Posts by StampedChipmunk

STS comparison

If I remember rightly the main cost incurred in refurbishing the Shuttle was the checking and replacing of the re-entry tiles as they never lasted as long as anyone expected and the slightest failure would prove catastrophic to the vehicle (see STS-107 Columbia - though the damage to the tiles was caused in orbit).

Oh, and there were a lot of them. Over 20,000.

I recall only the OMS and the Main engines needed to removed, stripped and refurbished.The OMS rockets were built in modules and could be replaced quickly.

Rocketdyne built 45 RS-25 engines and only had one in mission failure throughout the lifetime of the shuttle. Considering they were gimbal-mounted and throttleable that's astounding. Anyway even with the full fleet of four orbiters full built, there would be 33 engines either being refurbished, in the test phase or certified ready-to-fly.

If it wasn't for those tiles, the shuttle turn-around could probably been much faster. But it's not really fair to say components being reusable isn't effective, or safe, or cheap. As Killing_Time says, there's plenty of data around on the RS-25 project - 405 individual engine missions to be exact.

The main things that killed the shuttle as a resuable space truck was that its hand-gnawingly expensive to get humans into space, meaning that each shuttle launch was $500m+, and that the complete system simply didn't go high enough, or carry enough payload, to make the economics work.

Falcon 9, however, can heft a payload to much the same altitude as the Shuttle did, and bring the vast majority of its lifting ability back to earth safely for refurbishment. The 9 engines on Stage 1 are largely identical to the single engine on Stage 2 so the entire system uses one engine design (Shuttle had two, Apollo had four). A lot of the control hardware is off-the-shelf gear running open source software. All of this brings down the cost-per-launch and the cost-per-kilo to launch.

Dragon support launches for the ISS cost Nasa $133m each under a fixed price contract. Falcon 9 launches are currently $69.2m. If SpaceX can reuse large parts of that first stage, perhaps $30m a launch is achieveable - that is extraordinarily cheap.

If Bezos gets his New Shepherd to the same level, competition will drive the commercial unmanned prices down. If the Falcon Heavy can shift twice the payload to twice the height that 9 can, that'll drive the prices down. if the Dragon Crew capsule gets approval that puts SpaceX in commercial competition with RKK “Energiya” (Soyuz) which will bring the manned launch prices down.

This is the start of something great.

Where would the interview be held?

Point a. In the Ecuadorean Embassy? Can't imagine they'd be too keen about having a load of Swedish rozzers come and visit.

Point b. How about the nearest Regus then? Oh, hang on, if the albino dingbat steps a foot outside the embassy, the British rozzers will have him for skipping bail.

Ok then, how about we set up a Swedish court in the UK solely for the chance to charge the little twerp? Where exactly? In the Embassy? I can't see that happening (c.f. point a. above).

Ok then, we'll set it up someplace else.

Erm.. no, (c.f. point b. above)

Assange, like him or loathe him (and personally I think he's a narcissist with a dangerous amount of influential friends), is in a pickle of entirely his own making. He's consistently flouted laws and given a big f-you to social convention across a wide range of states and countries, while evangelising about freedom of speech and encouraging people to spill national secrets. He then rides on the glory of these damaging revelations while letting the misled leakers suffer the consequences of their actions without a shred of remorse or regret (c.f. Bradley Manning). That arrogance has now led him to his current situation - cornered. Where everybody can quietly forget about him. Good.

Doesn't matter about Sweden...

It no longer matters about Sweden, or whether or not he'll be deported to the US or whether there's a case the actually be answered in Sweden OR in the US.

The moment he broke his bail restrictions and fled to the Ecuadorean embassy, he broke British Law. There is no doubt about this, no questions raised about he said/she said, no questionable documents, he broke British Law.

The moment he steps outside the embassy, Plod will (hopefully) bang him up so that he can face those charges. Then it's up to Sweden and the US to demand extradition from Britain through the usual channels, and they would have to make their cases to the British and (dependant on appeals) European courts.

