I think the difference is that the $10k/pound is likely the cost for launching a satellite. The 5000 pounds that NASA is launching is inside a pressurized container (according to Wikipedia, the dry mass of a Dragon is roughly 9300 pounds) so the total mass that NASA is paying for is probably closer to 15,000 pounds per launch. Plus they're getting back about 3500 pounds from orbit, which is also good because it allows for return of experiments (Soyuz can return a little, but not anywhere near that much). Also, I seem to remember that the $10k/pound figure was for the Space Shuttle, not Falcon and that article probably hasn't been updated in awhile.

In the end, by the time you include the various payload prep and recovery services, NASA is probably getting quite a good deal from SpaceX. The reverse is also true since NASA signing the contract gave other SpaceX customers confidence in their ability to get the job done and gave SpaceX an assured funding source to continue development. These are all good things!

It gets even more "fun" if you're trying to netboot since you never get to see any of the output. When I whined about this problem on Slashdot before, someone suggested adding a parameter to drop to a shell. Which is great, only then systemd didn't get far enough to actually *hit* the problem so I could debug it. So then I tried the flag to systemd that is supposed to get it to tell you what order stuff starts in, but it won't let you run that as root.... Googling got me nowhere. Eventually, I discovered that DBus (another solution in search of a problem, IMO) wasn't functioning correctly because somehow the DHCP server had the wrong MAC address for the host so the network didn't come up right (why isn't DBus talking over 127.0.0.1!!??!).

In short, systemd has me looking into how quickly I can switch to NetBSD. Although I should investigate Slackware as well.

In the article it barely mentions the issue that causes the 6 figures of expense, which is earthquakes. The museum exhibit has to be certified as safe in an earthquake (since it's in LA). Presumably, there is *TONS* of data explaining the exact forces that the Shuttle stack will stand up to using all original parts. If the parts are replicas, you'd need to certify that the replica wouldn't fail in an earthquake, which would involve quite a lot of engineering work.

The distros are going with it presumably because they think they need it to turn Linux into a desktop or notebook OS. However, they seem to be ignoring the issues it presents for servers. Let's take my *THREE HOUR* debugging session on systemd yesterday. I had a netboot system up and running. Client boots from Server and mounts root filesystem from Server. I changed from Server A to Server B. Due to an NFSv4 vs. NFSv3 issue, Client could no longer mount the root filesystem read/write. Simple, right? It would've been with SysV init because the errors during the mount would've been spewed to the console and I would've seen them. What *actually* happened is that a bunch of services failed to start. Instead of spewing the error message, systemd "helpfully" told me to run "systemctl status" on the service to see the error message. Except that I never got to a login prompt due to the errors. And I couldn't mount the filesystem read/write so it lost the logs.

Two+ hours later, I managed to disable enough stuff to get to a login prompt where I was finally able to figure out what was going on (never did get systemctl to show me the logs, probably because they couldn't be written to disk and it doesn't seem to hold them in RAM).

Please explain to me what the advantage of systemd is again? Because I'm *REALLY* not seeing it. It took something that was trivial to figure out and made it astronomically difficult. I no longer have any idea what order my services start in or whether that order is repeatable. Yes, SysV init scripts were really long. But once you learned them, you realized that you only had to modify 5 or 6 lines of them to get a new service going. I have yet to figure out how to even create a service with systemd or how I figure out what I'm depending on.

In short, for a server, I have yet to see a single advantage of systemd over SysV init. Maybe I'm missing something and someone will enlighten me, but I'm extremely skeptical.

Am I just resistant to learning new things? Maybe, but learning stuff takes time and my time is money for my employer. So if I'm not getting a return on my investment of time (in new capabilities or reduced debugging time or *something*), why would I invest the time to become an expert on systemd?

Plus, Radio Thermostat has a fully published API to program it, query it, operate it, etc. so if you don't like their Ap, or they go belly up, the thing is still useful (assuming you, or some open source project, can write the code). It's a pretty simple Web API with JSON. I think the term is RESTful, but I've never been clear on exactly what makes and API "RESTful" vs. just sending JSON to a URL....

In any event, documentation can be found here: http://www.radiothermostat.com/latestnews.html#advanced

Well, certainly the part where you take what materials science researchers have discovered in concrete technology and design structural members of a bridge certainly seems to fit that statement of what an engineer does quite nicely. Depending on how "cutting edge" the bridge is, I image there is more or less engineering involved vs. looking up the right sizes in a table, although I'm not a civil engineer so......

