Throwawayaerlei

Static RAM they bought from IBM; they trusted it too much, didn't include ECC in its path to CPUs, and completely torched any chance at becoming an enterprise vendor by blaming their customers, making them sign NDAs before Sun would "help" etc. You really don't want customers to describe an "enterprise" experience as "They treated the whole thing like a cover-up" https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596346/more-users-sla...

That and what PeterStuer's describes as "They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items." killed them dead.

Specifically startups weren't able to buy Sun's high quality x86 systems in medium quantities from Sun's designated channels, there was a fatal gap between what you could put on a credit card and placing million dollar enterprise quantity orders. So startups bought from Dell which was actually willing trade money for hardware, learned how to deal with those cheaper systems' quirks, and if successful by the time they were big enough to buy Sun systems in enterprise quantities it was way too late. This of course before the cloud became a thing.

Something like what's discussed in the recent topic "Bugs that cost money" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 If you won't accept money from the people who want to pay you it for your stuff you aren't likely to survive.

Is that really a lot in the scheme of things? I don't have CFL backlit LCD TV info handy since they've been supplanted by LEDs, but I looked at Best Buy (a big US seller of these sorts of things) and found a popular $500 65" and their most insane 98" $15,000 Samsung ones, 190 and 360 watts respectively.

I'm old and by my family's standards 65" diagonal would be questionable at best, so I checked in the vicinity of 48", 43" and 50" only gets you down to 120-5 watts. Add probably not very many watts for whatever's supplying the signal and it doesn't sound like a big deal, although of course everything adds up.

Real, intelligent people for customer support (well, the last time I needed any, which was years ago). You are paying for the service and it's not cheap although also not expensive compared to normal things you also need like Internet service (using US prices). GMail is normally "free," you are the product, and customer support and caring about customers is simply not in Google's DNA. Which we can see in too many of their paid services.

The real protection is to get your own domain which Fastmail of course supports, so you can point it at a different email provider if worst comes to worst, like ajross's plausible proposition that:

"[...] I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account. In the world of real data and not anecdata, Big Tech is incredibly reliable."

"not going out and getting better vaccines for narcissistic reasons"

Not narcissism but the loss of face, which also means a loss of power. Which is the only thing Communists care about; compared to that the loss of a few million lives is nothing unless that also brings about a loss of power.

"If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors."

Except there's a whole lot of the Fediverse that doesn't work by this "free speech is fascism that must be banned" principle. You can even find huge lists of such nodes in the huge blacklists maintained by this loose community.... And it's quite refreshing to communicate without worrying about every word you say.

It's an outside of the Fediverse problem which therefore cannot escape it, but with solutions that work both outside and inside it.

There are others, Pleroma was explicitly designed to be lightweight for small nodes, written in Elixir and thus running on the battle tested Earlang ecosystem BEAM VM. Also have heard and run across a few instances of Misskey which runs on node.js. Both use Postgres and I see from the install instructions the latter also uses Redis. Have heard of others as well but have no idea at all about them, a search on the above two backends will find you more.

You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.

"I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation."

And God help you if you use or let your users have the option of using the Soapbox Front End (FE) on top of Pleroma.

You should be careful about such "I'm sure" statements. "Right wing" Fediverse is very tolerant in moderation, that which results in bans, the only big issue is how much, if any pornography to allow and that gets fierce arguments. The big issue users might run into is harassment, but there are fine grained controls that allow you to trivially ignore or block such people going forward.

Other issue which may not matter so much if you're "a fascist capitalist pig" is that your instance will likely be blocked by left wing Fediverse nodes. This can get silly, there are blocklists that often cite as cause nothing more than the software "right wing" nodes use, or in one case written by a particular developer. Too much of the Fediverse is that tribal.

For a concrete example, look at how TERF spinster.xyz federates with "right wing" nodes and is blocked by many left wing ones, including all the ones I could look up just now with a Google search.

I use scare quotes for right wing because many of these sites are politically neutral or thereabouts.

