Re: Darwin Award
The phrase "greater good" comes to mind. Since it's the other side of the pond, and the involved person will son be in a political position, you could also say "colateral damage".
2210 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2009
Further to that, I just paid a one-off pittance and got a single static IPv4 IP with my ISP. I also have a small range with a £10 a month dedicated server in a French datacenter, included for free.
Do tell. The best I can find here is a 30€/month fee to borrow a fixed IP, plus I have to use the provider for my Internet connection. If even be happy with the fixed IP address being someone else, and route from that over a VPN to get my in and out using that IP address. Needles to say I don't want an IP address that will always be on blacklists!!
Having your own independent launch capacity is something worth having.
You have to remember that Europe started down the road of independent access to space because the USA put a "no compete" rule in allowing launches using US vehicles, so no non-US commercial payloads could be launched by them. That rule no longer exists, but the possibility to be added to a "no fly list" still exists if you anger the beast (e.g. start to match/exceed it in technology, commerce, influence,etc.)
> "...but really can't see the need for Wifi to go faster that the 1GB/s I've got wired to my desk."
The reason is because that 1Gb/s (they are boys, not bytes) is that much up, and that much back. With WiFi they are shared, so you now need 2Gb/s for the same. Now consider that the other things that all have their own 1Gb/s cable would be sharing the same WiFi bandwidth too, including the thing your desk is talking to at 1Gb/s (local NAS maybe) so maybe now you need 4Gb/s or 8Gb/s...
I work for a subsidiary whose corporate overlords have forced us to move from our internally developed systems to Winchill (PDM) and SAP. We've been forced to change our processes to those of Windchill and SAP, how've both of these systems are also heavily modified because they couldn't do some things we are required to do in our industry (worst of both options!)
We're now told we should migrate to SAP cloud, although we have sensitive data that can't go there, and you can't modify it a much, so it wouldn't meet or needs. Regardless, we continue the roll out of SAP, breaking all our processes, and pretty sure that we'll have to migrate away from it again (I'm hoping back to our original system).
To be honest they also have a good return policy; to the point where we'll shop with Amazon instead of others.
Also you know the Amazon delivery price when you select the object; with many suppliers on Amazon, its impossible to know until check-out. Even ebay does better!
I would say the approximate cost of an assembled, tested PCB is off by about 4× (as in more like $200k), but i don't know this Leonardo unit.
The ceramic capacitors in question are probably type-II ceramic chip capacitors that previously could have the solder joints reflowed in case they weren't perfect. Now they have to be thrown in the bin and a new one fitted. On top of that, the qualification of the mounting and the soldering process of type-II capacitors is now done for all types of soldering (various automatic/manual) and per size and per manufacturer.
Speaking of perfect; there have been some comments about how everything should be perfect. I've seen solder joints that have been rejected, and until you see them under ×20 or ×40 magnification binocular microscope, it's impossible to see that it isn't perfect.
The UV/light sensors on the Curiosity weather station have magnets around them to minimise light blocking by ferrous dust - and it works to an extent; you see the accumulated dust around them like doughnuts! Of course not all the dust is affected by the magnets.
What's the pool for? On Earth you need one to float and swim. In microgravity, you can just do that in the air without any worries about not breathing the water and having to dry off afterwards. Also how do you keep the water where you want it?
Now relax with a Pimms or mojito, that I understand.
I've been asked to change my way of working to agile too. I'm responsible for the power systems on spacecraft. I asked how Agile helps with that? I deliver a few cards, and they launch the spacecraft. Then later I deliver a few more cards, and they launch then to orbit, and then maybe at the end the motherboard for them to plug into and the box?
I've wondered about that. Do the houses have their heating and air conditioning turned off while they are stationary too?
Although admittedly i probably thought of it here, where in summer the temperatures inside a car go above 45 within a minute of turning off the aircon, and similarly in winter when it's -15°C outside, you'd freeze not long after turning off the engine (which also turns off the suplemental heating.
