The new Star Wars trilogies show that no huge amount of F/X money can compensate for bad scripts, bad directing and bad acting. I've seen a ton of indie movies with interesting characters and stories made for one thousandth of the budget.
The author is comparing apples and oranges. Serious design on the space telescope started in in the late 1970s for a mid-1980s launch. And the launch was delayed considerable, first by its own delays, then delays in the shuttle program and the first shuttle disaster. A 2005-2010 era space telescope would castly beat the Hubble and an Antarctica telescope.
Another counter example is the 2003 great blackout. Most of the US InterNet operated fine during and after this incident. Another result of decentralisation.
The 1989 Loma Prieta quake had a magnitude of 6.9 and affected the entire San Francisco area. The InterNet and computers did not go down, except in the few places that lost power.
This month's copy of Physics Today had the Google Aptitude Test (GLAT) as an insert. I guess they they were interested in brainy people like physicists. For years, MicroSoft would recruit physics departments.
I found some of the questions ironic. Like some say "in five lines say how you change this...". I roll my eyes then when a Google search returns "128,983,871 pages found".
Other computer deci-billionaires like Larry Ellison , Michael Dell, Paul Allen, Steve Balmer have barely given away their windfalls while Bill Gates has given away almost half of his to education and medicine.
Bush wants to prohibit research on reproductive research- stems cells and sexual sociology. Kerry wants to prohibit R&D on next generation nuclear weapons and anti-missile technology. I think limiting R&D of most any kind is counter productive in the long term. Some other country will do it.
Some movies e.g. Dracula, Superman, are re-made over and over. One reason is superior F/X technology. A second reason is current cute actors/esses. A third reason is to modernize a timeless story. WOTW is essentially a reflection of the brutality of war. The first movies reflected the horror of WWI. However we now have the mideast terrorism.
As others have said, you store and transmit energy in hydrogen, but it has to be created somewhere. Manufacturing hydrogen out in the "boonies" in a wind farm is an option.
Since the beginning of the computer age people have been touting computers that maintain themselves, software that practically writes itself, and reusable software. To some degree all of these have happened. At the some time computing systems have been immensely larger and more complex; Instead of one computer per ten thousand people, each person may have several dozen computers when you count all the embedded ones.
When you balance these two factors- better computers verus bigger and more- one might predict an eventual reduction in the number of software engineers needed. It hasnt happened to a great degree yet, but might sometime.
Now that overhead approaches 50-100% of an employee's salary, its still cheaper to overwork an existing employee at lower efficiency than hire a new one.
Overhead includes employers social security (7.65%), workmans comp (6.8% in California), health insurance (about $7000 employers portion for a family), 401K matching, paid vacation time, office, computers, etc.
And its even cheaper to hire abroad with zero employee overhead and same salary.
I was impressed with the number MicroSoft Asia authors at the 2004 SIGGRAPH Meeting in Los Angeles last month. Something like 12% of the papers. Its very hard to get a paper accepted at that meeting- over 80% are rejected.
The research was solid, but not not super creative. There were things like you might do in a 3-D version of Photoshop, etc. The heavy duty mathematics came were still in papers from Stanford and CMU.
The big mystery is when MicroSoft is going release products from its impressive R&D lab. Most of its products are boring copycat stuff like the recent MS-Tunes.
I'd hesitate "siliconizing" an algorithm before I knew what the best algorithm was. People have working on this problem for 50 years. They have some reasonable solutions for slow speech. But there are still clever things to be discovered. You can always test it on a supercomputer, or slowed down speech.
>As if when I think "Apple," I think "Beatles."
Up the the early 1980s most people thought of the Beatles when they heard of Apple Ltd. Apple, the computer company, barely got to keep its name. I was there.
The ethernet (and mostly internet) protocol was predicted to die 30 years ago. People offered alternatives like ATM and MicroSofts early 90s protocol (failed attempted hijacking of the Net),
but none really caught. A mediocre standard used by billions of computers perseveres.
This issue has been studied for many decades in order to help organizations minimize losses on bad bids. Courses are taught on this. I took something like this once. There was an exercise to estimate the number of beans in jar. People's guesses fell along a curve called the binnormal distribution. From this equation you can estimate the best price to offer versus other people's bids in order to ocassionally win and make money at it.
The space derbis problem exists and is serious.
A grain of dust has the momentum of a rifle bullet and a coin that of an automobile when there is a several thousanf MPH velocity differential.
Norad radar tracks about 20,000 pieces larger than a coin. In the long term the derbis smashes itself into tiny pieces and settles in a "ring" orbit- the only stable configuration.
I read a scifi story where the space program ends because there is too much dangerous derbis up there. So does global communication, GPS, pagers, etc. when all the satellites are trashed.
Slashdot Mirror
The new Star Wars trilogies show that no huge amount of F/X money can compensate for bad scripts, bad directing and bad acting. I've seen a ton of indie movies with interesting characters and stories made for one thousandth of the budget.
The author is comparing apples and oranges. Serious design on the space telescope started in in the late 1970s for a mid-1980s launch. And the launch was delayed considerable, first by its own delays, then delays in the shuttle program and the first shuttle disaster. A 2005-2010 era space telescope would castly beat the Hubble and an Antarctica telescope.
