And now you know, the rest of the story. (jebus I usually hate that phrase.)
Thanks Leigh, it's good to hear what happened to that.
Re:Xerox, Copiers with SmallTalk via GhostScript
on
Game of Life in Postscript
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes and no. I was a bit lazy with that. The URL is apparently the only piece of it easily available through google these days.
DataGlyphs were the key behind the implementation of many of the features I described.
For instance if you scanned your 100 page paper in, and got a token back, but what that token was was the URL printed out in nice easily read text as well as easily machine read dataglyphs.
The hangman game printed out looking like a hangman game complete with head, noose, whatever, but there were also identifying dataglyphs to help the machine recognize this was a hangman game, and which particular hangman game it was.
There used to be more, including a FLASH presentation, but I can't easily find that through google now.
By the mid-90s, Xerox had written what was basically a SmallTalk interpreter using GhostScript. It was called DocuScript.
With that, Xerox wrote all sorts of applications for hallway copiers, including web browsers, hang-man games, and image processing/manipulation applications.
Take a piece of paper with an image you want to copy. Circle the image. Scan it. Take a piece of paper that you want the image on. Mark where the image goes. Scan the paper. Output: new piece of paper with the image from the first on it and the other elements from the second piece.
Ooops, you dropped 200 pages of a paper on the floor, and you have gathered it up in the wrong order. Circle the page number on the first page of the paper. Scan the entire paper in. Output: your paper now resorted according page number.
Go to a hospital and triage yourself by taking a printed image of the human body and circling on the image where you hurt and scanning it in to the hallway copier.
Take your 100 page paper and scan it into the hallway copier. Get a one page token in return (containing, basically, an encoded URL) Fly across country to a conference holding only that one page token. At the conference scan in your token. Output your 100 page paper.
And then, being Xerox, they found they couldn't/wouldn't/didn't want to sell it. Talk about the Game of Life!
I know that. The context of the discussion is that Ron Dittemore was quoted as saying that nothing could be done. Which folks suspected was not true, and which we now have official statements that that was not true. So Ron's statements may have just been self-serving and I am calling his leadership and management skills into question, along with much of NASA's leadership and management skills.
Which is way too bad, because I'd really prefer to work for NASA than any other job I can imagine.
Thank you for posting this. I have written about a dozen letters to the CAIB and journalists telling them that I recall this very thing from articles in the LA Times in the late 70s and early 80s.
And part of my point was that by reducing the frequency of shuttle flights they actually increased the severity of shuttle mishaps because they eliminated on orbit rescue missions. And I wanted to know if NASA and Congress had actually recognized that, because if so, then one salient recommendation might be to build a very reliable, very quickly launched rescue vehicle. It appears that such is now planned, but for something like 2015 and not for 2005.
I regret no one has contacted me back, perhpas because my recollections just don't have the same cred as the URL you have now provided.
"They talked about this kind of stuff early in the program, but it became impractical," Thagard said. Early predictions that shuttles would blast off from the Cape almost weekly never materialized because of financial and technical roadblocks. Turn-around processing ended up taking a lot longer than shuttle system designers once thought.
Still, the ideas were there and special equipment was even made. Thagard and another former astronaut, Blaine Hammond, remembered being shown beach ball-like "personal rescue spheres" NASA had designed with basic life support systems for just such a rescue. The idea was that rather than carrying a full set of spacesuits on a shuttle, each astronaut could curl inside the rescue ball and be carried across the void by another spacewalker.
The balls aren't used, but the astronauts said they're one example of the extensive thought NASA had given rescue flights.
As Admiral Gehman, head of the CAIB noted, we commonly send 120 soldiers in to rescue one downed pilot.
First we had (on/. and fark) the just-say-go crowd telling us the astronauts sign up for missions, and that they're not heroes, and that because others would sign up for the same exact mission again we should not ground anything (just keep building shuttles I guess), and basically apologizing for NASA and Ron Dittemore.
