Hell, they're robbing CPUs out of computer museums and buying them from eBay to keep their old designs running. There could be NASA systems right now running on the old 386 you threw out 10 years ago.
There's no reason to think it wouldn't be every bit as good as a new 16" scope. An inch of mirror diameter is the same size then as now, the quality just depends on how well it was ground. Mirror grinding hasn't changed significantly in 100+ years except people are using machines for the tedious parts now (they're not more accurate, just less tedious). There's no reason in the world to assume that this scope isn't every bit as good as any new scope.
At worst, the mirror may need stripping and recoating, but that's normal maintenance.
I have a 15" scope that I just built 3 years ago; I'd bet the views are almost identical. This is an equitorially mounted scope, so it's in a way better than mine, though I can put mine in my car in 10 minutes.
I hope that this scope goes to a group that will take good care of it, and hopefully let the public use it. Any telescope that's being looked through by the public, especially kids, is going to waste. I think Clyde would have liked that.
I think you better start shopping around better for your blanks. I've been buying Memorex 4x at big box stores; just wait for the sales, you shouldn't be paying more than $1 a disc. You can get Ritek's every day for $1.50 through the web. Ritek makes discs for most major labels.
Obviously you've not been caching. FIrst off, GPS isn't accurate to within 15 feet when you're in the woods. Also, nobody puts the caches in plain sight. I've been to caches where me and my kids walked around a 50 foot diameter circle for 30 minutes before finding the cache, to find out we'd walked right past it dozens of times. Many times it'll be a camoflaged ammo box half buried with twigs and leaves over it.
Well, one can assume that it's smaller than baby-AT. Take baby-at as a maximum size, hell, take full size AT, the old ones that totally fill an AT case. One billionth of that.
Oh well, it was a weak joke to start with, and between the two of us we killed it off.
With what? We *do* *not* *have* *boosters* that can even take h-bombs out there.
We're getting, at best, a week's notice. If we had a booster ON THE PAD, ready to go, when we discovered the asteroid, we still couldn't do anything about it. If it's on an elliptical solar orbit, we'll get practically no warning, maybe a day. If we launched instantly, the thing would be within a few hours of impacting when the bomb got to it.
The bomb isn't going to do much, either. In space, a bomb is just an energy release. Unless it hits very close to the object, it's not going to deflect it AT ALL. So you've got an object coming in at perhaps a mile per second or faster, our rocket going outwards at a mile per second, we don't have really solid ephemeris on the rock so we don't know exactly where it is, and we need to hit it within a hundred yards.
This is a much different proposition than hitting a stationary target that we know to the inch where it is.
Even if we got an h-bomb to blow up on the surface, so what? Bombs do not erase mass from the universe, they just break it up or redirect it.
The mass will still be going the same speed, and will dump the same energy into the Earth when it hits.
With only a few hours to a day before impact, the mass will still hit the earth. We don't have good enough data to know where it will hit, and we can't guarantee what vector a bomb will impart to the object; we might take something that was going to hit the desert and steer it into Las Vegas.
I think we should keep impact defense in mind as we develop technology. But building a system strictly for this purpose would be a waste. Building it as part of an outward expansion system would be much more sensible. If we had a lunar base that was used for asteroid mining, then we would have:
- lunar telescopes that could find these things WAY earlier and with WAY more accuracy - mass boosters intended to move asteroids.
THAT would make sense to do; it would have a payback even if we never encountered a major impactor.
Also, getting humans off the earth is the only SURE way to survive whatever happens to the Earth. Of course, this is very long term; there's no way we're going to have viable, self-sustaing colonies for hundreds of years yet. But it's a nice goal.
Sure, what do you suggest? Maybe we should spend a billion buck or so to go out and tweak it on the 1-in-10^6 (probably way higher, I'm just guessing) chance that it'll hit a $50M bird?
It wouldn't matter. See my other post in this thread here. We couldn't do anything about it anyway; we don't have the equipment and even if we had a Saturn V to bolt onto this thing and fire, it wouldn't give it enough delta-V to help unless we'd detected it in time to get the rocket there and firing at least weeks in advance.
We have no technology that can deflect an asteroid that's going to hit anytime soon. We can't even GET to an asteroid that's going to hit us unless we detect it several orbits back. If it's going to hit soon, then it's so far away that we can't get to it with any booster that we currently have with enough mass to make any difference.
