Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Depends how you calculate it :-)
The core stage and tankage etc is all still there, but possibly modified for the new engines, so yeah, a bit like an old car or plane restoration that only has maybe 10-15% original, everything else is new :-)
"Hopefully in the last 47 years, we've made some progress in power conversion efficiency that can be applied to future devices."
We do, but the temptation with better power sources is to use more of it. See the improvement in laptop batteries and power management, the end result being not a laptop that run for two or three days, but smaller, thinner laptops with the same battery life :-)
"In the end, everyone will end up losing, including Google themselves."
Sadly, in realty, what will happen is the vast majority will accept the situation and the few of us who actually care will have to either switch off and tune out or join the crowd and put up with it :-(
"interrupting videos every 3-5 minutes."
That seems to be "The American Way". I was watching a YT video of Adam Savage the other day talking about his time on Mythbusters and was shocked to hear him describe it as a "6 act show", ie 5 ad breaks in what is supposedly an hour long show. I'd only ever seen it on UK TV, with 3 ad breaks in the show. It's no wonder streaming services took off so rapidly and meteorically in the US is they are forced to watch ads on broadcast TV every 5-7 minutes during a show. YT are just copying that modal and making it even worse. Surely the people at YT who are doing this must remember growing up watching TV with far too many ad breaks and being frustrated by them! And yet they are inflicting the same on their audience, on steroids!
Either way, it still doesn't make sense to me.
"file its lawsuit in Texas's 5th District court, as opposed to the 9th District where X is headquartered,"
Shirley they should be filing this where either they or Media Matters are headquartered, not "shopping around" for the most sympathetic jurisdiction.
"When you think how many Falcons they blew up in their early days, they actually seem to be on a pretty good trajectory with this latest toy."
And, of course, not forgetting the number of early Starship "hops" that ended in RUDs too, but to be fair, this is effectively two separate rockets, each with the own foibles and problems doing things that have either not been done before or not been done on this huge size of vehicle and then combining them and their "unknowns" into one big launch stack :-)
I wasn't surprised the first launch ended in explody bits, but was surprised at the amount of damage to the launch pad and tower. I wasn't *too* surprised at the second lauch booster explosion and was really getting hopeful for Starhip as it just seemed to keep going up and was sadly dissapointed but hugely surprised that it too didn't fully succeed.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. SpaceX seem to operated a little like Kickstarter projects. There's a goad you want and need to reach, and then there's "stretch goals" that would be nice to reach. On the whole, SpaceX do generally seem to meet their main goals and sometimes reach some of the stretch goals. If nothing else, it's a lot more existing than spending 10 years, going massively over budget and massively of target date for a "first time success" :-) And as someone else suggested, a first time success could mean it's over engineered and over weight as well as over budget!
On a similar note, the booster engines shut down in stages, probably to reduce the levels of deceleration "pushing" the fuel upwards, potentially either cause pressure issues or hydraulic shock, and so was a mitigation. But I wonder if the thrust from the Starship engines doing a hot staging "pushed" back on the booster, causing an increase in deceleration rate and resulting in fuel pushing "upwards" and/or hydraulic shock" to levels more than expected? Whatever caused the problem, it does seem to have been an issue with fuel feeds to the engines as they seemed to go out in a cascade very quickly after re-light.
From the article, it's only been available since Jan 2022, so most teachers have been using it for 12-18 months, the early adopters being the few at the 18 month end of the curve and after education had been pretty much back to "normal" for a while. So for most teachers, only one school year. It should not be hard to go back to how the worked in the previous school year. In the case of UK schools, I doubt they switched to this before the start of a new school year, so most likely used it from Sept'22 to July'23. That means they are into their 2nd year of using it now, so the short notice cut-off is a bit of a bastard, and the current years course is based on it, but it really should not be THAT hard to go back to their older lesson plans. Likewise, anything that is free is going to be limited in some way, never depend on "free forever" because it never, ever is.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell with the Americanisation of El Reg, as in the US, "school" can be almost any form of learning environment from compulsory age schooling through to college and university. Back in the dark ages, when I was young and there was much less US TV and films available in the UK, hearing a US university student talk about being "in school" or "going to school" was very confusing until I started to understand that US English was similar to but not entirely unlike English :-)
An excellent question. It's not a service I can get my head around. What is the business case for companies transferring data around, especially between parts of their own spread out organisation, that a middle-man can do it better or cheaper? A middle-man for the actual fibres and wires inbetween, but why would anyone need a middle-man to actually send the data for them?
I'm sure there are people here who will have good reasons for why MoveIt exists and people use their services, so please, do share that info because I'm stumped!
Yeah, but that's poor "AI", misunderstanding the context of "average". The request, to a human, would be an "average Afghan girl", not an "average of all the afghan girl images you've ever seen". Based on the first contextualisation, the face might bear some similarities, but more likely look like a very different person. In the second case, the image will trend towards the most commonly seen photo if, as you say, 90% of the images found to base the new image on are that same image.
What that, and the whole Disney thing demonstrate to me is that those AI companies claiming the training data is not used in the final model are lying. They say the AI is trained on the technique and skills or whatever and the actual data is discarded. A human, in most cases, doesn't have a perfect memory and so will mostly end up creating a "fair use" image based on various memories, combinations and imagination, while a computer can't help but have a perfect memory and no imagination but is being trained to not use its perfect memory with varying degrees of failure.
"In this case, a simple spell checker would have caught the mistake."
