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Comment Re:3D printing whole rockets was such a dumb idea. (Score 1) 45

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 35

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Comment Re:I don't think it would matter (Score 1) 35

On the one hand, yes, there's no good way to regulate technology which is only used in a very limited number of vehicles. It would have to be more like spaceflight where it's regulated based on what damage it could do to third parties and not the staff and crew.

On the other hand they could have just called up James Cameron and the submersible engineers he knows, asked them if it was safe and waited for the laughter to stop before refusing to let it operate from Canada.

It seems that everyone involved in operating deep-sea submersibles knew it was a disaster waiting to happen but there was nothing they could do to stop it as no-one cared about their opinions.

Comment Re:I don't think it would matter (Score 1, Interesting) 35

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

Comment 3D printing whole rockets was such a dumb idea. (Score 1) 45

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

Comment Re:Anyway SpaceX is a huge scam so I suspect (Score 3, Insightful) 45

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

Comment Re:this sure reminds me of a time (Score 1) 53

Had to look up his name to confirm this actually happened as I remembered it, but this reminds me of that time former Arizona Senator John Shadegg asked during a late 90s tour of a NOAA facility "Why do we need NOAA when I get my weather from the internet?"

Is that true? I can't find any reference to it, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be documented, if only to make fun of it.

Comment Re:And Broadcom doesn't really care. (Score 1) 65

Broadcom's strategy all along has been;

1. Buy VMWare.
2. Squeeze maximum short-term money out of it to earn back the purchase price plus a big profit.
3. Kill VMWare dead in five years because they'll have their money and they don't want to be bothered with it anymore.

And because they knew the product was going to die anyway. Open source alternatives have caught up and there's nothing to keep customers from switching.

This isn't a justification, but it's an explanation. If they thought VMWare would be a long-term cash cow, they would keep it going. They know that won't happen, so they've opted to squeeze as much cash from it as possible, as quickly as possible. They recognize that will accelerate its demise, but apparently believe it will make them more money, since they won't have to invest anything in maintaining or marketing it.

I'm surprised they aren't more worried about legal action, though. It seems like it would be safer to continue complying with the contracts, perhaps with far inferior (and far cheaper) support quality until those ended. As for the perpetual licenses, it would seem safest to just shrug and say "Yeah, you can keep using it, and we'll keep giving you every update we release", while cutting the engineering team down to nothing. The aggressive approach they're taking seems likely to net them some ugly fines after some uglier legal fees.

Comment Re: Inner monologue (Score 1) 63

The funny thing was that I knew him for like six months online before I realized he was fully paralyzed. He's been covered in the Finnish press a number of times. Amazing guy. Up until recently he was living in a house he built himself before ALS struck, but the medical service decided he was too far away and he had to move closer. You lose a lot of control over your life with ALS.

He wrote a book about nuclear safety engineering recently, which is a fascinating read, and which I strongly recommend.

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