Hell, we don't even have a booster that could get people to the moon anymore, and even if we still had operational Saturn V's, they still wouldn't boost enough mass out of Earth's gravity well to move a rock that big.
If we had a moon base (far shallower gravity well), and had big ass boosters there (which we wouldn't; why would we have such a thing?) AND we detected an impactor several YEARS early, we might be able to do something. But if we have a significant impactor in the next 100 years or so, we're pretty much fsck'd. Just have your wild party and watch the shock wave come at you at the end.
4) You mention server alerts. Are you attempting to manager either personal servers or servers you've set up for a side business on company time? If so, why should they permit that? Many companies even have specific rules against moonlighting because they know the drain two jobs can have on a person. Switch to email alerts and have the mail sent to an account you can check at work. Then if they see that you're doing a second job on their time, they can deal with that as appropriate.
Did you ever think maybe he's getting server alerts for a server at work?
I have my servers email my cell phone. Sure, I could carry a pager, but that's just silly. I have enough crap on my belt already, no point in buying another thing I don't want when what I already have does just fine.
By having it page my cell phone, I know if there are servers having trouble if I'm in a meeting, the bathroom, lunch, work, home, whatever. Yes, my servers are that important; a few minutes downtime translates into thousands of support calls.
I agree, if it's that neccesary, and the company bans personal phones, then they should provide a phone. My company doesn't ban personal phones so I just use my own; it doesn't cost me anything more and I don't want to carry two phones.
OTOH, my company has no trouble at all with me carrying my camera anywhere, but they don't want me bringing my laptop to work. I bought a $3000 laptop so that I could do personal stuff at lunchtime. 2 weeks later they issued a "no employee owned computers on the premises" rule. So I have a $3000 laptop that I hardly ever use.
There's no way I'd put a hard drive in this thing. I have a couple of servers in the house already. I'd just boot from CF and have it pull images from a server via wireless.
Remember, Giga meant 10^9 a long, long time before computers came along and tried to redefine it as 2^30. Giga was just a handy phrase, it's only through misuse that it came to be thought of as 2^30.
I waffled on this a lot myself, but now I think the SI people are right.
Yes, just like radio astronomers throw a fit now because cell phones operate very near an important absorption frequency. And people will care just about as much.
I'm an amateur astronomer myself. I don't like it either, but the truth is, most people don't give a rat's ass about seeing the stars. If they did, they wouldn't use cheap-ass mercury vapor insecurity lights to try to fend off their fear of the dark.
Actually I bike to work. It's good exercise, fun, cheap, and saves the environment. The drawback is, I figure it's probably around ten to a hundred times more likely (per mile) to be fatal.
Actually only about 4 times, from what I understand.
They would, except Dish's contract came up before DirecTVs. If DirecTV doesn't have these problems when their contract comes up, it'll probably be because the standard terms have already been worked out by Dish Network, in the same way that the UAW works out the year's contract with one automaker and then says "OK, this is the deal" to the others.
Their DVR is nothing great. DirecTIVO beats it hands down. They do have a dual tuner unit but it's expensive. A lot of my friends have DirecTIVO but I don't really care that much about it. I don't have time to watch that much TV.
Their customer service was always top notch when I called it. Didn't need to very often though. We've been using them for a lot of years and I've only called them about 5 times, mostly to add channels.
Just FYI, there is currently no safe plan for deorbiting Hubble. It has NO retros. It steers based completely on reaction wheels which are incapable of altering the orbit, they can only repoint the scope.
So, some kind of mission to the scope is going to be necessary if it's to be safely de-orbited. And if we're going there anyway, and we have new equipment ALREADY BUILT for it, why not bolt on the de-orbit retros, and at the same time put in the new equipment and reboost it, and get another 5 years out of the old dog?
The mirror is seriously messed up. It has been corrected with a lens, but the quality is still rather less than it should have had.
The mirror has a slight spherical abberation. It's slightly undercorrected IIRC. The lens COMPLETELY fixes this. It's every bit as good as it was designed to be.
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Hell, they're robbing CPUs out of computer museums and buying them from eBay to keep their old designs running. There could be NASA systems right now running on the old 386 you threw out 10 years ago.
There's a typo in that post. Please report to HR to have a fingertip removed. Don't let it happen again.
There's no reason to think it wouldn't be every bit as good as a new 16" scope. An inch of mirror diameter is the same size then as now, the quality just depends on how well it was ground. Mirror grinding hasn't changed significantly in 100+ years except people are using machines for the tedious parts now (they're not more accurate, just less tedious). There's no reason in the world to assume that this scope isn't every bit as good as any new scope.
