, with engines run by Linux-based hard real time controllers.
Actually Linux is becoming a big player in the embedded world. Several companies offer both hard real time, and near real time OS's that are either modified Linux kernels, or preserve binary compatibility with Linux, or provide a hard real time kernel, which then runs a instance of Linux as one of its tasks.
for more on why the "small, 100% completely understandable and predicatable systems" vs. general, complex operating systems battle ground is shifting, and why Linux is getting design wins.
Well, if Dan Goldin was still NASA Administrator you might have a point, but Sean O'Keefe has been in charge for about, oh, 18 months now...
Also, Goldin didn't rise through the ranks at NASA. He came over from 25 year career at TRW to head up the agency, although he had worked at NASA in the early 1960s.
Actually, even the AP stylebook (ISBN 0-7832-0308-4) recognises the ambiguity. The entry for hacker (page 127) is
Hacker: a highly skilled computer enthusiast. In common usage, the term has evolved to mean one who uses those computer skills to unlawfully penetrate proprietary computer systems.
The patent isn't for a quantum well, it's for a "wellstone fiber", which would allow you to actually make bulk programmable matter using quantum wells -- which are currently limited to surface films.
Have we learnt ANYTHING about the moon, which we couldn't have done, sitting here?
Absolutely. Here's one shining example -- the so-called genesis rock, a piece of anorthosite which formed part of the moon's priomordial crust, was a critical piece in unlocking the moon's early history.
It was recoverd by the crew of Apollo 15, the first of the J-missions, where the objectives focused on science and not just seeing if the Apollo hardware worked (e.g. landing on 11, precision landing on 12).
This crew had been trained as pretty good field geologists by the legendary Lee Silver. Without their eye for geological context this rock would probably never have been spotted, and certainly not had it's recovery site as well characterised. Even geologists who had been previously opposed to the manned missions to the moon acknowledged the value of their contribution, and those of Apollo 16 and 17.
To quote geologist Dale Jackson, who said at the time: "Did you see those guys today? They got up there on the side of that mountain and found that bolder and they sampled the soil around the rock, and then they knocked a piece off it, and then they rolled it over and got some of the soil underneath it! Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!"
If you think this material could have been recovered by, say, remotely controlled machine, well, I invite you to place the best robot and robot team you can find in the Arizona desert and match them up against a single geology grad student and search for, say, fossils, for a day.
I have a pancake of the stuff sitting in my cube that I got from SpaceDev at the 2002 World Space Congress -- it has their biz-card embedded in it! (They were showing off a pretty cool hybrid engine design). I'm sure if you wrote to their PR department they'd send you some.
You have to be a little careful regarding Faget and the shuttle, given that his short winged 'DC-3' design was on the losing side of the compromise with the Air Force regarding the shuttle's cross range capability. Additionally, the DC-3 looked like it would have suffered from severe heating and aerodynamic instability problems on re-entry. Unlike the Mercury/Apollo era, where Faget's word was the only word, industry pushed back with their own spacecraft designs for the shuttle program and largely won -- the idea for a planform orbiter and a drop tank came from outside his team.
However, to be fair, after the DC-3 battle, Faget's team did have the crucial insight that the external tank could serve a structural function as the backbone of the shuttle stack, instead of just hanging off it, and their MSC-040 orbiter design was the baseline for the production orbiters.
Slashdot Mirror
In today's dollars, NASA average budget from 1961-1973 was about $17 billion per year. This is only 10% more than NASA's current budget.
I like many of the points raised here, but this one is perhaps a little misleading. The window chosen, 1961-1973, does correspond to the Apollo Era (from Kennedy's mandate to Apollo 17's departure from the lunar surface), but it does not correspond to the funding associated with the Apollo Mode described.
Funding rapidly increased in the early 1960's to support the R&D and infrastructure needed for Apollo, peaking in 1965 at about 4% of the federal budget. By then it looked the elements needed to compete in the space race were in place, so developing new hardware for e.g. Mars expeditions became a tough sell. Apollo 8's orbit of the moon also established that the US was likely to win, further reducing the pressure for funding. By 1974 NASA's funding had been slashed to about 1% of the federal budget.
