Those who denigrate aerospace projects for being over budget and over schedule are either naive or disingenous.
The unfortunate reality is aerospace companies are strongly motivated by the Federal Gov't proposal selection process to bid too low and too fast for high-risk projects like JWST. While not truely "lowest cost" bidder selection, it's understood that a winning bid will be in a certain range, regardless of whether its realistic. And the schedule proposals must also target certain bogies to have a chance of winning, regardless of winning.
And so companies bid low and fast to meet the proposal expectations and requirements, knowing that they'll make it up in cost-plus overruns as the Program proceeds.
And those running the programs know this too.
And ultimately, each project such as JWST is a one-of-a-kind endeavor. New technologies, new manufacturing methods, new test techniques are invented during the course of the project. It's difficult to predict the budget and schedule for doing something never done before; much less keeping to an optimistic budget driven by political needs more than the technical.
To those on JWST, they are doing incredible work, putting in long hours, and coming up with creative solutions to very challenging problems. And everyone of them wants to see JWST succeed.
Astronomical telescope mirror manufacturing is a labor intensive, hands-on, non-automated process. And the culture of aerospace is highly risk averse: this comes from the very customers, like the good people at NASA Goddard.
Lunar telescope manufacturing would require some exciting scientific, engineer, and processing improvements that would also pay off for terrestrial manufacturing.
First, assuming they're not planning to house and employ a standard aerospace company, with 1000 engineers, technicians, and managers on the moon, this would be fully automated. Mirror making is anything but automated. The development of highly automated methods for processing and testing mirrors would be quite a move forward. It would also have direct benefits for conventional manufacturing.
Second, making a mirror on the moon would seem to require a tolerance of risk currently not accepted. Every time a mirror is moved, a crew of people must oversee the affair, sign the (physical) paperwork, and manually inspect the mirror afterwards. For lunar construction, this would have to become an assembly line that ran without that direct oversight, paperwork, or crews. Enabling more efficient methods would certainly benefit normal processes as well.
Moreover, the task of creating such a facility would keep many, many aerospace workers employed for years:)
That's my office. Public terminals for visitors in the open space. A few yards away is the secure facility, which prohibits all cell phones, unless the batteries are first removed.
Thus, it is safer to just leave the phone in your car, if you're visiting and have any business in the secure area.
The author spent $200 to buy an LCD monitor to replace a 19" CRT, saving $18 / yr electricity: more than a five year payoff. And he's putting a CRT into a landfill somewhere. There's no economic incentive to buy an LCD; savings are pocket change and doesn't realistically pay for itself. And the environmental cost could be a wash, since the reduced carbon footprint is weighed against a CRT dumped in the trash.
This article is fun, and I might play a similar game at home. But people chasing $90 in electricity is nearly trite compared to the real energy users: home heating and cooling and clothes washers and dryers. Globally, this is spitting in the ocean compared to the real change that's (presumably) neeeded.
It's reported that eliminating coal-mine fires (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/from-bagels-to-coal-fires-an-unorthodox-economist-keeps-pushing-for-change/) would reduce CO2 emissions annually equivalent to that produced by all cars and light-trucks in the US. There's little value in individuals replacing 3 W cable modems for 2 W versions when the "easy" targets are still ignored.
Pogue wrote an article with bogus info, then printed a retraction. ValleyWag wrote that Pogue got duped. And then ValleyWag wrote a searing article noting -- get this -- high level electronics reviewers have better access to help and hardware than the rest of us! Who knew? And sometimes their review hardware is cherry picked for advance features! Investigative journalism at its best.
I can only assume the real interesting meat is in the unseen "back and forth" emails. Pity we can't read those. We might learn something interesting.
Is there an alternate installation of Gimp on the Mac that provides a more OS X interface? The default X11 setup is an abomination of an interface; it's essentially unusable. With a halfway more normal GUI, GIMP would be significantly better. Any options out there? Thanks.
Assuming the Mr. Righli's self comments are accurate to the situation, I'm impressed by his personal dedication to protecting civil liberties, and saddened that he had to quit prematurely due to the realities of life. I mean no personal criticism of him or certainly not to diminish his serious effots.
However, while I can understand and support his choice to not show ID to the policeman, I still fail to understand his refusal to show his receipt and bag to Circuit City. Though he has a principled and legal view on this, it seems wholly divorced from reality.
