This reminds me about the billions that were spent on the so called space pen. The Soviets showed us common sense, (and sadly continue to do so despite their economic troubles), by employing the time tested and proven hard black (HB) pencil.
Your own link debunks you:
"Be that as it may, beginning with the Apollo program astronauts did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen called the Fisher Space Pen. The nitrogen-pressurized space pen worked in "freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down," as well as in the weightless conditions of outer space.
It was developed not by NASA, however, but by one enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent "thousands of hours and millions of dollars" of his own money in research and development — not billions.
The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can even buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks."
"I hate to spam you, but on your quotes page you've tripped one of my pet peeves. The Space Pen. There is a common email circulating that describes how much money NASA wasted on making a pen that writes upside down, in vacuum blah blah blah. You know how much it really cost the US Gov't? Nothing. Fisher developed it at TREMENDOUS cost, all of it absorbed by them. In return they got to be the sole provider. Normally this means that they would sell these pens to NASA at some obscene amount. They charged just a few dollars. Admittedly, a few dollars for a pen was a lot in the 60's, but 1/100th what they could have charged. Fischer did this out of True Faith, True Faith that knowledge and research is its' own reward. And since that day, they have sold so many of their pens to the private sector, that they have made their money back a ten times, and still never charged that much. I have one of these pens, you can buy them at any stationary store, even Hallmark stores carry them. I recommend them, they're damn good pens.
Oh, and the bit about the pencil is true, the russians did use pencils. Remember the space station fires that they had? At least one of these, I forget which, but it caused a fatality, at least one was caused by airborn pencil shavings mixing with sensitive electronics. Their solution? Mail order Fischer Space Pens."
I realize its not quite what you are referring to but iPhone apps are tied to your iTunes account, not a particular device. So if you have and iPhone and an iPad you can load the app on both. When you upgrade a device you can load the app on the new device.
As a long-time Linux user, one of the best points is that everything comes without strings attached. I would say "the idea that apps should cost something" is questionable at best, but leave it to Apple and their users to advocate it.
Why just Apple? Even the FSF is OK with software costing something. The GPL allows for charging for the binary. The GPL even allows for charging a nominal fee for delivering the source code to the user.
Imagine someone releasing a GPL'd program for Mac OS X and then only distributing the source as a $1 Mac Store app download. That might be GPL compliant. This might spur RMS to get to work on GPL v4.:-)
Users want a trial which is why I offer a free app, Perpenso Calc for iPhone RPN, 5 modes: Scientific Stats Business Hex Bill, which is upgradable to full (RPN, tape, etc) via in app purchase.
Users may also want customization so I offer the more specialized functionality (statistics, business, hex, etc) as in app purchases. So rather than a higher priced app with everything included I can keep the price down and let users only pay for the specific functionality they want.
I think your engineering dept is your IT dept. "Engineering" has many definitions and in the industry/context that you describe your engineering department seems to a support department focusing on technology. It does not seem to be "engineering" in the product/tool development sense. In this sense it makes sense for IT to be a group inside *your* engineering dept.
I appreciate the idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts, but the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already (and has been far more active over the course of its history) so if it makes sense to search anywhere, it's here. I'm not sure what could really be accomplished by scouring the moon...
The argument in the SETI paper is that the lunar environment can preserve surface artifacts and alterations for millions of years. Plus the search only involves looking at satellite imagery be collected for other reasons. No one is claiming the moon was a more likely destination.
Science tends to look at the world in terms of numbers, technology and confirmed facts. Religion tends to tell the world has been made by some imaginary person in the sky, tells you to pray towards said imaginary person and completely disregards science in favor of what someone wrote on paper 1500-2000 years ago. They are not compatible.
History shows that you are mistaken. Individual men of science and individual men of religion have occasionally created a false conflict but that was due to their personal politics and personal closed mindedness, not some inherent conflict between science and religion. For example when a Roman Catholic priest proposed the currently accepted cosmological model of the universe, the big bang theory - originally known as the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", some of the leading men of science of the day dismissed the theory not on its merits but because it came from a priest. I believe they said it "smelled of creationism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre
The western tradition of the scientific method (observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment) was popularized by various bishops, who also promoted the idea that science should be based on mathematics. Your "look at the world in terms of numbers, technology and confirmed facts" characterization is precisely the sort of thing promoted by various members of the clergy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Grosseteste
Other men of science who were members of the clergy and who may be more familiar to readers:
Nicolaus Copernicus, Roger Bacon, Gregor Mendel,...
