Beal claims a thrust of 810,000 pounds for its heavy lift engine. That's not bad, but the F-1 engine, 5 of which fired the first stage of the Saturn V developed 1.5 million pounds each, and those were still undergoing R&D. I think Rocketdyne was up to F-1g by the time they cancelled the program and those were putting out 1.75 million pounds each.
Bottom line, I think they've done a great job so far, but to do any real heavy lifting you need more thrust. They claim this engine is scalable, but we'll see. Getting more thrust out of it now will probably require massive investment, if the engine is capable of any more.
I may not be remembering correctly, but even Bob Zubrin's Mars Direct plan called for some serious heavy lifting. And I think he mentioned the Energia Booster.
You can cluster more engines to get more thrust but the Soviets learned that that isn't always the best solution. I think the first stage of their Saturn V equivalent (sometimes known as the G-1, but also know as something else, N1?) used 30 engines, and they had problems keeping them all working. They even managed to blow a few of them up.
So I question whether these are up to the task of real heavy lifting. I hope they prove me wrong.
Heck, just bust out the plans for the F-1 and start making those again. Sure, all of the tooling is gone but you could probably re-start the production of that engine for very little.
OR, get with the Soviets and re-start their Energia Heavy Lift program. THAT was the most powerful heavy lift vehicle ever built.
Just because those were government sponsored programs doesn's mean private industry couldn't take over (though I don't buy the whole argument that the private sector necessarily does things more efficiently than does government).
The NRA used to complain about mandatory waiting periods which were being discussed (and that are in use in many states) when purchasing a gun. They were arguing that "a right delayed is a right denied."
Wouldn't that apply here??
OK, so perhaps someone with sysadmin privs can go in and unblock any given website, it's very likely that this will take some time.
I wonder if the same conservatives making the argument for the NRA will make the same argument in this case.
Could Sun's plans for Star Portal and Corel's Office Suite for linux have been enough to convince MS to enter this market?
It certainly does seem unlikely, but you never know. I've read most of the messages in this thread and thought about it for the last hour and really can't some up with any real solid reasons for them to do this.
I'm not even sure that I'll use it if it does get ported. I may be the only person in the world who doesn't use all of the applications in my office suite every day.
And most of the time I only need a word processor to type a simple letter or resume'.
I no longer get my local paper delivered to my home because my paper boy has proven to be very unreliable.
I do not get it at the newstand every day, but practically every day, and the reason I do so is primarily for the local news section and the joy of reading the OP/ED section to see what the local people have to say about things.
There are in fact about 5 regulars who write editorials that I look for every time I open that section. They tend to be quite entertaining if not insane.
Plus the rantings of our own local psycho mayor make for an interesting read.
Where do I go for other news?
Online I go to the NY Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.
The real question here might be whether or not printed newspapers will exist in 10 or 15 years.
Will they? Who knows, but probably not.
I for one would enjoy having all of my "newspaper" choices delivered to my huge LCD flatpanels located in every room of my home via an incredibly fast net connection, and we all know it's coming.
Will my older relatives enjoy this? No, certainly not, and they'll continue buying regular papers until the day they die.
But I suspect the fast-paced technology world will make paper "newspapers" obsolete, and they'd all better prepare for that day.
How is this vacuous comment insightful? It says nothing. The poster rants about the US govt doing illegal things now, that in 20 years will be known fact. Yet does he ever try to support his point?
On the whole I agree with this poster's complaints. I have said the same thing many times.
HOWEVER.
I was not attempting to do anything with that post but paint a general picture in the abstract. I have dozens of posts currently on/. and many of them have the very facts for which you ask.
have one question....all that money spent trying to fix the Y2K bug...shouldn't some of it had gone to solar flaring ( or CME ) protecting our information infastucture.
Well, there is little TO do, unfortunately.
We rad-harden our satellites as best we can, but this radiation is powerful.
If a significant solar event happened when our guys were on the surface of the moon, they would have been dead in hours.
I however did surround my linux box with ~1200 lbs. of lead.
Sure, they're not making fun of me NOW are they?!:-)
This may or may not be true, but people too often dismiss such reports as conspiracy theories because the naive little word they live in would crumble if they believed any branch of their beloved US gov't would ever do anything corrupt or unlawful. So to them stories such as these HAVE to be conspiracy theories.
However, right now, the US gov't is engaging in activities both in this country and others which in 5 years will eventually get reported and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" and in 20 years will be found to be fact, and those same people who were calling them conspiracy theories will then apologize for the "one time" error the government made and then believe they won't do it again. (after all, the gov't SAID they wouldn't do it again....).
The problem is, our government does horrible things as a part of POLICY, and this will never change until we get a real democracy.
His original article (I forget which one) seemed a little uninformed.
