Limping through the writeup with what's left of my high school French I get the idea that he's not just making homemade tubes, he's duplicating a particular class of historic tubes which were common around WWI. He's using authentic techniques. These tubes were handmade at great expense because they were used for maritime communication where price was no object, and modern standards of longetivity didn't apply; if such a tube lasted 500 hours it was doing great. Also, some of those tubes had soft vacuum so an imperfect seal wasn't such a big deal.
I do have to say this is one of the most impressive projects of its type I've ever seen; it's clearly a labor of both love and skill.
1. Make the most common operations the easiest to get to, and hide things that aren't done very often behind menus and secondary forms.
2. Use it yourself, and rearrange the controls to get rid of any apparent awkwardness.
3. Give it to the actual end users, and be prepared to rearrange the controls again when you notice all the unexpected things they do to it.
4. Don't get cute. Use standard controls that people recognize.
5. Pay attention to keyboard shortcuts and tab order. Don't make the user use a pointing device.
By far the biggest thing is the willingness to refactor. You won't get it right the first time; that's almost impossible, and nothing is worse than a UI that is written to spec and then slavishly nailed to that spec even when the users complain about it. You'll probably find something that you thought would be a common operation is hardly ever done; get the annoying button out of their faces. And something else you thought would happen once a month happens every hour; bring the control out front for them.
Hermetic seals tend to fail, and when the breathing starts moisture wicks in, condenses, and does not leave. You end up with an enclosure full of water. Hard drives have always been made with breather elements that filter out dust but allow the internal atmosphere to reach equilibrium with the atmosphere outside the HD.
As a kid I had a surplussed computer called the "Interact Model R." All of the game tapes were 8K even, and at the end of many of them I found commented 8080A assembly code for other games and the BASIC interpreter that was supplied with the system (yes, it was on tape for this machine). Starting with 200 lines of source I would eventually reverse assemble the entirety of what I later learned was Tiny BASIC.
That was a crew of people they hired en masse from DEC, whose previous experience was developing the operating system for the VAX mainframe computer. Unlike Microsoft, whose core competency was writing slow buggy 8-bit BASIC interpreters, these guys knew how to build a pre-emptively multitasking OS, and they did their job.
Today none of them work for M$ any more. I believe that factoid should complete the picture for you.
Faithful companion for 15 years, one day it finally died and I was unable to figure out why it wouldn't turn on. I have a TI-83 now, much more capable, but it just isn't the same. I still have the urge to punch 2 2 + ENTER to get a 4.
Over the years I've never missed the degree I never got, but I have caught people with CS degrees doing bonehead things nobody who ever tried to do animation on a Commodore 64 would be dumb enough to try. Not knowing about floating point rounding errors comes up all the time, and is especially nasty when the pennies stop adding up right in the business math. One person I know at a large manufacturing concern insists that you should look for people with computer engineering degrees, because they are at least taught how the machine works. CS people aren't, and many of them have never written a program in a lower-level language than Javascript or stored data without the assistance of a DB engine.
According to TFA the improvements are in simpler and more robust construction methods. Also, the manufacture of semiconductors is extremely toxic and high-energy; CSP plants use less toxic raw materials and more conventional manufacturing techniques. The manufacturing capacity to cover thousands of acres with PV cells would have to be developed; the capacity to cover thousands of acres with CSP exists already.
Originally, Dell switched entirely to Vista just like everyone else. Then after a month or two they strong-armed M$ into letting them offer XP to their business customers. (I would love to have been a fly on the wall listening in to the conversation that got that concession out of M$.) This is just M$ offering the same thing to other vendors, who are probably losing a lot of business to people who want XP and can only get it from Dell.
So after you lock the box down so tight it can't be used for anything practical, for less than the cost of a pair of jeans junior can buy a used laptop that is more than capable of showing jpegs and playing RealMedia, plug it straight into the cable modem bypassing both your domain controller and your spiffy locked-down machine, and do whatever he wants. Oh, you use a filtering ISP? Do all of your neighbors have their wireless routers secured too?
