"Well that's great, that's just fuckin' great man, now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man... That's it man, game over man, GAME OVER, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?" - Hudson, the panicky guy.
I'm not saying Bear did a bad job - just the opposite, it was a good book. I just found it enormously depressing that my home world got destroyed, even though Humanity did manage to survive. It's just hard to cope with the destruction of good ol' terra firma. (Well, I guess that depends on the author's purpose - it was funny in Hitchiker's Guide.) I recognize that this is a highly personal reaction.
I read Anvil of Stars. Nice sequel. I think it would have been fun to be one of the Peters.
The Rama series is simply a case of a Big Name milking sequels for all they're worth. Rendezvous With Rama was a fascinating adventure, but the sequels sucked serious donkey - as did pretty much anything Clarke cowrote with Gentry Lee. One of the sequels, and my memory has blessedly let me forget which one, is the most depressing thing I have ever read in my life! It was even more of a downer than Greg Bear's Forge of God, which at least left me with a little hope in my heart. You call the Rama sequels buffalo chips? That's being extremely kind.
"The Ramans do everything in threes." Clarke should have stopped at one.
I thought Columbia was the one shuttle that could NOT dock with the ISS.
It can't, and that's a point I entirely missed in ranted about how tricky it is just to get to the station. Even if Columbia could have gotten there, it couldn't have docked. Columbia was scheduled to be refit with ISS docking hardware after STS-107. Discovery (I think) is being overhauled, so for the rest of the year we only have two ISS-capable orbiters.
I predict that the problem was in the updated avionics software.
Yeah, maybe if it was Microsoft Avionics Software v2.0. Oh, sorry, make that "Microsoft.NET Avionics software v2.0". Microsoft's excuse: it's NASA's fault; they didn't install the latest patch.
The last option is some kind of engine failure leading to fuel ignition. Although the main tanks are mostly empty...
I got a laugh off this line - actually the main tanks are gone, having separated from the orbiter shortly after MECO and then burned up in the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.
Because there's little that can be done for Columbia, even if you assume that it has damage. In the case of Challenger, there's an easy answer: Don't launch. But you can't tell Columbia "Don't come home." They have nowhere else to go and they can't stay up there.
It would be incomprensible if there was any explosive whatsoever in any of the propulsion systems, because after the Shuttle begins the drop out of orbit, the engines are never used again.
The OMS engines aren't used after the de-orbit burn, but the RCS (reaction control system) engines are used to maneuver the orbiter until it reaches an altitude where the atmosphere is dense enough that the aero surfaces become effective. The RCS engines use the same hypergolic propellants that the OMS engines do, and they're fired all the way to the ground to assist the aero surfaces. I've seen pictures of the vehicle turning around the HAC where you can actually see a pair of the RCS jets firing.
A guy I work with, and a former PROP flight controller, has told me that they don't entirely dump the OMS propellant because its weight can be used to manage the orbiter's center of gravity (cg). The cg is important because during entry, it affects the stability of the vehicle. It's been a long time since this was explained to me (not my area of expertise), but I do know that the orbiter's cg has to fall within about a 3-foot long area along the vehicle's long axis. The "dead weight" of that fuel can be used to balance the orbiter and keep the cg within its safe range.
So there are still some hypergolic propellants within the vehicle all the way to the ground. Ever noticed the suits the ground crew wears when they come out to greet the shuttle after it lands? Those suits protect the ground crew from the nasty corrosive vapors of the OMS/RCS propellants. The ground crew runs around the orbiter with a sniffer to detect vapor levels, and the crew doesn't get off until any fumes have dissipated.
I thought you're right, though, that it's unlikely for those propellants to have caused an explosion. They don't ignite until they come into contact with each other, and that shouldn't happen unless their tanks get ruptured - in other words unless the vehicle is already in serious trouble.
You can't just "park" at the ISS like you're checking into a Motel 6. If you're going to rendezvous with the station, that has to be planned way in advance and built into the mission design. Docking at the station is an enormously complex maneuver and it isn't something you do unless that's what the mission plan calls for. Even if you could get to the station, it can't handle a crew of 10 (its 3 plus the Columbia 7).
The Columbia crew didn't even know if there was any damage. There's no way to see that region of the craft; I'm not sure they could see it even if they had a remote manipulator aboard. NASA did an extended analysis of the debris impact, but didn't believe there was any cause for concern. Maybe they were wrong but if not there was nothing the crew could have done. Nothing. There's nowhere else to go. You bring the crew home and hope for the best.
