Jobs personally spearheaded NeXT with a small group of engineers. He knew exactly what he was doing. I remember him talking about NeXTStep and he openly boasted about its portability and high degree of hardware abstraction. He tried to sell this idea to other software companies but no one bit. It is no coincidence that OSX is so portable. It is by design.

You seem to imply that if someone is not a coding ninja, then they have nothing to contribute to software. I strongly disagree with this. Job's strength was that he saw the broad arcs of software design. He realized that simplicity and cleanness was key to good software, to maintainable software, to portable software. He realized that if software was not written properly at its earliest stages, it would remain inherently flawed no matter how much it was maintained.

It is no coincidence that Jobs made his best software when he was working with a small team of engineers. This is how he created NeXT. And this is how he created the original iPhone.

As for your comment on NeXT, well it became OSX, so it was in the end extremely successful. And another little thing came of of NeXT workstations. Tim Berners Lee first implemented hypertext on a NeXT workstation...that was the beginning of the web as we know it today. If you had every used an NeXT workstation (as I did), you would realize that the cleanness and elegance of the OS likely had a lot to do with Tim Berner Lee's invention. There was simply nothing like it at the time.

Grrrrrr...stupid accidental touchpad click wipes out part of my post. To continue ...fastest accelerating mass produced four door sedan ever. Doesn't sound like an Aztek to me.

Actually I have an actual counterexample to your assertion. Elon Musk is as close to an engineer CEO as you can get. As head of Tesla, they have produced the Model S, which is fairly widey acknowledged as a triumph of engineering. Its high end model goes from 0 to 60mph in 3.2 seconds and is the fastest accelerating mass produced fo

And yet, I think the problem is still there, in spite of the work MBA's have done on their "branding". Exhibit (A) is Tim Cook with corroborating evidence to be found in TFA.

Alas. I didn't have time to check the name and now my entire argument is refuted. Oh wait.

A short history on JOHN Sculley can be found here. Of note:

Sculley did not have technical expertise. He pivotal strategic technical decisions such as described above without the expertise to do so. He didn't understand that using a mature UNIX foundation would allow his company to port the operating system (relatively) easily and quickly from one processor to another. This is exactly what Jobs did. It allowed him to (relatively) smoothly port OSX from PowerPC to Intel to ARM. In my opinion, this was Job's most important technical decision and it is what allowed Apple to become successful again.

I have heard they have already put engines through 40 or more simulated launch cycles. These engines were designed to be reliable. To a certain extent, having tested an engine through previous launches might imply more reliability, at least up to a certain point. In any case, if they recover the rocket, they will be able to analyze how the launch has affected the structure and systems.

These rockets do not use hydrogen, and thus do not have the problems of embrittlement that the shuttle engines had. I suspect one of the bigger problems will be coking from using kerosine fuel, but I also suspect that can be mitigated using solvents to clean the fuel systems.

More evidence for my hypothesis that MBA managers are driving the American economy into the ground. Contrast him with Steve Jobs who was not an MBA. He brought the company back from the edge, after being destroyed by another MBA, Jim Sculley.

If you want a strong perspective against MBA's, I recommend reading John Ralston Saul's "The Unconscious Civilization" . Here is part of a summary of his arguments against MBA's:

Contrast this with real innovators like Elon Musk, who has created disruptive companies in four separate sectors (banking, transportation, space launching, and energy production). Please note that he is NOT an MBA and openly says that he disagrees with their methods.

Just because others do it doesn't make it right. Just because organizations like Rockefeller's have purchased and corrupted our political system doesn't make it right. Just because similar organizations have purchased most of the media and broadcast the subtle propaganda that you have so faithfully reproduced doesn't make it right. Rockefeller illegally used his dominant market position to supress actual competition. That you so casually defend such reprehensible behavior speaks more to the effectiveness of the propaganda environment we live in than to the actual strength of any argument you are presenting. Your comment is basically an admission of your own slavery.