Now we have the "at what risk" crowd saying that it would have been too risky, and basically apologizing for NASA and Ron Dittemore.
NASA and Ron Dittemore had 20 years and 102 flights of warning to think about tile problems, foam problems, tile repair kits, and rescue options.
Me, I'm with the I love the space program, and I think the most courageous thing a leader at NASA would do, if they are as underfunded as we imagine they are, is to fucking resign, publically, and loudly. If Ron Dittemore, holder of One of the Most Prestigious Leadership Jobs in the World really thinks the shuttle is unsafe or underfunded, then it's his job to resign. If NASA management is such that it rewards employees and managers for saying yes to everything and to always do it with smaller budgets, well, THAT IS an accident waiting to happen and one WE need to fix before the shuttle flies again.
I don't want to explain to my kids again how NASA management decisions and leadership failed and another shuttle has uh, "had a bad day" (god what a sick euphemism that ran throughout NASA).
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . .
on
Satellite Imagery
·
· Score: 1
Full disclosure, Haas MBA '97 -- I had never realized until tonight that it was the school's idealism (career center listings) to blame for the dot-com bubble. Damn us farkers and our idealism!
Okay Quattrone, you're free to go home now. Okay Andersen, sorry about all that commotion.
Ignore the guys from Harvard and Wall Street. Presumably Berkeley is to blame because of its location. Oh yeah, except that Berkeley isn't even in the heart of the Silicon Valley and presumably that other business school, at the Jr. University holds less than idealistic views. Or maybe they are idealistic but in ways that conform to poster Shoten's viewpoints making them non-idealistic.
Huh? WTF? I want my last five minutes back. The parent's post is one non-sequitur after another.
I seem to recall this being done in cracks in metal and even plastic (?) surfaces on light aircraft. The quickest, best explanation googled for (stress holes reduce) is here.
Their explanation goes to crystalline structures, and stress and loadbearing being a function of surface area. Basically the crack hitting the hole allocates the stress around a much larger unit of area. So the force per area is much smaller than when there is no hole and only a crack. The reduced force per area can then be managed by the material and won't crack further.
Note, the hole must be smoothly finished (you did use the smooth finishing h-bomb and not the rough cut h-bomb) and than there are no more dislocations to start a new crack.
That's my laymen's understanding.
Pretty neat though, the final scene with two moons. THIS MOVIE SCARED THE HELL OUT OF ME!
PageFlicker IMDb home PreviousMain DetailsNext Help Page 9 of 16
Dr. Steven Sorenson (Andrews) plans to tap the geothermal energy of the Earth's interior by means of a thermonuclear device detonated deep within the Earth. Despite dire warnings by fellow scientist Ted Rampian (Moore), Dr Sorenson proceeds with the experiment after secretly learning that he is terminally ill. This experiment causes a crack to form and grow within the earth's crust, which threatens to split the earth in two if it is not stopped in time.
Layperson: What if the crack keeps going - right around the world? What happens then? Scientist: Where the land masses split the oceans will be sucked in, and the colossal pressure generated by the steam will rip the earth apart - and destroy it. Layperson: You mean - the world will come to an end!? Scientist: The world as we know it, yes. As a cloud of astral dust, it will continue to move within the solar system. [That's what's known as "scientific consolation"....]
We are terribly sorry to be forced to interfere, gentlemen, but we cannot permit you to harm yourselves.
As I stand here, I also stand upon the home planet of the Kalifornian Empire and the home planet of your Federation, Captain. I'm putting a stop to this insane war.
No one has been unemployed. No has been killed. No one has died here in uncounted thousands of years.
It is true that in the future, you and the Kalifornians will become fast friends. You will work together.
Your emotions are most discordant. We do not wish to seem inhospitable, but, gentlemen, you must leave. Yes. Please leave us. The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us. That of us which you see is mere appearance... for your sake.