Actually, having metabolic syndrome myself, I can say that if you catch it in time it responds well to a low carbohydrate diet. You don't need to restrict calorie intake at all, just carbohydrate intake; if you do that you'll find you lose your appetite quickly when you're thinking of eating too much, and your weight settles to a much more reasonable setpoint with no effort or hunger pangs at all.
Also, you cannot eat pure protein; if you are eating low carb, you must eat fat. My blood pressure and cholesterol have confirmed that this isn't unhealthy as long as you aren't poisoning yourself with too much sugar and corn syrup (which is in a lot of foods you'd normally consider healthy, unfortunately.)
This is easy. We know its mass because of its orbital period and its size because it occludes its parent star. It isn't too big, it LOOKS too big. It has a highly inclined axis of rotation and an extensive ring system like Saturn.
Germany already requires licenses for TV sets and things like baby monitors. And they enforce it. They actually have vans equipped with detection equipment that scan for electromagnetic radiation from these devices, and if you're not on record as having paid the tax their is a knock on your door. Extending this to 802.11 will be trivial.
Carl Sagan actually wrote a lot of science fiction
Sagan wrote exactly one fiction novel, Contact. He was a pure research scientist who published peer-reviewed papers, and a popularist who wrote essays and nonfiction books and produced a wildly successful nonfiction PBS series.
Might want to check out that log in your own eye, etc.
Really, this is a serious misunderstanding, mostly because of the events leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The thing is, all of the major advances in physics which made the atomic bomb possible, and physics suddenly important rather than an obscure new branch of philosophy, were made in Europe. All of them. What America did was industrialize those discoveries. Enrico Fermi stated flatly that it would be impossible to perform isotope separation because "you'd have to turn the whole country into a factory." When he arrived in the US and saw the scale of Manhattan Project constructions, Ed Teller reminded him of his comment and Fermi shot back "and you have done just that." That's what we Americans seem to excel at.
I did not know what U3 was when I got my 512 MB SanDisk, which I got simply because it was the cheapest per MB available at the time. When I plugged it in I noticed that it wanted to install a bunch of garbage. So I unplugged it, held shift down, plugged it back in, and watched it install itself as a normal flash drive. I deleted all the pre-existing crap on the drive, and never had another problem with it.
But Coca-Cola had already switched most of its bottlers to high fructose corn syrup before the formula changed.
This is not so. I occasionally do work for a sugar refinery that supplies over 10% of the US supply. A manager there told me that their sales dropped steadily as the original sugar-sweetened Coke Classic was phased out for New Coke, and did not resurge when HFCS-sweetened Coke "Classic" was "reintroduced." New Coke was, in fact, a spectacular feint which got the old taste of Coke out of peoples' mouths while preserving their market share and keeping demand up. People would have noticed and most likely pitched the same uproar over the old Classic to new Classic transition that they did over old Classic to new Coke. But New Coke was deliberately designed to be a lot like Pepsi, so that for people who hadn't had the old stuff for several months generally couldn't tell the difference.
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I do have to say this is one of the most impressive projects of its type I've ever seen; it's clearly a labor of both love and skill.
2. Use it yourself, and rearrange the controls to get rid of any apparent awkwardness.
3. Give it to the actual end users, and be prepared to rearrange the controls again when you notice all the unexpected things they do to it.
4. Don't get cute. Use standard controls that people recognize.
5. Pay attention to keyboard shortcuts and tab order. Don't make the user use a pointing device.
By far the biggest thing is the willingness to refactor. You won't get it right the first time; that's almost impossible, and nothing is worse than a UI that is written to spec and then slavishly nailed to that spec even when the users complain about it. You'll probably find something that you thought would be a common operation is hardly ever done; get the annoying button out of their faces. And something else you thought would happen once a month happens every hour; bring the control out front for them.
Hermetic seals tend to fail, and when the breathing starts moisture wicks in, condenses, and does not leave. You end up with an enclosure full of water. Hard drives have always been made with breather elements that filter out dust but allow the internal atmosphere to reach equilibrium with the atmosphere outside the HD.