In my first job, worked for Eliot Brothers/Marconi Avionics/GEC (depending on the day of the week). The entire business ran on a homebred system on ICL mainframes. I shipped ship before 2000, but going into that, they were replacing the system because ICL no longer existed, and as I understood it, even the OS would fall over once the magic year change occurred.
On the subject of stiff that just works, there was another temp program running on a digital VAX that just never needed anything done to it. Until they turned the machine off one day to move it, after working for good knows how many years. It didn't come back and no one even knew how to get the program/ data from that machine to put on another cluster. It's a problem with long projects when even the apprentices at the start of the project retire before it finishes!
The use case isn't just to shoot down your opponents sats. When the US did it, it was to stop anyone being able to look at any bits that survive after deorbiting. (I think the excuse that hydrazine would've survived re-entry to pose a problem on the ground is a bit weak).
With the emergence of sats to perform on-orbit inspection, I see the possibility of someone deciding that they don't want someone else looking at something already in orbit. Let's hope that none decides that to avoid that they want to obliterate more sats. The correct solution is send something up to de-orbit them; which also reduced reduces what is up there.
Sometimes, certain countries are very cagey about the orbits of certain objects (and deliberately don't list them on their publicly available databases), and have been known to even design systems capable of changing orbits while on "the other side of the planet" from certain observers.
No describing in detail what a bird does is just par for the course, except in the cases where you are trying to market and sell its services publicly.
The plans I've seen have about 1kW/m² on the Earth's surface, similar to what you'd get from the sun anyway. Mispointing just means you lose the power.
The antenas to receive this are very efficient, and only need to be a few dipoles spaced apart. You could have a nice flower meadow growing around them.
No, no, no. You miss understand. They are not making this statement to make you stop sending all your money to the US military complex. They are making this statement to make you send EVEN MORE.
In other news, the US is spraying champaign because one of their satellites successfully grappled an on orbit satellite, and started to control it.
The atmosphere on the moon is very thin; not enough to clay, nor enough for "air" cooling. Plus the dust is so abrasive it will eat anything worth movement.
SLAM and auto navigation and obstacle avoidance are not the problem; we were doing that 15 years ago. The moon is the problem, and nothing that isn't designed specifically for it won't survive.
My company has just replaced an ERP system. That system replaced the original one that ran on ICL Mainframes until someone realised that the ICL's wouldn't survive Y2k. The original ran on greenscreens.
The original system would still run runs around either of its two replacements if it was still with us :-(
GEC Marconi
Oh those were the days.There were circuit diagrams done by hand on drafting film, and the smell of the blueprint duplicators....
Not everything there was a failure. I have boxes still flying and still good. BOMIS (Bill Of Materials Incoice System) that ran in the ICL mainframes that were turned off for y2k still far out performs what I work with now, as did the paperless production history dossiers even running on Apricots!).
It's true that there were a few duds along the way. The done that put on so much weight it couldn't carry its own wheels, the Lidar that didn't, etc.
We did have live telemetry from Goce as it came down. The temperatures inside our unit went through the roof, but it carried on working just fine to the end.
As for Soho, I know the failure case too well. It still gives nightmares to anyone doing anything new, hoping to not suffer the same fate.
I can't remember the specifics for Solo; it was a long time ago, but I think the radiation total dose was similar to about 20 years in geostationary orbit. Then it had to work perfectly at 20°C higher than the expected highest temperature. And all of this with a reliability of something like 99.999. I had to meet the whole specification for that, but the mission could probably work with worse performance
It doesn't surprise me when it lasts longer than the initial mission life.
A redundancy of 2 working out of 3 sub-sytems is very common in space flight. It's good that everything was ok with only 2 parachutes, to cover the possible FAILURE of one. However If they are doing that this WASN'T a failure, does that mean that the system has to cope with one less in a real failure case?
Now the boffin icon, or the troll one?