Re:If every space flight was guaranteed not to ret
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Speaking only about shuttle and iss flights and not about Mars flights....
First, no one will stand in front of me, in the claim of being pro-space.
Based on my understanding of the science and research being performed on the shuttle and ISS, I just don't see the pressing need at this time to base a space program on the anticipated deaths of seven astronauts every 50 flights or so. Or a pressing need to base a space program on three shuttles, one of which must be cannibalized to serve the other two.
An alternative in my mind is to pony up the resources (that means dollars) to have a safer, more reliable, more productive space program.
We are cowards, and we are immoral when we have resources available but instead insist on paying for our progress with human lives.
Regarding Mars.
Mars is going to be expensive, take a long time, require a real commitment on everyone's part. And be very risky.
We'd better do it right. To lose a Mars Mission because of organizational bungling would be tragic for all.
Uh, we've long known what happens when a tile is struck on liftoff. Every single flight had tile damage that wasn't designed for and wasn't corrected in 20 years of flying.
I believe all of our astronauts are heroes, but there is no contradiction in seeing these seven as casualties either.
And to wonder if NASA never fixed the original shuttle problem (NASA's own management of shuttle problems) is not to dishonor any of our astronauts or most NASA employees.
To ask questions is a patriotic and honorable duty, and to want and work for a better, and safer Space Program is a very honorable goal.
Re:If every space flight was guaranteed not to ret
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
I think you're being glib.
I've heard astronauts speak, and I've heard them describe what it's like to put their flesh on the line. They value their lives. They value their families. They value their careers. They don't give their lives easily and they don't want to give them up for mistakes or some blind notion of progress.
I would be interested in a survey of our astronauts asking them if knew then what they know now, would they still volunteer to go.
And just because some will volunteer for a death march, doesn't mean it is moral or ethical of you to allow them to participate in a death march. And to justify this by speaking of how proud you are of them for their bravery, ducks the issue of the morality of the mission itself.
At the risk of being spanked again with an offtopic moderation...
I placed it with the others because the website I found it on placed it with the others. But I think most folks look at this as an example of hubris and one of the worst market calls in history. Fischer was of the belief that there were no more business cycles, that we had reached a new era of prosperity and economic understanding, and that the market would not being going down.
Over the course of every long boom in the history of industrial capitalism, economic interests have sought to account for continuing growth and stock market expansion by arguing that a New Era has arisen, which has tamed, or even eliminated the business cycle. Such New Era pronouncements are always rooted in some notion of changing technology and/or business organization. Prior to the 1929 stock market crash that introduced the Great Depression, it was commonly argued that a New Era had emerged with the growth of the large monopolistic capitals, which were able to manage and regulate the economy more efficiently, smoothing out the economic swings and decreasing or eliminating the downswings altogether. Irving Fischer, professor of economics at Yale, and the most prestigious U.S. economist of his day, is reported to have declared, on the basis of such New Era thinking - just prior to the stock market peak in 1929 (which was closely followed by the crash) - that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" (quoted in Schiller, Irrational Exuberance, p. 106).
So uh, what's insightful about the parent comment?
"Tripoli -- nobody is going to use it" -- FreeLinux, 2003
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981
"There's no possible reason anyone would ever want to have a computer in their home" -- Ken Olson, 1977
"I think that there may be a world market for maybe five computers" -- Thomas J. Watson, 1943
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" -- Irving Fischer, 1929
"This wireless music box [the radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay to hear a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- RCA Executives, 1920
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers - 1927
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible" -- Lord Kelvin, 1895
"I'm gonna get laid this year" -- FreeLinux, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
Just being a curmudgeon, just saying "feh", is not insightful.
Slashdot Mirror
The Architect: Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.
Most downloaded program?
We're talking viruses here, aren't we?
I'd say Rhinovirus. Sperm based genetic programming next. Readers of Snow Crash might suggest the Bible is a close third.