The Catholic church explicitly addresses the compatibility of science and religion. It's official position IIRC is that faith and scientific findings are not in conflict, that science investigates the mechanics (the "how") of God's creation while philosophy and religion investigate "why" not "how". Other Christian churches have similar perspectives.
Yea this will replace tutors just like books have replaced tutors since days of yore. EReaders are great, they may replace books someday but when it comes to education, the biggest barrier is getting kids to pickup a book/e-reader not how much space they occupy.
In the classical era tutors also applied discipline to students. Perhaps an ereader/tablet will be a useful educational tool when it tells the student it can't play the games because the lessons and homework are not complete yet. An ereader/tablet is not magic, it is just another type of computer, a far more compact and portable computer. Desktop computers in school have been tried, laptops for students have been tried, readers/tablet will have comparable results.
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
Perhaps it is more important to teach not believing everything that you read. Especially on the internet where there is little barrier to being published.
To instill some sort of ability to judge credibility. For example, two people make conflicting medical claims. One is an unknown but licensed medical doctor who trained at a well regarded university and the other is a famous and popular actress. That the actress' lack of relative credibility would require extraordinary evidence of her claims.
The rush to get a story out first is hardly anything new, nor is the inevitable occasional false reporting. "Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman.
Just what the world needs. More insurance policies....
On the other hand the insurance policies may require some reasonable IT practices. Perhaps a manager who is not so responsive to the argument "these practices are standard and recommended" will be more responsive to "failure to meet these practices will get our insurance policy canceled".
An audacious project to construct a vast infrastructure housing a neutrino observatory at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is being undertaken by a consortium of 40 institutes and universities from ten European countries.
Click the link to the PDF and read section PE204, which starts on page 25. There are actual pictures of the EOS ring and its position on the seat. It's much more reasonable than the summary make it sound.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but my recollection was that the seat was not installed in an aircraft. Once installed it may not be reachable from the direction the photograph was taken.
Its probably the rush to make it to market for the Christmas season, "doing whatever it takes" to meet the deadline, code for "taking shortcuts" and "cutting corners". This phenomena is especially applicable to video games.
Another manifestation of the pressure to ship for Christmas is moving features from the original launch of the game to the expansion pack.
It hasn't been called into combat because it is a trump card. Why reveal its capabilities for others to prepare for? The F-22 is there so no major air force in the world challenges the US. In mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
All of them with a 1:100 ratio. The ratio is normally expressed as kill:loss, so you should use 100:1 to accommodate the less careful readers.;-)
Deja Vu. F16 pilots were also falsely blamed when the true fault was a hardware failure in instrumentation. Wiring rubbing against a rivet eventually shorted out IIRC and pilots were given erroneous info regarding which way is up or down, critical when flying on instruments (zero visibility) where a pilots ignores his senses and puts full faith in instruments.
Its unlikely that only one specific bit pattern causes the problem. Its more likely that some related set of values are equivalent with respect to manifesting the bug. Also as specific and unlikely the necessary sequence of events that manifest the bug then the less likely it is to occur in fuzzing and the real world.
Fuzzing is no panacea but it is surprisingly effective with respect to robustness and it is very low cost.
The lecturer's story seems consistent with recollections of being on dive boats (scuba) as dive computers were entering the market. The subgroup using mechanical/analog devices for depth, pressure and time and carrying a plastic card with no-decompression time limits was where nearly all the computer programmers and electrical engineers could be found.
So is the problem that the people going into b school are stupid, or is it the teachers who are incompetent? Because that's definitely not what's coming out.
Business school is like any other educational program. You can teach people how to do things correctly, or at least reasonably, but they don't always do as they were trained. The same things happens in computer science. We are taught good methods and practices in order to write robust and reliable software but some graduates don't put those lessons into practice.
