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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)?
Wouldn't he qualify as first geek in space? I mean, the Russians didn't send a painter up did they?
yeah, cos everyone that's gone to space so far has been a football jock right?
Nerdy? Well can he quote the Holy Grail and make you ROTFLOL?
"Okay this'll get me laid, right?"
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.
I've often thought, whoever came up with this convention for naming variables ought to be shut in a Russian spacecraft and sent far, far away.
First "nerd in space"? Simonyi isn't even the first nerd in space this year! Cripes, Anousheh Ansari has barely been back on the ground a month.
This sig intentionally left blank.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Being fired is one thing ... but being fired into space?
Gone where no Windows has gone before... along with the anti-spyware, anti-virus and firewall and sun block.
I am sure, in nearly half a century of manned space flight there were many cosmonauts/astronauts that are nerdier than some rich Microsoft guy.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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
I for one am glad we're finally breaking the nerd in space barrier. I mean, it's not like we've ever seen a molecular biologist or astrophysicist go into space. No, they are far too nerdy for something like that.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian in Hungarian notation (you know, m_lpszUsrTxt and the like).
To be entirely fair to him, it wasn't intended to make variable names inscrutable, it applied to a language with weak type checking and few real types, and it still has valid uses today if you use it to mark information about the type of data instead of the "type" of variable.
.. do you really really think that to achieve either/or of the 3 goals you need to spend a truckload (or 10) of cash to go into space? Why not use the money to advocate better education, books, and a series of talks by prominent astronauts or the like? I find this to be a colossal waste of finances and time, which could be better utilized.
Usability Engineer, Master in Human Computer Interaction
I guess the submitter (I hope it wasn't the editor's) didn't realize that a heck of a lot of physicists and astronomers and other hard core scientists have been to space way before Charles Simonyi. If his point was that he was the first somewhat famous computer geek to make it into space, he would be wrong again. Simonyi was beaten to the punch years ago by Mark Shuttleworth of Thawte and Ubunutu Linux fame.
The last sentences means good luck Charles.
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
"Why it's a good idea to embed the type of a variable in its name has forever been lost on me."
szBeats szMe. szBut szMaybe szHis usHungarian szRoots szHad szSomething szTo szDo szWith szIt?
sz_I p_guess u_congratulations sz_are m_in p_order.
I'm pretty sure many previous "rocket scientists" are more nerdy than someone that went on a software to managment track.
He's the one to blame for Word.... :-)
... in Word ...
:-)
Just finished my 2nd book
My 3rd book will be in LaTeX [like my first].
That said, who gives a flying shit about some billionaire honky in space? Personally I'd think of cooler things to do with my money. I'd arbitrarily make cool people "funded" so they could pursue research and fun projects. Just all spontaneous like. That's just for starters...
Spending it on the big houses, cars, boats, etc is just cliche and lame. Once you get past your 1st 12,000 sq ft mansion you really don't need a second
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
4 eyes good, 2 eyes bad.
"My hovercraft is full of eels"?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The 3 goals he wishes to achieve on the trip: advance civilian spaceflight, assist space station research, and involve kids in space sciences.
That's what struck me most about the post: our focus on putting Humans In Space doesn't actually accomplish anything in terms of getting us to Mars, or even back to Luna, other than "raise awareness." In other words, it's just a publicity stunt.
I applaud all the private space flight ventures, but where is the exploration? I don't mean we should be focusing on robotic probes either. Right now we've got some missions that gather data about distant planets, and some that involve actual humans -- with no overlap!
Revive the Constitution.
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!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt every Astronaut a nerd? How about any number of non-astro-scientists that I'm sure have been in space doing research?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
"My hovercraft is full of eels"
Can we take up a collection to send a civilian into space with the ability to translate the experience into art? Somebody like Spider Robinson, or Tom Wolfe, perhaps? How long will the most liminal and mind-expanding human experience only be the province of those who lack the passion and subtlety to appreciate it, and who cannot, therefore, sublimate it for the rest of us? "Space. Wow. It was so damn empty. Man, you can see the whole earth! Even the dark bits, without people!" If we send somebody up who has the craft to record their experience in an engaging and creative way, then it is like sending ALL of us into space. I can think of no quicker way to give the space program the cultural boost it needs to survive increasing (understandable) voter apathy. Sure, Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop like chocolate, but they don't deserve the factory...
There's no telling what he'll try to do up there
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Nah, he's just like every other Microsoft employee, totally ignorant of things that ain't happening inside Microsoft. It's a sheltered culture.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Don't trust him, he's from "The Company"! Ain't that right Bishop?
That's lpszCharles lpszSimonyi, thank you very much.
First Russian cosmonauts were fighter pilots.
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
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)
well, the /. summary said something about him launching a web site.. Perhaps it should now be jettisoned..
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Come on only a BS.
OK, but does he play poker?
There were definitely nerds before him. He might be the first one to which the term "nerd" can be applied to negatively. For the other ones, if you call them nerds they can say "Yeah, well I invented a spacecraft, bitch!". This guy can just say he managed the development of some software. So he's the first bad nerd.
