Posts by Gary Stewart 102 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2020
- The botched pull out of Afghanistan leading to the Taliban retaking the country
Negotiated and signed by the Trump administration without any consultation with the Afghan government. As a bonus it included the release of 5000 Taliban fighters which happened during the Trump administration.
- The proxy war against Russia that's rapidly becoming a debacle
There is no proxy in this war. The Russians invaded Ukraine. However the west, not just the US was negligent in not sending the weapons they really needed when they needed them. I still don't understand why they took Putin's nuclear threat seriously.
- A US-Mexico border that's so porous 10,000 illegal immigrants cross per day
This has been a problem since the 1980s. Reagan pardoned 3,000,000 immigrants The huge influx of migrants is a world wide problem. I would like to see better control of the US border but apparently the Republicans in congress would rather keep it as an election issue rather than make a real effort to solve it.
I lived through the cold war (and even did "duck and cover" in school), the Cuban missile crises, Vietnam, the overthrow of the Iranian government, beginning of the Afghan and Iraq wars (,,,). The world has mostly been a very dangerous place for my entire life.
The ability of nuclear weapons to take out satellites has been know since the dawn of the space age. Parking one in orbit is one way to do it. Launching one from the ground or an airplane are a couple of others. They might take a bit longer but it will get the job done. Why is this just now important (rhetorical) ?
There was much more to the launch pad update than the deluge system. There was extensive upgrading of the base support structure that included many new reinforced concrete pillars scattered around the base pad. After watching this pair of a YouTube videos of these updates I was amazed that they got it all done in such a short time. They are long but very interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09DDpHdIYgU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqVLP3DKOk4
As to the oxygen leak "theory", oxygen itself does not explode (as I thought but I still looked it up), it requires some kind of fuel mixed with the oxygen to go BOOM.
Given Windows log and storied history of updates borking the OS I am assuming (yea, I know that one too) this is sarcasm. The last time I had a Linux update bork itself was when I was trying out PCLinuxOS about 15 to 20 years ago. It used RPM and often had huge updates, sometimes over a hundred packages, that always had multiple dependency problems.These usually caused a complete failure to boot afterwards. After a couple of those I switched to Debian (and now Devuan and Linux Mint) and have had only a few dependency problems that prevented a package from updating but never stopped it from booting. The package dependency problems were easily fixed although it did usually require using the command line (OH, the humanity!) with the needed fix information displayed in the error message. And none of these packages were system critical. Live and learn, a quick check of PCLinuxOS to make sure I got the time line correct shows that they are now using APT and Synaptic like Devuan and Linux Mint.
They are just beginning to test the Starship. You might want to check Falcon 9's and Falcon Heavy's record to see the end product after testing (hopefully). I do agree with the article that the 2025 date will not happen. There is still a lot of testing that needs to be done on all the hardware by both parties.
There is some fascinating footage taken by the YouTube site Astronomy Live from the Florida Keys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTcSMh4VYow showing the Starship tumbling out of control before it exploded (I assume by the fight termination system). There are also two fairly small and one large release of gas clearly visible in the live launch footage and a corresponding loss of oxygen pressure. I noticed these releases as I watched the launch live and thought that these were probably not a good sign. It is also interesting to note, although it may have nothing to do with the failure, that the launch was held up for a short time at the 40 sec. hold for a problem with the second stage oxygen pressure. I'm sure we'll learn more as the telemetry is examined. It is good to see that the launch pad suffered only minor damage, mostly being attributed to the "sprinkler system". As I noted in a previous post there was a massive reinforcement effort on the launch pad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09DDpHdIYgU that is a long watch (25+ minutes) but very interesting. This was a major contributor to the launch pad staying in one piece.
The first experimental launch attempt of the starship used first generation hardware that was obsolete when it was launched. The entire reason for this launch was to find out how far they could go with this kit and what would be needed to make the next attempt work better. SpaceX was required to address all of the know problems (around 1000) with the first launch before they could attempt a second launch which they have now completed according to SpaceX.
