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Comment Re:dirt cheap rocket launches (Score 1) 169

I'm pretty skeptical of that concept (for geopolitical reasons if nothing else), but yeah, it at least seems possible. Space elevators don't just require the unobtanium cable, but a counterweight made of pure handwavium to avoid energy stored as oscillations in the cable from building up to catastrophic levels over time.

But I do take the idea of robotic asteroid mining in high orbit seriously (at least for fuel, a nickel-iron asteroid is something else), as there's so much ongoing, related, high-budget research happening today for military, industrial, and commercial robotics.

Comment Re: Wow ... (Score 2) 289

It's about when manufacturers go to some cheap knock-off that closely enough matches some other component in the market close enough to get the wrong drivers.

And this doesn't happen by accident. Every component self-identifies in some way during POST, or during Windows plug-and-play scan. Driver INF files list the ID strings to match against. Building a knock-off that identifies itself as the "real" product to avoid driver certification is an old trick, but at least it's understandable why someone would do it. Deliberately building a component that identifies as an existing product, but needs your own drivers? The mind boggles.

Comment Re:dirt cheap rocket launches (Score 2) 169

That's a bizarre way of looking at the problem.

Sure, the fuel cost is a pretty trivial part of rocketry today, though it's more for high orbit. I believe LOX/Hydorgen fuel is about $10K/ton. That may be a NASA markup cost, I suspect it's rather cheaper for the Russians and Chinese, but still this stuff isn't like jet fuel - it's takes a considerable multiple of the energy of the fuel to make the fuel. It'll never be the sub-$1000/ton price of jet fuel.

You need about 60 tons of fuel to get 1 ton of payload into high orbit IIRC (if we're building anything interplanetary, you're paying that fuel cost one way or the other), so just the fuel costs alone (of lifting the "payload fuel") are about $600K/ton conservatively, but maybe half that cost on the cheap.

Current high orbit payload costs are about $18-36M/ton. SpaceX is shooting for 10% of that, and that certainly seems technically possible, but far into the land of diminishing returns. It seems quite fair to call $1M/ton "dirt cheap" (even if we somehow one day reach half that, it's not changing the game much).

So you're still looking at around $1B for each 1000 tons of fuel in high orbit.

ders of magnitude less expensive than the development of an asteroid mining colony.

Who said "colony"? Are a bunch of robots a "colony" now? Have we already "colonized" mars? The tech development from current vehicle automation and manufacturing automation to fully automated mining is of course non-trivial, but it's probably on the order of the several billion it would take to capture an asteroid and lift many tons of robots to high orbit, and there's certainly a market for fully automated mining here on Earth (and better autonomous vehicle programming, and better industrial automation in general).

Comment Re:dirt cheap rocket launches (Score 2) 169

Sorry, it's just never going to be "cheap" to lift thousands of tons of fuel into orbit. Lifting bulk raw materials into high orbit is just silly - the bulk raw materials are already up there, and landing a payload on an asteroid isn't science fiction any more. The robotics would break new ground, but that's a 1-time research costs with immediate commercial benefits.

Comment Re:dirt cheap rocket launches (Score 3, Interesting) 169

We need dirt cheap rocket launches, and the willingness to allow a few sacrifices of lives along the way

I don't think that's really the fastest way - the blocking problem seems to be radiation killing you on the journey. There are risks of the form "20% of the ships won't make it" that people might be willing to take, but barriers of the form "no one can make it alive, or at least not healthy enough to do anything once there" aren't about risk taking.

We need cheap fuel in orbit more than anything else. The ability to send very heavy payloads to Mars would go a long way towards the current blocking issues. I'm not sure "dirt cheap" rocket launches to orbit will ever be cheap enough for this scale. However, dragging a CHON asteroid into orbit and building a robotic fuel processor on it would make fuel quite cheap (and if we can solve the latter problem, the problem of how to move a CHON asteroid is solved too).

This is a low-tech "bigger hammer" solution for everything but the robotics aspect. Viewed as simply a robotics engineering problem, it doesn't seem that far-fetched: automatic mining of a soft surface, and repairs on a refinery that can make usable fuel from messy inputs (doesn't have to be great, high-purity fuel, as we'll have a remarkable quantity of it already in orbit).

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 272

This decision by Google is stupid and sets a bad precedent.