It looked like half of one 32-bit word was combined with half of another 32-bit word during queue assembly on at least some occasions. But there are errors not explained by that.
This is why I like fuzzing. Sending random and/or corrupted data to software to evaluate the software's robustness and sensitivity to corrupted inputs. For a project like this I would like to send simulated inputs from regression tests and recorded data from actual flights to the software while fuzzing each playback, repeat. Let a system sit in the corner running such tests 24/7.
In theory some permutation of the data should eventually resemble what you describe.
You learned this in school, other people learn this in other ways.
The problem with being self taught is that there are often gaps in knowledge compared to those who went to the university. I've seen this in computer science and business. Some topics required in a formal program are just not that interesting, yet there are often useful things to be found in that topic. Very few people will read textbooks on their own, more so for the less interesting topics. Its more common for folks to read pop business books from the local brick and mortar and that is not quite the same.
Plus in business school a lot of what you learn is part of a team effort with members of very different backgrounds (line managers, engineers, accountants, etc.). Given that the original poster specifically mentioned executive level duties learning how to work outside of your original field as part of a diverse team seems particularly relevant, not something you can do very well on your own. Your are going to screw up and get things wrong while you learn, better to do that in school than on your real job.
That said I'm all for learning things on your own, I think doing so is almost always required. I just think doing so supplements, not necessarily replaces, the university stuff.
No. The more formal the training, the more likely the person is to do something unbelievably short sighted and stupid for short term gains.
That is precisely the sort of ignorant and biased statement that I would have made prior to going to business school. Business school actually teaches you to avoid such traps and to stay away from potential partners who are doing as you describe.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words someone just discovered that R&D is not merely basic scientific research but also engineering.
This reminds me about the billions that were spent on the so called space pen. The Soviets showed us common sense, (and sadly continue to do so despite their economic troubles), by employing the time tested and proven hard black (HB) pencil.
Your own link debunks you:
"Be that as it may, beginning with the Apollo program astronauts did begin using a specially-designed zero-gravity pen called the Fisher Space Pen. The nitrogen-pressurized space pen worked in "freezing cold, desert heat, underwater and upside down," as well as in the weightless conditions of outer space.
It was developed not by NASA, however, but by one enterprising individual, Paul C. Fisher, owner of the Fisher Space Pen Company. By his own account, Fisher spent "thousands of hours and millions of dollars" of his own money in research and development — not billions.
The Fisher Space Pen is still used by both American and Russian astronauts on every space flight, and you can even buy one yourself direct from the company for a measly 50 bucks."
From http://www.spack.org/wiki/SpacePen:
"I hate to spam you, but on your quotes page you've tripped one of my pet peeves. The Space Pen. There is a common email circulating that describes how much money NASA wasted on making a pen that writes upside down, in vacuum blah blah blah. You know how much it really cost the US Gov't? Nothing. Fisher developed it at TREMENDOUS cost, all of it absorbed by them. In return they got to be the sole provider. Normally this means that they would sell these pens to NASA at some obscene amount. They charged just a few dollars. Admittedly, a few dollars for a pen was a lot in the 60's, but 1/100th what they could have charged. Fischer did this out of True Faith, True Faith that knowledge and research is its' own reward. And since that day, they have sold so many of their pens to the private sector, that they have made their money back a ten times, and still never charged that much. I have one of these pens, you can buy them at any stationary store, even Hallmark stores carry them. I recommend them, they're damn good pens.
Oh, and the bit about the pencil is true, the russians did use pencils. Remember the space station fires that they had? At least one of these, I forget which, but it caused a fatality, at least one was caused by airborn pencil shavings mixing with sensitive electronics. Their solution? Mail order Fischer Space Pens."
I realize its not quite what you are referring to but iPhone apps are tied to your iTunes account, not a particular device. So if you have and iPhone and an iPad you can load the app on both. When you upgrade a device you can load the app on the new device.
As a long-time Linux user, one of the best points is that everything comes without strings attached. I would say "the idea that apps should cost something" is questionable at best, but leave it to Apple and their users to advocate it.
