Its worth reading up on just what sort of work is involved in these Hubble servicing missions. Heck, on the first one, Story Musgrave probably had to have nerves of steel. The Hubble was not really designed for on-orbit servicing, and the kind of tasks they had to do were things that would be hard enough on a workbench, let alone in a spacesuit. By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
It got me more money. Seriously, when I got my masters I got a nice out-of-cycle raise. Ok, I probably was in the right place at the right time, had the right boss at the helm, and probably deserved the raise anyways, but it was the trigger.
Then again, I did do most of my masters part-time while I was already working. And not all companies reward finishing that in the same way.
That's ok. HR drones don't seem to understand that CompEng != CompSci either. Seriously, it used to drive me nuts. Undergrad CompEng (at a good school) is really a specialization of ElecEng with a focus on computer hardware and some CompSci classes. Of course due to the HR confusion, most of them seem to wind up going into programming jobs anyways.
The problem off the coast of Somalia is political squabbling over responsibility and jurisdiction. Any major Navy/Marine force has the capability to end the problem. They just need to be given the marching orders and rules of engagement that allow them to do it.
Heck, the US Navy and USMC actually has done this before. Of course it was about 200 years ago, and Pres. Jefferson was making policy.
We already do something like this. Its called Xenotransplantation, and is actually an accepted medical practice. The most common form I've heard of is harvesting replacement heart valves from pigs.
Which I think is stupid, since the skills that make you a successful real-world developer are quite different from the skills that get you straight-As in college.
Heck, your whole mentality when working on a real-world project is quite different from a school project. In a school project, its 2 weeks of trying to understand and clarify what the prof actually wants you to do, and 3 days of hacking together some minimal pile of garbage that just barely does it. In the real world, you actually care about overall architecture, design, methodologies for coordinating a team, maintainability, testability, etc.
I always find this the most challenging part of any interview for me, and why I usually have hated more traditional tech interviews. Sure, give me a laptop and a code editor, and I could easily bang it out. But put me in a suit, get me in a nervous state-of-mind, and stand me in front of a whiteboard... Well, I just totally freeze up and stumble.
The other thing I've found is that the skills important in writing real software are actually quite a bit different than the skills necessary to complete CompSci class assignments. I found my software development abilities improve drastically once I realized this and took it upon myself to read up on the right topics. (I didn't start the working-world in the sort of team environment where you learn from more experienced co-workers, so I had to pull myself up on my own at first.)
Point taken. However, from my own experiences trying to watch NASA TV, I think there's really just one simple thing that they could do. This simple thing would go a *long* way towards the channel being watchable and interesting. What is this simple thing?
Fire the half-asleep drunken hobo who runs their A/V control room, and replace them with someone at least half-way competent!
I have a similar book, but a little older, called the "Internet Yellow Pages". The best part is showing it to someone today, and then pointing out that there is not a single web site in the entire book!
Re:In some ways it was much better in 1996
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
And to this day, there exists an entire generation of people who assume that Java sucks purely because of experiences with those "applets". To make matters worse, many of them probably don't even realize that Java has other uses, which are far more common than applets ever were.
Re:When I think about the internet in 1996
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
Startrek.com, I think I remember that. Once upon the time the web was full of Star Trek fan sites. Then the officials at Paramount decided to jump on the bandwagon and make their "official" site. Of course to promote it they basically used legal strongarm tactics to force all those fan sites off the web.
For major applications, I can agree with you much of the time.
For utility programs and minor applications, I often find a far different situation. The commercial program needs to justify its existence, so they tend to feature-load it to the point of making it an overpriced and annoying pile of crap. Meanwhile, the F/OSS app just does what its intended to do, and doesn't get in your way.
While reading through the article, and some of the talkback, I stumbled across this document which contains results of the actual investigation. It has lots of actual details, and is worth a read. (meanwhile, the news articles are a little too dumbed-down to be of any real value or interest).
Even more people, including those that should know better, call the entire case "The CPU." I'm sorry, but "The CPU" hasn't filled an entire case since the pre-microcomputer era.
