Being serious for a moment, as well as the disgraceful case of Alan Turing, the British engineer/scientist Alan Blumlein did major work on audio intelligibility (working for the BBC when it was at the forefront of communications research).
In WW2, instead of protecting him like Churchill, he was allowed to go up in bombers - and was killed. Our deeply stupid Civil Service, then as now, has no notion of the value of scientists.
Back in the 1980s we were doing some work on tank internal networking. Our group turned up on Salisbury Plain for a trial on a hot, dry day. Whereupon I got my all-in-one biker suit and balaclava out of my kit bag just as my colleagues realised they were about to get their suits covered in dust. At which the sergeant in charge of the support crew remarked "You know, Sir, you're quite sensible for a boffin". I asked him if he'd let me quote him on my CV.
It's interesting that in the women's list boating ranks above horses, while in my own experience it is exactly the other way round. My cynical guess is that anyone who can afford a boat (as Lipton said, it's like tearing up banknotes under a cold shower) is seen by a lot of women as a good prospect. People who can afford boats can afford horses, but a lot of people who like horses don't have so much money (perhaps through a belief that one horse can be reliably predicted to run faster than another.)
Actually reading the paper shows that the terminology used tends to assume what is to be demonstrated. Calling the objects "cells" and the structures that appear in them "daughter cells" is a little bit hyperbolic. They could equally well be called "bubbles" and "internal bubbles".
Which is not to say they are wrong. There is a lot of speculation that neither DNA nor RNA were the actual encoding means of early life, but some other double helix that was more stable in the radiation and temperature extremes of early Earth. If this research justifies an in-depth study of what is in those hypothetical "nuclei" and what comprises that "cell membrane", that should tell us whether this is for real or whether it's some kind of nonliving artefact.
Apple is trying to attack Android, which is growing in marketshare much faster than the iPhone. So they are trying to encourage the view that a monoculture is a virtue, and the various flavours of Android are somehow fracturing the market. (One phone to rule them all...)
Personally I think this is complete nonsense. Android runs on a lot of devices - soon to be added is the Toshiba AC100 netbook, so it will run on everything from entry level phones to small computers - which involves numerous changes in UI arising from optimisation and features. But the underlying architecture should make it possible to ensure that things are properly partitioned to give a robust security model, and Google isn't exactly short of brainpower. I suspect that just as we had the Microsoft trolls trying to minimise reports of Windows security issues, here we have Apple trolls trying to find narratives to attack Android.
I think by this you mean "most tolerant of male bad behaviour." This is not a feminist definition of "best". In terms of overall national achievement, I think the French might want to make some claims.
Unless UL has changed its mandate, its role is to safety test products (hence its name - it was set up by insurance underwriters to help control insurance costs.)
However, the mere fact that a coffee machine or a breadmaker is safe doesn't actually make it any use for making coffee or baking bread - in fact, in the UK, makers of nonfunctioning "water treatment" products market them as WRAS approved - which is purely safety testing.
Any commercially sponsored test is flawed. Did you ever see a car magazine give a BMW a bad review? Usually they give critical reviews of second tier manufacturers or small cars, which have near-zero "marketing" budgets, and criticise very expensive cars (that their readers can't afford and whose makers don't advertise with them). I'm happy to pay taxes to an organisation that won't go out of business by telling the truth.
Completely wrong. Piston engines are limited by the essential geometry of the cylinder/valve combination, plus the maximum piston speed which is geometry independent. Once a spark ignition cylinder exceeds about 500cc, its specific output starts to drop. Beyond 2 liters, diminishing returns set in with a vengeance. Mechanical complexity thus sets a limit to aircraft engine horsepower. (Marine engines can be huge because they don't have to worry about weight.) Turbocharging and supercharging eventually reach the point at which a lot of the thrust is being produced by the exhaust - at which point, replace the mechanical complexity of the piston engine with a relatively simple burner, and you have a jet engine which is simpler, lighter and more reliable.
Bottom line: above a few thousand KW, piston engines for aircraft are simply too complex, expensive and unreliable. The fuel is immaterial.
Remind me never to offer you a job. If you think that stabilising a variable-geometry (people can move) rocket system with "a few gyroscopes...with some logic" is trivial, you are either a genius to make Newton look like a moron, or you have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about. I venture to suspect the latter.