Or are you one of those 1980ish, ascii encoded representation bigots?
I know, I need to learn to watch what I say.
Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull? Fallout from the atomic wars?
Don't worry about it. If there's a problem, I am sure a tax cut will fix it.
And now you know, the rest of the story. (jebus I usually hate that phrase.)
Thanks Leigh, it's good to hear what happened to that.
Yes and no. I was a bit lazy with that. The URL is apparently the only piece of it easily available through google these days.
DataGlyphs were the key behind the implementation of many of the features I described.
For instance if you scanned your 100 page paper in, and got a token back, but what that token was was the URL printed out in nice easily read text as well as easily machine read dataglyphs.
The hangman game printed out looking like a hangman game complete with head, noose, whatever, but there were also identifying dataglyphs to help the machine recognize this was a hangman game, and which particular hangman game it was.
There used to be more, including a FLASH presentation, but I can't easily find that through google now.
By the mid-90s, Xerox had written what was basically a SmallTalk interpreter using GhostScript. It was called DocuScript.
With that, Xerox wrote all sorts of applications for hallway copiers, including web browsers, hang-man games, and image processing/manipulation applications.
Take a piece of paper with an image you want to copy. Circle the image. Scan it. Take a piece of paper that you want the image on. Mark where the image goes. Scan the paper. Output: new piece of paper with the image from the first on it and the other elements from the second piece.
Ooops, you dropped 200 pages of a paper on the floor, and you have gathered it up in the wrong order. Circle the page number on the first page of the paper. Scan the entire paper in. Output: your paper now resorted according page number.
Go to a hospital and triage yourself by taking a printed image of the human body and circling on the image where you hurt and scanning it in to the hallway copier.
Take your 100 page paper and scan it into the hallway copier. Get a one page token in return (containing, basically, an encoded URL) Fly across country to a conference holding only that one page token. At the conference scan in your token. Output your 100 page paper.
And then, being Xerox, they found they couldn't/wouldn't/didn't want to sell it. Talk about the Game of Life!
I know that. The context of the discussion is that Ron Dittemore was quoted as saying that nothing could be done. Which folks suspected was not true, and which we now have official statements that that was not true. So Ron's statements may have just been self-serving and I am calling his leadership and management skills into question, along with much of NASA's leadership and management skills.
Which is way too bad, because I'd really prefer to work for NASA than any other job I can imagine.
Thank you for posting this. I have written about a dozen letters to the CAIB and journalists telling them that I recall this very thing from articles in the LA Times in the late 70s and early 80s.
And part of my point was that by reducing the frequency of shuttle flights they actually increased the severity of shuttle mishaps because they eliminated on orbit rescue missions. And I wanted to know if NASA and Congress had actually recognized that, because if so, then one salient recommendation might be to build a very reliable, very quickly launched rescue vehicle. It appears that such is now planned, but for something like 2015 and not for 2005.
I regret no one has contacted me back, perhpas because my recollections just don't have the same cred as the URL you have now provided.
"They talked about this kind of stuff early in the program, but it became impractical," Thagard said. Early predictions that shuttles would blast off from the Cape almost weekly never materialized because of financial and technical roadblocks. Turn-around processing ended up taking a lot longer than shuttle system designers once thought.
Still, the ideas were there and special equipment was even made. Thagard and another former astronaut, Blaine Hammond, remembered being shown beach ball-like "personal rescue spheres" NASA had designed with basic life support systems for just such a rescue. The idea was that rather than carrying a full set of spacesuits on a shuttle, each astronaut could curl inside the rescue ball and be carried across the void by another spacewalker.
The balls aren't used, but the astronauts said they're one example of the extensive thought NASA had given rescue flights.
As Admiral Gehman, head of the CAIB noted, we commonly send 120 soldiers in to rescue one downed pilot.
/. and fark) the just-say-go crowd telling us the astronauts sign up for missions, and that they're not heroes, and that because others would sign up for the same exact mission again we should not ground anything (just keep building shuttles I guess), and basically apologizing for NASA and Ron Dittemore.
