The versioning FS is nice, but it's really just a pretty UI on something that VMS had a couple of decades ago.
Is it really so important to debate whether these features are all completely new and revolutionary? OK, so I've seen workspaces and versioning before. The point is, they will be features I don't have right now, and they'll be set up in a simple and intuitive way for the average Mac user. Isn't that something? Thank God there's no phone.
Count your blessings. 46 and no reaction at all. My 8-year old daughter got a kick out of it, though. I'm sure she's hatching plans right now since I explained the whole thing to her (better to raise a pain in the ass than a well-behaved sheep).
But I still got the instant headache, so maybe it wasn't a complete waste of time.
Actually August is a terrible month for launch. From Florida, anyway because you often get thunderstorms in the afternoon and lightning does not play well with tall metal objects. This can cause a lot of headaches.
It's "Phoenix" because it's the 01 Lander which was not flown. The reason it wasn't flown is because the previous two missions failed. So Phoenix is a pretty good name IMHO. Obligatory wiki link here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Surveyor_2001_La nder
Why not? Look at the whole picture.
(1) First off, the industry doesn't care what ST says or what it's about. Continuity is a quaint notion. What they want is a revived franchise to make money. The best possible outcome is a revival on the order of Spiderman, X-Men, Pirates of the Caribbean, you name it. A big honking summer blockbuster with extensive merchandising. If it does well enough for a series, great, then it will keep the franchise in people's minds. I don't pretend this is any great insight, but it needs to be said.
(2) Why make another ST? It's familiar. Everybody knows some version of the characters and has some emotional attachment to them.
(3) Familiarity is exactly why we see so many remakes today, because we all trundle out to see them.
A lot of people would flock to a re-done Star Trek. Look at how well Battlestar Galactica has done, and that show was miserable. Let's just pick a couple of the best episodes and steam forward. Or what about Wrath of Khan, that did pretty well? People liked that one. So we've got Matt Damon as Kirk, who else can we find? How about Dallas Howard as Spock? She has a distant kind of air, the tension has always been there... and M Night hasn't done a franchise yet, we could get them both! We already sold out Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi. Sam Jackson's good in this kind of role and the fanboys would pay to see him wipe his ass, so he's Khan. If not, there's always Ben Kingsley. Jim Carrey would be great as that doctor guy, but he'd eat the profits up front... Seth Green or Matthew Lillard for backup. We can probably dump the engineer and that telephone operator.
I'm sorry, but this is utter crap. The solar system is not in a "delicate balance" of any kind. The gravitational attractions of the planets to each other are very small and totally outweighed by the huge flaming star in the middle.
For instance, the mass of the Earth is about 6e24 kg, that of Mars is about 6e23 kg, and the Sun is 2e30 kg. If Mars and the Earth are at their closest points, then the influence of the Sun on the Earth is about 480,000 times greater than that of Mars. Inverse square law, GM, etc... then the gravitational influence of Mars on the Earth is about the same that your computer exerts on you. Give or take an order of magnitude. Certainly the changes in their orbits could be detected if for some reason the laws of physics were suspended and one of the planets suddenly disappeared from this mortal plane. But I'm not sitting around trying to figure out how.
FYI the attitude at NASA is not, "Damn yes, let's get this thing up and damn the consequences! Have those grad students finished the designs yet?"
It's easy to come up with quick solutions and hard to come up with good ones. NASA is caught between a rock and a hard place: the funding is a political football, the leadership follows whatever the President wants, and meaningful long-range planning is totally absent. On the other hand, there is still an attitude that NASA represents our country to the world that doesn't apply to the DOE, CDC, etc. If there is a failure then people take it as an affront and come out of the woodwork to roast NASA for its "incompetence." Nobody looks back at the good old days to see how many launch vehicles exploded or probes were lost.
5. A lunar reactor. The USSR and the US have both flown reactors in orbit. If they can work in zero G and in one G then 1/6 G shouldn't be an issue. The politics of launching a reactor are just that Politics. A good solution for the protests would be to launch the reactor cold and use Sea Launch for the launch vehicle.
It's not politics when you think about scattering kilos of radioactive material over Africa or Europe. You need to consider the entire ascent path and the parking orbit, not just the launch site. Launching it "cold" still means you can scatter this stuff throughout the upper atmosphere.
