111–120 of 210 posts
Whenever one of my developers tells me that my phone is too slow when their app lags on my Android 4.1 phone, I tell them the specs of Apollo 11 computer and scold them for being unable to deliver a smoothly scrolling list of messages on a freaking supercomputer in my palm.
And despite the fact that a wall charger has more compute power than the Saturn V, we can't actually go to the moon today. We've actually lost the ability to go. No one understands how the engines on the Saturn V work anymore. It would take years to tear them apart and analyze them, and most of the original engineers are dead. And the guidance systems would have to be built back up from scratch. Kind of sad if you th…
We could easily go to the moon. It's just a completely useless exercise to do so, unless you can find a way to taunt China into another round of the space race. The scientific case for the moon was always weak, and most anything they could come up with has been done. Just look at the useless lets-grow-salad-in-space-oh-look-its-just-salad timesinks the ISS has been busying themselves with. So, in a way we've become m…
And despite the fact that a wall charger has more compute power than the Saturn V, we can't actually go to the moon today. We've actually lost the ability to go. No one understands how the engines on the Saturn V work anymore. It would take years to tear them apart and analyze them, and most of the original engineers are dead. And the guidance systems would have to be built back up from scratch. Kind of sad if you th…
None of that is true. It's really annoying to see it repeated. It's even been covered on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304188 before. There are parts of the F-1 engine that would be difficult to exactly replicate because while the engineering specs are known the exact fabrication processes weren't all documented. An exact workalike could be made for those parts that fit the specification without a problem.…
"The largest solid rocket motors ever built were Aerojet's three 260 inch monolithic solid motors cast in Florida.[18] Motors 260 SL-1 and SL-2 were 261 inches in diameter, 80 ft 8in long, weighed 1,858,300 pounds and had a maximum thrust of 3.5M pounds. Burn duration was two minutes. The nozzle throat was large enough to walk through standing up. The motor was capable of serving as a 1-to-1 replacement for the 8-engine Saturn 1 liquid-propellant first stage but was never used as such. Motor 260 SL-3 was of similar length and weight but had a maximum 5.4M pounds thrust and a shorter duration."
and
"Between Sept. 25, 1965 and June 17, 1967, three static test firings [of the AJ-260 rocket] were done. SL-1 was fired at night, and the flame was clearly visible from Miami 50 km away, producing over 3 million pounds of thrust. SL-2 was fired with similar success and relatively uneventful. SL-3, the third and what would be the final test rocket, used a partially submerged nozzle and produced 2,670,000 kgf thrust, making it the largest solid-fuel rocket ever."
For more see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet#Florida_facility_and...
> Car Wash Y/N? (wait) > Loyalty (wait) > Fuel Rewards (wait) > Alt ID (wait) > 0005550000 (wait for the numbers to appear on screen.
I bet they run Java.
And despite the fact that a wall charger has more compute power than the Saturn V, we can't actually go to the moon today. We've actually lost the ability to go. No one understands how the engines on the Saturn V work anymore. It would take years to tear them apart and analyze them, and most of the original engineers are dead. And the guidance systems would have to be built back up from scratch. Kind of sad if you th…
Other than all the advances that will give you much better performance at a lower cost enumerated in other comments, there is another problem.
When you dive a bit deeper into the history and design of the Saturn V (the NASA history website is a good source) you kinda get the feeling it was hacked together in many places to meet a deadline. Many of its systems were very complicated, labor intensive or hard to upgrade or extend jus so that they could meet the deadline and beat the Soviet Union to the lunar surface. The unlimitted money pass they got for this for a while definitelly did not help matters.
This also in my opinion is why Saturn V ended production so quickly - it did meet the deadline, but was just too expensove and inflexible due to all the hacks for a regular budget conscious "production" use.
This is brilliant and hilarious, but, as a person that cares about this I honestly have no idea what to do. Fighting software waste feels like getting in a fistfight with the ocean or something. I could write everything in C or assembly, I don't even think that notion is crazy , but my client's want javascript. Not that it's even javascripts fault, or any particular languages fault, I just don't know how you convince…
Every starry eyed AI/ML piece has me thinking, yes but where's the power going to come from? And where's the power on top to encrypt all this?
And quantum computing? Super-cooling at scale? Aye right pal.
The elegance of the AGC and it's approach to computing could provide a good starting point to a solution out of our mess.
to quote from a 2004 paper by Don Eyles, one of the AGC programmers:
"When Hal Laning designed the Executive and Waitlist system in the mid 1960's, he made it up from whole cloth with no examples to guide him. The design is still valid today. The allocation of functions among a sensible number of asynchronous processes, under control of a rate- and priority-driven preemptive executive, still represents the state of the art in real-time GN&C computers for spacecraft."
I'd like to also see an article examining these computing power attributes on the piece of garbage embedded computer on the front of the gas pumps where the lag between registering every keypress is like 800ms, and every screen redraw takes about 2000ms. It takes me an extra 60 seconds to get gas now thanks to how slow these things are, and it is nearly universal despite whether they appear to be 20 year old or new d…
Probably Electron apps.
I'd like to also see an article examining these computing power attributes on the piece of garbage embedded computer on the front of the gas pumps where the lag between registering every keypress is like 800ms, and every screen redraw takes about 2000ms. It takes me an extra 60 seconds to get gas now thanks to how slow these things are, and it is nearly universal despite whether they appear to be 20 year old or new d…
Yes, and the firmware for the USB-C wasn't sewn by hand into the plug (core rope memory). They did this for reliability purposes. It's amazing the craftsmanship that went into much of that rocket by people of all walks of life. http://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-... Here's another great article on the hand-welds on the F1. In only a short amount of time we've outsourced so much of these produ…