We had a renderfarm for "The Chronicles of Riddick" of 40 boxes. Each box was a dual-proc Opteron.
We evaluated several render-queue management systems, and decided on Rush. The most persuasive arguments for using Rush were the very good experience we have heard from other users, and the simplicity of extending it to manage a variety of different tasks. I have to add Hammerhead to the list of happy customers. It did everything we could have hoped for. In particular, it was able to handle the inevitable crashing of machines pretty well.
While it's true that Rush is a proprietary, gotta-pay-for-it system; a robust render queue management system pays for itself very quickly in the ability to make your renferfarm productive. Perhaps a render queue manager is overkill when you have just 6 or 8 systems, but once you get up to 30 or 40 it is essential.
Our experience is all under Linux, but if you're going to be running After Effects that means that you're not going to be running Linux -- so there's not too much more I can help you with there. We did find that the dual Opterons worked much more efficiently than dual Xeons in multiprocessor rendering -- don't know about the Xserves, though. We were running mostly Maya, RenderMan, Shake, and our own in-house tools on the farm.
This farm is unfortunately powered down now that Riddick is done -- if you need some dual opterons, let me know at thad@hammerhead.com
Laptops often run pretty close to the edge in cooling -- converting the bottom of the laptop from a radiator to an insulator sounds like a incredibly bad idea. Some laptops have vents in the bottom, too, which would be blocked by these mats.
I always remove the caps lock key from my keyboards, and have convinced a few of the other animators here of the wisdom of this -- there is just no use for Caps Lock in the work that we do.
I don't know who said it first, but the correct location for the Caps Lock key is in the other hemisphere from the one you happen to be in.
Thad
I personally think motion blur would have helped
on
LA to Oregon at Mach 9
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Averaging together 50 frames instead of just throwing away 99 in 100 would have made a much smoother video. While you still have all of the frames on line, it might be interesting to try. Even better (for video) would have been creating the final output on fields (60 fps)
Still, not to look a gift horse in the mouth -- it was a pretty cool video. Thanks!
Worse, of course, is the collateral damage. How will I be able to send mail using my own business' domain, as I do today, when it is going out via an ISP server? My "from" address is an alias, not a real sender, and I use it to send via more than one ISP, depending on where I am. SPF seems to make this a lot harder, thereby forcing more people to put their ISPs' name in the From: field, rather than their own.
I would think that it would not be hard, at all, to invent a system that would actually send mail from your business's domain. You could compose the mail at home, or on the road, and then forward it through your business's mail server. Isn't that what you really want to do, in any case? Don't you want your business clients to have confidence that the mail actually originated from the business?
It seems to me that your apparent 'flaw' would quickly become an actual benefit.
This blimp needs air for bouyant lift, so you are inevitably going to be in the atmosphere. Ion engines, unfortunately, only work in a vacuum. And even if they did work at that altitude, the drag would so high that they wouldn't accelerate the ship at all.
If the ship was, say, 50 ft wide and had a rediculously low drag coefficient of.01, then the drag force at 5000 fps, 1/5 of orbital velocity, is:.5 rho Cd V^2 A
where
rho is density (about 1.7x10^-5 slugs/ft^3) Cd is.01 V^2 is velocity squared. At 5000 fps, that's 2.5x10^7 A is area, 50 ft
This yeilds a drag of a little more than 100 lbf.
The most powerful ion engine is Nasa's new HiPEP that has a thrust of about 1/10th of a pound.
Now, I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace, and wish them all the luck in the world. Their program of launching sounding rockets from high-altitude balloon platforms was quite exciting. Hypersonic blimps, though, are just not going to happen.
When I was going to college, I was working weekends in NY and going to school in Baltimore, and, well, I had a little accident on the New Jersey Turnpike where I sort of hit a Highway Patrol car in the snow at very low speed. He wrote me up a ticket for "careless driving," which would have sent my insurance through the roof.
I was embarrassed about it, but I mentioned it to my although-I-didn't-know-it-wife-to-be, and felt that I had to plead guilty to the charge. She mentioned that her uncle was a lawyer in New Jersey, and that he was having trouble configuring his new Unix box (a Fortune computer, this was 1983.) A deal was quickly struck.
I went up there for the weekend, and got his machine configured, and he told me about this spectacular precedent called the Wenzel case in New Jersey -- where no matter what the evidence is, if the cop didn't actually see you being careless he couldn't charge you with that. He refused to represent me, but he counseled me with exactly what I had to say. Basically, although I was acting in my own defense, I couldn't testify for myself -- I would merely cite the case.