As for NASA's "groupthink", what the fuck do you know about the people who work for NASA, or the way they think? The people that I work with in the shuttle program are some of the best and brightest people I've ever worked with, and that includes both the graybeards and the baby engineers. They bring a variety of viewpoints, experience, opinions, and creativity to bear on every problem NASA encounters. To suggest that these people don't think for themselves is the height of ignorance.
So now you post your solution to the problem even though you clearly don't have a clue about how the shuttle works. Hell of a way to do Slashdot.
Why is this guy's rant considered "news that matters"?
Welcome to the cult of personality and post-modern dance phenonenon that is Jamie Zawinsky. Jamie's opinion "matters" because he used to Be Somebody and because he states his opinion in a manner that is guaranteed to raise hackles and Slashdot headlines. He made significant contributions to two open-source projects, XEmacs (Lucid Emacs) and Mozilla, and in between he made a shitload of money at Netscape. He also has a history of bailing out of projects before they're quite complete.
The sad thing is that he's right - the state of affairs in linux video just plain sucks. I've been there, I know. But Jamie has lost his edge. Instead of merely posting a scathing review littered with profanity, a real hacker would have spent a few sleepless nights throwing together his own elegant, attractive, and functional GUI, and would have posted the code somewhere for others to benefit from - accompanied by the scathing review littered with profanity. That's what Jamie Zawinsky might once have been capable of.
These days, though, he should just stick to selling beer.
The GPCs have seen minor upgrades, as have the MDMs, MMUs, and probably lots of other systems. The displays have been upgraded, in what is a fairly major upgrade to replace the old "steam guages" and green screens with a "glass cockpit". The Mass Memory Units have been replaced, or are scheduled for replacements in which the magnetic tape system is being replaced with solid state memory. None of these upgrades substantially change the flight software in that the replacement units "look like" their older counterparts to the GPCs.
The group that developed the flight software was one of the first SEI level-5 shops in the country (the group that developed the backup software was certified level 5 even earlier) and they have some rigorous test and certification procedures. A major cost for a complete overhaul of the avionics would be the recertification process. Don't think that people aren't seriously considering such a replacement - however, because NASA is a risk-adverse organization, it seems unlikely (ain't broke-don't-fix-it).
One upgrade that will put modern computers into an orbiter is the Cockpit Avionics Upgrade currently under way. User-interface code will be taken out of the primary avionics software and moved into PowerPC SBCs running VxWorks and coded in C++. This is a major opportunity for modern hardware, operating systems, and programming languages to prove themselves in critical systems.
There is a full scale production run for the shuttles. Unfortunately it isn't for making new shuttles. It's for practically rebuilding the shuttles every time they land.
Your implication is that we tear down each orbiter following a mission and rebuild it with new components, which is simply not true. Consider the recent case in which cracks were found in the MPS flow liners. To replace those would have taken the entire fleet out of operation for many months, maybe a year, because they hadn't been produced in years, and the maker would have to tool up again to make replacements. Instead we repaired the flow liners with welds and got the shuttles back in the air.
You're right that the turnaround maintenance is huge, and that there are significant recurring costs in the program. But we absolutely do not have an ongoing "production run" for building shuttles.
The bulk of a launch vehicle's mass, especially the Shuttle, is NOT it's computer-system, but the super-structure.
Yes, but that weight can't be changed unless you're talking about a new airframe, which essentially means a new vehicle. But if you can replace a 25 year old 100 lb computer with a modern 10 lb computer, that's ninety pounds of payload you can gain on the current orbiter. Do that eleven times (obviously I'm talking about more than just the five General Purpose Computers) you can gain nearly a thousand pounds more payload. You also reduce power requirements and reduce the heat load on the orbiter, two significant gains. I'd say off the top of my head that there might be as many as fifty such boxes you could replace with modern but reliable technology.
There's also a tremendous weight on the orbiters in just plain wires which deliver both power and data. Replace those with something more modern and you can make significant payload gains.
Of course, replacing an entire orbiter avionics system is going to be an expensive and risky undertaking (risky from the ain't-broke-don't-fix-it point of view). If you're willing to do the job, though, it would probably cost less than a whole new spacecraft program. It would be nice to do both, though. The shuttle's a great workhorse and we should keep flying it as long as possible, but we also need to be committed to building a new spacecraft for manned space flight.