One other thing to factor into this good picture you're making of the situation: at each step in greater transmissibility of variants and sub-variants for Omicron a given isolation or here Zero COVID policy becomes harder. That said, Xi/the CCP/PRC kept it up for almost a year after the first variants of Omicron started getting detected all over the world. Per Wikipedia the first ex-Africa case was in Hong Kong....

Against classic Wuhan it's pretty much accepted the two big PRC vaccines are less effective than the best two Western mRNA ones. This might not play out the same for variants, since these PRC ones are of the inactivated whole virus type, likely expose more proteins to the adaptive immune systems than spike focused ones.

Their two main COVID vaccines aren't terrible as far as I can tell but they're not great. Against classic Wuhan and I'm not sure about pre-Omicron variants. Which we've got some data saying is as bad as the previous ones to the totally immunologicaly naive (although per another paper 30% tested had general protection against all coronaviruses due to their adaptive immune systems targeting some of their most basic functionality and the four strains that were endemic prior to COVID).

There's theoretical reasons to believe they might hold up better than solely spike protein focused vaccines; a greater problem could be low uptake, especially among the elderly (the PRC doesn't have a great record overall with vaccines). See this recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053879#34054893 which covers other issues on the ground.

An even bigger problem is, aside from the measures people are themselves taking, Xi has in effect done an all or nothing approach, first Zero COVID then when that became unsustainable and regime threatening "let it rip."

My understanding is that Xi and the CCP he controls simply didn't prepare for this besides administering without mandates the PRC's two major indigenous vaccines which appear to be subpar in general. Although as inactivated whole virus ones in theory they could stand up better to variant mutations by presenting more proteins to our adaptive immune systems than the spike focused ones, see how in early testing Bharat Biotech's Covaxin showed activity against the nucleocapsid protein.

But building capacity in real hospitals or facilities that can do the basics of for medium serious cases that for example require supplemental oxygen? Nothing I've read of, just austere isolation facilities to support Xi's Zero COVID policy. Now we can be sure Xi and company are focusing on managing the fallout from the policy's end that was forced on them, which only tangentially will have anything to do with limiting the population's morbidity and mortality.

I thought it was a post-WWII Czechoslovak Soviet thing but it turns out the history goes 1419 and the English word to an example in 1618 which per Wikipedia helped spark the catastrophic 30 Years War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague

I run a desktop workstation with a UPS, its lead acid batteries are not infinite and don't like staying discharged, so at times shutting down quickly and cleanly is very important. The more I hear, the happier I am that I moved to Linux a decade and a half ago, and this general topic is a major reason I'm planning to go back to Debian after using Ubuntu LTS for my last two versions.

Yes, in the 1970s plus or minus black was the preferred term.

It's worse than that, most endowment funds are earmarked for specific purposes.

And/or a threat to his or the CCP's power, which is their first and foremost concern.

thinkmcfly might as well ask why WWI started when it predictably going to impoverish the major combatants. Saw a factoid some time ago that world trade did not return to the prewar level until a long time after WWII.

We could also Goodwin this and ask why did Hitler take the fatal step of seizing half of Poland. There age is also a possible motivation, he was 50 in the pre-antibiotic and much of modern medicine era.

And not just Google, or per the article Amazon and Apple. While I'm long out of the Windows ecosystem (my Year of the Linux Desktop was a decade and a a half ago), it's been noted it has partly changed from a product you use to get your stuff done to a platform to sell you more stuff from Microsoft, plus whatever they might be doing or will do with its build in advertising.

As a general principle, the Space Shuttle program was massively capital constrained, so many trade-offs were made that compromised safety and operating expenses. I suppose the latter helped in limiting the number of flights, but then again half the fleet and their crews were lost.

Perhaps start with what killed two shuttles and their crews? Besides no provisions for escape unlike all other "capsule" based craft, solid rockets are _dangerous_ because you can't turn them off, whereas liquid fuel rockets will effectively turn themselves off in many disaster scenarios.