By including the years after funding collapsed, when the agency was coasting on already developed and purchased hardware (which, as well as spacecraft, included ground equipment and facilities, such as the Vehicle Assemby Building, today literally falling down around engineers' ears), the cost of an Apollo Mode NASA is artificially lowered, and hence you wind up with your "only 10% more than NASA's current budget" conclusion. In reality, to sustain an Apollo Mode NASA, funding has to be significantly more than 110% of NASA's current level.
...you are paying relatively full price...
:).
I do not think this word means what you think it means
The fact is that you are not paying "full price" (I assume by "full price", you mean the price of the corresponding CD.) Most albums on iTunes cost $9.99, significantly less (about 33% for most albums) than most CDs.
You might counter that CD's give higher quality for that money, so some pro-rated accounting would close the gap between $9.99 and the CD price, and hence your "relatively." But I think having a high-quality (if not technically CD quality) pre-ripped track, delivered by (normally) zippy servers with good bandwidth, and reasonable DRM is enough added-value to open the gap up again. If even if you don't think these things are valuable, there are clearly differences between CD's and iTMS tracks, both in how they are purchased and what you do with them after purchase: more than enough to prevent any such pro rated accounting based purely on the bit sizes of a CD track vs an AAC. Which leads us back to the actual price and $9.99 !~ $14.99.
The iTMS selection, quality, or browsing mechanism, may not be to your taste, but I think implying that the albums are overpriced isn't supportable.
Well, as the rest of this thread demonstrates, your mileage may vary. Different rules seem to apply in different parts of the industry, so what you're writing will probably determine what you format you need. It seems that for literary publishers or production companies that demand hard copy submissions courier is the way to go. News organizations, or those that accept electronic submissions don't care, so you may as well send your work in a font you're comfortable with.
Still, just because you have to print it in courier doesn't mean you have to write it in courier. If you're happier working over drafts in Times New Roman stick with it till you have to dump a copy for the fedex envelope.
And for the record, Arial is tap water. Times Roman is Diet Coke.
:) (I should have mentioned the game was created in a pub).
I think you're missing the important element of alchohol that makes playing The Font Game seem like a good idea in the first place.
But what would you make of Garamond?
Ariel?!? How could an *editor* who supposedly knows so much about fonts spell "Arial" incorrectly? I guess it explains the horrible copy editing
:)
Well, if I was a copy editor I might agree with you, but actually that's someone else's department. Literally.
Actually it was Ribena and Wingdings. If you don't know, Ribena is a blackberry juice concentrate (just add water to taste!), generally targetted at children in the UK and Ireland. It seemed to fit.
Check your domain. Not every "major publishing house and professional magazine" publishes literary material.
For example, all the major scientific and technical publishers -- your Elseviers, your IEEEs, even your Natures either current heavily promote electronic submission (Nature even provides a MS Word template as its preferred format for submissions, with, guess what, body text in 12 point Times New Roman) or in the throes of moving to such a system. Certainly, even when I was working for a science publisher in the 1990's prior to their push for web-based submission, hundreds of manuscripts a month would come into the office, and I don't recall ever seeing more than one or two in Courier.
Also most news print organizations (the universe I inhabit now) don't demand double spaced Courier and they sure as hell accept copy electronically -- some journo following the campaign trail in Iowa isn't going to stop and fedex a 12 point courier hard copy manuscript back to New York. In news organizations, the need for speed pushed everyone to filing electronically a long time ago.
Word probably does the job you need, but for requirements specifications where you have to not only know what changed between the version you're looking at and two or three revisions back, but also keep track for all time of who changed what, when and why, CVS is a much better solution.
Exactly -- except in very rare circumstances I really don't care what was written two or three iterations back. Normally all I care about is the current iteration and getting it to through the next step, until it's finally out the door to the printers.