What are "robber barons" anyways? John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil is an excellent example of one. He gained an early lead in the oil industry. Then he used some rather extreme tactics to preserve his lead, none of which benefited consumers. For one, he bought up rail lines surrounding his competitors, and used this ownership to deny his competitors the ability to transport their oil. Those competitors responded by packing their oil in barrels which could then be loaded onto multiple means of conveyance (i.e. trucks). This is why oil is still measured in "barrels". Rockefeller responded by attempting to control the market on the compound that was used to seal the barrels from leaking. The government eventually responded by breaking up Standard Oil into many different companies.

The above doesn't sound like Space X under Elon Musk. Space X is the plucky newcomer disrupting the existing American launch contractor United Launch Alliance (ULA) and its cosy relationship with the US military. If anything, ULA, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing fall under the moniker of "Robber Baron". This writer sounds like a troll acting in the best interests of the decaying American launch industry.

I prefer to say that g is gravitational field strength in N/kg. It is equal to the acceleration of a free falling object, but I think it is clearer to think of it as the number of newtons of gravitational force one gets per kg in the field. Of course, 1N/kg is the same as 1m/s^2.

There are two approaches to radiation tolerant computing. One is to make the processors hardened to radiation. These processors are usually slower, and use an architecture with fewer knowledgable computer programmers. This seems to be the approach on Orion.

In contrast, the Space X Dragon Capsule uses multiple processors operating simultaneously to create a fault tolerant system. To quote:

An advantage of this is that the processors are far faster. There are also many more trained programmers available for these more current architectures. Such systems arguably have similar (or better?) radiation tolerance to the older hardened processors.

Read my post. Hydrogen as energy transmission is a dead end physics wise. Use the electrical grid and get 90%+ effiency, or use hydrogen and lose most of your energy. Electrolyzing water is, and always will be very inefficient. It will not, cannot reach the efficiency of the grid.

This is why I think electric vehicles have an advantage...you can put the charging station at your residence. All it needs is a wire. The infrastructure is already there, and can be expanded with relatively little expense. I can imagine charging stations everywhere one parks one's car. We all park our cars at some point, so we will all be able to charge our battery cars enough to make them usable, especially if the charging stations are high capacity.

In addition I think that in terms of space and expense, the potential power output of batteries is far larger than for fuel cells. I picture fuel cells as being finicky and complicated. If I am wrong, please correct me. However I have trouble imagining 800hp output (like the latest Tesla) from a fuel cell. My suspicion is that such a powerful fuel cell would be a Rube Goldberg machine.

Finally, and I think this is the real nail in the coffin for hydrogen as an energy source, is energy efficiency. Creating hydrogen from water, or from whatever other source you have takes a fairly large amount of energy. Let's say we take our hydrogen from water. How much of that input energy will actually make it to the fuel in terms of chemical potential energy? Some of the energy will be put into the O2 bond, which will not be transferred as fuel. Some (most) of the energy will be lost as thermal energy. Only a relatively small amount of the input energy will make it into the fuel. I would be surprised if it was even 20%, and I suspect it is less.

Compare this with gas turbine generators, that can have efficiencies well over 50%. So, you use your natural gas to generate electricity, in which you lose half of your energy already. Now you have a choice: you can use that electrical energy to electrolize water and lose 80% or more of that remaining energy. Or you can use the electrical grid to transfer the electricity directly to the car and lose only about 5% of the energy to the electrical grid.

The laws of thermodynamics are against the use of hydrogen is a fuel. Unless we can find a way of electrolyzing water that has an efficiency equivalent to the electrical grid (more than 90% - and such a process would violate the laws of thermodynamics), hydrogen as a fuel is an obvious dead end. If only the people who ran these companies knew a little bit of physics. I'll take a BSc in Physics any day over an MBA.

Here is a twitter discussion with Musk and Carmak that gives some reasons for using the fins. To quote:

My suspicion is that there will be a degree of unpredictability for this flight as they refine the control characteristics of these fins. Thus Musk was quoted as saying that the success probability was 50/50 for this landing.