Jeff, why waste the time?

Jeff, Eric is really a waste of time. Take his mention about IBM surviving.
Well I was there, I noticed that he did not mention the companies that did
not survive or are now shadows of themselves.

When was the last time you saw a Honeywell computer, RAND, ICL, RCA (yes they
tried to enter the market), even Digital and Data General are rare to see
these days.

IBM infact is a prefect example, the PC division had nothing to do with the
main company but as the market grew so did it. At it's peak IBM's PC
division controlled over 50% of the PC market but since it got so big the
main company rolled it backing to old big mainframe division and started to
make changes (remember the PCjr anybody?) today IBM controls about 20% of the
PC market, is smaller than Dell's share and until the stupid merger between
Compaq and HP was on it's way to being smaller then Compaq's PC section.

And IBM is one of the better survivers of the Mainframe - PC wars, basicly
because they can supply both and everything inbetween.

If the same happen to the space industry, it is unlikely that more than one
of the big aerospace companies can survive the turn over.

Earl Colby pottinger

--
I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:40:31 -0600, in a place far, far away, Earl
Colby Pottinger made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Jeff, Eric is really a waste of time.

You only noticed that now?

Speaking as someone who wastes altogether too much time on him, of
course...

h (Rand Simberg) :

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:40:31 -0600, in a place far, far away, Earl
Colby Pottinger made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Jeff, Eric is really a waste of time.

You only noticed that now?

Speaking as someone who wastes altogether too much time on him, of
course...

No, I noticed it about three months after he started posting. For the first
two months or so Eric asked questions which clearly showed that he did not
know the answers already. A little later in a period spanning less than a
week, he went from asking questions or debating details to making flat out
statements - clearly thinking he already knew the right answers. Nothing
wrong there except he did make a lot of mistakes and when corrected would not
acknowledge his errors.

Now Eric is arm chair rocket critic, he thinks mindless mouthing off is just
fun. On the otherhand I and others have bent enough metal and have done
enough experiments that go wrong to know that if I had not listened to Henry
Spencer, Doug Jones, George Herbert and many others that by now I would have
suffered injury or even death by now.

Many times it is not even advice being given to me, but the discussion of
something with others that warns me about areas to avoid or problems I have
not seen yet.

Anyone who thinks he is God and does not make mistakes or does not needs
correction at times if a fool, a kook, or a con.

And if they try to do any serious rocket work without listening to others,
they can easyily end up dead.

Earl Colby Pottinger

PS. I think there is a good reason why 'The Rocket Guy' has never flown
after the cascade of negative messages he recieved (many from the sci.space.*
groups) after he published his designs.


--
I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp

"Earl Colby Pottinger" wrote in message
...
Jeff, Eric is really a waste of time. Take his mention about IBM
surviving.
Well I was there, I noticed that he did not mention the companies that did
not survive or are now shadows of themselves.

Eric does seem to be quite a waste of time, but it gives me something to do
when I'm waiting for code to compile and link. ;-)

When was the last time you saw a Honeywell computer, RAND, ICL, RCA (yes
they
tried to enter the market), even Digital and Data General are rare to see
these days.

I agree. For every IBM that survived the mainframe to personal computer
transition, there were many that simply did not.

In my industry (engineering sofware), we've been seeing our customers
transition from expensive Unix boxes to cheaper PC's (some running Linux).
The PC I develop software on today cost about an order of magnitude less
than the SGI "personal workstation" type box I used ten years ago.

Many of the "big players" that I remember making these personal Unix boxes
ten years ago are gone today.

If the same happen to the space industry, it is unlikely that more than
one
of the big aerospace companies can survive the turn over.

Sounds about right to me. The others will either choose not to evolve (get
out of the launch provider business) or will fail to evolve quickly enough
to remain profitable.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:39:20 -0600, in a place far, far away, Earl
Colby Pottinger made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:


PS. I think there is a good reason why 'The Rocket Guy' has never flown
after the cascade of negative messages he recieved (many from the sci.space.*
groups) after he published his designs.

It helped that he has attended the last two Space Access
conferences...

