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Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Author seems unclear on music technology. (Score 3, Informative) 19

"Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers,"

The Gravis Ultrasound ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), as well as other soundcards which *USED WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS* were available.

Yeah, FM-synthesis sounds like a robot. The SNES SPC-7000 was wavetable. The Sega Genesis used a Z80 for FM synthesis. A GUS card was supperior to the SPC-7000.

If you want to know how good the music is, either run DOOM in DOSBOX with a correct GUS Wavetable patch set (which will let you know how *ACTUALLY GOOD* the music is). Alternatively, the Doom & Doom 2 remaster on Steam has an actual band covering the actual tracks. That also sounds awesome.

Lol; I guess the author wasn't aware of the state of the art in 1993 if that's what they wrote.

Comment Re: The helium leak (Score 2) 44

You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Diversity in promotions and hiring has lowered standards throughout corporate America as well as in government.

An example: a manufacturing company in the western U.S. needed to replace a mechanical engineer who was leaving. Hiring manager located an excellent candidate, but could not get sign-off to hire, because the candidate was a white male. He was told, “That would hurt our POC metrics.” The departing ME was a south Asian with dark skin, so they counted him as a POC in their ESG reports. After a battle, the manager was able to hire him. True story.

Boeing Corporation has aggressively pursued the hiring of underrepresented minorities, which necessarily has dumbed down what was once the world’s foremost aeronautical engineering company.

NASA same. Whistleblowers and general staff inside the agency have been complaining that the previous leadership was overly focused on racial equity and gender bias training and similar wastes of time. The previous administrator stated that it was NASA’s goal to land “the first woman and the first person of color on the moon”.

Then we could discuss how the FAA has been dumbing down Air Traffic Control. It is rampant.

And no, DEI is not about fairness. It’s about making whites in positions of power feel virtuous.

Comment The helium leak (Score 5, Insightful) 44

A helium leak was reported prior to launch, yet they proceeded with the mission because it was “minor”. Then, it became a major issue and they were forced to scrap the mission. Do I have it right?

The old NASA made occasional mistakes, but they had a culture of must-not-fail; each team had to prove their subsystem was nominal before the mission could proceed. Their dedication was legendary.

Politicization, DEI, and the general decline in American technical standards and work ethic have ruined Boeing and NASA.

Science

Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise (sciencedaily.com) 7

Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.

Comment Vibe coding just is... (Score 1) 61

I've been programming now for over fifty years. I'll also say that I'm using vibe coding for personal projects. So far, I'm getting good results. Here are some tips:

1. Know what you're doing. Right now, I'm working on an interpreter for a DSL. But I already know the basic structure of interpreters. I can tell when the code the AI is turning out is good or bad. When it's bad, I tell it what's good and ask it to correct the bad code. This usually works.

2. Vibe code in small chunks. I didn't say code the interpreter and here's the syntax. I coded it piece by piece - language primitives, environment structure, control flow primitives, etc. Each step of the way I checked the output to make sure it was what I wanted.

3. Let it write tests. Again, AI's are pretty good at looking at a piece of well-written code and building tests for it. If you point out corner cases you want tested, it will crank those out pretty well.

4. Show it what you want. If you want a particular style in the code, let it know. It will follow that extremely well.

5. Use it for boilerplate. Let's say I have five primitive types in my language. I work with the AI to generate the first one. Then I say "Do the same thing for these other four primitives". AI works well off examples, so give it some.

AI works pretty well if you know what you're doing and how to use it. I think of it as a relatively diligent junior coder. And it works about that well.

Comment Are there really no PD Asian fonts? (Score 1) 94

I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.

All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.

Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.

Comment Band-aids for burn victims. (Score 1) 117

So, we could use the renewable/carbon neutral (or negative) path .... OR .... not, but with lots of extra steps and no guarantee of success?

  "And then there's the problem of trying to stop. Because an abrupt end to geoengineering, with all the carbon still in the atmosphere, would cause the temperature to soar suddenly upward with unknown, but likely disastrous, effects... "

Just have an end to fossil-fuel use, you fucking idiots! That's a tractable challenge. That's something we have decades of experience with. Play to your strengths, humanity. Don't listen to fucking morons!!!

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