At worst, the mirror may need stripping and recoating, but that's normal maintenance.
I have a 15" scope that I just built 3 years ago; I'd bet the views are almost identical. This is an equitorially mounted scope, so it's in a way better than mine, though I can put mine in my car in 10 minutes.
I hope that this scope goes to a group that will take good care of it, and hopefully let the public use it. Any telescope that's being looked through by the public, especially kids, is going to waste. I think Clyde would have liked that.
I think you better start shopping around better for your blanks. I've been buying Memorex 4x at big box stores; just wait for the sales, you shouldn't be paying more than $1 a disc. You can get Ritek's every day for $1.50 through the web. Ritek makes discs for most major labels.
Why not set them for a collision course with the sun?
Obviously spoken by a person with a firm grasp of orbital mechanics and orbital energy levels.
Obviously you've not been caching. FIrst off, GPS isn't accurate to within 15 feet when you're in the woods. Also, nobody puts the caches in plain sight. I've been to caches where me and my kids walked around a 50 foot diameter circle for 30 minutes before finding the cache, to find out we'd walked right past it dozens of times. Many times it'll be a camoflaged ammo box half buried with twigs and leaves over it.
Well, one can assume that it's smaller than baby-AT. Take baby-at as a maximum size, hell, take full size AT, the old ones that totally fill an AT case. One billionth of that.
Oh well, it was a weak joke to start with, and between the two of us we killed it off.
Doesn't look 1 billionth the size of a normal ITX board to me. Should be about the size of a very small dust speck.
With what? We *do* *not* *have* *boosters* that can even take h-bombs out there.
We're getting, at best, a week's notice. If we had a booster ON THE PAD, ready to go, when we discovered the asteroid, we still couldn't do anything about it. If it's on an elliptical solar orbit, we'll get practically no warning, maybe a day. If we launched instantly, the thing would be within a few hours of impacting when the bomb got to it.
The bomb isn't going to do much, either. In space, a bomb is just an energy release. Unless it hits very close to the object, it's not going to deflect it AT ALL. So you've got an object coming in at perhaps a mile per second or faster, our rocket going outwards at a mile per second, we don't have really solid ephemeris on the rock so we don't know exactly where it is, and we need to hit it within a hundred yards.
This is a much different proposition than hitting a stationary target that we know to the inch where it is.
Even if we got an h-bomb to blow up on the surface, so what? Bombs do not erase mass from the universe, they just break it up or redirect it.
The mass will still be going the same speed, and will dump the same energy into the Earth when it hits.
With only a few hours to a day before impact, the mass will still hit the earth. We don't have good enough data to know where it will hit, and we can't guarantee what vector a bomb will impart to the object; we might take something that was going to hit the desert and steer it into Las Vegas.
I think we should keep impact defense in mind as we develop technology. But building a system strictly for this purpose would be a waste. Building it as part of an outward expansion system would be much more sensible. If we had a lunar base that was used for asteroid mining, then we would have:
- lunar telescopes that could find these things WAY earlier and with WAY more accuracy
- mass boosters intended to move asteroids.
THAT would make sense to do; it would have a payback even if we never encountered a major impactor.
Also, getting humans off the earth is the only SURE way to survive whatever happens to the Earth. Of course, this is very long term; there's no way we're going to have viable, self-sustaing colonies for hundreds of years yet. But it's a nice goal.
I'm assuming that *should* be modded as "funny".
Sure, what do you suggest? Maybe we should spend a billion buck or so to go out and tweak it on the 1-in-10^6 (probably way higher, I'm just guessing) chance that it'll hit a $50M bird?
It wouldn't matter. See my other post in this thread here. We couldn't do anything about it anyway; we don't have the equipment and even if we had a Saturn V to bolt onto this thing and fire, it wouldn't give it enough delta-V to help unless we'd detected it in time to get the rocket there and firing at least weeks in advance.
We have no technology that can deflect an asteroid that's going to hit anytime soon. We can't even GET to an asteroid that's going to hit us unless we detect it several orbits back. If it's going to hit soon, then it's so far away that we can't get to it with any booster that we currently have with enough mass to make any difference.
Hell, we don't even have a booster that could get people to the moon anymore, and even if we still had operational Saturn V's, they still wouldn't boost enough mass out of Earth's gravity well to move a rock that big.