Well, traffic court in New Jersey was a long slow process, and I was the last one there when the cop finally deigned to appear. He gave his report, and I offered no explanation, but cited Wenzel, and the judge said "Get out of here." And so I did.
That barter probably saved me many thousands of dollars over the next few years.
Microsoft has tried to revolutionize the gaming world through radical software redesign once before, in the mid-to-late 90's, with a project called Talisman. Microsoft had assembled a team of CG scientists that ripped the heart out of the industry, and they put them to work on this project.
The idea of Talisman was that each frame of a game is very much like the next one. In fact, rather than render the next frame from scratch, it might be possible to do projection of the previous frames image to get the next frame. Even if this couldn't be done for the whole image, it could certainly be done for part of it. For example, in a flight simulator, even if the ground is not flat, it is piecewise flat, and those pieces could be 2D-transformed from one frame to the next without the expense of full 3D rendering.
Microsoft hired the best people in the field of DVE (digital video effects) including Steve Gabriel and Alvy Ray Smith, almost certainly to work on this project. Steve Gabriel built the Ampex ADO, the first high-quality digital video effects machine, in the early 80's. Alvy Ray Smith wrote the Siggraph paper on 2-pass transforms, the foundation upon which the ADO is built.
Well. It turns out that rendering texture-mapped polygons can be done very very quickly indeed, and the analysis necessary to "save" time using the Talisman ideas was exceedingly complex and expensive. In the best case, Talisman might have sped things up by a factor of 2 -- about six months time given the fervid pace of graphics board development.
I don't think of this as particularly reassuring, though -- Microsoft usually fails a couple of times before achieving domination. Perhaps Talisman was Rev 1, and XBOX is Rev 2...
The 4KSTACK change is inevitable, unstoppable, and also foreshowed long in advance. There are too many benefits, especially when running large numbers of threads.
NVidia will release a new driver compatible with 4KSTACKS soon. It's a pity that they aren't available now, because Fedora Core 2 looks like a very exciting distribution otherwise.
Video-guided bombs will be trivial to implement as video camera-phones become available. I believe that this is the real threat -- they're just softening up the populace with the current jamming.
Thad
Right out of Ariadne
on
Metal Velcro
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The New Scientist magazine, back when I was in school in the early 80's, had a column on the last page of each issue, descibing the exploits of the mythical engineer/scientist Daedalus (actually David E H Jones.)
He had proposed doing exactly this, but with glass, back in one of these columns. It was exactly the same method and result.
It's not the first time that Daedalus's speculative inventions have turned into reality. A couple of books have been published collecting the best of Daedalus.
While it's true that both ATi's and Nvidia's new cards scream, it has to be noted that ATi decided not to compete with Nvidia on quality. The new 3.0 versions of the Vertex and Fragment shaders, as implemented in the NV40, are a stunning advance over the 2.0 shaders in the newest ATi cards.
At my company, we had considered using hardware for the final rendering on some of the shots in our current visual effect movie, but the 2.0 shaders just didn't have the capability -- they really are suited only for games (not too surprising, that's where 99% of the market is.) The lack of fully-functional floating point buffers, the limitation on the size of the shader programs, the lack of texture mapping in the vertex shaders -- these are all devastating to the notion of doing high-quality hardware rendering.
All of these limitations, and more, were addressed in the new 3.0 shaders.
I am sure that ATi will support these features eventually, as games come to require them -- but right now you are really comparing apples and Porsches when you compare ATi's and Nvidia's latest offerings.
When the US harmonized its patent laws with the rest of the world, it changed the expiration date of a patent from the previous 17 years from date of grant to 20 years from date of filing.
Currently existing patents are valid until the later of the two dates. As this patent was granted with remarkable speed, the later of the two is 20 years from date of filing, or sometime in 2006.
We do this kind of thing all the time. The biggest problem is with motion blur. If the camera is shaking around, even if you stabilize the motion you still get motion blur, which tends to 'buzz' the image in a completely terrible way.
Now, before you kids start saying "well, just turn down the shutter speed", you do run out of light pretty soon. Modern CCD cameras, though, can do amazing things with short shutter times, and in that case your idea of stabilization after-the-fact will work just fine.