Whats more of a concern is that there are a lot of people who take everything the teacher says as the gospel. Years later, you run into these people, and they have an incorrect assumption about how something works. You try to correct it, but they have a hard time believing you because that teacher supposedly has far more credentials.
Of course I really cannot blame the teachers in all circumstances here, because for every ignorance-related gaff, there are probably several forgivable brainfarts. I think the real problem is the students who just accept what they are told, and don't realize that perhaps that fancy professor might actually have gotten his facts wrong.
Lumping C# in with C is stupid. Lumping it in with Java makes a lot more sense. Or to put it in other words, C# is Java re-imagined (for better or worse, depending on your POV). (No, it isn't a direct copy. Too many important differences once you actually learn it.)
Except the way all the Linux updaters seem to work, is that they'll never update major versions in any supported way. So if your distro came with OpenOffice 3.0, it might update you all the way to 3.0.42, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you get 3.1. You need to upgrade to the next version of the distro for that.
Of course you can always add in 3rd party package repositories to work around the issue, but then all bets are off, and you might break something in the process.
That comment makes absolutely no sense. IMAP is a protocol. Exchange is a mail/groupware server software package. Exchange supports IMAP, as do many other mail/groupware server software packages.
This reminds me of something I notice whenever showing my digital images to someone used to consumer P&S cameras... They're always blown away at the clarity and detail of the image, even on ones I don't think anything special of.
Then I realized that the modern P&S world has conditioned people to accept abysmally poor quality as the norm. I never realized this because I've never really owned a P&S camera (since elementary school, anyways), and didn't even go digital until I was able to get a decent DSLR (due to my loathing of P&S cameras in general).
Another interesting thing that contributes to image quality is photographer camera-holding technique. This can easily make the difference between a sharp photo and a fuzzy one. Proper technique is pretty much impossible when you're holding your camera at an odd handle 2-ft away from your face.
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Its worth reading up on just what sort of work is involved in these Hubble servicing missions. Heck, on the first one, Story Musgrave probably had to have nerves of steel. The Hubble was not really designed for on-orbit servicing, and the kind of tasks they had to do were things that would be hard enough on a workbench, let alone in a spacesuit. By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
Yeah, they do now. 8-10 years ago, they certainly didn't know the difference.
It got me more money. Seriously, when I got my masters I got a nice out-of-cycle raise. Ok, I probably was in the right place at the right time, had the right boss at the helm, and probably deserved the raise anyways, but it was the trigger.
Then again, I did do most of my masters part-time while I was already working. And not all companies reward finishing that in the same way.
That's ok. HR drones don't seem to understand that CompEng != CompSci either. Seriously, it used to drive me nuts. Undergrad CompEng (at a good school) is really a specialization of ElecEng with a focus on computer hardware and some CompSci classes. Of course due to the HR confusion, most of them seem to wind up going into programming jobs anyways.
Of course not! But at least it'll "meet the requirements" :-D
Also, don't forget that anything major project is managed according to this chart. :-)
Now the fun part... Try and find the boxes in the diagram where something functional actually gets built!
And civil service personnel don't normally do the technical work either. That's the contractor's job.
The problem off the coast of Somalia is political squabbling over responsibility and jurisdiction. Any major Navy/Marine force has the capability to end the problem. They just need to be given the marching orders and rules of engagement that allow them to do it.
Heck, the US Navy and USMC actually has done this before. Of course it was about 200 years ago, and Pres. Jefferson was making policy.
We already do something like this. Its called Xenotransplantation, and is actually an accepted medical practice. The most common form I've heard of is harvesting replacement heart valves from pigs.
Which I think is stupid, since the skills that make you a successful real-world developer are quite different from the skills that get you straight-As in college.
Heck, your whole mentality when working on a real-world project is quite different from a school project. In a school project, its 2 weeks of trying to understand and clarify what the prof actually wants you to do, and 3 days of hacking together some minimal pile of garbage that just barely does it. In the real world, you actually care about overall architecture, design, methodologies for coordinating a team, maintainability, testability, etc.
