Do you think that scientists just sit around, with all the money they want, dreaming up daft experiments to do?
In reality they have to bid and win for the money to do such things, against stiff competition. Just think of the talent, skill and dedication that went into convincing a biscuit manufacturer to fund such research. Can you imagine standing up in front of a review board and pitching that? The man's a genius.
I'm guessing that this swallow work was a personal project, but this also was a work of genius. After all, most of their research will go into a dry and dusty journal. Nobody will read it, nobody will notice. However this will be quoted for as long as some smartarse quotes Monty Python. The publicity and the (indirect) fame is well worth the small effort involved.
Getting your name known, and getting contacts and work as a result, is as much a part of science today as actually discovering new knowledge. This is just marketing, but without the dodgy haircuts and inflated salaries.
Been done, better, elsewhere
on
Circuits Everywhere
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Take a look at this metal printing solution which has been around for a while and looks to be less marketing press shot and more substance.
The question is not 'can you put out a press release', more 'can you do something useful and get it to market'.
Finally, amongst 800 posts, someone who has more than two braincells to rub together.
Forget hydrogen, its an irrelevence. It can't be made cheaply enough, in big enough quantities, or stored efficiently enough, to make any real difference.
The peak in oil is now.
Did you hear that, NOW. Its no good pushing the fateful day off a decade or two, then deciding that if so, it makes no difference to you - 'think i'll get a bigger SUV'. Take a long hard look at the production figures, think supply lines, thing increasing demand, think easy target.
Such changes don't come with a wimper, they come with a bang. That market is going to flip, from restricting demand to enhance prices to enhancing prices to restrict demand. Think its going to stop at $100 a barrel? Think you'll just drive a little less?
Life in raw materials isn't that pretty, not when accountants have optimised the hell out of the system - made it brittle.
Take this prediction, a nuke will be let off, in the atmosphere, within ten years.
Your making the assumption that marketing always give the techie the right to vet what is being written by marketing, or that the techie will be credited with what they have done.
In my experience marketing seem to believe they are a law unto themselves - even going so far as to claim that accuracy isn't important in the things they put out.
Marketing are grouped with lawyers and accountants for a reason.
I'm surprised that no one has referenced the localiser concept of Verner Vinge yet.
If you want to understand just how powerful this idea can be, for good and ill, I suggest reading some of his books. The capacity for monitoring the environment and providing networked hopping bandwidth is tempered by the capacity for total 27x7x365 big brother.
This is an old concept, but no less powerful for it.
The countdown to the launch of the QinetiQ1 balloon altitude record has just started. Early on Tuesday a balloon the size of the Empire State Building will take off from the back of a trimaran warship, carrying a ultra high altitude UAV to fly and take its picture on the edge of space.
News: Check, they've been waiting on the right weather for two years Nerds: Check, this is real science and technology Rejected: Check, a slow news day eh?
And then we get a story like this ???
Too right I'm pissed
Why not change the tagline to "Funny Stuff and a Bit of Linux" - it'd be more accurate.
Since when has something as lightweight or obvious as this been worth an article? Why is it I seem to have to go elsewhere for stories that are actually interesting. How long are we going to have to wait before we can chose the stories that are run?
I don't know about BSD dying, a think Slashdot will go first.
The colour test pattern of the Beagle 2 has been created by the artist Damien Hurst.
Damien was one member of the joke band 'Fat Les', famous for their song 'Vindaloo'
Said song was famous for doing very well on the terraces at a previous excusion of the England football team into foreign parts.
So, not too far off the mark.
Now all we need is a Mars excusion robot shaped like a ball, with appropriately shaped black solar cells positioned over its surface and, BINGO! - Mars football...
Where is the option for moderating the author as a misguided idiot ?
The majority of programmers are male. The VAST majority of programmers are male. By putting the female pronoun in this article you pander to the PC brigade who are close cousins of the bad management brigade. They both believe you can shape the world to what you would like by saying something, rather than doing something.
Considering programmers to be 'geeks' or to have body odor, or even bad social graces, is as much discrimination as considering them to be only male. If fact, in my experience, its further from the truth. Take a close look at yourself before you start casting stones at others.
Maybe your next article should be entitled "Programmers tell it like it is: they hate bigots of any colour" - and maybe you can learn something at the same time about being honest in a complex world.
Option 1: Overseas programmers produce poor code with lots of errors.
Answer: Get a group of you together and setup a company offering to rescue faulty developments and fix bad overseas code on a high speed/high fee basis. Invest in tools that help you to do this, or write your own.
Option 2: Actually, they can program quite well - well enough that they are more cost efficient than you will ever be.