If you're going to have to move the image more than about 5% of the frame size, you will want to do a perspective distortion rather than just slide the image around in 2D. As the other responder says, you should frame wide, so that you don't lose too much of your scene when you stabilize. One nice thing about shooting on film is that we typically have a large amount of exposed film that gets cropped out of the movie when printed. This give us a substantial amount of leeway for stabilization.
Go for it! Have fun! Write me at thad@hammerhead.com if you need more help.
SpaceX is probably the most advanced of the new low-cost launchers. Interestingly, the man behind SpaceX is the founder of PayPal, who got out while the getting was good.
SpaceX is dedicated to creating a pair of low-cost extremely simple launchers. They've created their own engines based on a very simple design, and their own turbopump. The engines are LOX/RP1 (basically kerosene) engines, which are extremely well known, inexpensive and available.
There was a nice writeup on SpaceX in Aviation Week two weeks ago. They have been testing their engines and plan to launch their first orbital mission within a year or so.
It's always a longshot betting on any of these small rocket companies actually launching a rocket successfully. It's even harder to make money doing it. Lockheed built a small, solid fueled rocket of about the same class as the smaller of the SpaceX rockets about 10 years ago. The first one blew up, but the second and third ones succeeded. Unfortunately, the market for small launchers just didn't exist.
SpaceX has a government payload signed up for their first rocket. If it is successful, and they can really launch rockets for the rediculously small price that they quote, then perhaps they will be successful. More power to them!
Actually, SpaceShip One is a shirtsleeve environment. The pilots don't wear pressure suits. I believe all the windows are double-paned, each of which would hold pressure by themselves. The environmental controls on the ship are pretty simple, there are scrubbers to remove CO2 and water vapor, and they have an oxygen bottle to bleed some oxygen into the cabin.
Pressure suits are a real pain, and they restrict the pilot's vision, hearing, and motion so much that it's really good if you can avoid them. SpaceShip One is no walk in the park to fly, the pilot really needs all the help he can get to fly it.
Actually, according to this week's Aviation Weke, Burt is lobbying the FAA to allow him to carry passengers. There would be a list of disclaimers a mile long, but if the passengers sign a waiver that "Yes, I fully expect this rocket to blow up and kill me", they'd be allowed to fly.
Apparently the FAA is looking favorably on this proposal, as a way to stimulate private space travel. It's amazing to see government working for innovation, for a change.
Burt Rutan, in some ways, has the same kind of reality distortion field that Steve Jobs is legendary for. The thing is, it's not a joke -- reality is different after these guys get done.
Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt had a wonderful editorial in Aviation Week and Space Technology a couple of weeks ago, which is similar to this testimony before Congress. In it he laid out an arguably sound economic case for mounting a large-scale mission to the moon to mine Helium 3.
Helium 3 is present in abundance on the moon, and on a per-pound basis could be one of the most valuable substances there is. Assuming that one really could catalyze nuclear fusion in power reactors using Helium 3, it could have profound implications -- allowing us to move beyond hydrocarbon fossil fuels (although, ironically, you'd still need those fuels to power the rockets to the moon.)
I'd seen pie-eyed schemes for going to the moon for the Helium 3 before, but Schmitt really tries to nail it down, and answer most obvious criticisms. It's definitely worth a read.
Thad Beier
Re:What, no editorial? [help, please, moderators]
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 1
The parent positing is absolutely not flamebait. If I hadn't already posted here I would have moderated it up. Other moderators, please do so. If you have any question about whether it is flamebait, check out the link provided in the article -- Nugget is desparately trying to inform people, not bait them.
Thad Beier
They spelled my name right...
on
Red Hat Recap
·
· Score: 5, Informative
but they didn't put it in bold:) Oh well.
Once the article came out, I called Red Hat to make sure I hadn't misinterpreted what they were doing -- and to attempt to clarify how they were restricting distribution of what was apparently GPL'd software.
The person I spoke to make a clear distinction between the binary distribution and the source code. The source code is available for free download, and will continue to be available for free download forever. On the other hand, they do restrict you from installing the binary distribution onto multiple machines. They say that the act of compiling the programs, and assembling them into a distribution, is work that they demand to be compensated for.
I was under the mistaken impression that the price of the distribution was to compensate for the maintainance, and that they really wouldn't mind of you installed from the CD onto multiple machines. That is incorrect, they "consider that a violation of their license."
