Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40130739

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).

I expect if astronauts aboard HLS lose their altimeter they'd have to abort the landing immediately -- to proceed without it would be the height of recklessness. But Odysseus had no abort-to-orbit capability so was committed to landing.

But I also note that Odysseus cost NASA a little over $100M on a fixed price contract, per Ars Technica.

By way of comparison, the Indian government's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the lander of which touched down in 2023, cost roughly $90M.

So private space isn't automatically cheaper than 100% government agency-run missions: it just depends on the agency.

With E-VTOL, which is presumably aiming for local-to-local flights, you have the added problem that if you get your innovation wrong, potentially bystanders on the ground die when your flying car falls on them.

It's absolutely not impossible to do it right (i.e. with nobody dying). But if you do that you need to hit existing aerospace engineering safety standards for stuff like multiply redundant flight control systems, traffic routing that avoids extensive flight over densely populated areas, and so on.

And then you discover you're competing with an unexpected combination like, say, robo-taxis feeding a high speed rail station with 220mph trains running every 15 minutes and your business model turns out to be the new Zeppelin, not the DC-3.

Scotland isn't really a market for short distance electric flights unless you're thinking of the Highlands and Islands, where less than 10% of the population is scattered across crinkle-cut fjords.

France/Netherlands to Sint Maarten/St. Martin is, IIRC, served by wide-body airliners because it's both legally part of France itself (at least the St. Martin half of the island) and it's a significant tourist resort.

And if you think the EU and UK have laxer safety/regulatory standards than the FAA, you might want to re-think your position ...

You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.

Sad Puppy 2015 slate: https://www.scifiwright.com/2015/02/sad-puppies-3-announces-...

Patterson biography, volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Heinlein-Dialogue-Century-1948...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szilard_lette...

One of the engines has only 800 cycles; the others are around the 3000 mark (so roughly 300 flights/year, which sounds about right for an A380: they service long-haul routes).

It might be a case of (3), with the added problem of there being a glut on the market due to the availability of newer, less maintenance-intensive wide-body twinjets with >400 seats these days (Boeing 777X, Airbus 350)?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141533

Points: 144

# Comments: 52

It's true, but your mistake is in assuming an actual organization exists.

WSFS is just a club, the membership of which consists of the paying members of the current worldcon. The WSFS constitution is a set of rules for the WSFS business meeting which handles stuff like the bidding process for the next-but-one worldcon, and running running the Hugo awards. But there's no continuity of WSFS membership or governance from one worldcon to another except insofar as some people may be members of two or more consecutive worldcons.

It worked for 80 consecutive worldcons, then broke when it ran up against folks who didn't abide by the norms of behaviour that the rules presuppose.

There was an extensive campaign in favour of a particular faction circa 2013-17 organized by two loose groups (the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies) which in retrospect were best understood as dry runs for Gamergate, but they flopped (all they could do was rig the shortlist: but the Hugo voters are allowed to vote "no award" if they don't like the menu, and they did so with gusto until the rules could be reformed to make nomination-brigading impractical).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies

They don't.

World science fiction conventions are autonomous and independent of one another, apart from (in theory) having to abide by the WSFS constitution. There is no permanent floating worldcon organization that oversees these events. It has worked up until now -- through 81 conventions in a variety of countries -- because everyone abided by an unspoken agreement to observe the rules.

The Chengdu concom appeared to be following the rules right up until they didn't any more and went "rules? what rules?"

Here's your brief intro to what worldcon is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcon

(Disclaimer: I'm a three-times Hugo award winning author and the author with the most appearances on the Hugo shortlist from outside North America.)

McD-D had for a couple of decades prioritized military/defense/space contracts over civil aviation and had turned into a finely tuned machine for milking government cost-plus contracts. They also had a bad case of Jack Welch management disease.

Over the years after the merger, Boeing's traditional management was largely replaced by the imported profits-over-everything culture of McDonnell-Douglas. This is, to put it mildly, not your grandparents' Boeing any more.

Because the design life of an airliner is on the order of 30 years, it took years to decades for the cultural change to become visible on the outside, but the 737 MAX MCAS debacle is symptomatic of the change in priorities to focus on hitting sales targets over engineering and QA, with lethal results.

(The simple fact that they had to add MCAS to compensate for changed handling characteristics in the 737 MAX isn't damning on its own, although it was a marketing-driven decision: really, at 50+ years old, it's past time Boeing designed a clean-sheet 737 replacement to compete with the A320 family. But then Boeing didn't see fit to mention MCAS in the pilots' handbook. An MCAS failure can cause a 737 MAX to become unflyable if it fails and the pilots don't understand what's going on, and that has led to two fatal crashes. And the 737 MAX MCAS is controlled by a single sensor, introducing a single point of failure. A dual sensor option is available to customers, but at extra cost -- and this is unforgivable. And now we learn that new-Boeing's institutional response is to demand exemption from FAA oversight? It's not looking good!)

(It's still polite to ask/let the heirs know what you're doing.)