Answer: Setup a company sketching out the design of the software, and outsourcing the work yourselves to India. Sell it a as risk reduction exercise.
Option 3: They program well, but you don't fancy option 2.
Answer: Create code and programs that enable you to program cost effectively in relation to Indian programmers, even in only specific niches.
In short, the global marketplace isn't going away. If you want to survive doing what you're doing at the moment, you are going to have to raise your game to compete.
Times of change bring opportunties, grab them. When you do, and you control your destiny - you can have whatever setup you require.
The real world in action. Those in the know will find a way past this stupid restriction of trade and will profit from cheap printers AND cheap ink. The rest will pay through the nose. Who ever said this wasn't a knowledge economy?
These types of business model are generally a short term win. In the end the process is simplified and everyone knows how to do it - killing the business model. In essence this is what Napster did to music, made the sharing of music not dependent on your circle of friends and thus cutting the legs from under the corrupt business model. Laws can be used short term, but in the end these fall away and sustainable business models emerge.
With today's inkjet printers, nobody need a new printer for years and years at a time. Thus the belief is that the business model is in the ink. Large companies attempt to force you into using their (expensive) ink, but that is a fool's game. Instead the cheap ink manufacturers will win that market in the end, since its at heart a commodity market.
Better to put the prices of printers to an economic level and focus on innovation to drive purchases, than attempt the reverse. That way you have hope of IP protection and profit is immediate, not defered.
In fact, why not give the ink away for free with the printer ? Marginal costs are low and the interest on the extra money you can charge will pay for it quickly.
And don't forget the great use of 'Sinnerman' by Nina Simone. One of the best uses of existing music in a film - it really added to the onscreen action.
Not exactly sure what the us navy is up to, but I can guess. The big items of military equipment are getting too expensive to buy, even for the us. The only alternative is to make extensive use of COTS hardware and software to push down the prices. The aim is to modify cheap stuff to deliver what you need, with the idea that at least that way you can have a lot of them, even if they might have some compromises.
NT & 802.11b are just two examples of this, I'm sure if people do a little digging they will find more - in particular the computer hardware.
After all, a destroyer is just a platform for missiles and a radar. And a target, of course. Never say that to the navy though, they are kind of sensitive to that type of thing.
The question of/. readers is, how could they be supported in doing this better ? As usual, they get a load of contractors in who sell them the advice that Microsoft is a sure bet. What would an open source warship look like? Even better, how could you retro fit an existing hull to provide a cheap platform that be some use?
One thing is for sure, other countries have picked up on the same idea.
I predict the chinese will get to Mars before an american does.
As far as the US is concerned, if it doesn't pay for itself or get someone reelected, then it doesn't happen. A manned Mars flight does neither, therefore they are not going.
Those in charge of China have a different agenda and a different set of values. They have the basic makeup to succeed in this.
Get up. Go outside the door. Experience a world with more in it than you can understand. Try not to characterise people except into those that see the world anew every day, and those that try to make each day into every other.
I really hate the idea that some PHB decides that rather than give a monitary raise, they instead feel free to attempt to devalue a term that has a long and noble history because they either don't know, or don't care.
(Those outside the UK may have missed IKB gaining second place in the Top 100 Britons, which must count as one of the few times that an engineer has gained some degree of recognition against an actor or singer.)
Unless you've earnt it, your not an engineer; your a mechanic.
Role on the time when to call yourself an engineer without cause is to invite a public flogging. Entertainment and education in one.
Call them managers instead..... at least that's term has no positive historical connections.
To get the capacity up, these carriages have to be travelling quite close together, and very fast - with much kinetic energy. Take out one and how fast can the rest react? At the minimum you get a number of these carriages smashing into each other, at high speed.
Now, what about the rest of them that you manage to stop in the tunnel in time. You can't just leave them there, you have to move them before their air supply runs out. So straight away they need to be self powered. Even assuming they are, and they can crawl along, where do you take them to? You need one of those unloaders to get them out. They have to be many hundreds of miles apart to mesh with the base concept and sensible cost base.
And once you have cleared the system, how long will it take to repair? Not only do you have to repair the infrastructure, you need to pump the whole system down to vacuum again.
All in all a terrorist attack could be expected to kill hundreds and close the system for weeks. All that with a small shaped charge device, properly placed.
All of the other 'tempting' targets are more robust than this. Either its harder to significantly damage them, or even when damaged there is limited total effect.
I'm not saying anything like "large scale engineering shouldn't be attempted", I'm saying that when you engineer a large scale structure, you have to engineer it with robustness built in - and the idea as presented just doesn't do that.
Sorry if you think its nonsense, to me its just good systems engineering.