I'm not a no-nukes type, but there are very good reasons for not stacking radioactives on a launch vehicle.
Sorry, this is not a reactor. This is a radioisotope thermal generator which is not the same thing at all. The RTG is basically just a heat source due to radioactive decay. There's no fission going on. You can't call a stack of wood a "fire" unless it's actually burning.
RTGs have also been used on Galileo and Cassini spacecraft (and who knows how many black projects).
We'll know for sure if the moon base walks across the surface on mechanical legs, or if totoros are spotted outside. Actually, I'm liking this idea more every second.
Honestly, this story is in and of itself little more than a troll. Take one out-of-date but partinsanly beloved item, compare it against something new and shiny and cool, then watch the fur fly.
Just imagine if the article came out the other way: "Q1 found to be better than Newton." Nobody would be surprised but we would still have about half of the identical postings. I didn't know we could have AC stories too. Dumb dumb dumb.
Funny, when I first read the header I thought we were going to use a large spacecraft with nuclear warheads detonated behind it to reach the moon. That's what Project Orion used to be. But that's not the point. NASA has already used ion propulsion on a mission (Deep Space One) and I believe it's fairly common for station-keeping in earth orbit. But it's spectacularly ill-suited for launches. You fire a long time to get the velocity change you want, it's not like a swift kick in the pants.
And I'm pretty sure that the cost of lunar missions is not determined by the price of the fuel you use to get into orbit.
And the reasons for this are... what exactly? What do you think you will get for the tens of billions of dollars? IMHO if you like the ISS, you'll love a lunar base.
The earth is not just a hunk of rock. Don't get me wrong, I've spent 20 years taking spacecraft to Mars. And Mars is a hunk of rock. So is the moon. We'd need multiple Manhattan projects to even get a sustainable base at either place. If we're colonizing, we need reproduction. We need to know that long-term low-gravity and high-radiation environments won't kill us off. Colonization is a great idea, but we're decades away.
Do you think teenagers are looking at iPods and saying, "Well, this 6GB is not really 6GB. I need a minimum of 6 gig for my tunes, so I'm not buying." Regular people don't think this way. The selling point is the look and the reputation and how it makes people feel about themselves. It's not the tech specs.
I think the textbooks would read, "The commies almost pwned us in one thing, but we proved that by throwing money at a problem and not executing scientists and engineers, we could still pwn them." And no, I'm not a right-winger.
Not precisely true. Most of the USSR probes didn't make it into space, but one lived on the surface for less than a minute. Now this would be a career-ending "success" for me personally but it counts for something. It's a better experience than I had with Mars Observer......
Now the stuff about Sally Ride, well, forget it. Facts are facts. Although on second thought that statement has a lot of truthiness about it.
I've really enjoyed the press coverage, but the funniest parts are the gentle adjectives used to describe the orbit insertion burn. "Slipping" is new; I've also seen "eased" and "braked."
MOI changed the speed of the spacecraft by a tad over 1 km/sec, or 2238 mph for users of the system-formerly-known-as-English. It turned out to take about 1641 seconds to do so, 33 seconds longer than expected. That peaked out at about 0.08G, not bone-crushing but not exactly a lullaby.
Because they only have to loft those telescopes into earth orbit; it's a lot more expensive to send it to Mars. And people are willing to pay for images of the Earth (althtough we may never know exactly who they are, or how much). HiRISE is a pretty big instrument, for Mars.
What will it do that others can't? Remember, a satellite is not a class of objects like "a car," for instance. They don't just get pulled off a shelf and stuck on a rocket. A better question is, "What will these scientific instruments do that others haven't?"
You'd do better to visit one of the official websites, or even to read a news release, but here's my take. One of the instruments has sub-meter resolution, and it will be able to find better and safer landing sites for those landers. The IR spectrometer will give us better info about the composition, and more suggestions about where to put a lander or rover. We'll get information about sub-surface water from a radar mapper, and improved data about the atmosphere and its structure.
Actually we still use MOPS, what led you to believe we didn't? No mission has been lost by faulty maneuver design. There were other problems, yes, but not any associated with those programs.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank God there's no phone.
