It's not so much Windows "killing" OS/2 -- IBM can live with that in a fair fight. It's that Microsoft was parternered with IBM on OS/2, and saying nice things about it, right up until the eve of the Windows introduction.
Microsoft not only sucker-punched IBM on that, but also all the 3rd-party application vendors who were diligently developing for OS/2, leaving the Windows field wide open for Microsoft's Office apps.
The idea is older than that. I think it was Andre Norton who used the idea in her "Time Traders" (1958?) novel, although it might have been in Piper's Paratime novels or something by Poul Anderson. (I read it mid-1960s.) The rec room where the time travellers hung out between missions had a table display (high def!) used for games - eg complex maps for war games (think Avalon-Hill type games), etc.
Wall screens (large, flat, wall-hung displays) were pretty common in SF at the time (Star Trek's viewscreen, but also the wallscreen in "Fahrenheit 451"), it's a pretty obvious step to lay one of those horizontal as a map or game board.
Come to think of it, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) had tablet PCs that also showed video.
....to how this space drive patent application was treated. When this earlier patent was discussed on Slashdot I made a comment discussing how the patent just sailed through without a single question being raised about operability.
Well, the difference is that Volfson did have a working model. The fact that he swiped it from Area 51 was hushed up because of embarrassment over the breach of security.
What possible benefit would there be to occlude the Patent Office with "working models" of things for which there is no serious question whether it can work
Probably not much -- but on the other hand, if there "is no serious question whether it can work", the invention is probably too bloody obvious to deserve a patent. Certainly there may be exceptions where the inventor has an "aha!" moment and the solution to a previously intractable problem is now obvious in hindsight (the explosive lens design for an implosion type fission bomb, to work off your example). I'd probably settle for a thorough analysis that shows why it works in that case.
Why the hell should they have to create it physically if they can model it with something like ideas, solidworks or inventor?
How about because it's possible to model something in a CAD program that can't possibly be actually built in the real world?
See the Kansas City Hyatt Regency skywalk disaster (1981, killed 114 people, injured 180, called "the worst structural disaster in US history", at least until the collapse of the WTC, where there were aggravating circumstances) for an example of something that couldn't be manufactured as designed, with catastrophic consequences. (Henry Petroski's analysis in "To Engineer is Human" details the problems with trying to build the thing as designed, this report covers the actual changes made - Fig. 9 is most relevant.)
If you really think that IBM (or anyone else, for that matter) tools up a manufacturing line to produce a prototype, I call bullshit. Ditto for "spend a billion dollars to fab the first version of the chip". That stuff can be done as lab scale prototypes too, without building a dedicated fab line for it.
Quite frequently things don't work out in practise they way the did on paper -- sometimes we even discover new physical principles because of that. Ideas are cheap, a patent should only be awarded to somebody who makes the effort to reduce the idea to practise.
Ah, but in the US, even sub-megabit DSL is considered "broadband". Heck, so is 128kbps ISDN, for that matter. It makes the "% broadband penetration" numbers less embarrassing.
Not really. Sure, the basic specs say USB2 is 480 Mbps while 1394a is 400 Mbps, but when you add in protocol overhead and especially when you start adding stuff on the bus (1394 can do peer to peer, USB can't, 1394 also handles the bus better), the throughput is better for 1394a. And of course 1394b blows it out of the water (granted, there's still not much 1394b around).
Some posters seem to be confusing radial piston engines with rotary engines. While radial engines were common on many piston aircraft (some of which are still around), the pistons themselves still moved in a back and forth motion within the cylinders. In a rotary engine, specifically the Wankel used in the Mazda, the "pistons" are roughly triangular in shape and rotate (not oscillate) within an oval housing (the "cylinder" equivalent). The varying shape and volume of the space between the triangular center piece and the oval housing provides the compression and expansion provided by the oscillation of the piston in the cylinder of a more conventional engine.
Radial engines were so designed to provide adequate cooling airflow to all the cylinders, since all cylinders were at the front of the engine (or for some engines, in the space between two cylinders in front). Aircraft engines are usually air-cooled, for a variety of reasons (weight, reliability, etc).
As far as WW1 or WW2 engines, the required machining precision and seals technology to make something like a Wankel rotary was just not available. Cylindrical pistons and bores with circular seals are much simpler.
The next day, we all go back and return the disk and demand our money back
There's the rub. Virtually every place that sells discs have a return policy that states something like "opened discs may only be exchanged for another copy of the same disc".
Well, I'm sure Microsoft believes that most people who use custom-built (whitebox) computers pirate their copies of Windows anyway. OEM sales are where the money is at.