There is a reason why the term "rocket science" is used to suggest something is more than a bit difficult. But thank you for giving an old-timer a bit of amusement at the expense of what I suspect is one of today's teenagers.
I read the parent post and thought for a second or so "he has a point". Then I suddenly realised how I was scrolling. When you've used a mouse for an average of perhaps 2500 hours a year, your brain operates it completely on auto.
And yes, left hand tabs make a lot of sense. That, or can we go back to laptops with 3 by 4 screen ratios?
I'd really rather have a Windows 7 theme that works like standard Gnome on Ubuntu 10.04, please. Cue (perhaps) irate responses, but I work with both and I prefer Gnome. Add a proper terminal and sudo rather than uac, and my life as a developer would be significantly easier. Oh, and a decent package manager. I have one on my phone, it shouldn't be too hard.
Under the hood of the VW TSI I looked at this weekend is a "simple" 4-cylinder engines - well, 4 valves per cylinder, turbocharger, supercharger, 7-speed 2-clutch auto gearbox, 180BHP from 1.4 liters.
No, sorry, you are quite wrong. It is nothing to do with avoiding complexity. It is to do with CAD ensuring that every component is properly designed for the duty, advanced FEA ensuring proper thermal management of the engine, and advanced manufacturing and quality systems delivering accurate parts time after time. The complexity is there all right, delivered by the wonders of advanced computing.
You cannot learn engine design from a TSI engine. You can learn an awful lot from a research engine, single cylinder four-and-a-half inch bore Diesel with almost everything adjustable. You can learn very little (in fact) from a chainsaw engine, despite its only having a few moving parts, because again it is an optimised design. This is why learning on an old BBC Micro is more useful than learning embedded programming (I've done both.) The 6502 and all its works is not a modern, optimised 8 bit processor with a lean instruction set. It is clever, but a bit of a kludge. Assembler on a 6502 forces you to think. Crappy memory architecture causes you to think harder.
You have completely missed my point (you _have_ got electronic systems design experience, haven't you?). Given identical graphics capability, if you can put the GPU on the same die, or next door on the motherboard, as the main CPU, you will consume less power, as sure as V = Ldi/dt.
Anyone who has been paying attention for the last 10 years is well aware that the entire consumer electronics industry is largely driven by integration and shrinkage.
Power consumption. To use the discrete graphics card you need lots of bus drivers on the motherboard and the card. They have to drive the bus inductance and capacitance. The faster they go, the more bits on the bus, the more power they use. Integrate usable graphics and you are driving tiny loads, so the power consumption drops.
People simply don't want to sit in a fixed position governed by a box and a monitor, which is one reason laptops outsell desktops. The future is untethered, which means low power battery operated systems. Your discrete graphics card will never be more than a niche market.
I could give you an in-depth explanation of why this proposal is mind-numbingly stupid, but instead I will just invite you to consider (a) how big the dirigible will be and (b) how difficult it is going to be to ballast it with enough ice to get back again. What happens to a blimp when you take the load off? An oil rig weighs thousands of tonnes. When you offload it, you get thousands of tonnes of lift. Either you have to deal with that, an interesting technical challenge, or you have to dump hundreds of tonnes of expensive helium. In either case, as the arctic ice is melting, history is against any long-term dirigible design.
I'm not sure what you are saying here. I thought you were arguing for a "commuter vehicle" to get payloads to LEO. My point is that it isn't the cargo that makes the system expensive and unreliable; it's the crew and the fuel. If the payload is a satellite, it's quite happy with hard vacuum and a wide temperature range. Human beings don't much like either, plus a satellite doesn't need to pee. If you are arguing for a "commuter vehicle" to deliver people to LEO, my immediate question is "why?".
I agree that the Shuttle was always a ludicrous idea (if you like, the victory of the "pilots" and the X-project over the "chimps" and the Apollo program, sociology rather than engineering), but then so is the ISS. If rather than engage in manned spaceflight willy-waving we had waited until we had our current robot capability, we would have spent a lot less and found out just as much, and we could have had more suitable delivery vehicles to put robots around the Solar System.