Count your blessings. 46 and no reaction at all. My 8-year old daughter got a kick out of it, though. I'm sure she's hatching plans right now since I explained the whole thing to her (better to raise a pain in the ass than a well-behaved sheep).
But I still got the instant headache, so maybe it wasn't a complete waste of time.
Actually August is a terrible month for launch. From Florida, anyway because you often get thunderstorms in the afternoon and lightning does not play well with tall metal objects. This can cause a lot of headaches.
It's "Phoenix" because it's the 01 Lander which was not flown. The reason it wasn't flown is because the previous two missions failed. So Phoenix is a pretty good name IMHO. Obligatory wiki link here.a nder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Surveyor_2001_L
Why not? Look at the whole picture. ... and M Night hasn't done a franchise yet, we could get them both! We already sold out Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi. Sam Jackson's good in this kind of role and the fanboys would pay to see him wipe his ass, so he's Khan. If not, there's always Ben Kingsley. Jim Carrey would be great as that doctor guy, but he'd eat the profits up front ... Seth Green or Matthew Lillard for backup. We can probably dump the engineer and that telephone operator.
(1) First off, the industry doesn't care what ST says or what it's about. Continuity is a quaint notion. What they want is a revived franchise to make money. The best possible outcome is a revival on the order of Spiderman, X-Men, Pirates of the Caribbean, you name it. A big honking summer blockbuster with extensive merchandising. If it does well enough for a series, great, then it will keep the franchise in people's minds. I don't pretend this is any great insight, but it needs to be said.
(2) Why make another ST? It's familiar. Everybody knows some version of the characters and has some emotional attachment to them.
(3) Familiarity is exactly why we see so many remakes today, because we all trundle out to see them.
A lot of people would flock to a re-done Star Trek. Look at how well Battlestar Galactica has done, and that show was miserable.
Let's just pick a couple of the best episodes and steam forward. Or what about Wrath of Khan, that did pretty well? People liked that one. So we've got Matt Damon as Kirk, who else can we find? How about Dallas Howard as Spock? She has a distant kind of air, the tension has always been there
Tell me it couldn't happen.
Or maybe it will be the Dutch, they work hard for land too. Too bad the tulip speculation ended.
I'm sorry, but this is utter crap. The solar system is not in a "delicate balance" of any kind. The gravitational attractions of the planets to each other are very small and totally outweighed by the huge flaming star in the middle.
... then the gravitational influence of Mars on the Earth is about the same that your computer exerts on you. Give or take an order of magnitude. Certainly the changes in their orbits could be detected if for some reason the laws of physics were suspended and one of the planets suddenly disappeared from this mortal plane. But I'm not sitting around trying to figure out how.
For instance, the mass of the Earth is about 6e24 kg, that of Mars is about 6e23 kg, and the Sun is 2e30 kg. If Mars and the Earth are at their closest points, then the influence of the Sun on the Earth is about 480,000 times greater than that of Mars. Inverse square law, GM, etc
Don't forget to link all the other crackpots, too.
FYI the attitude at NASA is not, "Damn yes, let's get this thing up and damn the consequences! Have those grad students finished the designs yet?"
It's easy to come up with quick solutions and hard to come up with good ones. NASA is caught between a rock and a hard place: the funding is a political football, the leadership follows whatever the President wants, and meaningful long-range planning is totally absent. On the other hand, there is still an attitude that NASA represents our country to the world that doesn't apply to the DOE, CDC, etc. If there is a failure then people take it as an affront and come out of the woodwork to roast NASA for its "incompetence." Nobody looks back at the good old days to see how many launch vehicles exploded or probes were lost.
5. A lunar reactor. The USSR and the US have both flown reactors in orbit. If they can work in zero G and in one G then 1/6 G shouldn't be an issue. The politics of launching a reactor are just that Politics. A good solution for the protests would be to launch the reactor cold and use Sea Launch for the launch vehicle.
It's not politics when you think about scattering kilos of radioactive material over Africa or Europe. You need to consider the entire ascent path and the parking orbit, not just the launch site. Launching it "cold" still means you can scatter this stuff throughout the upper atmosphere.
I'm not a no-nukes type, but there are very good reasons for not stacking radioactives on a launch vehicle.
