121–130 of 158 posts
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> And then convince the Air Force to certify and let you use your new radar for their payloads. Well, yeah, which takes more money. I wasn't intending, upthread, to suggest that the route was easy ...
> Well, yeah, which takes more money. There may not be any amount of money that'll make the Air Force certify a civilian radar for the purpose.
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Aggressive scheduling is a tactic. Because no matter what the schedule, human nature dictates that things are likely to slip.
Spin it all you want but a failure to meet schedules isn't really acceptable. You either failed to deliver or failed to manage your project estimation process.
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It isn't silly to assume considering that an overwhelming majority of Google's revenue comes directly from advertisements. As for self driving cars, I can think of a ton of marketing use cases including tracking how often people drive, where they go, how long they stay there, the frequency in which someone goes to a location, what type of features in the car the user takes advantage of... And that's just from the top…
I suspect that technology giants like Google and Facebook are trying to wean themselves from ad revenue, to become conglomerates like other companies of that size, like GE. The alternative is massive problems in a few years, when somebody has the guts to kickstart a consumer laptop that comes with adblock preinstalled.
Android (and iOS) make it (intentionally?) much harder to install adblock than any pc browser.
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The business model for the self-driving car is a computer-scheduled, dynamically-provisioned taxi service cheap enough that nobody needs to own a car in the city. Because self-driving cars don't need to park (they can just move on to the next assignment or deprovision), if they catch on then in-city parking decks can be redeveloped into business space or park space.
You forget transportation of goods. Pretty much all over-land cargo in the U.S. and most of that elsewhere (less so, because trains) could be transported by self-driving cars/drones. Not sure if that is larger or smaller than transportation of people at this point, but it's still an astronomically huge market.
Mostly because, freight and passenger trains interfere badly. No passengers = easier freight. A big wave of deregulation of the market a few decades ago helped, too. The Economist ran a special about the US market a few years ago.
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Spin it all you want but a failure to meet schedules isn't really acceptable. You either failed to deliver or failed to manage your project estimation process.
Bummed to see this getting as downvoted as it. Although it may be construed as "managerspeak", it is contributing to the conversation as is evidenced by the several well thought out replies. Perhaps a reminder is warranted: downvote!=disagree. At least that's my understanding (and hope).
The reality is that aggressive scheduling is a reasonable tactic, even knowing that deadlines will almost certainly slip.
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Hardly.
The context here is NASA moving slowly and the possibility of SpaceX launching without their involvement. Can you think of a single customer for that? Try to get Russian permission to got to the Russian side of the station without NASA involvement or just hang out in the Dragon until you get tired of using diapers?
Even if it is just a company catering to customers who want to go to space for an orbit or two without actually docking with anything.
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That's not entirely correct. The bottom line is that military satellites are just expensive - period. They will always be expensive because of their capabilities.
Agreed. They will always have more capability than a non-military satellite, and so will be more expensive. If it didn't have more capability than a non-military satellite, then it isn't a military satellite.
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They control scheduling and occupancy. That is an issue with a shared launch pad but not with one you own and can schedule.
They don't share the pad. They share the range (which consists of multiple pads and various support services (radar, etc)).
I have to wonder, if Elon Musk is alive on earth today, what's the use of me? He's done pretty much everything I wanted to do in life, only a little less efficiently, and much faster. What's the point?
I have to wonder, if Elon Musk is alive on earth today, what's the use of me? He's done pretty much everything I wanted to do in life, only a little less efficiently, and much faster. What's the point?