Re:don't mean to be a pessimist, but...
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This concept has a whole bunch of problems.
As you say, keeping the vacuum would be a significant problem, which conveniently is ignored in the writeup. Saying that, if a very gas impermiable material is developed the rate of gas inflow could be limited such that low level pumping would keep the systems stable.
The idea that this company holds a patent is a bit of a joke. Anyone who wants to do something like this can avoid the patent, or invalidate it. Prior art is everywhere. Sounds like someone has convinced a VC to provide money on the basis that there is the potential to rake it in in future. That's good, nice to see something useful being done with the money, but god, I hate using patents to do it, it just brings the whole thing into disrepute.
Terrorist action would be a significant problem. Take out one of these carriages and the fact that all the rest are close behind, travelling at 400-4000 mph, makes for a tempting target. The system is in no way robust enough.
Construction costs would be MASSIVE. This thing has to be fairly straight and flat, otherwise the stress of the forces as these carriages 'go round the corner' will pull it apart. We are back to the situation of the railways. Laying two strips of metal is fairly cheap. Laying two strips of metal straight and flat, by cutting through hills and building viaducts is very expensive.
The carriages are too small and cramped to be serious for travel. With so few passengers per carriage the cost of the upkeep and construction starts to dominate. Better to use a train concept, with large carriages and longer trains, and only a few with drive units etc.
Saying all this, there is a way that something related to this type of concept can be made practical - but it won't be in the US. Its much more likely in Japan or China.
Lets get away from a world were nobody knows what to do with the computing power that is almost freely available. Let's move into the wonderful world of GRID COMPUTING, where we can con people into paying for something they really don't understand.
GRID COMPUTING, the marketing way of saying that Beowulf is a book - now give me the money.
Hmm, not only do people not read the article, they don't think what it means either.
This type of system cannot give you very high resolution, its essentially extracting data from the convolved signal. Its been researched for quite a few years, this is just the press release stage from companies looking to up their share prices.
However, it IS a very good way of defeating stealth, and monitoring for cruise missiles. Its the reason not to throw all you money into a stealth based basket, since stealth has a limited lifespan and is eventually defeated by such approaches.
I suggest looking first here, and then here. It begins to appear more interesting once you piece things together...
This is a prog that was on the BBC a year or two ago. Its nothing like either Junkyard (nee Scrapheap) Wars or Survivor, just some marketing creep looking for an angle. There is certainly no real roughing it - think your science teacher trying to make lessons more interesting.
That said, its still worth catching if you've nothing else to do.
Slashdot Mirror
In reality they have to bid and win for the money to do such things, against stiff competition. Just think of the talent, skill and dedication that went into convincing a biscuit manufacturer to fund such research. Can you imagine standing up in front of a review board and pitching that? The man's a genius.
I'm guessing that this swallow work was a personal project, but this also was a work of genius. After all, most of their research will go into a dry and dusty journal. Nobody will read it, nobody will notice. However this will be quoted for as long as some smartarse quotes Monty Python. The publicity and the (indirect) fame is well worth the small effort involved.
Getting your name known, and getting contacts and work as a result, is as much a part of science today as actually discovering new knowledge. This is just marketing, but without the dodgy haircuts and inflated salaries.
The question is not 'can you put out a press release', more 'can you do something useful and get it to market'.
Finally, amongst 800 posts, someone who has more than two braincells to rub together.
Forget hydrogen, its an irrelevence. It can't be made cheaply enough, in big enough quantities, or stored efficiently enough, to make any real difference.
The peak in oil is now.
Did you hear that, NOW. Its no good pushing the fateful day off a decade or two, then deciding that if so, it makes no difference to you - 'think i'll get a bigger SUV'. Take a long hard look at the production figures, think supply lines, thing increasing demand, think easy target.
Such changes don't come with a wimper, they come with a bang. That market is going to flip, from restricting demand to enhance prices to enhancing prices to restrict demand. Think its going to stop at $100 a barrel? Think you'll just drive a little less?
Life in raw materials isn't that pretty, not when accountants have optimised the hell out of the system - made it brittle.
Take this prediction, a nuke will be let off, in the atmosphere, within ten years.
And it will probably be an American nuke.
In my experience marketing seem to believe they are a law unto themselves - even going so far as to claim that accuracy isn't important in the things they put out.
Marketing are grouped with lawyers and accountants for a reason.
I'm surprised that no one has referenced the localiser concept of Verner Vinge yet. If you want to understand just how powerful this idea can be, for good and ill, I suggest reading some of his books. The capacity for monitoring the environment and providing networked hopping bandwidth is tempered by the capacity for total 27x7x365 big brother. This is an old concept, but no less powerful for it.
