Well, big chunks of the US aerospace industry (i.e., their audience) still use English units. You don't see this in formal publications as much as you used to, but it's still fairly common.

Well, it's an analogy. Generally, in the spacecraft case, the plug is just pulled, for a bunch of different reasons (which is why it doesn't happen all that often). In this case, L'Garde was trying to reuse a bunch of technology they developed for previous inflatable structures in space. This led to the sail inflation mechanism weighing more than the Sunjammer itself, which is not desirable, and likely not what you would do if you started from scratch. No new contractor would want to come in and try and make the L'Garde proprietary technology work, and NASA is well aware of that. So, there will be sails flown relatively soon, but they won't look like L'Garde's Sunjammer.

Oh, yes. FAME (to pick my previous example) absolutely deserved to be canceled. It hurt some people I have real respect for, but there it is. I am sure the current situation is pretty similar. (This is analogous to firing a contractor when they are halfway finished building an addition to your house - it is so messy and represents such a real loss of money, and also such a loss of face, that it is almost never done without some real provocation.)

It's worse than that. There are slugs, pounds and poundals, and (IMHO) anyone who doesn't immediately convert these units to MKS is just being silly.

Sunjammer was to have a total surface area of ~ 1,200 square metres, so its thrust at 1 AU would have been 2 x 1361 W / m^2 x 1200 / c ~ 0.01 Newtons (assuming the sail had a near perfect reflectivity). On the surface of the Earth, that thrust would be generated by a weight of 0.01 / 9.8 ~ 1 gm, or ~ 0.002 pounds.

It's not even really true; it's just bamboozlement for people who want to be bamboozled. If you listen to the actual fracking interview, he says that his goals, on this particular trip to the Middle East include outreach to the Muslim world, including reminding them in their role in the development of science. That is a non-surprising goal for an official trip to a particular region. I have a news flash - at the recent IAC meeting, he congratulated the Indians on the initial success of their MOM Mars mission. I suppose the Telegraph will take offense of that too.

I have met Mr. Bolden several times, and had the opportunity to see him in action. He is an excellent NASA administrator who is seriously focused on "boots on Mars," not self-esteem initiatives.

ASRock tends to be better than ASUS. If we went beige box route, I could drop the price so far as to be laughable, even using some premium stuff like SuperMicro motherboards.

How about we run top of the line mac pro right now, since it's still their absolute top-of-the-line computer. I'm at $9,599 maxed out. 64GB RAM But only 1833MHz DDR3 (My motherboard was 2133 DDR4.) The Apple RAM costs $1200. I can get that same amount for $900.

On the GPU side, yes those are server cards, but that is still PCI-Express, and again, a single one equals dual W9000s. At 2/3 the price, and roughly 2/3 the power consumption. Throwing two of those in is a no-brainer and you're still saving a couple thousand, easily.

Thunderbolt 2 vs Thunderbolt - well, the only thing that needs that kind of bandwidth is the monitor, for now. But HDMI can do that off one of my GPUs, so I wouldn't even worry about that. It's almost useless, and I prefer dedicated peripherals anyways.

Apple charges too much of a premium, period. Even with the change to a beige EE-ATX box (which is still not that expesive) and flip over to a good SuperMicro board for $500 that can support 1.5TB ECC DDR4 Memory, comes with 4 gigabit ethernet ports, and more good stuff, I'm still sitting well under Apple's price.

Apple just costs too much. I could build one of these for workstation/OpenCL stuff and still have enough money to build a lesser one for gaming, for the same cost, and a whole lot more power together.

A vote of no confidence. I remember when NASA canceled the USNO FAME satellite - they said it was over the budget, but really it was over the management team. I expect that there is something similar here - fortunately, there is still NASA Marshall's Solar Scout, which is much smaller and cheaper than the Sunjammer.

"I've used a SBLive in Linux, and had low latency audio working perfectly well."

Yea, after you did what, install the kX driverset which comes with an ASIO driver? (I helped design that.)

"You still do not understand what ALSA or ASIO are."

Given the statement directly above, you might wish to think again on that.

"ALSA can give as low a latency as the hardware is capable of."

Since when? I'm still getting 1/4 second latency using ALSA trying to play Wolf:ET. That's just on playback.