After watching these two videos I believe that the launch pad problem may be fixed! They are kind of long but the engineering and effort (and money) used to fix the launch pad is truly amazing and well worth the watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09DDpHdIYgU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqVLP3DKOk4
As I have said before, Musk lost me with the pedo incident and IMHO he has only spiraled downward since then. Luckily SpaceX has continued changing the future of space launch systems with and without him. They just launched and landed their 67th Falcon 9 and launched 3 Falcon Heavies as well this year. Two Falcon 9 boosters have now launched and landed 17 times. As an old timer that goes all the way back to the Mercury program this is like sci-fi to me, except of course it is really happening. For all his faults he has still managed, with a lot of help, to turn the space launch industry on its head.
But there is oversight. There is congressional (senate and house investigations), executive (Department of Justice investigations), and judicial (federal courts,
lawsuits and actions brought by the other two branches) oversight. Any of these agencies can and regularly do have investigations when a regulatory agency
is thought to have overstepped it's bounds. There is an upcoming Supreme court decision about this very subject that could have far reaching effects that
seeks to severely limit the ability of the regulatory agencies to set the policies they need to do their jobs. This has actually gone to court before and it was
wisely decided that an agency with experts in the fields needed to make such decisions where more qualified than the courts. It was also noted that if every
policy/change had to go through the courts that the burden would create a huge back log in the court dockets. I would add that the record of court cases where
competing interests, usually big corporations vs. anybody/everybody else complete with dueling scientists rarely end well with big money having a distinct
advantage. Tobacco companies vs. smokers lungs being one of the most obvious example. A more recent one would be newly leaked evidence that big oil
scientists' models of the effects of massive carbon dioxide emissions by post industrial age humans have echoed what climate scientists models have shown
and been covered up for decades.
And finally. When congress created/creates these agencies they have no intention of making decisions on every policy/change they make and relegated to them,
which they can do, some authority to do so when needed knowing full well that they and the other two branches will always have the final say.
"While we've been staring goggle-eyed at the conflagrations coming out of Elon Musk's SpaceX,Rocket Lab has been quietly becoming arguably the second biggest player in the private space industry with a minimum of explosive fanfare."
Yes because the first launch attempt of an experimental record breaking rocket design is apparently not expected to fail according to the author.
In the mean time (Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy):
Launch
#19 in flight failure 28 June 2015
#XX pre-launch failure 3 September 2016 (between launches 28 and 29),
227 successful launches in a row, knock on wood. Record number of launches by a US booster in a year, 64 and looking for a possible 100 launches this year. It all seems so routine now but I still love watching the boosters land, especially the dual Falcon Heavy landings.
Musk lost me with the beyond stupid "pedo" incident. Still a big fan of SpaceX. So looking forward to the next Starship attempt, go Starship!
Also a big fan of Rocket Lab. Looking forward to them getting this problem resolved and launching rockets again.
I started using Debian with the Sarge release and continued using it until they accepted systemd as the only "init+++" system they officially supported. There was at one time a supposed non-systemd version which I tried to install and then trashed after it failed to boot after installation (the first and last time that ever happened). Now I use Devuan most of the time for that good old Debian feeling and Linux Mint mostly so I can run the latest version of KiCad using its official Ubuntu PPA. I find that Mint is also a little better at playing DVDs and much better at playing Blu-rays. As a bonus Mint also allows me to gain experience with systemd which I would prefer not to but it has become way too invasive to ignore. Luckily for me I am retired and this is not a professional requirement, it's just a matter keeping up. As an added bonus I believe that Linux Mint is migrating away from its original Ubuntu base to Debian. They do have a release of the Debian based version now but I want to wait until it becomes official before I dive in.
Devuan is my primary desktop but I also recommend Linux Mint when you need to run more up to date software, better multi-media support, and of course the use and abuses of systemd.
Which it I am referring to is obvious. I went back and double checked and you are right, I couldn't find the Asus Tinker Board 3N on Amazon. I still haven't been able to find a Pi in the US in over three years now. Any bets on which comes in first? I'm hoping for, but not betting on the Pi.
P.S. I've owned Raspberry Pis since the model 1 B, You know the one that had to have the fuse bypassed to work properly (and if you were really serious, and I was, removing the Raspberry Pi +3.3V supply from +3.3 V output of the USB to Ethernet chip). And I've owned at least one of the model B versions from then on. As a from the beginning customer I am very annoyed that I haven't been able to purchase the model B I need for a project that has been on hold for too long. The 3 B, 3 B+, 4 B 2G, 4 B 4G, and 4B 8G I have are already in use, Unfortunately a combo LCD display/Pi case I bought only works with 3 B(+) or 4 B so for now the continued unavailability is more than a minor annoyance.