You might like to consider, vis-a-vis aviation, that we looked at supersonic passenger aircraft and then walked away from them because they were stupidly expensive (and actually unsafe.) We did much better with aircraft designed to work, as it were, with the atmosphere rather than against it. Jeremy Clarkson, no less, suggested that supersonic aircraft went away because of mobile phones and the Internet. In the same way, within the limits of our current technical capability, the need for manned spacecraft (if it ever existed, which I doubt) went away once we could put a little robot on Mars and have it wander around for years looking at things.
When it's the US, right-wingers bloviating this kind of stuff are "freem of speech" and heavily armed fruitcakes are "right to bear arms". Our PM suggests that the Pakistan Intelligence Agency is playing with both sides and that's a "gaffe", while US politicians say things every day that can be used to stir up most of the Middle East against them. We're supposed to know that when you write "nutjobs and mad mullahs" that's just free speech, but when they talk about the "Great Satan" that's a present danger.
I personally think that Iran has a disgusting record on human rights, that it really needs to sort out its misogynistic patriarchy, and that the "Iranian Minister of Justice" is an oxymoron. But a state of the US is about to execute a woman with an IQ of 72 for allegedly plotting to kill her husband, and the chance of being executed for various offences in the US is directly linked to socioeconomic status and skin colour. Am I supposed to draw the same conclusions about the US?
The energy distance from the ground to even low earth orbit is such that your "commuter vehicle" has to carry many times its own weight in fuel, and the fuel is very nasty stuff. Human beings with their fragility and their extensive maintenance requirements are the very worst kind of payload. If your car had to make it to the office through hard vacuum, carrying many times its own weight of fuel, it would indeed need to do the equivalent of carrying the entire house with it.
Although the ideal requirement can be stated concisely, that does not mean it is actually possible. NASA's overall problem is one of mission incompatibility. Normally if I post something like this, somebody replies "with your attitude we wouldn't have discovered fire yet". To which the reply is that fire is ridiculously easy to discover; wait for a thunderstorm after a dry period. We have got where we are because energy became more and more readily available as our tools improved. But energy has ceased to become more readily available; we do not have any feasible technology for space lift that does not require exotic chemical mixtures. NASA is being asked to look at the wrong end of the telescope. Much better fuel or lift means needs to come first. Douglas Adams, who was no fool, satirised the problem with his infinite improbability drive and bistromath drives, but in fact he identified the core problem in space travel.
If you filled in the extensive questionnaire Nokia sent N900 owners, you were asked to rate the N900 on a scale from "computer with phone functions" to "phone with computer functions". Nokia understands the issue well. I don't think the N900 is anything at all to do with the iPhone/Android world. It is simply a completely different class of machine, and Nokia's low key approach suggests they regard it as a research vehicle. In exchange for supporting their research, you get a piece of equipment targeted at software developers. Yes, it's slower than an iPhone or recent Android devices. It's heavier. It's clunkier. But it's lighter, smaller and more convenient than anything else which I can use to do the same job.
Old English legal saying. If you are guilty (or have a bad civil case) choose a jury. If you have a strong case or are innocent, choose a judge. If Oracle had any kind of strong case, they would obviously want a trial without jury because it would be over faster, their costs would be lower and they would get redress quicker. So? So this looks like a classical Von Falkenhayn Battle (after the German WW1 Minister who wanted a battle that would be inconclusive but would go on a long time, so as to wear out the French. Unfortunately, just as with SCO, he wore out the Germans as well.)
This is an aggregating computer at SpanAir HQ which is supposed to record aircraft alerts and notify when too many of them happen too close together. Its only connection with the on-board computer is that somehow it receives the alerts from it. Its OS is unstated. It is not a mission-critical system, it is a decision-support system. Even so, someone looks to have been careless.
Whoever modded up the above post - you've missed the point. There may have been a fault in the on-board management system - or human error failing to heed a warning - but nothing in TFA suggests that malware was in any way involved on the flight deck.
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In WW2, instead of protecting him like Churchill, he was allowed to go up in bombers - and was killed. Our deeply stupid Civil Service, then as now, has no notion of the value of scientists.