Must have missed the story about someone building a space elevator on the news.
The countdown to the launch of the QinetiQ1 balloon altitude record has just started. Early on Tuesday a balloon the size of the Empire State Building will take off from the back of a trimaran warship, carrying a ultra high altitude UAV to fly and take its picture on the edge of space.
News: Check, they've been waiting on the right weather for two years
Nerds: Check, this is real science and technology
Rejected: Check, a slow news day eh?
And then we get a story like this ???
Too right I'm pissed
Why not change the tagline to "Funny Stuff and a Bit of Linux" - it'd be more accurate.
Yeah, right.
Since when has something as lightweight or obvious as this been worth an article? Why is it I seem to have to go elsewhere for stories that are actually interesting. How long are we going to have to wait before we can chose the stories that are run?
I don't know about BSD dying, a think Slashdot will go first.
How about 1% of your wage, each year.
Or maybe 0.1% per square foot of road taken up by your vehicle - that would give those with the small and efficient a real bonus
- The colour test pattern of the Beagle 2 has been created by the artist Damien Hurst.
- Damien was one member of the joke band 'Fat Les', famous for their song 'Vindaloo'
- Said song was famous for doing very well on the terraces at a previous excusion of the England football team into foreign parts.
So, not too far off the mark.Now all we need is a Mars excusion robot shaped like a ball, with appropriately shaped black solar cells positioned over its surface and, BINGO! - Mars football...
The majority of programmers are male. The VAST majority of programmers are male. By putting the female pronoun in this article you pander to the PC brigade who are close cousins of the bad management brigade. They both believe you can shape the world to what you would like by saying something, rather than doing something.
Considering programmers to be 'geeks' or to have body odor, or even bad social graces, is as much discrimination as considering them to be only male. If fact, in my experience, its further from the truth. Take a close look at yourself before you start casting stones at others.
Maybe your next article should be entitled "Programmers tell it like it is: they hate bigots of any colour" - and maybe you can learn something at the same time about being honest in a complex world.
Option 1: Overseas programmers produce poor code with lots of errors.
Answer: Get a group of you together and setup a company offering to rescue faulty developments and fix bad overseas code on a high speed/high fee basis. Invest in tools that help you to do this, or write your own.
Option 2: Actually, they can program quite well - well enough that they are more cost efficient than you will ever be.
Answer: Setup a company sketching out the design of the software, and outsourcing the work yourselves to India. Sell it a as risk reduction exercise.
Option 3: They program well, but you don't fancy option 2.
Answer: Create code and programs that enable you to program cost effectively in relation to Indian programmers, even in only specific niches.
In short, the global marketplace isn't going away. If you want to survive doing what you're doing at the moment, you are going to have to raise your game to compete.
Times of change bring opportunties, grab them. When you do, and you control your destiny - you can have whatever setup you require.
The real world in action. Those in the know will find a way past this stupid restriction of trade and will profit from cheap printers AND cheap ink. The rest will pay through the nose. Who ever said this wasn't a knowledge economy?
These types of business model are generally a short term win. In the end the process is simplified and everyone knows how to do it - killing the business model. In essence this is what Napster did to music, made the sharing of music not dependent on your circle of friends and thus cutting the legs from under the corrupt business model. Laws can be used short term, but in the end these fall away and sustainable business models emerge.
With today's inkjet printers, nobody need a new printer for years and years at a time. Thus the belief is that the business model is in the ink. Large companies attempt to force you into using their (expensive) ink, but that is a fool's game. Instead the cheap ink manufacturers will win that market in the end, since its at heart a commodity market.
Better to put the prices of printers to an economic level and focus on innovation to drive purchases, than attempt the reverse. That way you have hope of IP protection and profit is immediate, not defered.
In fact, why not give the ink away for free with the printer ? Marginal costs are low and the interest on the extra money you can charge will pay for it quickly.
And don't forget the great use of 'Sinnerman' by Nina Simone. One of the best uses of existing music in a film - it really added to the onscreen action.
Not exactly sure what the us navy is up to, but I can guess. The big items of military equipment are getting too expensive to buy, even for the us. The only alternative is to make extensive use of COTS hardware and software to push down the prices. The aim is to modify cheap stuff to deliver what you need, with the idea that at least that way you can have a lot of them, even if they might have some compromises.
NT & 802.11b are just two examples of this, I'm sure if people do a little digging they will find more - in particular the computer hardware.
After all, a destroyer is just a platform for missiles and a radar. And a target, of course. Never say that to the navy though, they are kind of sensitive to that type of thing.