Why just Apple? Even the FSF is OK with software costing something. The GPL allows for charging for the binary. The GPL even allows for charging a nominal fee for delivering the source code to the user.
:-)
Imagine someone releasing a GPL'd program for Mac OS X and then only distributing the source as a $1 Mac Store app download. That might be GPL compliant. This might spur RMS to get to work on GPL v4.
Users want a trial which is why I offer a free app, Perpenso Calc for iPhone RPN, 5 modes: Scientific Stats Business Hex Bill, which is upgradable to full (RPN, tape, etc) via in app purchase.
Users may also want customization so I offer the more specialized functionality (statistics, business, hex, etc) as in app purchases. So rather than a higher priced app with everything included I can keep the price down and let users only pay for the specific functionality they want.
I think your engineering dept is your IT dept. "Engineering" has many definitions and in the industry/context that you describe your engineering department seems to a support department focusing on technology. It does not seem to be "engineering" in the product/tool development sense. In this sense it makes sense for IT to be a group inside *your* engineering dept.
For reference here is the sort of image they will be looking at: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/584640main_apollo17-right-670.jpg
I appreciate the idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts, but the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already (and has been far more active over the course of its history) so if it makes sense to search anywhere, it's here. I'm not sure what could really be accomplished by scouring the moon...
The argument in the SETI paper is that the lunar environment can preserve surface artifacts and alterations for millions of years. Plus the search only involves looking at satellite imagery be collected for other reasons. No one is claiming the moon was a more likely destination.
Science tends to look at the world in terms of numbers, technology and confirmed facts. Religion tends to tell the world has been made by some imaginary person in the sky, tells you to pray towards said imaginary person and completely disregards science in favor of what someone wrote on paper 1500-2000 years ago. They are not compatible.
History shows that you are mistaken. Individual men of science and individual men of religion have occasionally created a false conflict but that was due to their personal politics and personal closed mindedness, not some inherent conflict between science and religion. For example when a Roman Catholic priest proposed the currently accepted cosmological model of the universe, the big bang theory - originally known as the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", some of the leading men of science of the day dismissed the theory not on its merits but because it came from a priest. I believe they said it "smelled of creationism".
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre
The western tradition of the scientific method (observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment) was popularized by various bishops, who also promoted the idea that science should be based on mathematics. Your "look at the world in terms of numbers, technology and confirmed facts" characterization is precisely the sort of thing promoted by various members of the clergy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Grosseteste
Other men of science who were members of the clergy and who may be more familiar to readers:
Nicolaus Copernicus, Roger Bacon, Gregor Mendel,
The Catholic church explicitly addresses the compatibility of science and religion. It's official position IIRC is that faith and scientific findings are not in conflict, that science investigates the mechanics (the "how") of God's creation while philosophy and religion investigate "why" not "how". Other Christian churches have similar perspectives.
Yea this will replace tutors just like books have replaced tutors since days of yore. EReaders are great, they may replace books someday but when it comes to education, the biggest barrier is getting kids to pickup a book/e-reader not how much space they occupy.
In the classical era tutors also applied discipline to students. Perhaps an ereader/tablet will be a useful educational tool when it tells the student it can't play the games because the lessons and homework are not complete yet. An ereader/tablet is not magic, it is just another type of computer, a far more compact and portable computer. Desktop computers in school have been tried, laptops for students have been tried, readers/tablet will have comparable results.
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
Perhaps it is more important to teach not believing everything that you read. Especially on the internet where there is little barrier to being published.
To instill some sort of ability to judge credibility. For example, two people make conflicting medical claims. One is an unknown but licensed medical doctor who trained at a well regarded university and the other is a famous and popular actress. That the actress' lack of relative credibility would require extraordinary evidence of her claims.
The rush to get a story out first is hardly anything new, nor is the inevitable occasional false reporting. "Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman.
Just what the world needs. More insurance policies ....
On the other hand the insurance policies may require some reasonable IT practices. Perhaps a manager who is not so responsive to the argument "these practices are standard and recommended" will be more responsive to "failure to meet these practices will get our insurance policy canceled".
Real mission critical stuff at Boeing? NASA? All that stuff then right?