There are obviously loopholes that you could drive a truck through, if you were so inclined. I asked, and there is apparently no restriction on reverse engineering of the distribution, so you could buy one copy, download the corresponding source code, and make an exact copy of each of the programs in the distribution, and put those files on all of your machines. You could also monitor what their up2date system is doing on one machine, download the source code changes and compile and install those on each machine. This would be a significant pain in the neck, of course.
It's interesting that Red Hat has not done some things that would prevent one from doing this. In particular, they do not include software that Red Hat has written, but is not GPL'd. If they had done that, then there would be no way to legally create an identical distribution from source code.
We've got about 100 systems running RH 8 and 9. Some 40 of those are dual Opteron boxes, for which Red Hat Enterprise Edition is about $800/box, so it would not be an insignificant expense to sign up for the system.
Merdark says Also, it's more than likely that someone cracking the MS site would do SOMETHING to let it be known that they did it. Few hackers are purely malicious, most want some sort of fame.
Note that the compromisers of the debian, GNU, and now Gnome sites did not let it be known. They are either not driven by publicity or have longer term goals. Believing that systems are secure because crackers don't announce themselves is foolish at best, mendacious at worst.
While it's a three-dimensional space, the satellite is travelling so fast along its orbit that you really lose one of those dimensions. If the satellites were sitting still, you could put millions of them at GPS altitudes without fear of collision.
GPS satellites will stay in orbit for thousands of years. While they'll drift somewhat from their perfect orbits quickly, orbits at 11,000 miles are practically forever. You haven't noticed the moon's orbit decaying, and it has run out of maneuvering fuel quite some time ago.
Two satellites that hit each other won't be going at a few hundred mph relative to each other, it's likely to be a few thousand or even a couple 10,000's mph -- and the energy of the collision goes up with the square of the speed. When the Air Force intentionally collided two satellites about 15 years ago, they didn't just smash into bits -- they basically atomized each other.
They really do move the space station pretty often to avoid space debris, every few weeks. They're conservative, of course, but they wouldn't move it if they didn't have to. Of course the space station is at a far lower, and far more crowded, altitude than the GPS constellation.
Slashdot Mirror
We had a renderfarm for "The Chronicles of Riddick" of 40 boxes. Each box was a dual-proc Opteron.
We evaluated several render-queue management systems, and decided on Rush. The most persuasive arguments for using Rush were the very good experience we have heard from other users, and the simplicity of extending it to manage a variety of different tasks. I have to add Hammerhead to the list of happy customers. It did everything we could have hoped for. In particular, it was able to handle the inevitable crashing of machines pretty well.
While it's true that Rush is a proprietary, gotta-pay-for-it system; a robust render queue management system pays for itself very quickly in the ability to make your renferfarm productive. Perhaps a render queue manager is overkill when you have just 6 or 8 systems, but once you get up to 30 or 40 it is essential.
Our experience is all under Linux, but if you're going to be running After Effects that means that you're not going to be running Linux -- so there's not too much more I can help you with there. We did find that the dual Opterons worked much more efficiently than dual Xeons in multiprocessor rendering -- don't know about the Xserves, though. We were running mostly Maya, RenderMan, Shake, and our own in-house tools on the farm.
This farm is unfortunately powered down now that Riddick is done -- if you need some dual opterons, let me know at thad@hammerhead.com
Laptops often run pretty close to the edge in cooling -- converting the bottom of the laptop from a radiator to an insulator sounds like a incredibly bad idea. Some laptops have vents in the bottom, too, which would be blocked by these mats.
Thad
I wonder if you could have a car/helicopter team? I would think that a second set of "eyes" up high might solve a lot of planning problems.
thad
I always remove the caps lock key from my keyboards, and have convinced a few of the other animators here of the wisdom of this -- there is just no use for Caps Lock in the work that we do.
I don't know who said it first, but the correct location for the Caps Lock key is in the other hemisphere from the one you happen to be in.
Thad
Averaging together 50 frames instead of just throwing away 99 in 100 would have made a much smoother video. While you still have all of the frames on line, it might be interesting to try. Even better (for video) would have been creating the final output on fields (60 fps)
Still, not to look a gift horse in the mouth -- it was a pretty cool video. Thanks!
thad
isdnip says, among other things:
Worse, of course, is the collateral damage. How will I be able to send mail using my own business' domain, as I do today, when it is going out via an ISP server? My "from" address is an alias, not a real sender, and I use it to send via more than one ISP, depending on where I am. SPF seems to make this a lot harder, thereby forcing more people to put their ISPs' name in the From: field, rather than their own.