He spoke about it not being a good idea to multi-task and run many programs at once. He them implied it was bad to do this with both linux and Windows.
Well I can say that I don't like to overextend my windows system and was especially pleased when some program GPF'ed and zeroed out my SETI work unit which was about 90% done at that time.
I however don't worry about everextending my linux box. I beat the hell out of it and it simply won't die (preaching to the choir here).
I'd go back and reread his original article(s) to find my other example but the prospect of reading them again doesn't appeal to me.
The reason there aren't (and will never officially be) any software DVD players on Linux is because the Linux kernel is open-source, and thus not guaranteed to be trusted.
The copyright barons are pushing for end-to-end encryption. One end (DVD drives) is implemented. The other end (video/sound cards) is coming. Needless to say, open-source drivers would defeat the purpose, and the copyright barons would spend billions on fighting them. As for binary-only drivers, the GPL forbids them.
This is just one of many ways that huge corporations which embrace closed standards can get rid of linux. We were all afraid that MS would mount (no pun) some sort of campaign to defeat linux.. perhaps even releasing their own version, but with decisions like this they won't have to.
If linux isn't compatible with ANY of the hardware on the market due to closed standards such as these, who will want to run it? How could it possibly survive?
It gets worse.
With Microsoft about to spend millions this year (like 150) on MSN advertising to crush AOL, and AOL already having 10's of millions of users AND the infrastructure for high speed connectivity to boot (cable companies, etc..), are the days of the smaller non-proprietary ISP's numbered? And if they die out will too linux? Sure, we might see an AOL port to linux, but MSN seems unlikely (and I don't want EITHER). So what good is the next killer desktop OS without THE killer app, THE NET?
And it seems to me there's little we can do about any of this.
Ckaiken's amazing other stuff
on
Full Moon
·
· Score: 2
Chaiken is definitely an amazing writer. Another of his great works is A MAN ON THE MOON (The Voyages Of The Apollo Astronauts) on which Tom Hanks based his HBO Mini-series FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
The book A MAN ON THE MOON was recently published in a 3 Volume, Illustrated commemorative set, also with many amazing photographs.
For all you space geeks I highly recommend it.
And if any of you were watching the Mars Polar Lander news conferences (I know I was) Andy Chaiken was there reporting for space.com . I don't know if space.com is any good since it's a subscripion space newspaper (at least it used to be) and it seems a little pricey to me, but it looks like it's of quality. Especially if they have guys like Chaiken on the staff.
And speaking of Win2K (and I know this is a little off topic), but when I went to the mall today to buy my bro and sis-in-law an anniversary card, I stopped by the local Electronics Boutique and didn't see anyone buying, or even LOOKING at the Windows 2000 boxes that were on the shelf (all 2 of them).
So either they had already sold a ton of them by 5pm, or they didn't get that many of them, or I missed a separate display where there might have been 1000 boxes stacked up in another part of the store.
(I realize that Gates denied having said this, but it's fun to speculate).
But does anyone here really even want the source code to Windows 3.11?
:-)
Even if they did open source the code to Windows 2000, and even GPL it, how many endusers would use any version OTHER than the MS version? They seem to have faith in that company.
Frankly, I don't see that any of the proposed solutions to the MS monopoly will do anything to solve the problem. Even if you break them up into divisions Windows still dominates, and if they opened the source Windows would continue to dominate, AND it would be less buggy.
Call me an old dinosaur cold warrior, but I like having an enemy and knowing who it is.
his is one of my pet peeves; THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH GOOD SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS. There needs to be WAY MORE of them, they need to be PAID AND TRAINED BETTER, and (to put it bluntly) they need to be considered a critical resource REQUIRED for powerful computers on the Internet today, not as overhead expense to be minimized.
That is an idea that businesses (big business and corporations in particular) need to realize.
A happy workforce (regardless of job) is a loyal workforce. Give them all good pay and good benefits and you'll have employees willing to work late and go the extra mile 10 out of 10 times.
It never made sense to me that management would want an unhappy workforce.
*sigh*. Everyone on slashdot seems perfectly willing to babble on about Valenti being clueless, even though he's clearly a savvy businessman. (working for the minions of evil, but still reasonably intelligent)
I don't recall saying he was clueless, just a liar. And his lies need to be addressed. We still have to await our real day in court.
I'm doing my part. I've written editorials to my local paper and to CNN online.
I even wrote Michael Moore trying to educate him ont he issue in the hopes that he'd put it on his Bravo-TV show, THE AWFUL TRUTH.
It gets to the point where the criticism becomes even more inane than the original point. Seriously, how long will it take until you *are* able to send a DVD in just a few minutes to millions of people. Five years? Ten? Two?
First, he said BILLIONS, not millions.