Astronauts are allowed a small (in both weight and size) amount of personal items, which have to be approved for travel (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts121/launch/qa-hahn.html). They usually leave them there when they come back down (I've heard a few astronauts talk about it). They have also shipped up larger items (presumably including the guitar) using spare space on various spacecraft (like the Shuttle or the Dragon test mission). If you go read the Wikipedia article on Skylab, you'll see that one of the crew's basically mutinied over lack of rest/personal time. Since then, NASA has built rest and down time into the schedules for astronauts on space stations. Presumably the Russians do the same. On ISS, they've sent up leisure items so people don't go nuts. I have seen reference to an every growing DVD library on the ISS as well.

As for the camera/memory cards... That was probably on the ISS as part of the standard gear. Part of the mission is to take pictures of stuff on Earth. Since they now have an Internet connection, presumably they'll transfer the pictures and leave the memory cards up there until they stop working, when they'll be sent to an inglorious (and fiery) end on a Progress ship.

MIT is almost certainly using Kerberos for their authentication since a) they invented it and b) that's what they were using at least as recently as 2005. In any event, how Kerberos stores passwords depends on the exact implementation, but in at least some implementations (admittedly old) you could decrypt the password database on the Kerberos key server with a key stored in a file in /etc. The Kerberos server is supposed to be kept extremely secure, with Kerberos being the only service running on it and it being kept in a physically secure location.

This has to be 2.3 *peta* FLOPS not giga FLOPS. For instance, in 2010, an Intel desktop processor could do 109 gigaFLOPS (reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS).

Not really... Apollo 10 was everything landing on the moon was except the actual landing. The command module went into orbit, which meant it had to have enough fuel on board to do a burn to get back to Earth. The Lunar Module was mostly fueled (supposedly not completely fueled because they were afraid the astronauts would actually land if they had enough fuel to do so) and it did a deorbit burn, descended toward the surface and then did another burn to get back to the command module. This proposed mission isn't even Apollo 8, which went into lunar orbit.

Maybe Dragon can be turned into a Mars lander capsule and maybe a Falcon Heavy can launch a manned landing mission, but *this* capsule and *this* mission aren't really a dress rehearsal for landing or even for putting humans into Mars orbit (where they could, for instance, directly control a rover). It seems mostly like a publicity opportunity. That doesn't make it a bad idea to *do* (I'd love to see it happen, especially with private money because it may encourage the much more expensive landing mission to happen), but nobody should be fooled into thinking that it's one step away from actually landing.

Liquid nitrogen ice cream is awesome....

However, the XK6 chillers are a lot more boring. We take room air from under the floor, run it through a cold plate, blow it through the cabinet across 12 Opterons or 6 GPU's vertically, and then go through another cold plate and exhaust it at (approximately) the same temperature it came in it.

> Unless you know how the digital is encoded/modulated/carried, all you're going to hear is random noise.

Only if you look at it from the perspective of digital 1's and 0's. If you look at it from the perspective of analog signals, you'll see square waves or sine waves on a frequency. That doesn't really occur in nature (except from pulsars). So maybe we'd never figure out what the aliens are *saying*, but we would be clear that a signal existed on a given frequency. That said, I don't really believe that we'll find anything "out there", at least not in my lifetime.

It only takes about 10 minutes to get to orbit. I believe the Shuttle and the Progress & Soyuz spacecraft all took about 2 days to dock with ISS. I believe most of that time is spent matching the orbits perfectly and "catching up" with it in orbit (you don't want to approach too fast and slowing down requires fuel, and fuel is weight so you want to use as little as feasible).

Dragon is taking awhile longer because this is only the second time that the Dragon has flown and the first time docking. So, they're going to run a whole bunch of tests to ensure that they can control the spacecraft from the ground and then a bunch more to make sure the astronauts on the ISS can control it. Then, finally, they'll let it get close enough to dock. I suspect (though I have no actual information on this) that once they get past the "test flight" phase, it will take a similar amount to time to Soyuz/Progress/Shuttle to get there.

I was going to recommend QLab myself. I use it for live theater and it is excellent. The free download only outputs 2 channels (but is otherwise fully functional for audio). It isn't that expensive to get the paid version that does essentially unlimited channels. It has MIDI integration for triggers and a variety of other features.

I haven't found anything free that does what it does.

There is actually a use for "copyrighted birdsong". I've purchased a bunch of it as a part of sound effects collections. The "value add" is that it has been well recorded, mixed, compressed properly, and is free of annoying background noise (like planes flying over, cars in the distance, etc). Of course, the companies that do that also sell the collections with a license to redistribute the sound as part of another work (Ie, I can use it in a play or a movie I just can't resell the whole thing as a sound effects collection).