First we had (on
Now we have the "at what risk" crowd saying that it would have been too risky, and basically apologizing for NASA and Ron Dittemore.
NASA and Ron Dittemore had 20 years and 102 flights of warning to think about tile problems, foam problems, tile repair kits, and rescue options.
Me, I'm with the I love the space program, and I think the most courageous thing a leader at NASA would do, if they are as underfunded as we imagine they are, is to fucking resign, publically, and loudly. If Ron Dittemore, holder of One of the Most Prestigious Leadership Jobs in the World really thinks the shuttle is unsafe or underfunded, then it's his job to resign. If NASA management is such that it rewards employees and managers for saying yes to everything and to always do it with smaller budgets, well, THAT IS an accident waiting to happen and one WE need to fix before the shuttle flies again.
I don't want to explain to my kids again how NASA management decisions and leadership failed and another shuttle has uh, "had a bad day" (god what a sick euphemism that ran throughout NASA).
Gosh, Dun Malg's right. I mean Powers was flying a U2, and we don't fly *those* any more. And we haven't had a propeller driven spy plane shot down in over two years now!
And their planes, missiles and computers haven't gotten any better.
Full disclosure, Haas MBA '97 -- I had never realized until tonight that it was the school's idealism (career center listings) to blame for the dot-com bubble. Damn us farkers and our idealism!
Okay Quattrone, you're free to go home now. Okay Andersen, sorry about all that commotion.
Yeah, it was our idealism of the Berkeley Business School to blame. In the face of a history of defeats to the well heeled landlording bourgeois, we remained loyal to the underdog. Go Bears! Give 'em the AXE, Right in the Neck!
Ignore the guys from Harvard and Wall Street. Presumably Berkeley is to blame because of its location. Oh yeah, except that Berkeley isn't even in the heart of the Silicon Valley and presumably that other business school, at the Jr. University holds less than idealistic views. Or maybe they are idealistic but in ways that conform to poster Shoten's viewpoints making them non-idealistic.
Huh? WTF? I want my last five minutes back. The parent's post is one non-sequitur after another.
Insightful? Or just a full bong?
You can sometimes see this in cracks in car windows. The crack will travel until it hits a pit and then stop. Or it will travel from pit to pit.
I seem to recall this being done in cracks in metal and even plastic (?) surfaces on light aircraft. The quickest, best explanation googled for (stress holes reduce) is here.
Their explanation goes to crystalline structures, and stress and loadbearing being a function of surface area. Basically the crack hitting the hole allocates the stress around a much larger unit of area. So the force per area is much smaller than when there is no hole and only a crack. The reduced force per area can then be managed by the material and won't crack further.
Note, the hole must be smoothly finished (you did use the smooth finishing h-bomb and not the rough cut h-bomb) and than there are no more dislocations to start a new crack.
That's my laymen's understanding.
Pretty neat though, the final scene with two moons. THIS MOVIE SCARED THE HELL OUT OF ME!
Crack in the World (1965)
Plot Summary for
Crack in the World (1965)
PageFlicker
IMDb home PreviousMain DetailsNext Help
Page 9 of 16
Dr. Steven Sorenson (Andrews) plans to tap the geothermal energy of the Earth's interior by means of a thermonuclear device detonated deep within the Earth. Despite dire warnings by fellow scientist Ted Rampian (Moore), Dr Sorenson proceeds with the experiment after secretly learning that he is terminally ill. This experiment causes a crack to form and grow within the earth's crust, which threatens to split the earth in two if it is not stopped in time.
Immortal Dialogue
Layperson: What if the crack keeps going - right around the world? What happens then?
Scientist: Where the land masses split the oceans will be sucked in, and the colossal pressure generated by the steam will rip the earth apart - and destroy it.
Layperson: You mean - the world will come to an end!?