So for a get me out of here tower escape system a solid rocket makes a lot of sense, see also their use in ejection seats. But mounting some number of them (more than one unless used alone because you need symmetrical thrust) on the sides of your system means they must work perfectly every time.

The reentry heat shield protections which along with the wings etc. came from a requirement the Air Force says they never really wanted or needed, a single polar orbit mission returning to the launch location which thus required a lot of maneuvering in the atmosphere because the Earth turned while it was up there resulted in the infamously fragile tiles and some more refractory stuff for hotter locations (and eventually a bunch of tiles in a cooler location were replaced by something else).

Rear end heat shields are protected during the launch of a capsule, it's all hanging out there with the Shuttle. Change the foam and larger parts of it may break off, hit, and fatally compromise a part of the insulation system.

Now going from personal worry points and speculation:

The Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) are for institutional reasons extremely high performance and required a rebuild after every mission, so the SLS "throw away half a billion worth of engines every flight" would need to subtract that labor and parts.

That said, they were fired up and the SRBs not lit until it was clear the SSMEs were running fine, that resulted in three legit aborts and two from faulty sensors. Two failures after launch, split between both causes, noting catastrophic or mission endangering. But, still, you have all their complexity and SRBs.

Landing ... well, that's another thing that's more complex or at least different although landing in the sea also has its issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_4

It's a hell of a lot more complicated aerodynamic body/system than a cylindrical rocket and capsule system so that work was harder and more error prone. IBM Federal Systems modified a lot of code between the first and second launches, and caught an introduced error that would have released just one SRB. There's a 1984 CACM issue devoted to all this https://dl.acm.org/toc/cacm/1984/27/9 and is now free to read online or download, I highly recommend it. A lot of programmers outside of that world were concerned the code wouldn't be up to snuff, what you'll read in those articles explains how they pulled it off.

And, again, no escape systems. Fly enough times and things go wrong, the Shuttle compounded this by massively increasing complexity for very little gain.

Thanks for the general info ... have we found any caves on or in the moon?? And the reference, just skimmed it but it appears to be written at a high and thorough level.

But I wasn't clear about my real question: is there a shield planned for the Orion spacecraft to keep astronauts alive during a sufficiently bad solar event on a trip to or from the moon? As I recall the lunar orbiting space station was going to be unmanned but I was wrong or they've changed their minds: https://www.nasa.gov/gateway So they've got to be thinking about this problem, and as the reference notes we'll need for example adequate space weather surveillance which I note we've been emplacing as of late.

I've never checked it out like running the numbers but I've heard for a long time Apollo was timed for a low part of the solar cycle and one reason Nixon cut it short was because delays put those canceled missions into the active part of the cycle.

So fiction showing people were thinking about X at such and so a time not evidence people were thinking about X at such and so a time???

All the "get to the moon" or beyond SF, which per Robert Heinlein was an explicit goal of his juveniles, to teach the attitudes and what you needed to learn to to get into space, which he was later told actually worked for a number of Apollo project people was ... what??

Can't make fusion reactors that interesting and the SF series never tried except when they didn't get a chance to shut down properly and went boom (actually a very beginning plot point), but I'm glad for all the fiction creators who inspired me into a STEM career when I was young.

"Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time.

I was appalled when I learned about LEO atomic oxygen.

"Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse."

Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Or is this another Apollo Program timed with the solar cycle (which due to delays cut the latter short)?

"And then the status quo took root & reusable rocket proponens were no longer taken seriously because - what were they thinkig, this is how we have always been doing it!"

Disagree as someone who as a kid watched this happen in real time. The Saturn V follow on was always planed to be reusable, with a huge first stage booster that was something of a bigger brother of the stage that would make it to orbit. NASA was starved for capital after Apollo and this resulted in the horribly deadly and very expensive to operate kludge of the eventual Space Shuttle.

See https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Jupiter_Energy_Fleet from the late 1970s; people have been thinking about this problem for a long time. This SF TV series cheated with a new physics which allowed compact nuclear fusion reactors minus the ability to do anything with neutrons. We still don't have a good path to them for basic electrical power generation, seeing as how much we're still struggling with theoretical break even DT fusion, with the LLNL experiment per something I just read not counting the power input into the lasers.

