Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Charles Simonyi to be 1st Nerd in Space
Richard L. James writes "The BBC are reporting that Hungarian-born Charles Simonyi, a 58-year old Microsoft billionaire software engineer is set to become the first 'nerd in space' on board the Soyuz TMA-10 when the spacecraft launches on Thursday 09th March 2007. Charles oversaw the development of Multiplan, Word, and Excel among many other achievements. He has launched a website detailing the 3 goals he wishes to achieve on the trip: advance civilian spaceflight, assist space station research, and involve kids in space sciences. Jó szerencse pölö Charles!"
I thought Mark Shuttleworth claimed that title (the Ubuntu guy)?
Microsoft bashing aside, this is the guy who's founded the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. Richard Dawkins is the current head. I guess that qualifies him pretty much as a (science) nerd.
He still didn't have to put up a Flash 9 only website, though.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Wouldn't he qualify as first geek in space?
No; he's not even the first geek in space this fall.
According to The Fine Article, the "first nerd in space" moniker is actually Dr. Simonyi's speculation about himself, not just the mistake of some clueless reporter - in fact the reporter mentioned three previous nerdy space tourists. My mind boggles - surely before deciding to spend millions of dollars on this trip, Dr. Simonyi thought to learn a little about his predecessors?
Jó szerencse == Good luck pölö == ??? (it could be póló, which means tshirt or a phonetic version of pl, meaning "for example" but I haven't the slightest idea what did they mean to write)
by a native hungarian in the early morning (so if I missed something obvious, it's early!).
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The last sentences means good luck Charles.
\i{I mean, the Russians didn't send a painter up did they?}
Back on Vokhshod I. Alexei Leonov.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Almost all current astronauts are engineers and/or scientists, with PhD's and such.
but our first ones were fighter pilots, aka fighter jocks.
Actually they were aerospace engineers and test pilots. They may have also been fighter jocks (although some flew other types of aircraft) since that's about the only way to rack up time on high performance jets, but at the time of astronaut selection they were working as test pilots. Most (all?) of them had degrees in aerospace engineering. (Armstrong was accepted to MIT, but ended up attending a different college).
I wouldn't call them nerds, though.
-- Alastair
There are many problems with it though. First, there is absolutely no enforcement of such typing, which means that if the "type" changes in the future, you have documentation in your code that is linked to the code itself and much more difficult to change... which actually encourages the "out of date" comment problem. Secondly, it was popularized to such an extent as to be obnoxious.. leading to things like: for(int nCount=0;nCount10;nCount++); Thirdly, it gets unweildy for the cases when it begins to become useful, for instance a struct containing a struct of 2 strings, one null terminated and one not, and an int... at that point, I'm tempted to do hungarian on my weird pointer thingie, but my code will start to look like perl.
Well, the first couple of batches were fighter jocks, actually, hard men with extensive combat experience; but that didn't preclude them from being geeks/nerds as well.
The first American in space, Alan Shepard, had a Bachelor of Science from Annapolis.
Or take the first two men on the moon (please). Neil Armstrong had a Bachelor of Science from Purdue and a Master of Aeronautical Engineering from USC (and had been accepted at MIT). Buzz Aldrin majored in Science at West Point and eventually earned a PhD from MIT.
Jocks with slide rules. It happens.
KFG
I work for NASA supporting the Space Station, and the irony of a Microsoft guy going up is pretty amusing.
8
The crew has a network of laptops running WinXP to do non-critical support tasks, chiefly email. While they work pretty well and generally can be maintained from Houston, the crew does spend a fair amount of time keeping them working. You can often hear tales of woe with the network interspersed with operational discussions on the space to ground audio.
For example, this is from the September 8, 2006 ISS status report posted at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=2199
Jeff's attempts yesterday to set up an Outlook email account for Soyuz taxi crewmember Anousheh Ansari were not successful. This is a repeat of a problem seen with previous email accounts for Soyuz taxi crewmembers. Plans are in work to give the SFP (Space Flight Participant) a regular ISS email account.