But St. Julian will first have to answer charges of skipping bail here in the UK. There may even be a civil suit or two from the people who fronted his bail money to consider as well...

Am I missing something here?

The Swedes can't interview him in London because, er... he's in the Ecuadorean embassy which, to all intents and purposes, is a little chunk of Ecuador. If Assange doesn't want to speak to the Swedes (and the fact that he fled Sweden when they asked him to talk to them implies that he doesn't) then they can't force him to speak to them, at the very least the Ecuadoreans will simply deny any Swedes access to their embassy or their house guest.

Assange won't leave the Embassy because the moment he steps outside he will be, quite rightly, arrested for breaching the UK bail conditions. I'm sure some of the Liberal numpties who put up his bail would also like to have him in civil court to attempt to get some of their money back so expect some civil supoenas to be processed immediately as well.

British police can't go in and get him, unless they order the closing of the Ecuadorean embassy, which they're not going to do, but they also can't just let the little twat walk out of the country, so have to maintain a vigil for the moment the white-haired muppet leaves the Embassy's 'protection' while enduring the continued presence of their fugitive on Russia Today! Fancy letting someone who shows that much respect to your country's laws, reputation and society waltz off to the rainforest - Nope, neither does any home secretary.

So it's nothing to do with lazy Swedes, or incompetent Met police, but everything to do with a self-righteous, self-important asshole who thinks that laws do not apply to him, and a country that is pissed off with the western world seeing an opportunity to willy-wave on the global stage versus the rest of the world (less the Guardian readership) saying 'No, you are NOT going to get away with this. This kind of behaviour is an attack on the very bedrock on which our societies are built'.

I suspect this will go on for a long time, and may well require a change of government in Ecuador to resolve the matter.

Content is the key

The other week I turned 40 and my glorious missus booked out a screen at our local Cineworld as a surprise (lots of friends were there, all lovely). The film we saw was Back to the Future - now *gasp* nearly 30 years old. It was played off blu-ray through the digital projector.

It looked glorious. It sounded brilliant. We'd all seen it before but we still cheered when Biff got punched, when Marty played guitar and we all whooped at "1.21 Jigowatts!"

But here's the thing - it's a great movie. It's great on the TV, it's great on the ipad, but it's freakin' awesome on the big screen with thundering sound.

Most current movies aren't. Being fair to Marvel their films do tend to concentrate on the plot and characters more than most, but it still a bloke in tights thumping another bloke in tights. The only difference from film to film is the colour of the tights.

It seems as though the creativity has been leached out of the majority of cinema production. Where producers are confident to go with less mainstream (currently superhero) productions and provide a decent budget good films are still made - Ron Howard's Rush and Skyfall, for example. High quality scripts backed up with fine technique, but these aren't the blockbusters we all crammed into the Odeon to see when we were younger. Where's this generation's Indiana Jones? or ET? or Gremlins, or Explorers, or Goonies?

Mark Kermode once ranted that every blockbuster makes money through tie-ins and advertising and DVDs and box office, so why not make a good one? Back to the Future went through hundreds of rewrites before the script was deemed okay to shoot, and even then it went through dozens of iterations, including swapping out the lead actor!

Now things are lazy, people don't seem to bother.

So why should I bother to pay £7.50 to be disappointed?

All the Next gen games are ... average IMO

Is it just me or are the current glut of games more about tech projects than, you know, games?

I have recently bought Wolfenstein: The New Order and Watch Dogs. Guess which one plays better? Wolfenstein. Guess which one has more innovation? Wolfenstein. Guess which one (seriously now) is the more grown up? Wolfenstein.

Watch Dogs is GTA V with half the ambition, 100th of the cast list, poor visuals, some seriously dodgy car physics and one new innovation that, admittedly, is incorporated everywhere and well. Wolfenstein is an FPS blaster with carefully integrated stealth and cover play to the core game mechanic of ferocious blasting, it has a better script, is actually extremely grown up for a game that mechanised Nazi dogs in it (especially in the way it handles sex), better voice acting, better use of (excellent) music and much better location and character design/animation.