Back in the 1980s we were doing some work on tank internal networking. Our group turned up on Salisbury Plain for a trial on a hot, dry day. Whereupon I got my all-in-one biker suit and balaclava out of my kit bag just as my colleagues realised they were about to get their suits covered in dust. At which the sergeant in charge of the support crew remarked "You know, Sir, you're quite sensible for a boffin". I asked him if he'd let me quote him on my CV.
It's interesting that in the women's list boating ranks above horses, while in my own experience it is exactly the other way round. My cynical guess is that anyone who can afford a boat (as Lipton said, it's like tearing up banknotes under a cold shower) is seen by a lot of women as a good prospect. People who can afford boats can afford horses, but a lot of people who like horses don't have so much money (perhaps through a belief that one horse can be reliably predicted to run faster than another.)
Which is not to say they are wrong. There is a lot of speculation that neither DNA nor RNA were the actual encoding means of early life, but some other double helix that was more stable in the radiation and temperature extremes of early Earth. If this research justifies an in-depth study of what is in those hypothetical "nuclei" and what comprises that "cell membrane", that should tell us whether this is for real or whether it's some kind of nonliving artefact.
I was going to, like, contribute some stuff to Wikipedia...but now I know what happens, I guess I'll do something else that evening.
Personally I think this is complete nonsense. Android runs on a lot of devices - soon to be added is the Toshiba AC100 netbook, so it will run on everything from entry level phones to small computers - which involves numerous changes in UI arising from optimisation and features. But the underlying architecture should make it possible to ensure that things are properly partitioned to give a robust security model, and Google isn't exactly short of brainpower. I suspect that just as we had the Microsoft trolls trying to minimise reports of Windows security issues, here we have Apple trolls trying to find narratives to attack Android.
And no, I don't use Android.
I think by this you mean "most tolerant of male bad behaviour." This is not a feminist definition of "best". In terms of overall national achievement, I think the French might want to make some claims.
However, the mere fact that a coffee machine or a breadmaker is safe doesn't actually make it any use for making coffee or baking bread - in fact, in the UK, makers of nonfunctioning "water treatment" products market them as WRAS approved - which is purely safety testing.
Any commercially sponsored test is flawed. Did you ever see a car magazine give a BMW a bad review? Usually they give critical reviews of second tier manufacturers or small cars, which have near-zero "marketing" budgets, and criticise very expensive cars (that their readers can't afford and whose makers don't advertise with them). I'm happy to pay taxes to an organisation that won't go out of business by telling the truth.
Bottom line: above a few thousand KW, piston engines for aircraft are simply too complex, expensive and unreliable. The fuel is immaterial.
There is a reason why the term "rocket science" is used to suggest something is more than a bit difficult. But thank you for giving an old-timer a bit of amusement at the expense of what I suspect is one of today's teenagers.
And yes, left hand tabs make a lot of sense. That, or can we go back to laptops with 3 by 4 screen ratios?
I'd really rather have a Windows 7 theme that works like standard Gnome on Ubuntu 10.04, please. Cue (perhaps) irate responses, but I work with both and I prefer Gnome. Add a proper terminal and sudo rather than uac, and my life as a developer would be significantly easier. Oh, and a decent package manager. I have one on my phone, it shouldn't be too hard.
I think you've been reading too much Le Carré. Time to file away that old copy of Grimmelshausen.
No, sorry, you are quite wrong. It is nothing to do with avoiding complexity. It is to do with CAD ensuring that every component is properly designed for the duty, advanced FEA ensuring proper thermal management of the engine, and advanced manufacturing and quality systems delivering accurate parts time after time. The complexity is there all right, delivered by the wonders of advanced computing.
You cannot learn engine design from a TSI engine. You can learn an awful lot from a research engine, single cylinder four-and-a-half inch bore Diesel with almost everything adjustable. You can learn very little (in fact) from a chainsaw engine, despite its only having a few moving parts, because again it is an optimised design. This is why learning on an old BBC Micro is more useful than learning embedded programming (I've done both.) The 6502 and all its works is not a modern, optimised 8 bit processor with a lean instruction set. It is clever, but a bit of a kludge. Assembler on a 6502 forces you to think. Crappy memory architecture causes you to think harder.