Sometimes, when in a hurry, I've been known to accidentality hit "add to dictionary" instead of the correct spelling. If I'm in such a hurry that I don't notice what I've done, just noted that the red line went away, the next time I make the same typo, the spilling chucker isn't going to highlight it because I already told it that was correct :-)
But that's why journalists used to have Editors and proof-readers. From comments made by El Reg authors here, it get the sense that at least some of them write and hit publish, especially with "breaking" type articles, with no checking involved other than their own self-checking, which is hard. Proof-reading your own work, it's easy to see what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote :-)
I wonder if there's an industry rag for journalists with their own "Who, Me?" column? :-)
"I know of someone who did something similar on a mobile phone network."
Was this Australia, quite recently?
"You're removing the mass of a small lorry every second for 180 seconds."
Or, to be more UK (BBC especially) oriented, we need to know how many Olympic sized swimming pools[*] per minute that is :-)
* which in realty is only a defined length with a certain minimum width and minimum depth, both of which can be much greater, hence a wildly varying volume!
It's odd, but it seems to be a "thing" for huge numbers. 40,000lbs sounds a lot more than 20t (sticking with non-metric tons for less confusion)
I see/hear it a lot in US based media. I'm sure the general US public could probably understand and maybe visualise 20t more easily than 40,000lbs too, but it simply doesn't have the same dramatic effect when a newscaster or narrator can say, in a deep gravely voice, "FORTY...THOUSAND...POUNDS!!!!!" instead of a wimpy small number like:"twenty..err...tons" -)
(The oddest unit measurement I've heard spoken is 4 quarts!)
Conversely, in UK media, large masses such the article are almost always given in Tonnes, not Kg. Kg is usually reserved for sub 1t masses.
The depends on the definition of success and whether "millions of dollars" is a significant amount of the budget. See, for example, the deliberate test to destruction of various systems, especially fuel tanks and the various attempts to launch and land prototype Starships. And the many "failures" that lead to Falcon being the success it is today.
SpaceX have always said, when launching a test vehicle, what their primary aims and goals are, and rarely to they claim, in the early to mid stages of testing, that the entire aim is a 100% successful mission completing all the way to landing or orbit. The first Starship had a primary goal of testing the launch systems and clearing the tower. Everythi9ng else was "stretch targets". The second launch had a stated goal of reaching for a successful hot-stage separation, everything following were stretch goals. The next launch will probably have a primary goal of getting one or both into a landing position, although I have no doubt they will still be "landing" over water for safety reasons, just as they did with Falcon when it was still in testing.
"The EU institutional market can’t fill more than 5 or 6 slots per year."
There are commercial European requirements for launch services too. Depending on who they are and what they are launching, they may not be constrained to the cheapest provider, currently SpaceX. I'm not sure if that would be enough for Ariane to break even or remain a gov funded institution though.
"Seeing all the engines lit and some spectacular shock diamonds was pretty cool"
As was the shutdown sequence of the booster engines. Very pretty. Will this become a trademark "SpaceX Star", like the "Korolev Cross"?
"but I imagine the seperation's more stressful than a Musk divorce"
I've heard it said that is (at least part of) the reason for the sequenced engine shutdowns on the booster. It reduces the "shock" on the entire system, especially the hydraulic shock on the fuel tanks and pumps/pipes etc going from very high acceleration to almost none over a longer time period.
"I thought the point was to have a number of companies producing space ships... How are the others doing?"
iSpace Completes China’s First Reusable Rocket Test
Chen Chuanren November 06, 2023
Video here.
Ok, ok, I know that's not what you meant :-)
I'm a little surprised that the El Reg Space Desk hasn't reported on the Chinese company iSpace foray into landing a first stage rocket yet,
Looks like they are past the stage of SpaceX Grasshopper and at about an "early stage Blue Origin " level so far. I'd have thought that would have been major headlines, but seems to be very low key if not being ignored completely. It does look very interesting and promising though and I'm not finding anything about their failures and explosions :-)
Similar at one of our clients. Everyone has a laptop and in the office they use it plugged into the desk screen which in turn has mouse and keyboard. Some people prefer the full desktop keyboard, others are so used to the laptop they prefer that one and most will have the laptop open for the extra screen space. So keyboard/trackpad/mouse issues of the unused kit being accidentality pressed by $something used to be a common issue until everyone had suffered it at least once and learned the lesson :-)
Depending on the time period, it's possible they meant the on screen menu controlled by the IR remote and were trying to lead you into a settings menu. I'm assuming you aren't that daft though and maybe they were talking about a different, more high end model with a similar model number, hence the communications error.
"*sigh* if only we could do that with computers."
In the CP/M and DOS days of monochrome, text-only desktops, that's how it work in most places. Nowadays it's just assumed that "everyone knows how to work a computer/printer/copier". Except we are still in (the end of?) the transition period where not all adults used computers at school or even in their jobs until they got promoted into office/management roles. And even then, we may be at the beginning of the transition period where keyboards and mice may become superfluous anachronisms only "old people" use.
Never heard it called NSDE in all my 45+ years in the IT field, at least not here in the UK, so err, thanks for that, even if I no longer need it :-)
ISTR it was None System Disk or Disk Error. Maybe it depended on the version of BIOS or DOS? Also ISTR, that error was produced by the code in the boot sector of the disk too.
It was all a long time ago and I can't remember when I last used a floppy disk on a PC :-)
"Clean the contacts at both ends with a pencil eraser."
I wonder what we would use in a modern office? Pen and paper is pretty rare, let alone pencils with a rubber[*] on the end being almost as rare as an actual stand-alone rubber!
AKA an eraser in some versions of English :-)
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