Effective Java is a book very much in the style of Scott Myers' earlier C++ "Effective" series
This is about the highest praise you can give a language-specific programming guide. In his books Scott not only listed many of the ways you could get in trouble in C++, but also gave clear explanations of why they were trouble and why his recommendations were good practices. His books are top of the list I recommend to people who know the language and want to write solid fast code. If Effective Java is as good, I'll soon be adding a copy to my bookshelf.
on a regular keyboard it just lights the gutters between the keys.
Right. Which makes them useless on most non-Apple keyboards. However, these light kits do have the advantage that, since they have no light sensor, they allow you to waste power ALL the time, and not just in the dark.
My girlfriend is a "type II" diabetic, as is her mother, and calling it "the kind fat people get" is very short-sighted.
It sure is. My wife, whose weight the entire time I knew her was about ninety (yes, nine-zero) pounds developed type II diabetes after our second child was born. In fact, the diabetes was causing her to lose weight so that she weighed only about 75 pounds at the time she was diagnosed.
All kinds of people get type II diabetes.
BTW, my wife has an insulin pump and loves it. But the insulin pump operates open-loop: it doesn't monitor glucose levels and respond to them. My wife still has to prick her finger a couple of times a day, and still has to manually adjust the insulin pump around mealtime.
More importantly, he seems to have forgotten about the "1" key. Many old typewriters, including the one he appears to have used, lack a "1" key. Typists would simply use a lowercase "l" (ell) key in lieu of 1 - you can probably still see this on very old documents if you look hard enough.
...or in some modern "documents". A friend of mine who e-mails me regularly learned to type on one of those old keyboards and has never learned how to use the "1" key. She regularly types things like "...this was back in l996..."
Slashdot Mirror
"Well that's great, that's just fuckin' great man, now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man... That's it man, game over man, GAME OVER, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?" - Hudson, the panicky guy.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
from "The Hollow Men", TS Eliot.
Attribute your sources!
--Jim
According to the best cosmological theory we have now: The universe came into being...
"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has generally been regarded as a bad idea." --Douglas Adams
I'm not saying Bear did a bad job - just the opposite, it was a good book. I just found it enormously depressing that my home world got destroyed, even though Humanity did manage to survive. It's just hard to cope with the destruction of good ol' terra firma. (Well, I guess that depends on the author's purpose - it was funny in Hitchiker's Guide.) I recognize that this is a highly personal reaction.
I read Anvil of Stars. Nice sequel. I think it would have been fun to be one of the Peters.
--Jim
The Rama series is simply a case of a Big Name milking sequels for all they're worth. Rendezvous With Rama was a fascinating adventure, but the sequels sucked serious donkey - as did pretty much anything Clarke cowrote with Gentry Lee. One of the sequels, and my memory has blessedly let me forget which one, is the most depressing thing I have ever read in my life! It was even more of a downer than Greg Bear's Forge of God, which at least left me with a little hope in my heart. You call the Rama sequels buffalo chips? That's being extremely kind.
"The Ramans do everything in threes." Clarke should have stopped at one.
--Jim
...bathtub gin!
I thought Columbia was the one shuttle that could NOT dock with the ISS.
It can't, and that's a point I entirely missed in ranted about how tricky it is just to get to the station. Even if Columbia could have gotten there, it couldn't have docked. Columbia was scheduled to be refit with ISS docking hardware after STS-107. Discovery (I think) is being overhauled, so for the rest of the year we only have two ISS-capable orbiters.
--Jim
..sweet dreams and fine machines, in pieces on the ground...
Good quote. More precisely, "...sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground...". - James Taylor, "Fire and Rain"
I predict that the problem was in the updated avionics software.
.NET Avionics software v2.0". Microsoft's excuse: it's NASA's fault; they didn't install the latest patch.
Yeah, maybe if it was Microsoft Avionics Software v2.0. Oh, sorry, make that "Microsoft
Sorry, couldn't resist a swipe at Redmond.
--Jim
The last option is some kind of engine failure leading to fuel ignition. Although the main tanks are mostly empty...
I got a laugh off this line - actually the main tanks are gone, having separated from the orbiter shortly after MECO and then burned up in the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.
--Jim
Why was today different?
Because there's little that can be done for Columbia, even if you assume that it has damage. In the case of Challenger, there's an easy answer: Don't launch. But you can't tell Columbia "Don't come home." They have nowhere else to go and they can't stay up there.