Scientist: The world as we know it, yes. As a cloud of astral dust, it will continue to move within the solar system.
[That's what's known as "scientific consolation"....]
Realistic? I don't want realistic gear. I want real gear. I don't want real sound, not just realistic sound.
Who came up with realistic?
We are terribly sorry
to be forced to interfere, gentlemen,
but we cannot permit you to harm yourselves.
As I stand here,
I also stand upon
the home planet of the Kalifornian Empire
and the home planet of your Federation, Captain.
I'm putting a stop to this insane war.
No one has been unemployed. No has been killed. No one has died here in uncounted thousands of years.
It is true that in the future,
you and the Kalifornians will become fast friends.
You will work together.
Your emotions are most discordant.
We do not wish to seem inhospitable,
but, gentlemen, you must leave.
Yes. Please leave us.
The mere presence of beings like yourselves
is intensely painful to us.
That of us which you see
is mere appearance...
for your sake.
Speaking only about shuttle and iss flights and not about Mars flights....
First, no one will stand in front of me, in the claim of being pro-space.
Based on my understanding of the science and research being performed on the shuttle and ISS, I just don't see the pressing need at this time to base a space program on the anticipated deaths of seven astronauts every 50 flights or so. Or a pressing need to base a space program on three shuttles, one of which must be cannibalized to serve the other two.
An alternative in my mind is to pony up the resources (that means dollars) to have a safer, more reliable, more productive space program.
We are cowards, and we are immoral when we have resources available but instead insist on paying for our progress with human lives.
Regarding Mars.
Mars is going to be expensive, take a long time, require a real commitment on everyone's part. And be very risky.
We'd better do it right. To lose a Mars Mission because of organizational bungling would be tragic for all.
Uh, we've long known what happens when a tile is struck on liftoff. Every single flight had tile damage that wasn't designed for and wasn't corrected in 20 years of flying.
I believe all of our astronauts are heroes, but there is no contradiction in seeing these seven as casualties either.
And to wonder if NASA never fixed the original shuttle problem (NASA's own management of shuttle problems) is not to dishonor any of our astronauts or most NASA employees.
To ask questions is a patriotic and honorable duty, and to want and work for a better, and safer Space Program is a very honorable goal.
I think you're being glib.
I've heard astronauts speak, and I've heard them describe what it's like to put their flesh on the line. They value their lives. They value their families. They value their careers. They don't give their lives easily and they don't want to give them up for mistakes or some blind notion of progress.
I would be interested in a survey of our astronauts asking them if knew then what they know now, would they still volunteer to go.
And just because some will volunteer for a death march, doesn't mean it is moral or ethical of you to allow them to participate in a death march. And to justify this by speaking of how proud you are of them for their bravery, ducks the issue of the morality of the mission itself.
I placed it with the others because the website I found it on placed it with the others. But I think most folks look at this as an example of hubris and one of the worst market calls in history. Fischer was of the belief that there were no more business cycles, that we had reached a new era of prosperity and economic understanding, and that the market would not being going down.
Or to crib once more from a google found resource (warning this is FRENCH!) The New Economy: Myth and Reality -- Atelier:
So uh, what's insightful about the parent comment?
"Tripoli -- nobody is going to use it" -- FreeLinux, 2003
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981
"There's no possible reason anyone would ever want to have a computer in their home" -- Ken Olson, 1977
"I think that there may be a world market for maybe five computers" -- Thomas J. Watson, 1943
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" -- Irving Fischer, 1929
"This wireless music box [the radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay
to hear a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- RCA Executives, 1920
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers - 1927
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible" -- Lord Kelvin, 1895
"I'm gonna get laid this year" -- FreeLinux, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
Just being a curmudgeon, just saying "feh", is not insightful.
This is an incredibly insightful post. Funny, Interesting, and Underrated. Mod this one up!
Google on smell sensors faq
Smell with a digital sensor
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