It might be different in my universe (print journalism) -- book publishing is its own universe (a la how legal offices still use Word Perfect). The discrepancy may be because where it's still common to submit actual reams of paper rather than, say, a CD-ROM, I could see how a fixed width font would be useful to determine word counts and double spacing for comments. But I pity the readers...
I'm willing to bet though, that as manuscripts in the form of raw bundles of paper becomes increasingly anachronistic, you'll see the font reqirement fade away -- after all, there's a reason they don't publish the books in Courier.
BTW, where I work we generally use MS Word, because it turns out that some of those pain-in-the-ass advanced features do have utility, specifically the ability to track changes. This is critical for us because the article wends its way back and forth several times in quick succession between authors and editors and most communication is electronic even within the office walls.
Dear God, no! I'm an editor in the U.S. and you just sent a shiver down my spine at the thought that I should try to read the next manuscript to cross my desk in courier, or any non-proportional sans serif font.
Serif proportional fonts are much more readable for bulk text, as found in the body of a manuscript (this applies to paper printouts, not neccesarily on-screen where the crappy resolution of most monitors compared to paper gives proportional, sans-serif fonts the edge). As for things like word counts, etc, manuscripts invariably appear with an accompanying electronic copy (and often only the electronic copy, e.g. when something is filed by email).
I don't know anyone who demands Courier 12/24. Actually, once upon a time, I was drinking with a bunch of publishing nerds, and we tried to work out what booze would go with what fonts, i.e. if Ariel was a drink, what drink would it be? (I did mention we were nerds right?). Anyhoo, Whiskey was the best match for Courier, and Guinness the best match for Times New Roman. The point is, disregarding price, which would most people rather drink a pint of? The longer the text, the more likely I am to want to see it in anything other than Courier.
His behaviour during the series indicated that, if offered a position of power and low risk (Servalan offered him power, but not safety) he would betray any principles he may have been using at the time.
And yet... and yet...at the last, Avon stands over the fallen corpse of the only man who understood him but trusted him anyway, and choses certain death to make a final, pyrrhic, defence...
Part of what was so cool about Avon was that he was genuinely at war with himself and so his motives where not always clear, even to him. After Blake left his darker side seemed to grow almost unchecked (remember him trying to throw Villa out the airlock late in the day, when in previous years he would often defend Villa against outsiders?) -- until that fateful ambush where the apparant triumph of his dark side in fact opened the door to his redemption...
What side will Avon be on? I suspect not even Avon will know... And that'll be worth watching.
Just edit your .rpmmacros and set macros like %{bindir}, %{libdir}, etc.
Yes, that's so much easier than just dragging an icon a la OS X.
The point is not that it's theoretically possible to move apps or RPM under linux, or it can be automated if you do some fiddling under the hood (and anything that involved touching a file that starts with a '.' is almost by definition under the hood), but that Linux should offer this functionality automagically. Installing or moving apps in Linux can be a nightmare. In OS X its just drag and drop. Why can't we improve?
Personally, I thought the details about how he went about building a working LEGO harpsichord were fascinating. Ahhh, what do I know?
m l?tid=159
/. "older stuff" search sucks, but using Google with a 'site:www.slashdot.org' qualifier usually works fine.
Perhaps because they were, ironically enough, trying to their job and eliminate a dup:
see http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/24/1656216.sht
Perhaps submitters could meet the editors half way and check if their story was already posted. Admittedly the
The important distinction isn't between reusable/non-reusable, it's between shuttle and capsule.
Exactly! In fact the US had designed a resuable vehicle before the shuttle: the Gemini capsule, which was originally supposed to use a parafoil and X-15 style skids to make runway landings too.
For various (shortsighted) reasons, Gemini was dropped, but one or two of capsules during the manned program were refurbished and used again as part of a unmanned test program for the Air Force's ill fated Manned Orbiting Laboratory. (The Capsules were designed to easily refurbished by doing things like moving as many components outside the astronauts pressure shell as possible, giving Gemini it's relatively long nose.