And who knows how long it will take, that's not the issue.
He implied (if not outright SAID) that it could be done now. For the billions of people he's describing... it can't. With my unstable 56K dialup connection it would take days to Xmit one full length DVD film, probably weeks.
Well, Linus stands to make a good deal from Transmeta's IPO, whenever that happens. At the moment, I suspect he's getting a reasonable salary, not an over-the-wall one. We'll find out more about his deal when Transmeta files its S-1, but that might be a while.
I read an interview with Linus a few months ago where he described his salary as generous, (I'm paraphrasing here) and probably more than he deserves.
I didn't bookmark the interview.. I'll see if I can find it. Not that it's actually relevent to the topic of the main thread.
Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent.
True? I don't know... probably.
But if you adjust these numbers so that they actually MEAN something, by dividing by the companies yearly income, or net worth, you would see that Sun having 19% is far more impressive than MS having 25%.
The problem is in the architecture of the Internet. The FBI will say that they need more access to snoop on traffic, but what if the FBI gets cracked? (or heaven forbid, the US government turns out to be untrustworthy).
Is this a joke??????
Were you being facetious????
How many times does our government have to prove they can't be trusted? Where have you been?
Slashdot Mirror
Bottom line, I think they've done a great job so far, but to do any real heavy lifting you need more thrust. They claim this engine is scalable, but we'll see. Getting more thrust out of it now will probably require massive investment, if the engine is capable of any more.
I may not be remembering correctly, but even Bob Zubrin's Mars Direct plan called for some serious heavy lifting. And I think he mentioned the Energia Booster.
You can cluster more engines to get more thrust but the Soviets learned that that isn't always the best solution. I think the first stage of their Saturn V equivalent (sometimes known as the G-1, but also know as something else, N1?) used 30 engines, and they had problems keeping them all working. They even managed to blow a few of them up.
So I question whether these are up to the task of real heavy lifting. I hope they prove me wrong.
Heck, just bust out the plans for the F-1 and start making those again. Sure, all of the tooling is gone but you could probably re-start the production of that engine for very little.
OR, get with the Soviets and re-start their Energia Heavy Lift program. THAT was the most powerful heavy lift vehicle ever built.
Just because those were government sponsored programs doesn's mean private industry couldn't take over (though I don't buy the whole argument that the private sector necessarily does things more efficiently than does government).
Wouldn't that apply here??
OK, so perhaps someone with sysadmin privs can go in and unblock any given website, it's very likely that this will take some time.
I wonder if the same conservatives making the argument for the NRA will make the same argument in this case.
It certainly does seem unlikely, but you never know. I've read most of the messages in this thread and thought about it for the last hour and really can't some up with any real solid reasons for them to do this.
I'm not even sure that I'll use it if it does get ported. I may be the only person in the world who doesn't use all of the applications in my office suite every day.
And most of the time I only need a word processor to type a simple letter or resume'.
I do not get it at the newstand every day, but practically every day, and the reason I do so is primarily for the local news section and the joy of reading the OP/ED section to see what the local people have to say about things.
There are in fact about 5 regulars who write editorials that I look for every time I open that section. They tend to be quite entertaining if not insane.
Plus the rantings of our own local psycho mayor make for an interesting read.
Where do I go for other news?
Online I go to the NY Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.
The real question here might be whether or not printed newspapers will exist in 10 or 15 years.
Will they? Who knows, but probably not.
I for one would enjoy having all of my "newspaper" choices delivered to my huge LCD flatpanels located in every room of my home via an incredibly fast net connection, and we all know it's coming.
Will my older relatives enjoy this? No, certainly not, and they'll continue buying regular papers until the day they die.
But I suspect the fast-paced technology world will make paper "newspapers" obsolete, and they'd all better prepare for that day.
I'm assuming they used interferometry, though the article didn't say so?
And it was Mt. Palomar and Kitt Peak to boot. I've been expecting this stuff to come from Hawaii. Kudos to the scopes on the continental US!
I guess this officially beats the Hubble Deep Field which WERE the most distant objects found in the universe.
On the whole I agree with this poster's complaints. I have said the same thing many times.
HOWEVER.
I was not attempting to do anything with that post but paint a general picture in the abstract. I have dozens of posts currently on /. and many of them have the very facts for which you ask.
Well, there is little TO do, unfortunately.
We rad-harden our satellites as best we can, but this radiation is powerful.
If a significant solar event happened when our guys were on the surface of the moon, they would have been dead in hours.
I however did surround my linux box with ~1200 lbs. of lead.
Sure, they're not making fun of me NOW are they?! :-)
However, right now, the US gov't is engaging in activities both in this country and others which in 5 years will eventually get reported and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" and in 20 years will be found to be fact, and those same people who were calling them conspiracy theories will then apologize for the "one time" error the government made and then believe they won't do it again. (after all, the gov't SAID they wouldn't do it again....).