The other way to look at it is in terms of flight miles.
Yeah, but take a look at it in terms of takeoffs and landings and you get a different answer.
--Jim
It would be incomprensible if there was any explosive whatsoever in any of the propulsion systems, because after the Shuttle begins the drop out of orbit, the engines are never used again.
The OMS engines aren't used after the de-orbit burn, but the RCS (reaction control system) engines are used to maneuver the orbiter until it reaches an altitude where the atmosphere is dense enough that the aero surfaces become effective. The RCS engines use the same hypergolic propellants that the OMS engines do, and they're fired all the way to the ground to assist the aero surfaces. I've seen pictures of the vehicle turning around the HAC where you can actually see a pair of the RCS jets firing.
A guy I work with, and a former PROP flight controller, has told me that they don't entirely dump the OMS propellant because its weight can be used to manage the orbiter's center of gravity (cg). The cg is important because during entry, it affects the stability of the vehicle. It's been a long time since this was explained to me (not my area of expertise), but I do know that the orbiter's cg has to fall within about a 3-foot long area along the vehicle's long axis. The "dead weight" of that fuel can be used to balance the orbiter and keep the cg within its safe range.
So there are still some hypergolic propellants within the vehicle all the way to the ground. Ever noticed the suits the ground crew wears when they come out to greet the shuttle after it lands? Those suits protect the ground crew from the nasty corrosive vapors of the OMS/RCS propellants. The ground crew runs around the orbiter with a sniffer to detect vapor levels, and the crew doesn't get off until any fumes have dissipated.
I thought you're right, though, that it's unlikely for those propellants to have caused an explosion. They don't ignite until they come into contact with each other, and that shouldn't happen unless their tanks get ruptured - in other words unless the vehicle is already in serious trouble.
--Jim
You can't just "park" at the ISS like you're checking into a Motel 6. If you're going to rendezvous with the station, that has to be planned way in advance and built into the mission design. Docking at the station is an enormously complex maneuver and it isn't something you do unless that's what the mission plan calls for. Even if you could get to the station, it can't handle a crew of 10 (its 3 plus the Columbia 7).
The Columbia crew didn't even know if there was any damage. There's no way to see that region of the craft; I'm not sure they could see it even if they had a remote manipulator aboard. NASA did an extended analysis of the debris impact, but didn't believe there was any cause for concern. Maybe they were wrong but if not there was nothing the crew could have done. Nothing. There's nowhere else to go. You bring the crew home and hope for the best.
As for NASA's "groupthink", what the fuck do you know about the people who work for NASA, or the way they think? The people that I work with in the shuttle program are some of the best and brightest people I've ever worked with, and that includes both the graybeards and the baby engineers. They bring a variety of viewpoints, experience, opinions, and creativity to bear on every problem NASA encounters. To suggest that these people don't think for themselves is the height of ignorance.
So now you post your solution to the problem even though you clearly don't have a clue about how the shuttle works. Hell of a way to do Slashdot.
--Jim
Why is this guy's rant considered "news that matters"?
Welcome to the cult of personality and post-modern dance phenonenon that is Jamie Zawinsky. Jamie's opinion "matters" because he used to Be Somebody and because he states his opinion in a manner that is guaranteed to raise hackles and Slashdot headlines. He made significant contributions to two open-source projects, XEmacs (Lucid Emacs) and Mozilla, and in between he made a shitload of money at Netscape. He also has a history of bailing out of projects before they're quite complete.
The sad thing is that he's right - the state of affairs in linux video just plain sucks. I've been there, I know. But Jamie has lost his edge. Instead of merely posting a scathing review littered with profanity, a real hacker would have spent a few sleepless nights throwing together his own elegant, attractive, and functional GUI, and would have posted the code somewhere for others to benefit from - accompanied by the scathing review littered with profanity. That's what Jamie Zawinsky might once have been capable of.
These days, though, he should just stick to selling beer.
--Jim
The GPCs have seen minor upgrades, as have the MDMs, MMUs, and probably lots of other systems. The displays have been upgraded, in what is a fairly major upgrade to replace the old "steam guages" and green screens with a "glass cockpit". The Mass Memory Units have been replaced, or are scheduled for replacements in which the magnetic tape system is being replaced with solid state memory. None of these upgrades substantially change the flight software in that the replacement units "look like" their older counterparts to the GPCs.