At least it is available at a reasonable price. Still can't get any Raspberry Pi in the US. I just checked all of the US vendors listed on the official Pi Buy Raspberry Pi 4 Model B page. I also checked them for model 3 B and B+ with the same results (this is as low as the project I want to build can go). After reading for many months now that availability is improving I am almost to the point of no return.
After a couple of years with no problems I've recently, as in the last 8 - 12 months, had the same problem with my Brother HL-2240D laser printer. The exact same problem occurs on Devuan 4. Within the last month or so the problem has gotten much better but seems to reoccur when the printer is not used for several hours. Getting it to work after that is a real PITA and the easiest way is to just do a fult computer power down/up cycle with the printer left on. This "fix" only became reliable within the last month or so. When I first started having the problem I did quite a bit of searching on the web and found that it is/was a fairly common problem. It helps to turn the printer on before I turn the computer on much like the full power cycle fix. Since it occurs on two very different distributions of Linux I suspect that it may be a CUPS driver problem but I have no way to verify this.
Also as I mentioned in a previous post, Linux Mint 21.2 has the option to install a 6.2 kernel. I have used this option to install newer versions of the Linux kernel on previous releases with no problems. I won't be installing the 6.2 kernel though because as of this time support for it will end in Feb. 2024. The option to install newer kernels is in one of the pull down tabs in the Update Manager (sorry don't remember which one) in the View Kernels option.
I'm afraid Jeff got his pee-pee whacked real hard a couple of days ago when a BE4 went BOOM 10 seconds after ignition during an acceptance test. This was not a test engine, it was a production engine that was going to be used if it passed. So poor old Jeff will have to keep it in a bit longer (no pun intended). ULA was overheard muttering "an engine, an engine, my Centaur needs an engine". I thought I saw this here earlier but I could not find it with a quick search. It has been reported on a couple of other sites like slash dot and space.com.
"Boeing got the Commercial Crew contract before Falcon 9 existed, let alone Starship so congress could not have funded Starship instead of Starliner."
First successful Falcon 9 flight 4 June 2010. "Starting with a 2012 announcement of plans to develop a rocket with substantially greater capabilities than SpaceX's existing Falcon 9" Wikipedia.
Commercial Crew Contract awarded to Boeing 18 Dec 2015.
Just thought I'd clear that time line up for you.
The Dream Chaser is a long way off from being accepted for human use. I am actually excited about this project and hope it succeeds. However it does not have anywhere near the cargo capacity of the Starship. Certainly not enough to do anything beyond carry passengers and cargo to a space station, ISS or commercial. It will require super heavy lifters like the Starship and SLS block whatever (sorry, I haven't kept up with the various versions of SLS) to build those space stations and go beyond.
It will be interesting to see if the Starship will be ready for a moon landing when everything else is in place. I won't underestimate SpaceX (despite Elon) so at this point I give it a 50/50 chance. Of course the landing target date keeps getting moved out too so maybe 75/25. Can't wait for the next experimental Starship launch to see how much, if any improvements have been made. I already know they will be using better Raptor engines and hopefully a better launch pad.
Given the reliability of the Falcon 9, the last in flight/payload delivery failure was on 28 June 2015 (flight number 19 over 200[1} launches ago) with 27 ISS supply missions and 10 crewed missions I don't know if we really need a second crewed launch system any more. This seems to be especially true since Boeing can't seem to provide one any time in the near future anyway and of course SpaceX provides the service for a lot less money per launch. One has to wonder where the Starship program would be if NASA had given the money it gave to Boeing[2] to SpaceX for the Starship program instead. At least Boeing is having to pay for the cost overruns. With 1 billion USD (and counting) of their own money down the hole one has to wonder if Boeing can ever break even on this disastrous project.
1. This does not include 6 successful Falcon Heavy launches.
2. Almost(?) twice as much as it gave to SpaceX.
As someone who is currently undergoing treatment for inoperable pancreatic cancer I don't know why it took so long for the diagnosis. I found out the same day I visited a gastro-intestinal specialist after a high contrast CT scan. The CT scan also showed that it had spread to two lymph nodes making it inoperable with a 2% chance of survival after 5 years. A biopsy later confirmed the original diagnosis.