Wolfenstein takes an aging genre, one that has been abused over the past few years, and shakes it up a bit, polishes the core mechanics, seamlessly adds a handful of new features, shamelessly bringing back the great bits we all loved from the past, and applies a decent, well produced story with a distinct production design. On the surface it's a retro-blastathon, but it's much more than that.

Watch Dogs takes a single interesting mechanic, and reduces it to a single button press, then throws it into an open world sandbox where most of the stuff you can do, you don't want to. Who thought it was a good idea to put "Augmented Reality Games" into a video game which, by its very nature isn't real? Why would I want to play poker in a video game where I can nick money from any character on the street with a button press and an ATM. Why is my character such a noble person when I've just made him happily gun down a few hundred pedestrians on a ferry?

So why is Watch Dogs the poster child for the next gen? Because it's an impressive technical achivement to get all of these different systems to work together effectively and well.

But Wolfenstein is the better game.

BSkyB = RyanAir of Telcos

Comixology way better than Kindle... in some ways

Comixology allows for High def files, noticably better visual quality than Kindle does.

Kindle, however, is a bit easier to find known titles. Comixology is easier if you are a real comics geek (for example, some comics are issued by an imprint of a publisher, such as TopCow/Impact), but if you don't know this, you're adrift. Also some of the catagorisation is a bit muddled, and in some cases issues are completely missing! Often books are listed as being 'Vol 2' but the same title, which means your library gets a bit messy.

However since buying a couple of Kindle comic books, my Amazon recommendations list has become absolutely screwed, totally overloaded with comic books, most of which I have no interest in reading. It seems Amazon thinks all comic books are the same... *sigh* And I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm missing out on some regular books...

Anyway, reading comixology titles on my Xperia Tablet is an absolute joy... hope amazon don't go and stuff it up now...

Peak Power PC?

IMO the growth in Tablets is simply because the chips that power our PCs have stagnated and there isn't the driver to upgrade the PC anymore.

Example I have a desktop gaming machine - an Intel Core 2 Quad with 8Gb of RAM. The only upgrade it's received in years is a new graphics card to get me access to DX11. It is now five years old and runs everything absolutely fine (Win7).

Thing is I don't need to change the machine. It's not like Photoshop won't run on it, I can play the latest games at pretty much full whack, MS Office, Email everything all fine.

I bought a tablet to play some games on, watch some TV on and read some books on. I had the budget to buy one because I didn't need to change the PC every four years to keep up with the latest software demands. It's a gimmick, a gizmo, something fun to play around with, but it is highly unlikely to ever replace my desktop machines.

Why? Primarily the interface. Touch is not a decent interface for the same reason it hasn't taken over the world before (it has been around since the 50s after all) - YOU HAVE TO BLOCK PART OF THE DISPLAY TO INTERACT WITH IT. Your thumb has to press the virtual button on the screen, thereby obscuring that button as you do so. This means that, by definition, touch interfaces must be simpler than mouse-based versions.

I'm hugely impressed by some of the interfaces employed by a great many apps, and UI nightmares such as Photoshop could do well to learn the lessons of the hidden interfaces you see on a great many apps - but that does not mean they are a decent substitute.

The fact that a great many Bluetooth or clip-on keyboards are now available for tablets implies there is a consumer demand for IO techniques that do not use up visual real estate.

Then there is the size - 10" is about as big a size the tablet market can take. I run a macbook through a 27" monitor. My Windows desktop runs three 24" monitors. I don't see the 24" tablet being a sales champion, do you?

Tablets are excellent for the consumption of media and for portability with limited production tools. They have, quite rightly, killed off the tiny laptop and netbook. I suspect the Ultrabook market will probably succumb in the future too. They excel at portability and, with the application of a well designed app or two, can be a superb business or office tool - for example customer surveys.