"Jeff Findley" :

I'm not talking about SS1 here. With a better vehicle design, you
shouldn't
need VAB's, crawlers, and huge launch pads. Reducing the size and cost of
the ground infrastructure will reduce launch costs. Your "old school"
launch vehicle designer is so interested in reducing the wet mass of the
vehicle itself to the barest minimum that the ground infrastructure costs
are ignored.

A vehicle proposal like the Delta Clipper didn't need all this ground
infrastructure. DC-X proved that this concept ought to work. Certinaly
DC-X was small, but even for its size, the infrastructure and ground crews
needed to launch it were absolutely *tiny* by traditional aerospace
standards. That's the way you reduce launch costs, by looking at all your
costs and not worrying so much about the wet mass of your vehicle.

As an Armadillo fan I would like to point out the same thing happens when
thier designs are debugged. The crew needed to setup/fuel/launch/land/and
return the craft to storage totals less than ten people. The smallest
lanuches by NASA still seem to need a team up to 100 people from start to
finish.

NASA seems to have to major problems in thier organizations. (1) Paper,
paperwork and paperwork. Tons of money is wasted filling out papers that
have nothing to do with flying the crafts. (2) Not Invented Here, NASA seems
to hate farming out work to small outside companies. Result they keep on
staff people who do not work most of the time, they ae just there for when
they are really needed, in some case this could be less than10% of their
working time.

And at the time, the "usual suspects" in the computer industry would say
that "that isn't a real computer" because it could never do as much as a
mainframe computer. This is *exactly* like SS1 is today. The "usual
suspects" in the aerospace industry think SS1 is a toy and say it's "not a
real spaceship", because it can't get into orbit.

The really important thing to note is that the customers for these "toys"
won't necessarily be the existing customers who buy the older "real"
products. The customers for these "toys" will largely come from completely
new markets. In the case of personal computers (like the IBM PCs, Apples,
Commodores, Ataris, and etc.), it was small businesses and individuals who
could never afford a mainframe computer. In the case of manned launch
vehicles (like the follow-on to SS1) the customers will be individuals
looking for "the ultimate thrill", not big companies interested in
launching
comsats. Completely different market for a completely different vehicle.

Eventually though, personal computers became so powerful (in numbers) that
they began to replace mainframes for many tasks. As these small,
inexpensive, manned space vehicles grow in capabilities (i.e. when they can
get into orbit), they too will begin to replace ELV's for many tasks (i.e.
small LEO satellite launches).

I'm old enough to remember the change from mainframes to peronal computers.
I played text games on terminals attached to a minframe as a kid in the
early 80's. As a teenager, I bought a C-64 and learned basic programming.
At college in the late 80's, I was again using terminals to write my
engineering programs (Fortran 77 and C) that ran on huge Unix mainframes
(with hundreds of students sharing the same mainframe at the same time).
But by the time I neared graduation in the early 90's, I was working on my
senior design project on an 80386 class PC, Macintosh computers, and little
Sun "pizza boxes" (which ran Unix).

Today, I'm working on a Pentium III computer that's at least 10 times more
powerful and costs less than 1/10 the money of my first computer cost at
work (it was a "high end" SGI workstation that cost the company over $20k).

We'll eventually see the same changes happen with manned launch vehicles,
but it will take time since the existing markets are very small, so the
amount of money which will be invested in the startups is also very small
(by big aerospace company standards).

Does that take me back, by 1980 I came out of college trained to program
mainframes but entered into the microcomputer field instead. Back then if I
went to major computer conferences like the CCC I would get comments about
working on 'toys'.

One thing people use to doing things the old way have problems with is
learning to think about solving a problem diffirently. I remember one person
coming into the store to complain about his C64 'only' having 38K of useable
ram and that his pipeline program ran out of memory when he wanted the full
size array.

For some reason he could not get out of the 'floating point' mode of thinking
and realize that the integer arrays can be treated as 'fixed point decimal'
if he wrapped the right code around the array access. I had to write him the
sample code and point out since his expected range of temperture was 35c at
the input end and he wanted to find where it dropped to 25c to locate the
next heater/pump that 10 degrees in a variable that had a value range of 65
made recording the sections to one thousand of a degree was a piece of cake.