Shuttleworth did it! Shuttleworth did it!
I relate to your financial trouble. Sorry to burst your bubble but one of the reasons that he can afford the 20 million, is that he *doesn't* help random geeks out of debt. If he would, that would quickly drown his reserves now wouldn't it?
You'd have a better chance of getting out of debt by asking for a raise or increasing your pay by changing jobs. If you're any good, a 500 raise should be doable. If you have a partner (of course, this is slashdot), a 250 raise for each of you should be even easier to arrange for. This should allow you to get out of debt in a few years, without need to reduce your standard of living in the meantime. I'll assume that you're already saving as much as you can. If this assumption is false, shame on you for begging- you don't need to yet.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.
...you're all completely jealous.
So am I.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Because obviously all those engineers and scientists usually in orbit aren't nerds...
... Russians didn't have to rewrite their code to Hungarian notation before he steps in!
Did you read the link? That wasn't really what he was suggesting... most of his suggestions went beyond things that the type system provides for you.
(And it also got started in BCPL, which didn't do typechecking at all. So there something like iSomeInt or dSomeDouble would be very helpful if not essential.)
"I am a Geek." Lets see, according to this source, the most important factor on determining whether a person is a geek or not should be if he claims to be a Geek. Congratulations, you truly are a Geek.
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
I read a biography of Charles Simonyi once. What struck me was that he must be the luckiest man alive after Ringo Starr. As far as I could tell, he was simply in the right place, at the right time, to give us the WORST word processor or all time - and make billions in the process.
I know that Hungarian notation is often cited as one of his great achievements, but really - what has this guy ever actually positively contributed to anything other than a superlative example to coat-tailing?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The article makes it sound like "nerds" should feel proud of this. I, for one, don't.
Simonyi condemned us to Hungarian notation and decades of writing code in C, C++, and COM, and is significantly responsible for the bloatware that is Microsoft Office. The negative impact of this, both for Microsoft products, and outside, has been enormous. Simonyi's most important contribution was his creation of the first WYSIWYG editor, while he was at Xerox.
Fortunately, after several decades of this, Microsoft is finally dumping Hungarian notation and moving away from C++. Let's hope they'll redesign Word and Excel from the ground up, too.
Sputnik was just a satellite. The first dog in space was called Laika.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
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
I mean, that's the least MS should do for their guy. After all, if he's the 'first' nerd (totally untrue if you know a little bit about Mark Shuttleworth :-) and he's been so 'influential' (right time at the right place) than MS ought to give him the best help possible and send him up controlled by a bunch of Vista systems that are naturally edge-to-edge DRM-ed to make sure he's 100% "safe".
:-).
Buuuugs in spaaace. Oh sorry, that should be 'piiigs'
Insert
Read the Right Stuff. The scientists running the first missions wanted "Spam in a Can" - monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts. However, lowering the entry qualifications *so* low meant obvious problems in recruitment, with too many people flying. So the "obvious" pick was amongst fighter pilots and aerospace test pilots. the latter soon realised they were overly qualified (as both pilots and geeks) to run a mercury or an apollo rig but that got out-balanced by the inherent dangers of the missions. The tests they took to become astronauts could easily have been done by, oh, weight-lifters, long-distance runners etc. However, there's not much glory attached to sending runners into space ...
The Soviets went through a similar process.
The shuttle changes things again, but I would dispute that you need to be a fighter-jock to control it. A bomber or transport or even an airline pilot would be equally, if not better adapted, to deal with the shuttle controls. If they had kept the X15 program going, then that truly was a fighter-jocks dream aircraft and we'd've had returnable aircraft flying today rather than the flying brick of a shuttle.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Most airforce pilots do a degree of some sort. Firstly, they are officers, and secondly the Air Force has to do SOMETHING with them when they are not flying or stop flying, and thirdly, you do aero so you at least have some idea how the hell this ship your piloting works.
And trust me, test pilots aren't merely Fighter Jocks, they're the Alpha Fighter Jocks.
polo has no meaning in hungarian exept for a very informal way of saying for example, and it is only used in speech not writing. And "jo szerencse" means good luck, but it is in a wrong form, it would be "Jo szerencset Charles!", but that is not commonly used anymore, it was a greeting for miners, and in citys/towns where mines where present, like Pecs but i think it mostly died out. A common form for "Good luck Charles" would be "Sok szerencset Charles" (i missed out the accents, dont like them) ps: sorry for my english, i'm working on it
During launch will the Soyuz TMA-10 perform a "Hungarian Rotation"?
My interpretation of the top post was that it claimed Yuri Gagarin was the first *nerd* in space (because any astronaut is likely to be a bit of a nerd), whereas Dr. Simonyi would be the first *geek* in space (using the distinct "computer geek" associations of that word); so I was trying to point out that even if you change "nerd" to a restrictively defined "geek" the statement about Dr. Simonyi wouldn't be true. Your interpretation's more reasonable, though; now I feel illiterate.
I can't wait to see what personSimonyi does to the spacecraftSoyuzTMA-10 conventionNamingConvention.