I would think that it would not be hard, at all, to invent a system that would actually send mail from your business's domain. You could compose the mail at home, or on the road, and then forward it through your business's mail server. Isn't that what you really want to do, in any case? Don't you want your business clients to have confidence that the mail actually originated from the business?
It seems to me that your apparent 'flaw' would quickly become an actual benefit.
Thad Beier
This blimp needs air for bouyant lift, so you are inevitably going to be in the atmosphere. Ion engines, unfortunately, only work in a vacuum. And even if they did work at that altitude, the drag would so high that they wouldn't accelerate the ship at all.
.01, then the drag force at 5000 fps, 1/5 of orbital velocity, is: .5 rho Cd V^2 A
.01
If the ship was, say, 50 ft wide and had a rediculously low drag coefficient of
where
rho is density (about 1.7x10^-5 slugs/ft^3)
Cd is
V^2 is velocity squared. At 5000 fps, that's 2.5x10^7
A is area, 50 ft
This yeilds a drag of a little more than 100 lbf.
The most powerful ion engine is Nasa's new HiPEP that has a thrust of about 1/10th of a pound.
Now, I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace, and wish them all the luck in the world. Their program of launching sounding rockets from high-altitude balloon platforms was quite exciting. Hypersonic blimps, though, are just not going to happen.
Thad
When I was going to college, I was working weekends in NY and going to school in Baltimore, and, well, I had a little accident on the New Jersey Turnpike where I sort of hit a Highway Patrol car in the snow at very low speed. He wrote me up a ticket for "careless driving," which would have sent my insurance through the roof.
I was embarrassed about it, but I mentioned it to my although-I-didn't-know-it-wife-to-be, and felt that I had to plead guilty to the charge. She mentioned that her uncle was a lawyer in New Jersey, and that he was having trouble configuring his new Unix box (a Fortune computer, this was 1983.) A deal was quickly struck.
I went up there for the weekend, and got his machine configured, and he told me about this spectacular precedent called the Wenzel case in New Jersey -- where no matter what the evidence is, if the cop didn't actually see you being careless he couldn't charge you with that. He refused to represent me, but he counseled me with exactly what I had to say. Basically, although I was acting in my own defense, I couldn't testify for myself -- I would merely cite the case.
Well, traffic court in New Jersey was a long slow process, and I was the last one there when the cop finally deigned to appear. He gave his report, and I offered no explanation, but cited Wenzel, and the judge said "Get out of here." And so I did.
That barter probably saved me many thousands of dollars over the next few years.
thad
Microsoft has tried to revolutionize the gaming world through radical software redesign once before, in the mid-to-late 90's, with a project called Talisman. Microsoft had assembled a team of CG scientists that ripped the heart out of the industry, and they put them to work on this project.
The idea of Talisman was that each frame of a game is very much like the next one. In fact, rather than render the next frame from scratch, it might be possible to do projection of the previous frames image to get the next frame. Even if this couldn't be done for the whole image, it could certainly be done for part of it. For example, in a flight simulator, even if the ground is not flat, it is piecewise flat, and those pieces could be 2D-transformed from one frame to the next without the expense of full 3D rendering.
Microsoft hired the best people in the field of DVE (digital video effects) including Steve Gabriel and Alvy Ray Smith, almost certainly to work on this project. Steve Gabriel built the Ampex ADO, the first high-quality digital video effects machine, in the early 80's. Alvy Ray Smith wrote the Siggraph paper on 2-pass transforms, the foundation upon which the ADO is built.
Well. It turns out that rendering texture-mapped polygons can be done very very quickly indeed, and the analysis necessary to "save" time using the Talisman ideas was exceedingly complex and expensive. In the best case, Talisman might have sped things up by a factor of 2 -- about six months time given the fervid pace of graphics board development.
I don't think of this as particularly reassuring, though -- Microsoft usually fails a couple of times before achieving domination. Perhaps Talisman was Rev 1, and XBOX is Rev 2...
Thad Beier
The 4KSTACK change is inevitable, unstoppable, and also foreshowed long in advance. There are too many benefits, especially when running large numbers of threads.
NVidia will release a new driver compatible with 4KSTACKS soon. It's a pity that they aren't available now, because Fedora Core 2 looks like a very exciting distribution otherwise.