He had been programing for years on mainframes but could not by himself
(atleast in the short term) make the jump to fixed decimal on a C64 just
because that was not a directly supported variable type.

And as for the number of UNIX people who put down the NeXT machine and Linux,
I have lost count.

Same for the number of people who told me VT terminals was all that were
needed and that GUIs were a waste.



The present Aerospace companies biggest mistakes will come when they try to
treat the new spacecrafts coming online by the standards of the old rocket
designs. Perfect example is Derek Lyons who thinks the SS1 is worthless
because it does no go into orbit. Give him a SS1 for free and he still could
not make money off it because he will try to use it wrongly, or will not even
try because it is sub-orbital and thus not a real space craft.

Earl Colby Pottinger

--

h (Rand Simberg) :

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 08:39:20 -0600, in a place far, far away, Earl
Colby Pottinger made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:


PS. I think there is a good reason why 'The Rocket Guy' has never flown
after the cascade of negative messages he recieved (many from the
sci.space.*
groups) after he published his designs.

It helped that he has attended the last two Space Access
conferences...

I am still not sure what his real game it is. It may be to only sell toys,
but I at the time got the impression he really planned to fly in his design.
The fact that he did not after learning about the problems ahead puts him
well ahead of people like Eric who do not listen to others.

Earl Colby Pottinger

--
I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:55:09 -0600, in a place far, far away, Earl
Colby Pottinger made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

PS. I think there is a good reason why 'The Rocket Guy' has never flown
after the cascade of negative messages he recieved (many from the
sci.space.*
groups) after he published his designs.

It helped that he has attended the last two Space Access
conferences...

I am still not sure what his real game it is. It may be to only sell toys,
but I at the time got the impression he really planned to fly in his design.

I think that he does really plan to fly, but he's altering his
thinking of how to do so as a result of feedback.

Earl Colby Pottinger ) wrote:
: Jeff, Eric is really a waste of time. Take his mention about IBM surviving.
: Well I was there, I noticed that he did not mention the companies that did
: not survive or are now shadows of themselves.

So what? Was it even relevant?

: When was the last time you saw a Honeywell computer, RAND, ICL, RCA (yes they
: tried to enter the market), even Digital and Data General are rare to see
: these days.

Again, so what? Honeywell, Unisys, RCA and HP are still around. Not suree
what you're on about.

: IBM infact is a prefect example, the PC division had nothing to do with the
: main company but as the market grew so did it. At it's peak IBM's PC
: division controlled over 50% of the PC market but since it got so big the
: main company rolled it backing to old big mainframe division and started to
: make changes (remember the PCjr anybody?) today IBM controls about 20% of the
: PC market, is smaller than Dell's share and until the stupid merger between
: Compaq and HP was on it's way to being smaller then Compaq's PC section.

: And IBM is one of the better survivers of the Mainframe - PC wars, basicly
: because they can supply both and everything inbetween.

I stated that the clone market forced IBM to compete with itself. They
tried to introduce "microchannel" while everyone else was using ISA,
which IBM created! VESA localbus, which is an extension of ISA, beat out
microchannel, which IBM tried to licence. Eventually PCI, from Intel, took
over the industry WRT to busses.

: If the same happen to the space industry, it is unlikely that more than one
: of the big aerospace companies can survive the turn over.

Totally different right now in make up. As stated, commerical space as
compared to the PC market is back around 1971, ten years before IBM even
created the PC. SS1 is like the Mark IV, which predated the Altair.

Eric

: Earl Colby pottinger

: --
: I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
: SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
: the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp

Rand Simberg ) wrote:
: On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:40:31 -0600, in a place far, far away, Earl
: Colby Pottinger made the phosphor on my monitor
: glow in such a way as to indicate that:

: Jeff, Eric is really a waste of time.

: You only noticed that now?

: Speaking as someone who wastes altogether too much time on him, of
: course...

But since you add little what's the difference? In short, your time isn't
worth much anyway.

Eric