Practically, if a store cannot inspect your receipt and bagged possessions before you leave the store to prevent shoplifting, the logical solution is to: keep absolutely all merchandise locked up and behind counters, and to not give customers any merchandise until they've paid and are stepping out the door. The Soviets essentially did it this way. It's monumentally inefficient and consumer hostile.
The world is imperfect place filled with imperfect people. Showing a receipt and my bag of stuff is a fair compromise for easy-to-browse and shop stores. And if someone's got a better way that doesn't involve bag-checking, I'd enjoy hearing it.
Gimp's interface is violently different from OS X applications, and so loses tremendous functionality. This is mere color coordination of buttons, but user-hostile interface design.
The Mac version needs an OS X interface. The current version uses X11 and is just frighteningly unusable, having no commonality any with other Mac software. It's so bad, I'd rather pay $50 for a less capable image editor than suffer the Gimp.
Circuit City was identified as the best performing company in Jim Collins' book, Good to Great. Over about 15 years, Circuit City transitioned from a mediocre retailer to a phenomenally performing company, beating the market over 18-fold over 15 years (1982 - 1997)! (p7 of the book).
So what happened?
I no longer shop at the local CC if I can avoid it. Black Friday last year they were a complete mess. It took several minutes to process a customer. Rebates were filled out by clerks, keeping the line waiting. Lines were randomly woven throughout the shopping aisles: you didn't know what aisle you were in and customers were kept from shopping by the congestion. Presently, during normal shopping, their checkout system is quite slow and cumbersome.
In contrast, Best Buy was very well organized and the checkout lines as fast as possible.
The important thing is that you manage your corporate IT policies to make your job easier, and not to actually serve your customers: the employees who struggle to get their work done in spite of your draconian rules.
I work with similar issues: it can be interesting finding ways to get work done in spite of IT's (un)support and (un)help.
I love DST! I think we should be on it all year 'round.
On a normal work schedule, DST gives me more sunlight when it matters most: in the evening when I'm home. It also preserves a bit more afternoon sunlight in the short, dark winter days.
As for morning sunlight, I don't care. I'm getting up before sunrise much of the year anyway. I might as well suffer a bit there to have a better evening.
The reason to buy a PS3 is to have a virtual apartment? For $599, I can rent a real one!
I want a games console to, you know, play games. Not sit on a virtual couch, watching video on a virtual video screen in a virtual apartment, on my real TV while I sit on my real couch in my real house.
And what's all this blather about "everything is physics based"? To quote, "More interestingly, everything is physics based. Picture frames can be pinned to the wall, and any content on the PS3 is postable up there." What's "physics based" about pinning frames to the wall? Do I have to buy 30-lb rated virtual pins or the physics-based virtual frame crashes to the floor? Then I have buy a virtual broom and sweep it up, watching physics-based glass shards tumble on the floor?
And what's physics-based about having PS3 content in my frame? I can't put PS3 content in my real, physically physics-based picture frame on my real wall in my real house.
I must just be an old, non-physics based, curmudgeon.
I'm a typical engineer at an aerospace company and I have 15 passwords, 9 usernames and a voicemail PIN for my accounts. There are about 5 different sets of password requirements, depending on the system. Some require symbols, uppercase, or numbers and some don't. They have different refresh cycles, most on out-of-phase 90-day cycles. Some secondary systems have to be updated manually to be matched to primary passwords.
I can't remember them all, so I use a password minder program on my PDA to reference. This stores all my passwords - except for the three passwords and two usernames which are verboten outside of their area -- and I refer to it every few weeks when I blank on an infrequently used password.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who denigrate aerospace projects for being over budget and over schedule are either naive or disingenous.
The unfortunate reality is aerospace companies are strongly motivated by the Federal Gov't proposal selection process to bid too low and too fast for high-risk projects like JWST. While not truely "lowest cost" bidder selection, it's understood that a winning bid will be in a certain range, regardless of whether its realistic. And the schedule proposals must also target certain bogies to have a chance of winning, regardless of winning.
And so companies bid low and fast to meet the proposal expectations and requirements, knowing that they'll make it up in cost-plus overruns as the Program proceeds.
And those running the programs know this too.
And ultimately, each project such as JWST is a one-of-a-kind endeavor. New technologies, new manufacturing methods, new test techniques are invented during the course of the project. It's difficult to predict the budget and schedule for doing something never done before; much less keeping to an optimistic budget driven by political needs more than the technical.
To those on JWST, they are doing incredible work, putting in long hours, and coming up with creative solutions to very challenging problems. And everyone of them wants to see JWST succeed.