Sorry, this is not a reactor. This is a radioisotope thermal generator which is not the same thing at all. The RTG is basically just a heat source due to radioactive decay. There's no fission going on. You can't call a stack of wood a "fire" unless it's actually burning.
RTGs have also been used on Galileo and Cassini spacecraft (and who knows how many black projects).
And now Rice doesn't play Texas either, at least not every year. How our civilization has decayed ...
We'll know for sure if the moon base walks across the surface on mechanical legs, or if totoros are spotted outside. Actually, I'm liking this idea more every second.
Oh yeah, let's get rid of all the zealots in this thread!
First Post!!!
Honestly, this story is in and of itself little more than a troll. Take one out-of-date but partinsanly beloved item, compare it against something new and shiny and cool, then watch the fur fly.
Just imagine if the article came out the other way: "Q1 found to be better than Newton." Nobody would be surprised but we would still have about half of the identical postings. I didn't know we could have AC stories too. Dumb dumb dumb.
Funny, when I first read the header I thought we were going to use a large spacecraft with nuclear warheads detonated behind it to reach the moon. That's what Project Orion used to be. But that's not the point. NASA has already used ion propulsion on a mission (Deep Space One) and I believe it's fairly common for station-keeping in earth orbit. But it's spectacularly ill-suited for launches. You fire a long time to get the velocity change you want, it's not like a swift kick in the pants.
And I'm pretty sure that the cost of lunar missions is not determined by the price of the fuel you use to get into orbit.
And the reasons for this are ... what exactly? What do you think you will get for the tens of billions of dollars? IMHO if you like the ISS, you'll love a lunar base.
The earth is not just a hunk of rock. Don't get me wrong, I've spent 20 years taking spacecraft to Mars. And Mars is a hunk of rock. So is the moon. We'd need multiple Manhattan projects to even get a sustainable base at either place. If we're colonizing, we need reproduction. We need to know that long-term low-gravity and high-radiation environments won't kill us off. Colonization is a great idea, but we're decades away.
Do you think teenagers are looking at iPods and saying, "Well, this 6GB is not really 6GB. I need a minimum of 6 gig for my tunes, so I'm not buying." Regular people don't think this way. The selling point is the look and the reputation and how it makes people feel about themselves. It's not the tech specs.
I think the textbooks would read, "The commies almost pwned us in one thing, but we proved that by throwing money at a problem and not executing scientists and engineers, we could still pwn them." And no, I'm not a right-winger.
Not precisely true. Most of the USSR probes didn't make it into space, but one lived on the surface for less than a minute. Now this would be a career-ending "success" for me personally but it counts for something. It's a better experience than I had with Mars Observer ... ...
Now the stuff about Sally Ride, well, forget it. Facts are facts. Although on second thought that statement has a lot of truthiness about it.
I've really enjoyed the press coverage, but the funniest parts are the gentle adjectives used to describe the orbit insertion burn. "Slipping" is new; I've also seen "eased" and "braked." MOI changed the speed of the spacecraft by a tad over 1 km/sec, or 2238 mph for users of the system-formerly-known-as-English. It turned out to take about 1641 seconds to do so, 33 seconds longer than expected. That peaked out at about 0.08G, not bone-crushing but not exactly a lullaby.
Because they only have to loft those telescopes into earth orbit; it's a lot more expensive to send it to Mars. And people are willing to pay for images of the Earth (althtough we may never know exactly who they are, or how much). HiRISE is a pretty big instrument, for Mars.
What will it do that others can't? Remember, a satellite is not a class of objects like "a car," for instance. They don't just get pulled off a shelf and stuck on a rocket. A better question is, "What will these scientific instruments do that others haven't?"
You'd do better to visit one of the official websites, or even to read a news release, but here's my take. One of the instruments has sub-meter resolution, and it will be able to find better and safer landing sites for those landers. The IR spectrometer will give us better info about the composition, and more suggestions about where to put a lander or rover. We'll get information about sub-surface water from a radar mapper, and improved data about the atmosphere and its structure.
There is a new software set, but it's not official for MRO. I used MOPS.
Actually we still use MOPS, what led you to believe we didn't? No mission has been lost by faulty maneuver design. There were other problems, yes, but not any associated with those programs.