Jeff Kell writes:
>The Saturn V was forgotten.  The designs and the tooling have been lost in
>in inexcusable bout of stupidity.  We can't build another one.
 
This is a common misconception. The tooling no longer exists, it's true,
but neither does the tooling for most 30-year-old designs. There are
copies of the plans in several different NASA archive locations. Another
COULD be built, but only at enormous cost. Things have changed in the 30+
years since Saturn V was designed: new materials, new design techniques,
new (and yes, more reliable) controls, make it possible to build a
booster with Saturn V's capabilities at substantially lower cost than the
original, in constant dollar terms. Your analogy isn't wasted, however,
because the same question applies to Saturn V and MPE: do we need it?
 
>NASA needed
>a heavy-lift launcher after the shuttle proved not to be *that* economical,
>but we sat around while the Russians launched Mir aboard their new heavy-
>lift launcher (name escapes me, sorry).
 
Proton -- which, by the way, doesn't have the lift capacity of Saturn V.
So how many hundred-metric-ton payloads do YOU send to low Earth orbit
every year? Building one-offs costs an enormous amount of money,
especially if you had to push the design envelope to do it.
 
>... Some applications are so critical
>there may only be one solution to go that extra step and reach your
>goal.  But once that goal is accomplished, don't let it go.
 
But if that goal is a one-off, and you used extraordinarily expensive
means to achieve it, and nobody cares about goals like that any more
anyway, what's the point?
 
>I don't think it's a big secret I'm an avid scuba diver, and yes, we
>have dive computers.  I use one, but don't necessarily trust it; that's my
>life at worst or my health at best relying on those cryptic numbers...
> The more
>gimmicks you add the more can go wrong if, heaven forbid, your batteries
>die, or your computer floods out.  No thank you, I still use old-fashioned
>tables as a backup and sanity check.
 
Ah, then what you want is a Unix or PC solution. The standards are
changing, and us dinosaurs (over-25s) had better change with them. Today,
"good enough" IS good enough. People expect to lose some data now and
then; hasn't "sorry, my computer's down" become as accepted an excuse as
"sorry, my car wouldn't start"? Read the newspaper "computer advice"
columns, or go to an "Internet" class. Having the right answer 90% of the
time is perfectly acceptable; we pocket-protectored techies are just
being stuffy when we insist that computers and people give right answers.
 
Nobody in their right mind expects a computer to be easy to use, or to
provide reliable error messages, or to preserve the user's data above all
else. Oh, sure, a FEW people still want that kind of stuff. But they're
mostly the eccentrics who keep Rolls Royce and Lexus in business. By and
large, a crash here and there or a lost file or an inexplicable
computational result are just part of everyday living, like dead
batteries.
 
The nice thing is this means that we dinosaurs can lighten up some. Do
backups every other day instead of every day. Get rid of half the cases
in our test suites; most of them never find any problems anyway. If you
KNOW that one-line change in the billing program won't hurt anything, put
it in production: the user wants the feature, and if it causes a problem,
he'll understand -- he's got a computer now, too.
 
This really is good news: nobody wants to pay for quality, but nobody
really expects it either. Oh, sure, there'll be a few applications for
our skills, on the computers that everyone agrees are REALLY important --
the ones that run radiation therapy machines, for example, or state
lotteries. But for the most part, we can practice our profession freed
from the shackles of excellence that have bound us all these years.
 
-- Bruce
 
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Toback    Tel: (602) 996-8601| My candle burns at both ends;
OPT, Inc.            (800) 858-4507| It will not last the night;
11801 N. Tatum Blvd. Ste. 142      | But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
Phoenix AZ 85028                   | It gives a lovely light.
[log in to unmask]                   |     -- Edna St. Vincent Millay