Thankfully the Germans have it much simpler... The standard size glass in Bavaria was 500ml, and the larger "Mass" size is 1L :-)
If you look closely at this photo of their tracking computer, its a MacBook Pro running Ubuntu :-)
I always find this the most challenging part of any interview for me, and why I usually have hated more traditional tech interviews. Sure, give me a laptop and a code editor, and I could easily bang it out. But put me in a suit, get me in a nervous state-of-mind, and stand me in front of a whiteboard... Well, I just totally freeze up and stumble.
The other thing I've found is that the skills important in writing real software are actually quite a bit different than the skills necessary to complete CompSci class assignments. I found my software development abilities improve drastically once I realized this and took it upon myself to read up on the right topics. (I didn't start the working-world in the sort of team environment where you learn from more experienced co-workers, so I had to pull myself up on my own at first.)
Point taken. However, from my own experiences trying to watch NASA TV, I think there's really just one simple thing that they could do. This simple thing would go a *long* way towards the channel being watchable and interesting. What is this simple thing?
Fire the half-asleep drunken hobo who runs their A/V control room, and replace them with someone at least half-way competent!
I have a similar book, but a little older, called the "Internet Yellow Pages". The best part is showing it to someone today, and then pointing out that there is not a single web site in the entire book!
And to this day, there exists an entire generation of people who assume that Java sucks purely because of experiences with those "applets". To make matters worse, many of them probably don't even realize that Java has other uses, which are far more common than applets ever were.
Startrek.com, I think I remember that. Once upon the time the web was full of Star Trek fan sites. Then the officials at Paramount decided to jump on the bandwagon and make their "official" site. Of course to promote it they basically used legal strongarm tactics to force all those fan sites off the web.
For major applications, I can agree with you much of the time.
For utility programs and minor applications, I often find a far different situation. The commercial program needs to justify its existence, so they tend to feature-load it to the point of making it an overpriced and annoying pile of crap. Meanwhile, the F/OSS app just does what its intended to do, and doesn't get in your way.
While reading through the article, and some of the talkback, I stumbled across this document which contains results of the actual investigation. It has lots of actual details, and is worth a read. (meanwhile, the news articles are a little too dumbed-down to be of any real value or interest).
Even more people, including those that should know better, call the entire case "The CPU." I'm sorry, but "The CPU" hasn't filled an entire case since the pre-microcomputer era.
Whats more of a concern is that there are a lot of people who take everything the teacher says as the gospel. Years later, you run into these people, and they have an incorrect assumption about how something works. You try to correct it, but they have a hard time believing you because that teacher supposedly has far more credentials.
Of course I really cannot blame the teachers in all circumstances here, because for every ignorance-related gaff, there are probably several forgivable brainfarts. I think the real problem is the students who just accept what they are told, and don't realize that perhaps that fancy professor might actually have gotten his facts wrong.
Lumping C# in with C is stupid. Lumping it in with Java makes a lot more sense. Or to put it in other words, C# is Java re-imagined (for better or worse, depending on your POV). (No, it isn't a direct copy. Too many important differences once you actually learn it.)
Except the way all the Linux updaters seem to work, is that they'll never update major versions in any supported way. So if your distro came with OpenOffice 3.0, it might update you all the way to 3.0.42, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you get 3.1. You need to upgrade to the next version of the distro for that.
Of course you can always add in 3rd party package repositories to work around the issue, but then all bets are off, and you might break something in the process.
That comment makes absolutely no sense. IMAP is a protocol. Exchange is a mail/groupware server software package. Exchange supports IMAP, as do many other mail/groupware server software packages.
This reminds me of something I notice whenever showing my digital images to someone used to consumer P&S cameras... They're always blown away at the clarity and detail of the image, even on ones I don't think anything special of.
Then I realized that the modern P&S world has conditioned people to accept abysmally poor quality as the norm. I never realized this because I've never really owned a P&S camera (since elementary school, anyways), and didn't even go digital until I was able to get a decent DSLR (due to my loathing of P&S cameras in general).
Another interesting thing that contributes to image quality is photographer camera-holding technique. This can easily make the difference between a sharp photo and a fuzzy one. Proper technique is pretty much impossible when you're holding your camera at an odd handle 2-ft away from your face.