GLAT: Number of blank lines for testee's answer: 5.
Number of "found pages" for typical google search: 523,984
Another counter example is the 2003 great blackout. Most of the US InterNet operated fine during and after this incident. Another result of decentralisation.
The 1989 Loma Prieta quake had a magnitude of 6.9 and affected the entire San Francisco area. The InterNet and computers did not go down, except in the few places that lost power.
This month's copy of Physics Today had the Google Aptitude Test (GLAT) as an insert. I guess they they were interested in brainy people like physicists. For years, MicroSoft would recruit physics departments.
...". I roll my eyes then when a Google search returns "128,983,871 pages found".
I found some of the questions ironic. Like some say "in five lines say how you change this
Wouldnt Mars get wacked more frequently by a "big one" because it is much closer to the asteroid belt?
The science method requires that results be repeatable. Students, get those kegs rolling!
Other computer deci-billionaires like Larry Ellison , Michael Dell, Paul Allen, Steve Balmer have barely given away their windfalls while Bill Gates has given away almost half of his to education and medicine.
Bush wants to prohibit research on reproductive research- stems cells and sexual sociology. Kerry wants to prohibit R&D on next generation nuclear weapons and anti-missile technology. I think limiting R&D of most any kind is counter productive in the long term. Some other country will do it.
Some movies e.g. Dracula, Superman, are re-made over and over. One reason is superior F/X technology. A second reason is current cute actors/esses. A third reason is to modernize a timeless story. WOTW is essentially a reflection of the brutality of war. The first movies reflected the horror of WWI. However we now have the mideast terrorism.
As others have said, you store and transmit energy in hydrogen, but it has to be created somewhere. Manufacturing hydrogen out in the "boonies" in a wind farm is an option.
Since the beginning of the computer age people have been touting computers that maintain themselves, software that practically writes itself, and reusable software. To some degree all of these have happened. At the some time computing systems have been immensely larger and more complex; Instead of one computer per ten thousand people, each person may have several dozen computers when you count all the embedded ones.
When you balance these two factors- better computers verus bigger and more- one might predict an eventual reduction in the number of software engineers needed. It hasnt happened to a great degree yet, but might sometime.
Now that overhead approaches 50-100% of an employee's salary, its still cheaper to overwork an existing employee at lower efficiency than hire a new one.
Overhead includes employers social security (7.65%), workmans comp (6.8% in California), health insurance (about $7000 employers portion for a family), 401K matching, paid vacation time, office, computers, etc.
And its even cheaper to hire abroad with zero employee overhead and same salary.
I was impressed with the number MicroSoft Asia authors at the 2004 SIGGRAPH Meeting in Los Angeles last month. Something like 12% of the papers. Its very hard to get a paper accepted at that meeting- over 80% are rejected.
The research was solid, but not not super creative. There were things like you might do in a 3-D version of Photoshop, etc. The heavy duty mathematics came were still in papers from Stanford and CMU.
The big mystery is when MicroSoft is going release products from its impressive R&D lab. Most of its products are boring copycat stuff like the recent MS-Tunes.
Wouldnt you get a similar effect on some of the larger roller coasters? You could ride one 25 times for a days admission to a theme park.
National Security Agency: "We did, and they are hooked to the national phone system."
I'd hesitate "siliconizing" an algorithm before I knew what the best algorithm was. People have working on this problem for 50 years. They have some reasonable solutions for slow speech. But there are still clever things to be discovered. You can always test it on a supercomputer, or slowed down speech.
>As if when I think "Apple," I think "Beatles." Up the the early 1980s most people thought of the Beatles when they heard of Apple Ltd. Apple, the computer company, barely got to keep its name. I was there.
The ethernet (and mostly internet) protocol was predicted to die 30 years ago. People offered alternatives like ATM and MicroSofts early 90s protocol (failed attempted hijacking of the Net), but none really caught. A mediocre standard used by billions of computers perseveres.
Perhaps there is a Planet X out there. Pluto was postulated on Neptune anomalies, but Pluto turned out to be too small.
Perhaps the Sun has a binary brown dwarf out there so cold and small it hasnt been detected yet.
This issue has been studied for many decades in order to help organizations minimize losses on bad bids. Courses are taught on this. I took something like this once. There was an exercise to estimate the number of beans in jar. People's guesses fell along a curve called the binnormal distribution. From this equation you can estimate the best price to offer versus other people's bids in order to ocassionally win and make money at it.
The space derbis problem exists and is serious. A grain of dust has the momentum of a rifle bullet and a coin that of an automobile when there is a several thousanf MPH velocity differential. Norad radar tracks about 20,000 pieces larger than a coin. In the long term the derbis smashes itself into tiny pieces and settles in a "ring" orbit- the only stable configuration.
I read a scifi story where the space program ends because there is too much dangerous derbis up there. So does global communication, GPS, pagers, etc. when all the satellites are trashed.
Like someone can use the computer or watch TV 24/7.
The collection wafers may still be recoverable, but perhaps broken and jumbled by the crash.