What's next, Intel re-introduces the processor serial number?
Close, s/card/GPU/ throughout your comment. From TFA, the graphic chips may support it, but the graphic cards don't, so if you bought a graphic card because the GPU claimed HDCP support, you're SOL even if (the rest of) the host hardware does support it.
Ask them if they've ever read a media story about something they knew a lot about. Ask them how much of it the media got right. Ask them why they think it would be any different with respect to IT.
I think it's more that "Laws" are simple, qualitative statements of what, whereas "Theories" are typically quantitative explanations of how.
The "Law of Evolution" would be something like: "offspring can differ from their parents, and pass those differences to their offspring", and (okay, the Two Laws of Evolution) "populations (not individuals) evolve over successive generations".
The "Law of Gravity" is, essentially, "things fall", or "there is a mutually attractive force between all objects with mass". The various theories of gravity then quantify it, from Newton's g=(m1+m2)G/r^2 to the more complex formulations of Einstein and others.
To the extent that there's a "Law of Relativity", it might be "nothing can accelerate past the speed of light" (the weasel-wording still allows for tachyons, should they actually exist).
I don't think the term "Law" has been supplanted by "Theory" so much as it has been supplanted by "Principle" -- eg it's Pauli's Exclusion Principle, not Pauli's Law of Exclusion (which it certainly could be considered).
Indeed, quantum mechanics has quite a few laws, some of them so-named and others not -- Stefan's Law, Wien's Law, Fermi-Dirac-Sommerfeld Law, etc (all seem to be named for people vs what they describe), plus the (Pauli) exclusion principle, the (Heisenberg) uncertainty principle, etc.
When I write a job ad, I distinguish between what is required and what is an asset (e.g., "Shell scripting, Motif, and Snobol experience are all assets, but not required.").
Shell scripting: sh, csh, ksh, bash... check. Motif: 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, and even Lesstif... check Snobol: Been a long time, some SNOBOL4 (SPITBOL)... check.
They recently started doing a few lunar observations with Hubble
Ah, cool. I know they've swapped out the instruments a time or two, and it's nearing end of life (at least in terms of what NASA is willing to support) so I guess they've relaxed the constraints I was remembering from Hubble's early days.
it has been suggested that the best way to counter the myth that the moon landing was faked is to go back to the moon and bring back something
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean did that on Apollo 12. They landed within sight and easy walking distance of Surveyor III, which had landed a few years earlier, and cut off and brought back part of the scoop arm and the TV camera. They're in the Smithsonian.
Didn't convince anyone who wanted not to be convinced.
Oh, and the Hubble's software won't let it be pointed anywhere near the Moon (or Sun, or Earth) without closing the "lens cap" (sun shield), so as to avoid burning out extremely sensitive instruments.
However, with the right equipment you can bounce a laser off the laser retroreflector panels the Apollo missions left, and see that.
You aren't the market. Your boss is the market. The home user is the market. Because dad wants the NFL in HD and the kids want Disney.
Nope, because the boss needs to run a few custom apps but doesn't want or need the hassle of paying for and tracking signing certificates, and dad and the kids can watch it on TV. (Besides, given the wear and tear the kids put on their Disney media, dad likes to be able to make backups.)
The finding suggests the comet's surrounding cloud of gas and dust may largely be fed by underlying ices, rather than by gas streaming off its surface.
This is hardly surprising. Out in my backyard, there's the remains of a snowman my daughter made a couple of weeks ago. It's black.
Oh, it was white -- and much bigger -- when she made it, but in rolling up the snow (only a couple inches deep) to make it, the snow picked up a fair bit of sand and dirt. Now, after the outer few inches has melted, the dirt that was in those few inches has settled back to the new surface while the water has melted/evaporated away. The result -- a fairly solid dirt surface.
Any city dweller in the northeast sees this every spring in the dirty snowbanks beside plowed roads.
It's hard for gas to stream off a surface that's a thick layer of dust and grit. More likely for it to come from the ices underneath. What would be interesting -- and would require a soft landing on a comet -- is to measure the thickness of the outer dirt "crust" and look at the volume of dirt per unit volume of ice underneath that. That'd let you calculate the approximate thickness of the ice already evaporated from the comet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so much Windows "killing" OS/2 -- IBM can live with that in a fair fight. It's that Microsoft was parternered with IBM on OS/2, and saying nice things about it, right up until the eve of the Windows introduction.
Microsoft not only sucker-punched IBM on that, but also all the 3rd-party application vendors who were diligently developing for OS/2, leaving the Windows field wide open for Microsoft's Office apps.