But the creation of that app, the development of the graphics, the testing of the design, the writing of the code, and the employment of the server that hosts the data collected will all be done by desktop-based machines.

I see tablets as being the 21st century dumb terminal - great for getting access to centrally held information. The desktop PC will be around for a long while yet... trouble is there is no need to buy a new one...

Fencesitter

Last generation I waited a while then bought a PS3 which I ran for about a year and sold on simply due to the lack of decent games for it (The last game I bought was the first Uncharted and that was the start of the second generation of games for the console which has seen a steady increase in quality ever since). I'd had enough at that point and moved to the Xbox Elite which came with all the things the Xbox should have come with when released (Hard disk, HDMI etc) which I have used ever since and been very happy with.

My wife has no interest in gaming, so my Xbox lives in the office alongside the PC. There will never be a console in our lounge.

At a stroke the XBox One has lost a sale. I've been gaming all my life, I started with an Atari FFS, I tend to run one console at a time and I have always had a personal computer in addition (Amstrad, Amiga, Windows PC). All the 'centre of the home' stuff is of no interest. If I could use it as a PVR, possibly, and I presume it'll still media centre extend as before, but it would be better for me if it could just access my NAS boxes (where my recorded TV and DVD collection is stored) directly rather than requiring me to have a Windows PC switched on and doing nothing.

My biggest problem is with having a mandatory Kinect connection. I don't want a camera that can be activated remotely in my house. I don't want an always-on console so my mother can call me on Skype any time she fancies. I want to be able to swear and curse in my own house without the fear of being 'blacklisted' by Microsoft and lose access (which I pay for) to some games. I'm not going to use the Kinect, my office isn't big enough to dance around in and, any way, I'm not a twelve year old girl. I don't play online that much and, if I did, I'd be using my headset as the racket from the speakers would be annoying to anyone else in the house.

If I could use my headset, that is. I'm annoyed that none of my existing peripherals will work with the Xbox One, and there is no option of an adaptor being available. Apparently wired peripherals will work, but MS have had a policy of shifting all their 360 peripherals to wireless for years now - stupid case in point being the Wireless Wheel which had a power supply and a connection the pedal box but was wireless to the Xbox... Basically Microsoft are saying they will support only the oldest peripherals for our last generation box, which is weird. I do get the 'new console, new controllers' paradigm - it is as old as the hills - but typically you can use the previous gen controllers at the start of a new hardware lifecycle until the new controllers with their whizzy new features eventually make an upgrade essential. The Xbox controller could be used on the 360 via USB. Hell my 360 Elite still has the memory card slots fitted (remember them?). The PS1 controller could be used on the PS2. The Dual Shock 2 could be used on the PS3 (with a cable), but this time MS have chosen to prevent this from happening. I'd probably pay £30 quid-odd for an adaptor to use with my wheel to play Forza 5 with for example...

Microsoft seem to have spent their time making the case for upgrading to an XB1 as difficult as possible for existing users. For me, I'm not convinced ... yet. Typically these machines go through one or two evolutions over their lifetime and, historically, the Xbox evolutions have been to add stuff that should have been there from the start (Hard disc, DVD playback software, HDMI output etc). Playstation tend to have the specs pretty well sorted from the off and just make adjustments to reduce the production and sale prices.

However the PS4 launch titles are mostly ... absent at the moment. DriveClub, the next NaughtyDog release, and GT, for example, are all months away and there is nothing outside of the multiplatform releases (Assassin's Creed 4, NFS etc) at the moment.

If someone said I had to buy a new console today, I'd have the PS4. TBH I'm going to sit and wait before buying. I suspect in ten months time both offerings will be mature and easier to weigh up.

Oh dear, tl:dr :(

problem was the subject matter

The film was reviewed as ok, just a little dull.

The problem is that it set Assange up as a hero, some kind of modern day information-based Robin Hood fighting the black-hats for the good of all mankind. Whereas, in my opinion at least, he's a dislikeable, arrogant a$$hole who feels that laws and rules of society are optional.