Thad Beier
Video-guided bombs will be trivial to implement as video camera-phones become available. I believe that this is the real threat -- they're just softening up the populace with the current jamming.
Thad
The New Scientist magazine, back when I was in school in the early 80's, had a column on the last page of each issue, descibing the exploits of the mythical engineer/scientist Daedalus (actually David E H Jones.)
He had proposed doing exactly this, but with glass, back in one of these columns. It was exactly the same method and result.
It's not the first time that Daedalus's speculative inventions have turned into reality. A couple of books have been published collecting the best of Daedalus.
thad
While it's true that both ATi's and Nvidia's new cards scream, it has to be noted that ATi decided not to compete with Nvidia on quality. The new 3.0 versions of the Vertex and Fragment shaders, as implemented in the NV40, are a stunning advance over the 2.0 shaders in the newest ATi cards.
At my company, we had considered using hardware for the final rendering on some of the shots in our current visual effect movie, but the 2.0 shaders just didn't have the capability -- they really are suited only for games (not too surprising, that's where 99% of the market is.) The lack of fully-functional floating point buffers, the limitation on the size of the shader programs, the lack of texture mapping in the vertex shaders -- these are all devastating to the notion of doing high-quality hardware rendering.
All of these limitations, and more, were addressed in the new 3.0 shaders.
I am sure that ATi will support these features eventually, as games come to require them -- but right now you are really comparing apples and Porsches when you compare ATi's and Nvidia's latest offerings.
Thad Beier
When the US harmonized its patent laws with the rest of the world, it changed the expiration date of a patent from the previous 17 years from date of grant to 20 years from date of filing.
Currently existing patents are valid until the later of the two dates. As this patent was granted with remarkable speed, the later of the two is 20 years from date of filing, or sometime in 2006.
Thad Beier
IANAPL
We do this kind of thing all the time. The biggest problem is with motion blur. If the camera is shaking around, even if you stabilize the motion you still get motion blur, which tends to 'buzz' the image in a completely terrible way.
Now, before you kids start saying "well, just turn down the shutter speed", you do run out of light pretty soon. Modern CCD cameras, though, can do amazing things with short shutter times, and in that case your idea of stabilization after-the-fact will work just fine.
If you're going to have to move the image more than about 5% of the frame size, you will want to do a perspective distortion rather than just slide the image around in 2D. As the other responder says, you should frame wide, so that you don't lose too much of your scene when you stabilize. One nice thing about shooting on film is that we typically have a large amount of exposed film that gets cropped out of the movie when printed. This give us a substantial amount of leeway for stabilization.
Go for it! Have fun! Write me at thad@hammerhead.com if you need more help.
thad
SpaceX is probably the most advanced of the new low-cost launchers. Interestingly, the man behind SpaceX is the founder of PayPal, who got out while the getting was good.
SpaceX is dedicated to creating a pair of low-cost extremely simple launchers. They've created their own engines based on a very simple design, and their own turbopump. The engines are LOX/RP1 (basically kerosene) engines, which are extremely well known, inexpensive and available.
There was a nice writeup on SpaceX in Aviation Week two weeks ago. They have been testing their engines and plan to launch their first orbital mission within a year or so.
It's always a longshot betting on any of these small rocket companies actually launching a rocket successfully. It's even harder to make money doing it. Lockheed built a small, solid fueled rocket of about the same class as the smaller of the SpaceX rockets about 10 years ago. The first one blew up, but the second and third ones succeeded. Unfortunately, the market for small launchers just didn't exist.
SpaceX has a government payload signed up for their first rocket. If it is successful, and they can really launch rockets for the rediculously small price that they quote, then perhaps they will be successful. More power to them!
thad
Actually, SpaceShip One is a shirtsleeve environment. The pilots don't wear pressure suits. I believe all the windows are double-paned, each of which would hold pressure by themselves. The environmental controls on the ship are pretty simple, there are scrubbers to remove CO2 and water vapor, and they have an oxygen bottle to bleed some oxygen into the cabin.
Pressure suits are a real pain, and they restrict the pilot's vision, hearing, and motion so much that it's really good if you can avoid them. SpaceShip One is no walk in the park to fly, the pilot really needs all the help he can get to fly it.
Godspeed, Burt.
thad
Actually, according to this week's Aviation Weke, Burt is lobbying the FAA to allow him to carry passengers. There would be a list of disclaimers a mile long, but if the passengers sign a waiver that "Yes, I fully expect this rocket to blow up and kill me", they'd be allowed to fly.