I have the feeling that he is going to be jokingly dubbed the "new on-site IT support" by the commander as soon as he arrives.
Worst...sig...ever!
From Wikipedia:
Apparently if you've got something approaching serious money there isn't any reason you can't do all that and go for a joy ride.
KFG
This guy was really the first nerd in space...
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt
He was a geologist from Cal Tech who got to check out lunar geology
up close up close and personal on the Apollo 17 mission.
That's *very* nerdy, in a *very* cool kind of way.
"Jó szerencse pölö Charles!" just doesn't make any sense. If you wanted to right: "Good luck, Charles!", you would say: "Jó szerencsét, Charles!". BTW, you'd rather say: "Jó szerencsét, Károly!" - as the name Charles is Károly in Hungarian. And yes, his original name is Simonyi Károly, written in this order as per the Hungarian custom of naming.
I just wonder how the "pölö" part came into the sentence - as it's not a word in our language. The closest I can think of that it's the pronounciation of the abbreviation "pl.", which is short for "például" - meaning: "for example". I guess you guys asked someone: "How do I say Good Luck in Hungarian?", and the answer might have been: "Jó szerencse, pl." meaning: "For example: Jó szerencsét".
Ákos
a native Hungarian (speaker)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he the guy who developed the Hungarian notation (not that developing code-standards should lead to fame, fortune and grandeur, but just sayin')
More than mere navel gazing.
Did you read the link that was posted a couple comments up? Almost all of the original suggestions AREN'T putting the data type in the name. They're stuff like 'd' to mark that the variable is a delta -- x is an absolute position, dx is a difference between two points. If you see code like x1 + x2 then, that should raise your eyebrow. The linked article gives the example of using 'us' and 's' to prefix unsafe and safe strings respectively, where "unsafe" means "just came in over the network; protect against injection attacks". This is information that your IDE won't give you.
Though to be fair, there are a number of things Simonyi suggested that *aren't* like that -- he suggests 'w' for 'word', 'b' for 'byte', 'p' for 'pointer', and maybe a couple others. 'sz' (null-terminated string) is sorta in between; it doesn't provide much semantic information, but it does provide a little, because does 'char* x' point to a single character or a string?
Though even the ones that encode strict datatypes have a valuable heritage in BCPL, where there isn't typechecking.
I'd have guessed the first nerd in space would be Buzz Aldrin on Gemini XII, the last Gemini flight. He's the one with the PhD in Astronautics from MIT; the rest had masters or bachelor's, highest. Though, all of the Astronaut Group 1 and Astronaut Group 2 and Astronaut Group 3 were pretty much really smart people who have enough intelligence to be considered nerds, one going on to head up software on Apollo.
Not sure if Joe Walker on X-15 flights 90 and 91 (which went past 100km in altitude) should be considered nerd, even with a Physics bachelors degree.
Not sure about the Soviet astronauts' backgrounds either, but judging from the technical school educations, I'd assume it's similar to the astronautics and aeronautics degrees. But they did not appear to have the graduate degree like Aldrin.
The grammar nazi allready bashed you for the spelling so I'll take the second round.. :)
:P
Sputnic [sic] wasn't a dog. It was the first satelite launched into space. Sputnik means satelite but also companion, or even better "co-traveller" in russian. Laika was the first dog (living creature [not counting bacteria and the like clinging to the insides of satelites]) in space.
Back on subject, this here Charles is definitely not the first geek/nerd in space. It's a joke to try and take the title just because he's got som media dweebs to back his claim. All true geeks/nerds know the truth anyway..
Cheers!..
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Olsen
He worked at RCA Laboratories the same time I did. I can testify that he is, indeed, a nerd.
Fred
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he the guy who developed the Hungarian notation (not that developing code-standards should lead to fame, fortune and grandeur, but just sayin')
Yes he is. That's why they call it "hungarian notation". He also hasn't worked for Microsoft since 2002. Right now he's running a company called Intentional Software.
Parent post is an AC.
Anyway, in case your interested.
Have you read my journal today?