"Precedent" implies this is the first time something like this happened. The trend is quite clear: don't depend on anything offered by Google for your business, as Google will just take it away at a whim. It's one thing to use their service opportunistically: this week they're the best choice, but we could use someone else next week. But to build your business around a Google service shows you're really not paying attention.

Comment Re:Different from Jails? (Score 1) 48

So what we have is an insanely more complicated way to manage your "VM-ish" things

Complicated how? It's the simplest way to manage lightweight containers at scale. It's not about what happens on any one machine (that's a well-solved problem), it's about fleet management in a way that decouples the hardware from the needs or the software, without the overhead of a full OS per container. I don't think it adds much value at the scale of a few machines, maybe not even at a few dozen machines.

Google

YouTube Algorithm Can Decide Your Channel URL Now Belongs To Someone Else 272

An anonymous reader writes: In 2005, blogger Matthew Lush registered "Lush" as his account on the then-nascent YouTube service, receiving www.youtube.com/lush as the URL for his channel. He went on to use this address on his marketing materials and merchandise. Now, YouTube has taken the URL and reassigned it to the Lush cosmetics brand. Google states that an algorithm determined the URL should belong to the cosmetics firm rather than its current owner, and insists that it is not possible to reverse the unrequested change. Although Lush cosmetics has the option of changing away from their newly-received URL and thereby freeing it up for Mr. Lush's use, they state that they have not decided whether they will. Google has offered to pay for some of Mr. Lush's marketing expenses as compensation.

Comment Re:Different from Jails? (Score 2) 48

It's designed to solve a deployment problem, not a security problem. People really like VMs for managing deployments - everything together in one image, no conflicts to resolve, very easy. Images can be shared internally or in an open-source way. Docker gives you that with far less overhead, so if you have a lot of very small "servers", you can cram them together in a VM (just like with jails), but without the security of VMs or jails.

For a single server, jails just seem better, but for managing a fleet, especially in the cloud, Docker has the infrastructure built.

Comment Re:good step, but... (Score 1) 116

Then you should be looking on some audiophile / high definition music sites where people actually understand this rather than a site that also sells plastic spoons.

Sites where you can buy the special green markers for the edges of CDs? And directional speaker cables? Are your interconnects "danceable"? Maybe you didn't pay enough.

Comment Re:Desktops vs Mobile (Score 1) 250

Mine were all generated automagically 10+ years ago by some Hibernate tool

Oh, I agree, if you're just doing simple stuff where you just have some web form that "looks like" the backend storage, without complex logic in between, and no scale concerns, there's little enough difference. You're barely writing any business logic in the first place, so any tool will do, and Java has better frameworks.

In a sense, Java frameworks are a great programming language where they make sense, but they're only tangentially related to Java. Solving complex problems with the raw language, however, is where Java is constantly irritating compared to C#.

Comment Re:Desktops vs Mobile (Score 1) 250

All that crap that you bemoan is just crap that's generated by the IDE

Yes, exactly, that's the problem. The language is so flawed that most of it is written by automation in the IDE. Why not have a language that's what you type in the IDE instead. C# finally, recently, got the idea right with properties that don't need backing fields: no more getters and setters, except where you're doing something more trivial, a great example of boilerplate reduction. List comprehensions that replace for loops with a single line are another great example.

Removing the boilerplate lets you read just the business logic when maintaining the code. The more business logic that fits on one screen, the more maintainable the code.

Comment Re:Desktops vs Mobile (Score 1) 250

Xamarin's whole model is making the GUI layer cross platform (I've only just started, so I may be buying the hype, but that's the point of it). QT is the same - you write against their presentation abstraction, and they present something platform-appropriate on each platform. That said, you may want a differently-behaving UI on tablet vs desktop, but even there a sufficiently clever presentation layer could make that work as well.

Comment Re:Desktops vs Mobile (Score 1) 250

LYNQ is not a cutting edge feature in C# - it's been there many years, and I've maintained very lambda-heavy code.that was already years old. Nothing fancy, it's just so much damn simpler to process lists that way than a foreach loop. Java 8 is still cutting edge, I guess, sadly enough, but Java 8 "streams" add enough boilerplate to list processing that they don't seem worth using over foreach loops - and that's pretty sad.

I often find it takes my three times as many lines of code in Java as in C#, for identical semantics. Lombok helps fix a lot of that, but Java+Lombok is almost a different programming language to read and learn.

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