Richard: As to treatment i know that it affects people differently but my original chemo treatment using two different aggressive drugs every other week was not devastating. It was debilitating, mainly serious fatigue and immune system suppression but that was just about it. No nausea or other serious side effects. It included a couple of side effect suppression drugs administered before the chemo which were effective. I also had a couple of anti-nausea/vomiting drugs prescribed for home use that I never needed. The treatment itself was effective and brought my cancer under control. I am now on a different treatment with a study drug that uses a gene mutation I have (PALB2) to attack the cancer. It is currently used for other types of cancer and has the advantage of being an oral medication that I can take at home instead of having to go to the hospital twice a month for blood tests and intravenous chemo. I do still have to go for blood tests once a month with a CT scan once every two months for the study. So far the new treatment has also proved to be effective. This should add some (many, I hope) years to my life.
What I am trying to say is that people should at least try the currently available treatments. Over the years the treatments and treating the side effects has gotten much better. Unfortunately it will not always be effective or cause severe side effects but not trying them first leads to the ultimate devastating.
A giant water cooled steel patch. Last I heard steel is much more resistant to heat damage than concrete. Even concrete especially designed to resist heat damage. And i seriously doubt even if it did fail that it would not generate anywhere near the derbies the concrete did. There are other serious problems with the amount of dust generated and widely dispersed throughout the environmentally sensitive area. If most of that was concrete then the giant steel water cooled "patch" should solve most of that problem and kill two (hopefully not endangered) birds with one stone. If a large amount of the dust was from the surrounding area other fixes will be needed. Perhaps a plume tunnel that Elon for some reason does not want to use.
Every single building will have to be inspected and some of them will have to be repaired.
This was the first fully operational (well mostly) TEST vehicle launch! JFC, it was expected to have problems, some serious and some not so serious..The Falcon Nine, a much "simpler" rocket took several tries to get it right and now it is one of the most reliable launch vehicles available. And to top it off the boosters are reusable. At least two boosters have been reused 15 times with several more in double digits. So SpaceX does know how to do reliability. Sometimes it took tweaks, and sometimes it took serious re-engineering but they managed to get it right eventually. As long as the money holds out, and I have no idea if that is really a problem or not although I am sure that infinite does not accurately describe the amount needed, I fully expect them to be able to do the same with the Starship. Given the complexity, it will certainly take longer to do this time.
As for the rockets flips and flops described below, as explained the rocket was supposed to do a single flip to position it for a landing back burn while at the same time imparting the momentum needed to separate the second stage from the booster. A complicated maneuver that I have doubts about, we will see. Since this separation did not occur it is not surprising that things got dodgy after that. I suspect that the added mass and momentum of the second stage caused the loss of control when the flight computers could not properly compensate for it. At that point it was time to destroy the rocket which the on board computer or ground flight control did.
They destroyed the launch pad, not the launch site. Other than having some of ts support pillars exposed the launch tower survived relatively unscathed. I am very curious to see if the giant steel water cooler that was not ready for this test will work as expected. It, along with other changes should end the derbies problem. With 31 rocket engines I fully expected some engine failures on the first try at running all of them at close to full power on a test launch vehicle. There were more non-working engines than I would have liked to see but please note that most of them did work. I also wonder if any of them were damaged by the copious amounts of derbies generated when they destroyed the launch pad. I expect this problem to be fixed although it may take a few more tries along with a major upgrade to the launch pad. I don't believe that there was any expectation to launch StarLink V2 satellites using the Starship this year. As explained many times by Elon and SpaceX this will be a work in progress for at least the rest of this year and probably some of next year too.
The promise of lower mass to orbit obviously depends on a fully operational Starship and as most know that is still more than a few test launches away. Given SpaceX's record so far I hope/expect that it will become fully operational sometime (late?) next year.
The Japanese are also finally coming out of their post WWII isolationist cocoon and starting to talk about building up their own defensive capabilities. This is good news to the US and all the other Asian Pacific nations that appose China's ongoing expansion in the South China Sea.
