Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I Am an Astrophysicist (but you do not salute m (Score 1) 234

agree 100%. It worked for me. I learned physics and astronomy OTJ. I already had the technical skills. Besides the skills mentioned in the parent post, real-time programming and controls can get you into the other end of the process, sensors, and their associated control and data acquisition systems. In addition to the places mentioned above, many universities, national labs and FFRDCs have space science programs. Also, while its totally obvious, but nobody else has mentioned it, there's NASA and its contractors. If you have the skills and you really want to do this you can. You need to use your imagination, keep your eyes and ears open and be willing to relocate.

Comment Re:Screw DARPA, give it to NASA (Score 1) 10

There has been a satellite servicing project at NASA/Goddard for about, uh, 3 decades. While for most of its existence it was focused on servicing performed by astronauts, there has always been some work going on in robotic servicing. One of the recent accomplishments was a robotic refueling demonstration

http://ssco.gsfc.nasa.gov/robo...

The only time the robotic effort was funded it a relatively high level was during the space station freedom era, and that only lasted for a couple of years before congress pulled the plug. To make matters worse, most of the money that was appropriated went to Martin-Marietta for concept studies

http://www.astronautix.com/cra...

Comment Re:Twas Ever Thus (Score 2) 120

Indeed. Back in the '80s when I worked for a Corporation that made Digital Equipment, we had an group that purchased our competitors equipment, evaluated it against our products in the same categories, and published a document called the Competitive Handbook. Outside of our financial information, the Competitive Handbook was one of our most closely protected documents.

Comment Re:Ithaco Space Systems made the wheels that faile (Score 5, Informative) 55

Is this: "crappy company delivers badly on contracts" or "company specializes in class of components that have a relatively high failure rate"?

While RWs are way more complex than you would probably guess and have a history of failures across the industry, I still think in this case it is the former rather than the latter. After it started looking looking like there were systemic problems with Ithaco wheels, we developed our own wheels in-house. They haven't been perfect but there have been no mission ending problems with ours (so far; knocking on wood etc), unlike the Ithaco wheels.

Comment Re:Was FORTRAN really that hard? (Score 1) 224

It wasn't so much that BASIC was all that much simpler than FORTRAN. Rather that to run a FORTRAN program required mastering not just a little FORTRAN, but also JCL (or the UNIVAC equivalent) and the keypunch. Using BASIC was an interactive experience. The job control and editing functions (as primitive as they were) were built into the language. // EXEC VSF2CG //FORT.SYSIN DD *

Comment Re:About time! (Score 1) 306

no argument about the basic evilness of comcast, but their core network engineers are really, really good.

I'm running V6 at home thru a tunnel and the only major sites that I see supporting V6 are facebook and google.

What this says to me is that the really big players have already gone to V6 out of need, as you pointed out about comcast.

Comment Re:Remember when... (Score 4, Informative) 31

GPM is a joint mission with Japan. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has provided the primary science instrument, the Dual frequency Precipitation Radar, and the launch vehicle. This is the same arrangement we had with Japan for GPM's predecessor, TRMM, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. Besides the primary goal of better understanding the processes that drive our planet's weather there is the secondary goal of fostering international scientific cooperation.

Please do not confuse launch services with space exploration. NASA hasn't directly been in the commercial launch service since the dawn of the space age was over. Commercial satellite operators contract directly with commercial launch providers such as ULA, Orbital, Space-X, Arianespace or ILS.

I am in complete agreement with your point about lack of political support for space science and exploration. While there has been no real support for space exploration for decades, the past decade has seen a real drop in actual support (that is, money) for space science. I suspect that is true for science in general, but space is my business.

Comment Re:LinkSys (Cisco) sucks Microsoft balls (Score 1) 189

Serious question - which open firmware is the best choice for current router hardware? years ago, I put DD-WRT on my WRT54g (v2.0) and it worked great, but there's been a lot of forking since then and its not clear at all to me which firmware is the best choice for modern open friendly hardware like the boxes from ASUS.

Comment Re: Secure password vs keylogger. (Score 4, Insightful) 174

A "secure" password does nothing to mitigate keyloggers. The only thing that does is two factor.

I think the comments regarding the password strength were general, and basically the usual Slashdot topic drift.

IMO it's way past time for two factor everywhere. Federating logins makes that much more feasible.

Slashdot Top Deals

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

Working...