Apparently the FAA is looking favorably on this proposal, as a way to stimulate private space travel. It's amazing to see government working for innovation, for a change.
Burt Rutan, in some ways, has the same kind of reality distortion field that Steve Jobs is legendary for. The thing is, it's not a joke -- reality is different after these guys get done.
Thad
Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt had a wonderful editorial in Aviation Week and Space Technology a couple of weeks ago, which is similar to this testimony before Congress. In it he laid out an arguably sound economic case for mounting a large-scale mission to the moon to mine Helium 3.
Helium 3 is present in abundance on the moon, and on a per-pound basis could be one of the most valuable substances there is. Assuming that one really could catalyze nuclear fusion in power reactors using Helium 3, it could have profound implications -- allowing us to move beyond hydrocarbon fossil fuels (although, ironically, you'd still need those fuels to power the rockets to the moon.)
I'd seen pie-eyed schemes for going to the moon for the Helium 3 before, but Schmitt really tries to nail it down, and answer most obvious criticisms. It's definitely worth a read.
Thad Beier
The parent positing is absolutely not flamebait. If I hadn't already posted here I would have moderated it up. Other moderators, please do so. If you have any question about whether it is flamebait, check out the link provided in the article -- Nugget is desparately trying to inform people, not bait them.
Thad Beier
but they didn't put it in bold :) Oh well.
Once the article came out, I called Red Hat to make sure I hadn't misinterpreted what they were doing -- and to attempt to clarify how they were restricting distribution of what was apparently GPL'd software.
The person I spoke to make a clear distinction between the binary distribution and the source code. The source code is available for free download, and will continue to be available for free download forever. On the other hand, they do restrict you from installing the binary distribution onto multiple machines. They say that the act of compiling the programs, and assembling them into a distribution, is work that they demand to be compensated for.
I was under the mistaken impression that the price of the distribution was to compensate for the maintainance, and that they really wouldn't mind of you installed from the CD onto multiple machines. That is incorrect, they "consider that a violation of their license."
There are obviously loopholes that you could drive a truck through, if you were so inclined. I asked, and there is apparently no restriction on reverse engineering of the distribution, so you could buy one copy, download the corresponding source code, and make an exact copy of each of the programs in the distribution, and put those files on all of your machines. You could also monitor what their up2date system is doing on one machine, download the source code changes and compile and install those on each machine. This would be a significant pain in the neck, of course.
It's interesting that Red Hat has not done some things that would prevent one from doing this. In particular, they do not include software that Red Hat has written, but is not GPL'd. If they had done that, then there would be no way to legally create an identical distribution from source code.
We've got about 100 systems running RH 8 and 9. Some 40 of those are dual Opteron boxes, for which Red Hat Enterprise Edition is about $800/box, so it would not be an insignificant expense to sign up for the system.
Thad Beier
And you have half the geeks in the world dying (happily, but still dying) of lust.
thad
As opposed to dishonest, I felt that mendacious carried with it the added meaning of intent to harm.
thad
Merdark says Also, it's more than likely that someone cracking the MS site would do SOMETHING to let it be known that they did it. Few hackers are purely malicious, most want some sort of fame.
Note that the compromisers of the debian, GNU, and now Gnome sites did not let it be known. They are either not driven by publicity or have longer term goals. Believing that systems are secure because crackers don't announce themselves is foolish at best, mendacious at worst.
thad
While it's a three-dimensional space, the satellite is travelling so fast along its orbit that you really lose one of those dimensions. If the satellites were sitting still, you could put millions of them at GPS altitudes without fear of collision.
GPS satellites will stay in orbit for thousands of years. While they'll drift somewhat from their perfect orbits quickly, orbits at 11,000 miles are practically forever. You haven't noticed the moon's orbit decaying, and it has run out of maneuvering fuel quite some time ago.
Two satellites that hit each other won't be going at a few hundred mph relative to each other, it's likely to be a few thousand or even a couple 10,000's mph -- and the energy of the collision goes up with the square of the speed. When the Air Force intentionally collided two satellites about 15 years ago, they didn't just smash into bits -- they basically atomized each other.
They really do move the space station pretty often to avoid space debris, every few weeks. They're conservative, of course, but they wouldn't move it if they didn't have to. Of course the space station is at a far lower, and far more crowded, altitude than the GPS constellation.
thad