The problem is, our government does horrible things as a part of POLICY, and this will never change until we get a real democracy.
He spoke about it not being a good idea to multi-task and run many programs at once. He them implied it was bad to do this with both linux and Windows.
Well I can say that I don't like to overextend my windows system and was especially pleased when some program GPF'ed and zeroed out my SETI work unit which was about 90% done at that time.
I however don't worry about everextending my linux box. I beat the hell out of it and it simply won't die (preaching to the choir here).
I'd go back and reread his original article(s) to find my other example but the prospect of reading them again doesn't appeal to me.
This is just one of many ways that huge corporations which embrace closed standards can get rid of linux. We were all afraid that MS would mount (no pun) some sort of campaign to defeat linux.. perhaps even releasing their own version, but with decisions like this they won't have to.
If linux isn't compatible with ANY of the hardware on the market due to closed standards such as these, who will want to run it? How could it possibly survive?
It gets worse.
With Microsoft about to spend millions this year (like 150) on MSN advertising to crush AOL, and AOL already having 10's of millions of users AND the infrastructure for high speed connectivity to boot (cable companies, etc..), are the days of the smaller non-proprietary ISP's numbered? And if they die out will too linux? Sure, we might see an AOL port to linux, but MSN seems unlikely (and I don't want EITHER). So what good is the next killer desktop OS without THE killer app, THE NET?
And it seems to me there's little we can do about any of this.
The book A MAN ON THE MOON was recently published in a 3 Volume, Illustrated commemorative set, also with many amazing photographs.
For all you space geeks I highly recommend it.
And if any of you were watching the Mars Polar Lander news conferences (I know I was) Andy Chaiken was there reporting for space.com . I don't know if space.com is any good since it's a subscripion space newspaper (at least it used to be) and it seems a little pricey to me, but it looks like it's of quality. Especially if they have guys like Chaiken on the staff.
So either they had already sold a ton of them by 5pm, or they didn't get that many of them, or I missed a separate display where there might have been 1000 boxes stacked up in another part of the store.
In any case, I didn't witness any hordes.
But does anyone here really even want the source code to Windows 3.11?
Even if they did open source the code to Windows 2000, and even GPL it, how many endusers would use any version OTHER than the MS version? They seem to have faith in that company.
Frankly, I don't see that any of the proposed solutions to the MS monopoly will do anything to solve the problem. Even if you break them up into divisions Windows still dominates, and if they opened the source Windows would continue to dominate, AND it would be less buggy.
Call me an old dinosaur cold warrior, but I like having an enemy and knowing who it is.
That is an idea that businesses (big business and corporations in particular) need to realize.
A happy workforce (regardless of job) is a loyal workforce. Give them all good pay and good benefits and you'll have employees willing to work late and go the extra mile 10 out of 10 times.
It never made sense to me that management would want an unhappy workforce.
I don't recall saying he was clueless, just a liar. And his lies need to be addressed. We still have to await our real day in court.
I'm doing my part. I've written editorials to my local paper and to CNN online.
I even wrote Michael Moore trying to educate him ont he issue in the hopes that he'd put it on his Bravo-TV show, THE AWFUL TRUTH.
First, he said BILLIONS, not millions.
And who knows how long it will take, that's not the issue.
He implied (if not outright SAID) that it could be done now. For the billions of people he's describing... it can't. With my unstable 56K dialup connection it would take days to Xmit one full length DVD film, probably weeks.
Man, I must have one REAL slow connection.
And when did everyone on the planet get connected?
This man's lies need to be corrected.
I read an interview with Linus a few months ago where he described his salary as generous, (I'm paraphrasing here) and probably more than he deserves.
I didn't bookmark the interview.. I'll see if I can find it. Not that it's actually relevent to the topic of the main thread.
True? I don't know... probably.
But if you adjust these numbers so that they actually MEAN something, by dividing by the companies yearly income, or net worth, you would see that Sun having 19% is far more impressive than MS having 25%.
Adding up 52 of these would certainly add a little more downtime.
I already know him as the world's most knowledgable person on aerospace facts and trivia, so it's good to have him aboard.
I might go to this one. Ottawa isn't far away at all. The last time I was there I had a great time.
And on a side note, how can ET phone home when SETI@HOME'S servers aren't answering?
I was in contact with an astronaut recently and he told me that some of the programs they run on the shuttle are still MSDOS programs.
Is this a joke??????
Were you being facetious????
How many times does our government have to prove they can't be trusted? Where have you been?
My version is higher than your version! (my dad can beat your dad, etc...)
I have the highest version number, so I win, right?