I don't know, it's not anything I have a need for at the present time. The data sheet for the processor is available for download. As an interesting aside, I understand it the Raspberry Pi can do 16 bit transfers into and out of a 100 MiB RAM buffer using DMA and the GPIO pins. It is not well documented but how to do it is out there on the web. From what I read it also requires the use of most the GPIO pins. I assume that is how a GPIO based VGA interface is done. I looked for the links I have for it and tried a Google search but haven't found the ones I have yet.
I didn't say it was. I said it was close. Last time I looked the retail price of the 8 GiB Raspberry Pi 4 was around $80 and I haven't seen one below $100 for over a year (?) now. I did read that they were supposed to be increasing production after they got some supply chain issues fixed but they are still not available in the US from the normal retailers. It is still well below the price of the Tinker 5 and has 4 times the number (and faster) cores and 8 times the amount of RAM.
With a 1 Ghz single core processor this does not come close to the Raspberry Pi 4 (or 3 or 3+). I have included a quick overview of its specs and add that it is priced close enough to the Raspberry Pi 4 to considered a real competitor. I recently bought one but have not yet begun to work with it as I have a long backlog of projects. I do plan to move it up on the project list and start using it soon.
Specifications listed for the VisionFive 2 SBC include:
Processor System:
StarFive JH7110 4 core 64-bit SoC w/ RV64GC (up to 1.5GHz)
Memory/Storage:
Up to 8GB LPDDR4
eMMC storage socket
1x M.2 M-Key for SSD
QSPI Flash
1x Micro SD card slot
Connectivity:
2x GbE RJ45 ports
Bluetooth V4.2 BR/EDR, Bluetooth LE
Display:
1x HDMI 2.0
1x 4-lane MIPI-DSI port (up to 2K@30fps)
1x 2-lane MIPI-DSI port
Camera:
MIPI CSI (up to 4K@30fps)
USB:
2x USB 2.0
2x USB 3.0
I/O Interfaces:
40-pin GPIO header
Other Features:
1x Reset button
Debug pin headers
Power:
5V (via USB Type-C with PD, up to 30W)
5V (via GPIO Power in)
PoE (supports Power over Ethernet)
Dimensions:
100 x 72mm
TSMC is currently building new fabs and expanding old ones in the US. At this time it will not be their leading edge process but I see no
reason why this could not quickly change if needed. Ditto with Samsung.
As for China obtaining by the TSMC fab in Taiwan, running and getting spare parts for any of the leading edge manufacturing equipment,
especially the ASML DUV lithography machines, would be extremely difficult although probably not impossible.
China has changed. They have and continue to grow their military to the point where it has become a serious threat to all their surrounding neighbors several of which have direct ties to the US. They have used this new military power to threaten their neighbors and increase "their" territorial waters by constructing islands out of existing reefs well outside of their recognized territorial waters and turned them into military bases even though they said they wouldn't do that. Now they have the power to attempt to take Taiwan, for all practical purposes the chip manufacturer for the world, and have repeatedly threatened to do so. This clearly makes them a new threat to the rest of the world.
When I started my career at Mostek in 1976 I worked in Fab 2 as an engineering technician which was just beginning to ramp up production of the MK4116 the first 16 Kib (2 KiB!) dynamic RAM. The R&D lab was right next to Fab 2 and was run by a man of Chinese heritage. At the time I noticed that at least one other major chip manufacturer's R&D, I think it was Intel but I don't know for sure, was run by a Chinese man and wondered about the coincidence, I now suspect that spying by the Chinese on semiconductor manufacturers and military contractors has been going on for much longer than has been acknowledged and was instrumental to getting the Chinese military to be the threat it is today.
I watched the derBauer video and was impressed by the thoroughness of his investigation. I found it on the EXTREME TECH web site which included this: "Interestingly, fellow overclocking YouTuber Igor from Igor’s Lab has also chimed in according to Videocardz. He said he spoke with an AMD partner that agrees with De8auer, it’s the vapor chamber. This partner reportedly said a batch was made with an insufficient volume of liquid in the chamber." And this statement from AMD: We are working to determine the root cause of the unexpected throttling experienced by some while using the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards made by AMD. Based on our observations to-date, we believe the issue relates to the thermal solution used in the AMD reference design and appears to be present in a limited number of the cards sold. We are committed to solving this issue for impacted cards. Customers experiencing this unexpected throttling should contact AMD Support.
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