Astronomical telescope mirror manufacturing is a labor intensive, hands-on, non-automated process. And the culture of aerospace is highly risk averse: this comes from the very customers, like the good people at NASA Goddard.
:)
Lunar telescope manufacturing would require some exciting scientific, engineer, and processing improvements that would also pay off for terrestrial manufacturing.
First, assuming they're not planning to house and employ a standard aerospace company, with 1000 engineers, technicians, and managers on the moon, this would be fully automated. Mirror making is anything but automated. The development of highly automated methods for processing and testing mirrors would be quite a move forward. It would also have direct benefits for conventional manufacturing.
Second, making a mirror on the moon would seem to require a tolerance of risk currently not accepted. Every time a mirror is moved, a crew of people must oversee the affair, sign the (physical) paperwork, and manually inspect the mirror afterwards. For lunar construction, this would have to become an assembly line that ran without that direct oversight, paperwork, or crews. Enabling more efficient methods would certainly benefit normal processes as well.
Moreover, the task of creating such a facility would keep many, many aerospace workers employed for years
That's my office. Public terminals for visitors in the open space. A few yards away is the secure facility, which prohibits all cell phones, unless the batteries are first removed.
Thus, it is safer to just leave the phone in your car, if you're visiting and have any business in the secure area.
The author spent $200 to buy an LCD monitor to replace a 19" CRT, saving $18 / yr electricity: more than a five year payoff. And he's putting a CRT into a landfill somewhere. There's no economic incentive to buy an LCD; savings are pocket change and doesn't realistically pay for itself. And the environmental cost could be a wash, since the reduced carbon footprint is weighed against a CRT dumped in the trash.
This article is fun, and I might play a similar game at home. But people chasing $90 in electricity is nearly trite compared to the real energy users: home heating and cooling and clothes washers and dryers. Globally, this is spitting in the ocean compared to the real change that's (presumably) neeeded.
It's reported that eliminating coal-mine fires (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/from-bagels-to-coal-fires-an-unorthodox-economist-keeps-pushing-for-change/) would reduce CO2 emissions annually equivalent to that produced by all cars and light-trucks in the US. There's little value in individuals replacing 3 W cable modems for 2 W versions when the "easy" targets are still ignored.
Perhaps I'm the only person who's actually bought a lapdesk... I bought the Laplander from Levenger.
http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/PRODUCT/PRODIDPG.ASP?Params=Category=5-344%7CPageID=1859%7CLevel=2-3
I really like it for home use.
Pogue wrote an article with bogus info, then printed a retraction. ValleyWag wrote that Pogue got duped. And then ValleyWag wrote a searing article noting -- get this -- high level electronics reviewers have better access to help and hardware than the rest of us! Who knew? And sometimes their review hardware is cherry picked for advance features! Investigative journalism at its best.
I can only assume the real interesting meat is in the unseen "back and forth" emails. Pity we can't read those. We might learn something interesting.
Is there an alternate installation of Gimp on the Mac that provides a more OS X interface? The default X11 setup is an abomination of an interface; it's essentially unusable. With a halfway more normal GUI, GIMP would be significantly better. Any options out there? Thanks.
Assuming the Mr. Righli's self comments are accurate to the situation, I'm impressed by his personal dedication to protecting civil liberties, and saddened that he had to quit prematurely due to the realities of life. I mean no personal criticism of him or certainly not to diminish his serious effots.
However, while I can understand and support his choice to not show ID to the policeman, I still fail to understand his refusal to show his receipt and bag to Circuit City. Though he has a principled and legal view on this, it seems wholly divorced from reality.
Practically, if a store cannot inspect your receipt and bagged possessions before you leave the store to prevent shoplifting, the logical solution is to: keep absolutely all merchandise locked up and behind counters, and to not give customers any merchandise until they've paid and are stepping out the door. The Soviets essentially did it this way. It's monumentally inefficient and consumer hostile.
The world is imperfect place filled with imperfect people. Showing a receipt and my bag of stuff is a fair compromise for easy-to-browse and shop stores. And if someone's got a better way that doesn't involve bag-checking, I'd enjoy hearing it.
That's very interesting. The Gimp version I got ran in X11 and looked like this:
http://screencast.com/t/PqI2XiJn0
What you show is quite decent looking. I'll have to look for that.
Gimp's interface is violently different from OS X applications, and so loses tremendous functionality. This is mere color coordination of buttons, but user-hostile interface design.