"Because as a society, we decided long ago that everyone should be treated as equally as possible."

That we have a progressive instead of flat personal tax rate system shows this is a pretty lie.

The big thing that's missing from this discussion is the primary reason for the US manned space mission program and it's ultimate goal per JFK in 1961, 4 months into his presidency, of "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

The previous president Eisenhower allowed the Soviets to get ahead of us starting with Sputnik to avoid them whining forever about overflights of others' territory. To the point Wernher von Braun's team had to put ballast in their rocket payloads to make sure they wouldn't "accidentally" put something into orbit.

This resulted a massive shock in the US which you can see in for example a whole bunch of science education programs spawned after Sputnik, and to the rest of the world put into doubt our technological superiority. After the Soviets were the first to put a man in orbit a month before JFK's speech and a few weeks before our first manned suborbital fight, the next spectacle was obviously a manned moon mission. Which we had a chance to beat them at although back in 1961 that was no sure thing.

This would also fit in with the JFK campaign's fictitious "missile gap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

A very great deal depends on urgency. Here in the US when it was erroneously through I might have cancer I was in the specialist's office in less then 24 hours. Granted, that was a "Oh, we're not going to be too busy tomorrow morning, come in and we'll make room for you" partial special case. Other times I've waited a lot longer for a specialist's appointment, but those absolutely weren't high urgency situations.

NASA was always a public works program, that's one of the reasons LBJ was its biggest high level booster back in the 1960s, it had an explicit mission to uplift the US South. Per the guy who invented the reentry vehicle, the lack of one or more staging space stations along the way for Apollo came from that spending "a billion dollars" more in Texas, call that $10 billion today.

After the end of the Apollo Project, "politics and corruption" were all that was left, as should be obvious from the lethally ridiculous design of the Space Shuttle.

Some people have called the SLS the Senate Launch System.

"a massive unforced error, like the Chinese government going after all its internet giants with a hammer"

Depends on who's viewpoint you're talking about. The Xi and CCP are so far presumably very happy with the results, because those companies are no longer much of a threat to their power.

Who made the decisions to end New York's sustained growth?

"now we're doing it safely."

Mercury through Apollo really did not like the idea of using solid rocket boosters, you can't turn them off if things get out of hand, and of course they'll do that themselves in lots of failure modes. Suitable for a launch escape system ... and see the Shuttle for when these principles were turned on their head.

Its SRBs, now being literally recycled for Artemis were low capital, high operating cost kludges that infamous killed one shuttle and its crew. In part because there was no provision made for escape aside from the pilots in the first couple of launches or so and that was rather limited, SR-71 technology with a pretty low max altitude.

On the other hand the Orion crew capsule does have a tower escape system.

So that old NASA you decry, they didn't lose a crew except on the ground due to a high pressure test with pure oxygen!?!?!! OK, that's a credible validation of that part of your thesis, see also Apollo 13 which was a close call.

On the other hand does the Orion have a heavy shield for the astronauts to shelter behind in case of a solar storm (see Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars)? If not Apollo and the Artemis program are every bit as dangerous in what was a primary reason Nixon stopped Apollo before all its planned missions, program delays would have extended it into the change in the solar cycle.

I would also note the start of this program many years ago was so badly designed the booster system's vibrations would have been lethal to humans. Springs in the crew capsule were part of the proposed solution to that, but going back to Shuttle diameter SRBs, only adding one segment, and all the mass of the tank and SSMEs should have fixed that. If my memory is correct that was a rocket powered by a single stack of SRBs, purely for sending crews out into space.

But I'd like to know what happened after the Shuttle and it to make NASA take crew safety seriously. NASA was utterly callous about the known risk from the launch that killed the second shuttle and its crew.

I finish by noting a bit of humility is warranted after just a single test mission success. That NASA and its contractors were able to pull it off is quite a feat, but as the Shuttle should have taught us bad designs can eventually catch up with you.