The idea is older than that. I think it was Andre Norton who used the idea in her "Time Traders" (1958?) novel, although it might have been in Piper's Paratime novels or something by Poul Anderson. (I read it mid-1960s.) The rec room where the time travellers hung out between missions had a table display (high def!) used for games - eg complex maps for war games (think Avalon-Hill type games), etc.
Wall screens (large, flat, wall-hung displays) were pretty common in SF at the time (Star Trek's viewscreen, but also the wallscreen in "Fahrenheit 451"), it's a pretty obvious step to lay one of those horizontal as a map or game board.
Come to think of it, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) had tablet PCs that also showed video.
'This page has since been removed as it was posted prematurely and was for testing purposes only.'"
Testing what, the waters?
....to how this space drive patent application was treated. When this earlier patent was discussed on Slashdot I made a comment discussing how the patent just sailed through without a single question being raised about operability.
Well, the difference is that Volfson did have a working model. The fact that he swiped it from Area 51 was hushed up because of embarrassment over the breach of security.
What possible benefit would there be to occlude the Patent Office with "working models" of things for which there is no serious question whether it can work
Probably not much -- but on the other hand, if there "is no serious question whether it can work", the invention is probably too bloody obvious to deserve a patent. Certainly there may be exceptions where the inventor has an "aha!" moment and the solution to a previously intractable problem is now obvious in hindsight (the explosive lens design for an implosion type fission bomb, to work off your example). I'd probably settle for a thorough analysis that shows why it works in that case.
Why the hell should they have to create it physically if they can model it with something like ideas, solidworks or inventor?
How about because it's possible to model something in a CAD program that can't possibly be actually built in the real world?
See the Kansas City Hyatt Regency skywalk disaster (1981, killed 114 people, injured 180, called "the worst structural disaster in US history", at least until the collapse of the WTC, where there were aggravating circumstances) for an example of something that couldn't be manufactured as designed, with catastrophic consequences. (Henry Petroski's analysis in "To Engineer is Human" details the problems with trying to build the thing as designed, this report covers the actual changes made - Fig. 9 is most relevant.)
But why would they ever tool a manufacturing line
If you really think that IBM (or anyone else, for that matter) tools up a manufacturing line to produce a prototype, I call bullshit. Ditto for "spend a billion dollars to fab the first version of the chip". That stuff can be done as lab scale prototypes too, without building a dedicated fab line for it.
Quite frequently things don't work out in practise they way the did on paper -- sometimes we even discover new physical principles because of that. Ideas are cheap, a patent should only be awarded to somebody who makes the effort to reduce the idea to practise.
so far nobody seems to have been given the 1984 treatment. (emphasis added)
How would you know?
Ah, but in the US, even sub-megabit DSL is considered "broadband". Heck, so is 128kbps ISDN, for that matter. It makes the "% broadband penetration" numbers less embarrassing.
Not to mention that USB2 is faster than 1394a.
Not really. Sure, the basic specs say USB2 is 480 Mbps while 1394a is 400 Mbps, but when you add in protocol overhead and especially when you start adding stuff on the bus (1394 can do peer to peer, USB can't, 1394 also handles the bus better), the throughput is better for 1394a. And of course 1394b blows it out of the water (granted, there's still not much 1394b around).
Some posters seem to be confusing radial piston engines with rotary engines. While radial engines were common on many piston aircraft (some of which are still around), the pistons themselves still moved in a back and forth motion within the cylinders. In a rotary engine, specifically the Wankel used in the Mazda, the "pistons" are roughly triangular in shape and rotate (not oscillate) within an oval housing (the "cylinder" equivalent). The varying shape and volume of the space between the triangular center piece and the oval housing provides the compression and expansion provided by the oscillation of the piston in the cylinder of a more conventional engine.
Radial engines were so designed to provide adequate cooling airflow to all the cylinders, since all cylinders were at the front of the engine (or for some engines, in the space between two cylinders in front). Aircraft engines are usually air-cooled, for a variety of reasons (weight, reliability, etc).
As far as WW1 or WW2 engines, the required machining precision and seals technology to make something like a Wankel rotary was just not available. Cylindrical pistons and bores with circular seals are much simpler.
And Venus is brighter than Mercury. The GP obviously transposed them.
So much for that mnemonic.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The next day, we all go back and return the disk and demand our money back
There's the rub. Virtually every place that sells discs have a return policy that states something like "opened discs may only be exchanged for another copy of the same disc".
Well, I'm sure Microsoft believes that most people who use custom-built (whitebox) computers pirate their copies of Windows anyway. OEM sales are where the money is at.