"ALSA is the lowest level of the sound stack, so talking to it directly gives the lowest latency. Pulseaudio runs on top of ALSA, as do all sound servers on Linux."

I see you've never heard of OSS. It sure as fuck doesn't talk to ALSA at all.

"Most likely, you were using direct analog passthrough within the sound card in XP, and software monitoring in Linux. Both paths are also possible in ALSA on Linux."

Nope. SBLive does not have a direct analog pass-through (at least this revision, with the additional DRM restricting the 'What U Hear' option) This is simply testable across several OSes - XP/2K give no lag. Vista and 7 introduce about ~150ms lag. OSS gets me ~20ms latency. ALSA gets me ~50. Pulseaudio can't even handle it and clips the fuck out of my line-in.

"I am a professional audio engineer with 25 years of experience, so these things do matter to me."

I can't tell. Bet you're the type that compressor-limits the fuck out of everything, too.

"just plain kW to refer to energy"

Yea, that better be a fail grade because the SI unit of energy is the joule.

That's why kW is understood to include hour. Because using kW to refer to energy is stupid as the SI unit is the joule.

"what layer of abstraction comes to rescue then?"

The base coding languages, which are abstractions of the machine language. Those are the only libraries that should be installed, in the first place. Everything else should reference those.

I remember arguing with people here on Slashdot long ago that BattleTech never had an animated series.

I bet those people still hold that belief. Yet they'll never know the Jade Falcon.

"It doesn't make sense to say 'Pulseaudio can't do ASIO'."

I can tell you've never had a SBLive card under Linux.

Also, ALSA is laggy as shit, hence why I'll still install ASIO drivers for a sound card if possible.

Don't believe me? Go try it for yourself. Un-mute your line-in, plug in a guitar. Try to keep steady timing with ~90ms latency.

Even Windows XP's non-ASIO stuff would give me instantaneous feedback if I simply un-muted the line-in.

" I have single sided deafness and can never expereince stereo. Nobody, even doctors or audiologists, ever really explained what I am missing out on."

Stereo Harmonics, binaural beats, various harmonies between notes when played in separate channels (easier to perceive in stereo than in combined mono.)

Lots of stuff you're missing out on.

"It's about high background noise environments like on airplanes or in offices."

I'm sorry, those are nowhere near high background noise environments.

Here, let me show you what a high background noise environment is like. This is from my old job as an LCD panel repair tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I suggest you turn your speakers down 'lest you get them blown.

And that's not including the noise from the forklifts outside of the clean room, semi truck pulling in for loading, etc.

"Actually, the high-end Mac Pro is currently cheaper [extremetech.com]."

It's pretty obvious these guys never heard of Pricewatch.com - I just built their same $10,000 computer for less (and it's still selling for that price on Apple's website.)

Their quoted price on the case was ~$160 on newegg. $130 on pricewatch (from TigerDirect, everyone else is still pushing $160 or higher)

Again, $160 for the PSU. Same PSU - $130 (via tigerdirect.)

$2750 for the CPU. $2600 (and again from TigerDirect.)

I'm already a couple hundred bucks cheaper. We haven't even gotten to motherboard, RAM, GPUs, or Storage or OS license, yet.

On to the motherboard. $280 for a mobo that only supports 32GB Non-ECC and no thunderbolt? Found a better ASRock mobo for $260 that can do 64GB ECC DDR4 (The X99M Extreme 4) AND IT HAS THUNDERBOLT, plus more connectors, and is STILL mATX. (Again, Tigerdirect via pricewatch advertising)

$3400 each ($6800 total) for the dual FirePro W9000s? A SINGLE S10000 OUTPERFORMS and costs ONLY $2300, but we want exact hardware so let's drop TWO in for the fuck of it. (found on Google Shopping) So we're at $4600 on the GPU side.

Just the GPU price discrepancy alone DESTROYED extremetech's price argument. Do I need to keep going?

Windows machines, on a hardware-for-hardware basis, have ALWAYS been lower-cost than Apple's equipment. There are tons of images floating around doing comparisons over the years - Windows machines always come out at LEAST 10% cheaper, and quite often upwards of 50% cheaper for the same hardware options.