People who build " kiosks and building heating systems" are not driving the demand for hard real time Linuxes (for which soft real time is sufficient). So we can assume the companies described in the IEEE Spectrum articles have customers with needs that go beyond those of kiosks and heating systems.
:
a er o.php3
o
You might be interested in the following descriptions of Lynuxworks embedded Linux based OS, use in mission critical, aerospace applications
http://www.lynuxworks.com/solutions/milaero/mil
http://java.sun.com/industry/news/story/40340.d
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000810S0027
As, say, fighter jets develop increasingly powerful self-monitoring capabilities, etc, the need for a network friendly embedded OS to run sub systems like engines, etc, will make Linux style OS's even more popular. I'd say it's just a matter of time before you get to sit in a commercial passanger jet, with engines run by Linux-based hard real time controllers.
Actually Linux is becoming a big player in the embedded world. Several companies offer both hard real time, and near real time OS's that are either modified Linux kernels, or preserve binary compatibility with Linux, or provide a hard real time kernel, which then runs a instance of Linux as one of its tasks.
0 1/nlinu.html
e /dec01/embed.html
Check out these articles from IEEE Spectrum
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/mar
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur
for more on why the "small, 100% completely understandable and predicatable systems" vs. general, complex operating systems battle ground is shifting, and why Linux is getting design wins.
Well, if Dan Goldin was still NASA Administrator you might have a point, but Sean O'Keefe has been in charge for about, oh, 18 months now...
Also, Goldin didn't rise through the ranks at NASA. He came over from 25 year career at TRW to head up the agency, although he had worked at NASA in the early 1960s.
The patent isn't for a quantum well, it's for a "wellstone fiber", which would allow you to actually make bulk programmable matter using quantum wells -- which are currently limited to surface films.
There's one here:
p r0 3/book.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/a
Have we learnt ANYTHING about the moon, which we couldn't have done, sitting here?
Absolutely. Here's one shining example -- the so-called genesis rock, a piece of anorthosite which formed part of the moon's priomordial crust, was a critical piece in unlocking the moon's early history.
It was recoverd by the crew of Apollo 15, the first of the J-missions, where the objectives focused on science and not just seeing if the Apollo hardware worked (e.g. landing on 11, precision landing on 12).
This crew had been trained as pretty good field geologists by the legendary Lee Silver. Without their eye for geological context this rock would probably never have been spotted, and certainly not had it's recovery site as well characterised.
Even geologists who had been previously opposed to the manned missions to the moon acknowledged the value of their contribution, and those of Apollo 16 and 17.
To quote geologist Dale Jackson, who said at the time: "Did you see those guys today? They got up there on the side of that mountain and found that bolder and they sampled the soil around the rock, and then they knocked a piece off it, and then they rolled it over and got some of the soil underneath it! Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!"
If you think this material could have been recovered by, say, remotely controlled machine, well, I invite you to place the best robot and robot team you can find in the Arizona desert and match them up against a single geology grad student and search for, say, fossils, for a day.
I have a pancake of the stuff sitting in my cube that I got from SpaceDev at the 2002 World Space Congress -- it has their biz-card embedded in it! (They were showing off a pretty cool hybrid engine design). I'm sure if you wrote to their PR department they'd send you some.
As I noted below:
You have to be a little careful regarding Faget and the shuttle, given that his short winged 'DC-3' design was on the losing side of the compromise with the Air Force regarding the shuttle's cross range capability. Additionally, the DC-3 looked like it would have suffered from severe heating and aerodynamic instability problems on re-entry. Unlike the Mercury/Apollo era, where Faget's word was the only word, industry pushed back with their own spacecraft designs for the shuttle program and largely won -- the idea for a planform orbiter and a drop tank came from outside his team.
However, to be fair, after the DC-3 battle, Faget's team did have the crucial insight that the external tank could serve a structural function as the backbone of the shuttle stack, instead of just hanging off it, and their MSC-040 orbiter design was the baseline for the production orbiters.
As noted in another thread below, it's pronounced "Fa-jay", not "faggot"
Well, the fact that it's pronounced "Fa-jay" not "faggot" might have helped a little.