Actually their most critical software is probably written in COBOL, their payroll software. Without that COBOL based software nothing gets done. :-)
An audacious project to construct a vast infrastructure housing a neutrino observatory at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is being undertaken by a consortium of 40 institutes and universities from ten European countries.
This sounds like a front for SPECTRE.
Click the link to the PDF and read section PE204, which starts on page 25. There are actual pictures of the EOS ring and its position on the seat. It's much more reasonable than the summary make it sound.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but my recollection was that the seat was not installed in an aircraft. Once installed it may not be reachable from the direction the photograph was taken.
Its probably the rush to make it to market for the Christmas season, "doing whatever it takes" to meet the deadline, code for "taking shortcuts" and "cutting corners". This phenomena is especially applicable to video games.
Another manifestation of the pressure to ship for Christmas is moving features from the original launch of the game to the expansion pack.
It hasn't been called into combat because it is a trump card. Why reveal its capabilities for others to prepare for? The F-22 is there so no major air force in the world challenges the US. In mock combat the F-22 has had something like 1-100 kill ratios, so what air force could?
All of them with a 1:100 ratio. The ratio is normally expressed as kill:loss, so you should use 100:1 to accommodate the less careful readers. ;-)
Deja Vu. F16 pilots were also falsely blamed when the true fault was a hardware failure in instrumentation. Wiring rubbing against a rivet eventually shorted out IIRC and pilots were given erroneous info regarding which way is up or down, critical when flying on instruments (zero visibility) where a pilots ignores his senses and puts full faith in instruments.
Its unlikely that only one specific bit pattern causes the problem. Its more likely that some related set of values are equivalent with respect to manifesting the bug. Also as specific and unlikely the necessary sequence of events that manifest the bug then the less likely it is to occur in fuzzing and the real world.
Fuzzing is no panacea but it is surprisingly effective with respect to robustness and it is very low cost.
The lecturer's story seems consistent with recollections of being on dive boats (scuba) as dive computers were entering the market. The subgroup using mechanical/analog devices for depth, pressure and time and carrying a plastic card with no-decompression time limits was where nearly all the computer programmers and electrical engineers could be found.
So is the problem that the people going into b school are stupid, or is it the teachers who are incompetent? Because that's definitely not what's coming out.
Business school is like any other educational program. You can teach people how to do things correctly, or at least reasonably, but they don't always do as they were trained. The same things happens in computer science. We are taught good methods and practices in order to write robust and reliable software but some graduates don't put those lessons into practice.
It looked like half of one 32-bit word was combined with half of another 32-bit word during queue assembly on at least some occasions. But there are errors not explained by that.
This is why I like fuzzing. Sending random and/or corrupted data to software to evaluate the software's robustness and sensitivity to corrupted inputs. For a project like this I would like to send simulated inputs from regression tests and recorded data from actual flights to the software while fuzzing each playback, repeat. Let a system sit in the corner running such tests 24/7.
In theory some permutation of the data should eventually resemble what you describe.
You learned this in school, other people learn this in other ways.
The problem with being self taught is that there are often gaps in knowledge compared to those who went to the university. I've seen this in computer science and business. Some topics required in a formal program are just not that interesting, yet there are often useful things to be found in that topic. Very few people will read textbooks on their own, more so for the less interesting topics. Its more common for folks to read pop business books from the local brick and mortar and that is not quite the same.
Plus in business school a lot of what you learn is part of a team effort with members of very different backgrounds (line managers, engineers, accountants, etc.). Given that the original poster specifically mentioned executive level duties learning how to work outside of your original field as part of a diverse team seems particularly relevant, not something you can do very well on your own. Your are going to screw up and get things wrong while you learn, better to do that in school than on your real job.
That said I'm all for learning things on your own, I think doing so is almost always required. I just think doing so supplements, not necessarily replaces, the university stuff.
No. The more formal the training, the more likely the person is to do something unbelievably short sighted and stupid for short term gains.
That is precisely the sort of ignorant and biased statement that I would have made prior to going to business school. Business school actually teaches you to avoid such traps and to stay away from potential partners who are doing as you describe.