Anyone who has been paying attention for the last 10 years is well aware that the entire consumer electronics industry is largely driven by integration and shrinkage.
People simply don't want to sit in a fixed position governed by a box and a monitor, which is one reason laptops outsell desktops. The future is untethered, which means low power battery operated systems. Your discrete graphics card will never be more than a niche market.
I could give you an in-depth explanation of why this proposal is mind-numbingly stupid, but instead I will just invite you to consider (a) how big the dirigible will be and (b) how difficult it is going to be to ballast it with enough ice to get back again. What happens to a blimp when you take the load off? An oil rig weighs thousands of tonnes. When you offload it, you get thousands of tonnes of lift. Either you have to deal with that, an interesting technical challenge, or you have to dump hundreds of tonnes of expensive helium. In either case, as the arctic ice is melting, history is against any long-term dirigible design.
A bill for a helicopter may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to afford to go there the next year.
Helped organise the Bay of Pigs and tried several times to assassinate Castro?
I agree that the Shuttle was always a ludicrous idea (if you like, the victory of the "pilots" and the X-project over the "chimps" and the Apollo program, sociology rather than engineering), but then so is the ISS. If rather than engage in manned spaceflight willy-waving we had waited until we had our current robot capability, we would have spent a lot less and found out just as much, and we could have had more suitable delivery vehicles to put robots around the Solar System.
You might like to consider, vis-a-vis aviation, that we looked at supersonic passenger aircraft and then walked away from them because they were stupidly expensive (and actually unsafe.) We did much better with aircraft designed to work, as it were, with the atmosphere rather than against it. Jeremy Clarkson, no less, suggested that supersonic aircraft went away because of mobile phones and the Internet. In the same way, within the limits of our current technical capability, the need for manned spacecraft (if it ever existed, which I doubt) went away once we could put a little robot on Mars and have it wander around for years looking at things.
I personally think that Iran has a disgusting record on human rights, that it really needs to sort out its misogynistic patriarchy, and that the "Iranian Minister of Justice" is an oxymoron. But a state of the US is about to execute a woman with an IQ of 72 for allegedly plotting to kill her husband, and the chance of being executed for various offences in the US is directly linked to socioeconomic status and skin colour. Am I supposed to draw the same conclusions about the US?
Although the ideal requirement can be stated concisely, that does not mean it is actually possible. NASA's overall problem is one of mission incompatibility. Normally if I post something like this, somebody replies "with your attitude we wouldn't have discovered fire yet". To which the reply is that fire is ridiculously easy to discover; wait for a thunderstorm after a dry period. We have got where we are because energy became more and more readily available as our tools improved. But energy has ceased to become more readily available; we do not have any feasible technology for space lift that does not require exotic chemical mixtures. NASA is being asked to look at the wrong end of the telescope. Much better fuel or lift means needs to come first. Douglas Adams, who was no fool, satirised the problem with his infinite improbability drive and bistromath drives, but in fact he identified the core problem in space travel.
If you filled in the extensive questionnaire Nokia sent N900 owners, you were asked to rate the N900 on a scale from "computer with phone functions" to "phone with computer functions". Nokia understands the issue well. I don't think the N900 is anything at all to do with the iPhone/Android world. It is simply a completely different class of machine, and Nokia's low key approach suggests they regard it as a research vehicle. In exchange for supporting their research, you get a piece of equipment targeted at software developers. Yes, it's slower than an iPhone or recent Android devices. It's heavier. It's clunkier. But it's lighter, smaller and more convenient than anything else which I can use to do the same job.
Old English legal saying. If you are guilty (or have a bad civil case) choose a jury. If you have a strong case or are innocent, choose a judge. If Oracle had any kind of strong case, they would obviously want a trial without jury because it would be over faster, their costs would be lower and they would get redress quicker. So? So this looks like a classical Von Falkenhayn Battle (after the German WW1 Minister who wanted a battle that would be inconclusive but would go on a long time, so as to wear out the French. Unfortunately, just as with SCO, he wore out the Germans as well.)
Whoever modded up the above post - you've missed the point. There may have been a fault in the on-board management system - or human error failing to heed a warning - but nothing in TFA suggests that malware was in any way involved on the flight deck.