If we had a moon base (far shallower gravity well), and had big ass boosters there (which we wouldn't; why would we have such a thing?) AND we detected an impactor several YEARS early, we might be able to do something. But if we have a significant impactor in the next 100 years or so, we're pretty much fsck'd. Just have your wild party and watch the shock wave come at you at the end.
4) You mention server alerts. Are you attempting to manager either personal servers or servers you've set up for a side business on company time? If so, why should they permit that? Many companies even have specific rules against moonlighting because they know the drain two jobs can have on a person. Switch to email alerts and have the mail sent to an account you can check at work. Then if they see that you're doing a second job on their time, they can deal with that as appropriate.
Did you ever think maybe he's getting server alerts for a server at work?
I have my servers email my cell phone. Sure, I could carry a pager, but that's just silly. I have enough crap on my belt already, no point in buying another thing I don't want when what I already have does just fine.
By having it page my cell phone, I know if there are servers having trouble if I'm in a meeting, the bathroom, lunch, work, home, whatever. Yes, my servers are that important; a few minutes downtime translates into thousands of support calls.
I agree, if it's that neccesary, and the company bans personal phones, then they should provide a phone. My company doesn't ban personal phones so I just use my own; it doesn't cost me anything more and I don't want to carry two phones.
OTOH, my company has no trouble at all with me carrying my camera anywhere, but they don't want me bringing my laptop to work. I bought a $3000 laptop so that I could do personal stuff at lunchtime. 2 weeks later they issued a "no employee owned computers on the premises" rule. So I have a $3000 laptop that I hardly ever use.
Hey, it has links to download some of the necessities, but not all. Where's the link to download this "Windows Operating System" thing?
There's no way I'd put a hard drive in this thing. I have a couple of servers in the house already. I'd just boot from CF and have it pull images from a server via wireless.
No, that's ~370 GiB, or 400 GB :-)
Remember, Giga meant 10^9 a long, long time before computers came along and tried to redefine it as 2^30. Giga was just a handy phrase, it's only through misuse that it came to be thought of as 2^30.
I waffled on this a lot myself, but now I think the SI people are right.
Yes, just like radio astronomers throw a fit now because cell phones operate very near an important absorption frequency. And people will care just about as much.
I'm an amateur astronomer myself. I don't like it either, but the truth is, most people don't give a rat's ass about seeing the stars. If they did, they wouldn't use cheap-ass mercury vapor insecurity lights to try to fend off their fear of the dark.
You're right, I'm sure.
Some safety guidelines. "Don't do anything risky."
If those were always the rules, we'd all be naked, shivering at night sleeping on rocks in Africa. No, actually, we'd be extinct.
Bush himself will kill it if he's still in office come 2005. It's election year grandstanding, nothing more. Bush is practically anti-science.
Actually I bike to work. It's good exercise, fun, cheap, and saves the environment. The drawback is, I figure it's probably around ten to a hundred times more likely (per mile) to be fatal.
Actually only about 4 times, from what I understand.
DirecTV doesn't have these problems, Dish.
They would, except Dish's contract came up before DirecTVs. If DirecTV doesn't have these problems when their contract comes up, it'll probably be because the standard terms have already been worked out by Dish Network, in the same way that the UAW works out the year's contract with one automaker and then says "OK, this is the deal" to the others.
I'm a dish network customer.
Their DVR is nothing great. DirecTIVO beats it hands down. They do have a dual tuner unit but it's expensive. A lot of my friends have DirecTIVO but I don't really care that much about it. I don't have time to watch that much TV.
Their customer service was always top notch when I called it. Didn't need to very often though. We've been using them for a lot of years and I've only called them about 5 times, mostly to add channels.
Just FYI, there is currently no safe plan for deorbiting Hubble. It has NO retros. It steers based completely on reaction wheels which are incapable of altering the orbit, they can only repoint the scope.
So, some kind of mission to the scope is going to be necessary if it's to be safely de-orbited. And if we're going there anyway, and we have new equipment ALREADY BUILT for it, why not bolt on the de-orbit retros, and at the same time put in the new equipment and reboost it, and get another 5 years out of the old dog?
The mirror is seriously messed up. It has been corrected with a lens, but the quality is still rather less than it should have had.
The mirror has a slight spherical abberation. It's slightly undercorrected IIRC. The lens COMPLETELY fixes this. It's every bit as good as it was designed to be.