What's next, Intel re-introduces the processor serial number?
Close, s/card/GPU/ throughout your comment. From TFA, the graphic chips may support it, but the graphic cards don't, so if you bought a graphic card because the GPU claimed HDCP support, you're SOL even if (the rest of) the host hardware does support it.
Ask them if they've ever read a media story about something they knew a lot about. Ask them how much of it the media got right. Ask them why they think it would be any different with respect to IT.
I think it's more that "Laws" are simple, qualitative statements of what, whereas "Theories" are typically quantitative explanations of how.
The "Law of Evolution" would be something like: "offspring can differ from their parents, and pass those differences to their offspring", and (okay, the Two Laws of Evolution) "populations (not individuals) evolve over successive generations".
The "Law of Gravity" is, essentially, "things fall", or "there is a mutually attractive force between all objects with mass". The various theories of gravity then quantify it, from Newton's g=(m1+m2)G/r^2 to the more complex formulations of Einstein and others.
To the extent that there's a "Law of Relativity", it might be "nothing can accelerate past the speed of light" (the weasel-wording still allows for tachyons, should they actually exist).
I don't think the term "Law" has been supplanted by "Theory" so much as it has been supplanted by "Principle" -- eg it's Pauli's Exclusion Principle, not Pauli's Law of Exclusion (which it certainly could be considered).
Indeed, quantum mechanics has quite a few laws, some of them so-named and others not -- Stefan's Law, Wien's Law, Fermi-Dirac-Sommerfeld Law, etc (all seem to be named for people vs what they describe), plus the (Pauli) exclusion principle, the (Heisenberg) uncertainty principle, etc.
job posting that required 10 years of C#
;-)
Just tell them that the first few years of that was in the C subset. (And yes, I know C isn't a proper subset of C#.)
Hey, I was programming in C++ for years before AT&T released "cfront"
When I write a job ad, I distinguish between what is required and what is an asset (e.g., "Shell scripting, Motif, and Snobol experience are all assets, but not required.").
... check. ... check
;-)
Shell scripting: sh, csh, ksh, bash
Motif: 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, and even Lesstif
Snobol: Been a long time, some SNOBOL4 (SPITBOL)... check.
So, what you got?
They recently started doing a few lunar observations with Hubble
Ah, cool. I know they've swapped out the instruments a time or two, and it's nearing end of life (at least in terms of what NASA is willing to support) so I guess they've relaxed the constraints I was remembering from Hubble's early days.
Thanks for the info.
it has been suggested that the best way to counter the myth that the moon landing was faked is to go back to the moon and bring back something
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean did that on Apollo 12. They landed within sight and easy walking distance of Surveyor III, which had landed a few years earlier, and cut off and brought back part of the scoop arm and the TV camera. They're in the Smithsonian.
Didn't convince anyone who wanted not to be convinced.
Oh, and the Hubble's software won't let it be pointed anywhere near the Moon (or Sun, or Earth) without closing the "lens cap" (sun shield), so as to avoid burning out extremely sensitive instruments.
However, with the right equipment you can bounce a laser off the laser retroreflector panels the Apollo missions left, and see that.
use a nuke to carve out a crater
Somehow, on the Moon, that seems a bit redundant.
You aren't the market. Your boss is the market. The home user is the market. Because dad wants the NFL in HD and the kids want Disney.
Nope, because the boss needs to run a few custom apps but doesn't want or need the hassle of paying for and tracking signing certificates, and dad and the kids can watch it on TV. (Besides, given the wear and tear the kids put on their Disney media, dad likes to be able to make backups.)
The finding suggests the comet's surrounding cloud of gas and dust may largely be fed by underlying ices, rather than by gas streaming off its surface.
This is hardly surprising. Out in my backyard, there's the remains of a snowman my daughter made a couple of weeks ago. It's black.
Oh, it was white -- and much bigger -- when she made it, but in rolling up the snow (only a couple inches deep) to make it, the snow picked up a fair bit of sand and dirt. Now, after the outer few inches has melted, the dirt that was in those few inches has settled back to the new surface while the water has melted/evaporated away. The result -- a fairly solid dirt surface.
Any city dweller in the northeast sees this every spring in the dirty snowbanks beside plowed roads.
It's hard for gas to stream off a surface that's a thick layer of dust and grit. More likely for it to come from the ices underneath. What would be interesting -- and would require a soft landing on a comet -- is to measure the thickness of the outer dirt "crust" and look at the volume of dirt per unit volume of ice underneath that. That'd let you calculate the approximate thickness of the ice already evaporated from the comet.