The group that developed the flight software was one of the first SEI level-5 shops in the country (the group that developed the backup software was certified level 5 even earlier) and they have some rigorous test and certification procedures. A major cost for a complete overhaul of the avionics would be the recertification process. Don't think that people aren't seriously considering such a replacement - however, because NASA is a risk-adverse organization, it seems unlikely (ain't broke-don't-fix-it).
One upgrade that will put modern computers into an orbiter is the Cockpit Avionics Upgrade currently under way. User-interface code will be taken out of the primary avionics software and moved into PowerPC SBCs running VxWorks and coded in C++. This is a major opportunity for modern hardware, operating systems, and programming languages to prove themselves in critical systems.
--Jim
There is a full scale production run for the shuttles. Unfortunately it isn't for making new shuttles. It's for practically rebuilding the shuttles every time they land.
Your implication is that we tear down each orbiter following a mission and rebuild it with new components, which is simply not true. Consider the recent case in which cracks were found in the MPS flow liners. To replace those would have taken the entire fleet out of operation for many months, maybe a year, because they hadn't been produced in years, and the maker would have to tool up again to make replacements. Instead we repaired the flow liners with welds and got the shuttles back in the air.
You're right that the turnaround maintenance is huge, and that there are significant recurring costs in the program. But we absolutely do not have an ongoing "production run" for building shuttles.
--Jim
The bulk of a launch vehicle's mass, especially the Shuttle, is NOT it's computer-system, but the super-structure.
Yes, but that weight can't be changed unless you're talking about a new airframe, which essentially means a new vehicle. But if you can replace a 25 year old 100 lb computer with a modern 10 lb computer, that's ninety pounds of payload you can gain on the current orbiter. Do that eleven times (obviously I'm talking about more than just the five General Purpose Computers) you can gain nearly a thousand pounds more payload. You also reduce power requirements and reduce the heat load on the orbiter, two significant gains. I'd say off the top of my head that there might be as many as fifty such boxes you could replace with modern but reliable technology.
There's also a tremendous weight on the orbiters in just plain wires which deliver both power and data. Replace those with something more modern and you can make significant payload gains.
Of course, replacing an entire orbiter avionics system is going to be an expensive and risky undertaking (risky from the ain't-broke-don't-fix-it point of view). If you're willing to do the job, though, it would probably cost less than a whole new spacecraft program. It would be nice to do both, though. The shuttle's a great workhorse and we should keep flying it as long as possible, but we also need to be committed to building a new spacecraft for manned space flight.
--Jim
Effective Java is a book very much in the style of Scott Myers' earlier C++ "Effective" series
This is about the highest praise you can give a language-specific programming guide. In his books Scott not only listed many of the ways you could get in trouble in C++, but also gave clear explanations of why they were trouble and why his recommendations were good practices. His books are top of the list I recommend to people who know the language and want to write solid fast code. If Effective Java is as good, I'll soon be adding a copy to my bookshelf.
--Jim
And you expect to find this tricorder thingy if you can't keep track of a pencil?
Not just any pencil - his favorite pencil. "Oh damn, I've lost another tricorder. And that one was my favorite!"
on a regular keyboard it just lights the gutters between the keys.
Right. Which makes them useless on most non-Apple keyboards. However, these light kits do have the advantage that, since they have no light sensor, they allow you to waste power ALL the time, and not just in the dark.
--Jim
NO. I repeat: when does the ++ operator increment the variable name and not its contents? Answer: never. See original post.
C++, ++ meaning +1, or in other words, D
Since when does the ++ operator increment the variable name and not its value? Duh?
--Jim
My girlfriend is a "type II" diabetic, as is her mother, and calling it "the kind fat people get" is very short-sighted.
It sure is. My wife, whose weight the entire time I knew her was about ninety (yes, nine-zero) pounds developed type II diabetes after our second child was born. In fact, the diabetes was causing her to lose weight so that she weighed only about 75 pounds at the time she was diagnosed.
All kinds of people get type II diabetes.
BTW, my wife has an insulin pump and loves it. But the insulin pump operates open-loop: it doesn't monitor glucose levels and respond to them. My wife still has to prick her finger a couple of times a day, and still has to manually adjust the insulin pump around mealtime.
--Jim
...or in some modern "documents". A friend of mine who e-mails me regularly learned to type on one of those old keyboards and has never learned how to use the "1" key. She regularly types things like "...this was back in l996..."
--Jim