Oh, and a bail-jumper, too - let's not forget that.

Point of order - it wasn't "the worst film of the year", it just is the worst financial flop of the year. Good movies sometimes fail to make their budget back, crap films often make squillions - the film industry kinda sucks like that...

Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited already exist

... as anyone with a Sony mobile device can tell you. They're not bad, streaming quality is good, Video Unlimited suffers from not having as big a selection as, say, Netflix. Prices are similar to Apple, so you can definitely buy cheaper elsewhere.

However I'm surprised PS4 isn't coming with PS4 equivalent versions of the Sony Mobile apps - Album/PlayMemories, Movies and Walkman ... somehow I suspect it will.

On my Xperia I can have local music/video playing in the appropriate app, or I can tap Devices and select my home DLNA server and stream content form my NAS box. Provided the stream source is in a format the Sony app understands (which can cause frustration) it just starts playing it. I fail to see why Sony wouldn't include this functionality in the PS4. If the PS4 is willing to be my DLNA server, so much the better.

Also what's to stop Netflix from writing a PS4 Netflix program downloadable from PSN? Nothing AFAIK.

Sony smart TVs have tight integration between the Xperia apps and their own software, allowing me to throw content playing on my Xperia to the TV. I don't see any reason why Sony wouldn't put the same technology into the PS4 to offer Xperia users who don't have a Sony TV similar functionality - ultimately they'd love you to have Sony everything so why wouldn't they gear the equipment to do that.

Lack of USB connectivity and a small HD are annoying. HDMI has been the standard video/audio connector for ten years or so I have no problem with that decision. There's any number of adaptors to break and HDMI stream out into DVI and AC3 (for example), both of which can be converted to analogue if you really need them to be run through your SCART plug - good luck with the resolutions though.

No backwards compatibility with existing kit is irritating for previous fans. New adopters won't care.

As for the 300Mb patch - have you used an Xbox 360 recently. Every time I turn it on the bleeding thing seems to be downloading an update. Some are tiny, some are huge. Most seem to add more Sky content to my homepage urging me to pay Rupert Murdoch for his substandard football service and nothing else.

No new

I noticed this about two years ago. If you install the Facebook app on your smartphone it slurps your phone number and adds it to the 'contact information' on the facebook site - along with anything else you have in your phone - email etc.

All you can do to stop it is block your contact information from being shared with anyone else in the privacy settings. Facebook still have access to it on their servers. AFAIK there is no way to stop the app from slurping your number.

In the recent update it now wants the ability to phone premium rate numbers on your device. I'm waiting for the first rogue dialer smartphone app to be seen in the wild. FB are FCKS...

Talk Talk's Homesafe provided by Huwaei...

Oooo I feel safer already </sarcasm>

Why not use the blast plate for the power connection

I may be missing something but why not use the blast plate for the power transfer?

Instead of it being one piece of aluminium, why not have it split electrically in two (perhaps a chunky circuit board with two big pads) and then have two spring loaded copper pads (use biro springs) in the rear of LOHAN that then transfer the power to the heater (with the whole thing being held in the rear of the plane, which makes for easier wiring).

So long as Lohan remains in contact with the blast plate, the power should be transferred. The only difficulty I can see is if Lohan slides away from the blast plate during her ascent, but this would also affect the performance of the rocket motor so may have already been solved... In fact the contact pads may actually help protect Lohan from any lateral buffetting she may receive during the ascent...

S.

Edge 705?

How about a Garmin Edge 705. It has a GPS, a bariometric altimeter and is sealed in a waterproof & dustproof case.

Has a two way USB port on the back and has a set of open APIs available so sites can download and make use of the device's data (though I don't know any more than that). It also is an ANT+ device which the latest generation of Smartphone can communicate over, so that's another possible avenue to explore.

I can vouch for its toughness and reliability as well as its accuracy and long battery life. It also doesn't weight very much and could be easily mounted to the truss...