Seashore is a nice little app, but more comparable to MSPaint than anything else. I'm using it until I find a suitable graphics app on the Mac.
The Mac version needs an OS X interface. The current version uses X11 and is just frighteningly unusable, having no commonality any with other Mac software. It's so bad, I'd rather pay $50 for a less capable image editor than suffer the Gimp.
Everyone here with digital data from 30 years ago raise your hand.
Everyone here with photographs from 30+ years ago raise your hand.
We need photographs to last "forever" because they are more easily kept, more permanent, more durable than the digital originals.
Pray that it comes out during your third-year lull, post Proposal when you're not getting much work done anyway.
;)
I'm not sure I'd have survived grad school without StarCraft.
Though my roommate nearly didn't because I introduced him to it before his proposal...
(1) So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod
or
(2) will [it] be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys.
False Dichotomy.
It will be both.
Circuit City was identified as the best performing company in Jim Collins' book, Good to Great. Over about 15 years, Circuit City transitioned from a mediocre retailer to a phenomenally performing company, beating the market over 18-fold over 15 years (1982 - 1997)! (p7 of the book).
So what happened?
I no longer shop at the local CC if I can avoid it. Black Friday last year they were a complete mess. It took several minutes to process a customer. Rebates were filled out by clerks, keeping the line waiting. Lines were randomly woven throughout the shopping aisles: you didn't know what aisle you were in and customers were kept from shopping by the congestion. Presently, during normal shopping, their checkout system is quite slow and cumbersome.
In contrast, Best Buy was very well organized and the checkout lines as fast as possible.
Where did the "great" Circuit City go?
Even during
The important thing is that you manage your corporate IT policies to make your job easier, and not to actually serve your customers: the employees who struggle to get their work done in spite of your draconian rules.
I work with similar issues: it can be interesting finding ways to get work done in spite of IT's (un)support and (un)help.
I love DST! I think we should be on it all year 'round.
On a normal work schedule, DST gives me more sunlight when it matters most: in the evening when I'm home. It also preserves a bit more afternoon sunlight in the short, dark winter days.
As for morning sunlight, I don't care. I'm getting up before sunrise much of the year anyway. I might as well suffer a bit there to have a better evening.
The reason to buy a PS3 is to have a virtual apartment? For $599, I can rent a real one!
I want a games console to, you know, play games. Not sit on a virtual couch, watching video on a virtual video screen in a virtual apartment, on my real TV while I sit on my real couch in my real house.
And what's all this blather about "everything is physics based"? To quote, "More interestingly, everything is physics based. Picture frames can be pinned to the wall, and any content on the PS3 is postable up there." What's "physics based" about pinning frames to the wall? Do I have to buy 30-lb rated virtual pins or the physics-based virtual frame crashes to the floor? Then I have buy a virtual broom and sweep it up, watching physics-based glass shards tumble on the floor?
And what's physics-based about having PS3 content in my frame? I can't put PS3 content in my real, physically physics-based picture frame on my real wall in my real house.
I must just be an old, non-physics based, curmudgeon.
Which European? He must be pretty important to get a Slashdot frontpage notice.
(apologies to Monty Python)
First Vicar: As I scan my computer for sinful programs...
(Cut to bishop and vicars at doorway.)
Bishop: The anti-virus, vic! Don't run the anti-virus!
(Cut back to vicar.)
First Vicar: (Scanning in process)
(The computer explodes. Vicar's sermons disappear in smoke. Cut to close-up of the bishop.)
Bishop: We was too late. The Reverend Norton's writings bit the ceiling.
Good. Now someone can steal my "key" with a parabolic mic. No need to rough me up and steal a physical key.
It is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
Act first, the paperwork will follow.
Timecards reflect essential truth, if not literal truth of when work is done.
Delegate to those with better bureaucratic kung-fu.
I'm a typical engineer at an aerospace company and I have 15 passwords, 9 usernames and a voicemail PIN for my accounts. There are about 5 different sets of password requirements, depending on the system. Some require symbols, uppercase, or numbers and some don't. They have different refresh cycles, most on out-of-phase 90-day cycles. Some secondary systems have to be updated manually to be matched to primary passwords.
I can't remember them all, so I use a password minder program on my PDA to reference. This stores all my passwords - except for the three passwords and two usernames which are verboten outside of their area -- and I refer to it every few weeks when I blank on an infrequently used password.
Is this typical? How many do you have?
The iPod flea is even smaller.
Also here