I don't think the Jargon File is the best authority on the geek versus nerd debate, because that's focused on the slang of hacker culture of the days of yore (pre-1994, let's say) and those terms are somewhat more widespread than that.
The ultimate answer, I think, is that geeks and nerds are pretty much the same thing, and although a lot of people make a distinction, what that distinction is varies from region to region. However, I have gotten the impression that the "Nerds are socially inept, geeks are merely weird" way of looking at it is fairly popular.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 10? I thought there were only two, at least until #2 replicated itself to turn Jupiter into a star.
"Whoa, it's full of stars" - Neo Bowman
Kind of retarded for not notiing their have been 40 PhDs in space already as astronauts or shuttle specialists. Plus three of the private astronauts made their fortunes in the computer industry.
well, I guess if everyone uses those definitions, then it is not wrong;however hostorically those are not what the terms meant.
In short, a geek is/was someone who has extreme interest and enthusiasm for topics not in the main stream.
A nerd was someone with a high degree of technical knowledge, and perfers the technical arena more then the social.
note: you can be a nerd with social skills, there just not your preference.
also note, you can be a geek AND a nerd.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Now let's meet the crew, we have
Bob Smith, A statistician
Joe Franklin, Another statistician
and
Tom Reynolds, A completely different type of statistician.
You can't tell me that a crew of statisticians isn't going to be nerdy!
-Runz
for (unsigned long ulCount = 10; ulCount > 0; ulCount--)
{
char szMsg[5];
MessageBox (NULL, itoa(ulCount,szMsg,10), "Countdown", MB_OK);
}
MessageBox (NULL, "Liftoff!", "Countdown", MB_OK);
This is how of many of us 40-ish programmers learned to code UIs...
Nerds create the things geeks obsess with.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wonder if he intentds to pack his vintage Star Trek uniform and bang out some one liners when up there. Maybe bring home a pet Tribble?
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
Well played
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Actually, Hungarian Notation is a good thing, and he should be thanked for that. The misuse of it, however, is to put the type in, and that is where things went bad.
I have some links in my JE on the subject.
Have you read my journal today?
Parent post is an AC.
Anyway, in case your interested.
Have you read my journal today?
"What's that flashing?"
Let's face it, we're all nerds and/or geeks because:
./ "News for nerds [and geeks]. Stuff that matters."
1. We're debating over the classification of nerds and geeks.
2. The debate is taking place on
monkeys would have done them, and probably would have performed better than the astronauts.
There were a number of incidents in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo series where the spacecraft or mission would have been lost if there'd been monkeys rather than humans aboard. (Gemini 6, Gemini 8, Apollo 13, Skylab -- just off the top of my head.) Of course, nobody would have cared much were it just monkeys.
As for the aerospace engineer astronauts being overqualified, they took a very active role in the design and engineering of the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft (some too in Mercury, but those were late changes). Yeah, others may have been more expert in single aspects of the vehicles, but the astronauts probably undestood the systems as a whole better than anyone else. It was their and their buddies' butts on the line, after all. No just spacecraft engineering either. Buzz Aldrin, for example, was the expert in both the theory and practise of orbital rendezvous manoeuvers.
It wasn't just about endurance -- certainly that was important: the Gemini launches for example subjected the crews to 8 Gs acceleration, and working in a pressurized space suit (especially the earlier designs) was something that would tax even olympic athletes -- it was also about a base of prior knowledge and experience to build on. (What does a long-distance runner know about roll, pitch and yaw, or celestial navigation? What does a weight lifter know about recognizing the effects of hypoxia or experiencing unusual +ve, -ve or sideways G forces? This is all stuff that is old-hat to any pilot even before they enter test-pilot school.)
And any graduate of test-pilot school will be known to have both a sufficient understanding of flight dynamics and a problem solving ability and coolness of head to be in a situation where, for example, if he's testing an aircraft outside its known envelope and it starts behaving in a manner totally unexpected, he can diagnose the problem and do something about it hopefully before it kills him, all while reporting to the ground everything that is happening and everything that he's trying to do to fix it just in case the fix doesn't work and he makes another smoking hole in the desert and gets a street at Edwards AFB named after him.
(And you're right, the Shuttle is definitely a "heavy" and not a fighter -- although most of its flight regime is supersonic and it has to dead-stick the landing. A Concorde pilot, perhaps, or SR-71 pilots. Although now computers can do the whole thing -- as witness the Soviet Buran flight.)
-- Alastair
Identify Strelka and Belka... without searching on the Net...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
M. Simony:
....)
Apparently took a night watch job baby sitting an old lamp (no not the recent version of lamp) based computer (thus they did not need to power it down at night, and since lamps are most likely to burn out when you turn them on or off...
And not only wrote a large part of the early versions of word, he also organized the teams so that it would work
And left microsoft
so no he is not the first, but it's still cool
(now if bill and steve could also take a rocket ticket, prefereably for proxima centauris, or even better the magelanian clouds, we would have a couple of quiter centuries
You're telling me astronauts aren't some of the biggest nerds around?
I have ridden the mighty moon worm!