The question of /. readers is, how could they be supported in doing this better ? As usual, they get a load of contractors in who sell them the advice that Microsoft is a sure bet. What would an open source warship look like? Even better, how could you retro fit an existing hull to provide a cheap platform that be some use?
One thing is for sure, other countries have picked up on the same idea.
As far as the US is concerned, if it doesn't pay for itself or get someone reelected, then it doesn't happen. A manned Mars flight does neither, therefore they are not going.
Those in charge of China have a different agenda and a different set of values. They have the basic makeup to succeed in this.
Yes, Mars will be red.
Sad little man.
Get up. Go outside the door. Experience a world with more in it than you can understand. Try not to characterise people except into those that see the world anew every day, and those that try to make each day into every other.
People like you.....well you make me sad really.
Look up.
Maybe your 5 years behind...
I really hate the idea that some PHB decides that rather than give a monitary raise, they instead feel free to attempt to devalue a term that has a long and noble history because they either don't know, or don't care.
(Those outside the UK may have missed IKB gaining second place in the Top 100 Britons, which must count as one of the few times that an engineer has gained some degree of recognition against an actor or singer.)
Unless you've earnt it, your not an engineer; your a mechanic.
Role on the time when to call yourself an engineer without cause is to invite a public flogging. Entertainment and education in one.
Call them managers instead..... at least that's term has no positive historical connections.
To get the capacity up, these carriages have to be travelling quite close together, and very fast - with much kinetic energy. Take out one and how fast can the rest react? At the minimum you get a number of these carriages smashing into each other, at high speed.
Now, what about the rest of them that you manage to stop in the tunnel in time. You can't just leave them there, you have to move them before their air supply runs out. So straight away they need to be self powered. Even assuming they are, and they can crawl along, where do you take them to? You need one of those unloaders to get them out. They have to be many hundreds of miles apart to mesh with the base concept and sensible cost base.
And once you have cleared the system, how long will it take to repair? Not only do you have to repair the infrastructure, you need to pump the whole system down to vacuum again.
All in all a terrorist attack could be expected to kill hundreds and close the system for weeks. All that with a small shaped charge device, properly placed.
All of the other 'tempting' targets are more robust than this. Either its harder to significantly damage them, or even when damaged there is limited total effect.
I'm not saying anything like "large scale engineering shouldn't be attempted", I'm saying that when you engineer a large scale structure, you have to engineer it with robustness built in - and the idea as presented just doesn't do that.
Sorry if you think its nonsense, to me its just good systems engineering.
- As you say, keeping the vacuum would be a significant problem, which conveniently is ignored in the writeup. Saying that, if a very gas impermiable material is developed the rate of gas inflow could be limited such that low level pumping would keep the systems stable.
- The idea that this company holds a patent is a bit of a joke. Anyone who wants to do something like this can avoid the patent, or invalidate it. Prior art is everywhere. Sounds like someone has convinced a VC to provide money on the basis that there is the potential to rake it in in future. That's good, nice to see something useful being done with the money, but god, I hate using patents to do it, it just brings the whole thing into disrepute.
- Terrorist action would be a significant problem. Take out one of these carriages and the fact that all the rest are close behind, travelling at 400-4000 mph, makes for a tempting target. The system is in no way robust enough.
- Construction costs would be MASSIVE. This thing has to be fairly straight and flat, otherwise the stress of the forces as these carriages 'go round the corner' will pull it apart. We are back to the situation of the railways. Laying two strips of metal is fairly cheap. Laying two strips of metal straight and flat, by cutting through hills and building viaducts is very expensive.
- The carriages are too small and cramped to be serious for travel. With so few passengers per carriage the cost of the upkeep and construction starts to dominate. Better to use a train concept, with large carriages and longer trains, and only a few with drive units etc.
Saying all this, there is a way that something related to this type of concept can be made practical - but it won't be in the US. Its much more likely in Japan or China.Lets get away from a world were nobody knows what to do with the computing power that is almost freely available. Let's move into the wonderful world of GRID COMPUTING, where we can con people into paying for something they really don't understand. GRID COMPUTING, the marketing way of saying that Beowulf is a book - now give me the money.
This type of system cannot give you very high resolution, its essentially extracting data from the convolved signal. Its been researched for quite a few years, this is just the press release stage from companies looking to up their share prices.
However, it IS a very good way of defeating stealth, and monitoring for cruise missiles. Its the reason not to throw all you money into a stealth based basket, since stealth has a limited lifespan and is eventually defeated by such approaches.
I suggest looking first here, and then here. It begins to appear more interesting once you piece things together...
That said, its still worth catching if you've nothing else to do.
The pity is, all those economic grads still didn't get it.
Ho hum