As a kid I had a surplussed computer called the "Interact Model R." All of the game tapes were 8K even, and at the end of many of them I found commented 8080A assembly code for other games and the BASIC interpreter that was supplied with the system (yes, it was on tape for this machine). Starting with 200 lines of source I would eventually reverse assemble the entirety of what I later learned was Tiny BASIC.
Well that didn't work out so well...
My nick
Oops.
Today none of them work for M$ any more. I believe that factoid should complete the picture for you.
Faithful companion for 15 years, one day it finally died and I was unable to figure out why it wouldn't turn on. I have a TI-83 now, much more capable, but it just isn't the same. I still have the urge to punch 2 2 + ENTER to get a 4.
Over the years I've never missed the degree I never got, but I have caught people with CS degrees doing bonehead things nobody who ever tried to do animation on a Commodore 64 would be dumb enough to try. Not knowing about floating point rounding errors comes up all the time, and is especially nasty when the pennies stop adding up right in the business math. One person I know at a large manufacturing concern insists that you should look for people with computer engineering degrees, because they are at least taught how the machine works. CS people aren't, and many of them have never written a program in a lower-level language than Javascript or stored data without the assistance of a DB engine.
no text
According to TFA the improvements are in simpler and more robust construction methods. Also, the manufacture of semiconductors is extremely toxic and high-energy; CSP plants use less toxic raw materials and more conventional manufacturing techniques. The manufacturing capacity to cover thousands of acres with PV cells would have to be developed; the capacity to cover thousands of acres with CSP exists already.
Originally, Dell switched entirely to Vista just like everyone else. Then after a month or two they strong-armed M$ into letting them offer XP to their business customers. (I would love to have been a fly on the wall listening in to the conversation that got that concession out of M$.) This is just M$ offering the same thing to other vendors, who are probably losing a lot of business to people who want XP and can only get it from Dell.
So after you lock the box down so tight it can't be used for anything practical, for less than the cost of a pair of jeans junior can buy a used laptop that is more than capable of showing jpegs and playing RealMedia, plug it straight into the cable modem bypassing both your domain controller and your spiffy locked-down machine, and do whatever he wants. Oh, you use a filtering ISP? Do all of your neighbors have their wireless routers secured too?
The sooner you find a job that doesn't suck so much, the more productive you probably were.
Also, you cannot eat pure protein; if you are eating low carb, you must eat fat. My blood pressure and cholesterol have confirmed that this isn't unhealthy as long as you aren't poisoning yourself with too much sugar and corn syrup (which is in a lot of foods you'd normally consider healthy, unfortunately.)
This is easy. We know its mass because of its orbital period and its size because it occludes its parent star. It isn't too big, it LOOKS too big. It has a highly inclined axis of rotation and an extensive ring system like Saturn.
My playlist is copyrighted. The RIAA will be calling on you.
Germany already requires licenses for TV sets and things like baby monitors. And they enforce it. They actually have vans equipped with detection equipment that scan for electromagnetic radiation from these devices, and if you're not on record as having paid the tax their is a knock on your door. Extending this to 802.11 will be trivial.
And musings are not fiction. This is a musing:
Aliens probably exist out in the universe; let me tell you why I think so.
This is fiction:
I was abducted by an alien the other day. It had one I, one horn, it could fly and it tried to eat me.
See the difference?
Sagan wrote exactly one fiction novel, Contact. He was a pure research scientist who published peer-reviewed papers, and a popularist who wrote essays and nonfiction books and produced a wildly successful nonfiction PBS series.
Might want to check out that log in your own eye, etc.
Leading to the memorable line: "An Age is not Dark because there is no light, but because we refuse to see the light."
Really, this is a serious misunderstanding, mostly because of the events leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The thing is, all of the major advances in physics which made the atomic bomb possible, and physics suddenly important rather than an obscure new branch of philosophy, were made in Europe. All of them. What America did was industrialize those discoveries. Enrico Fermi stated flatly that it would be impossible to perform isotope separation because "you'd have to turn the whole country into a factory." When he arrived in the US and saw the scale of Manhattan Project constructions, Ed Teller reminded him of his comment and Fermi shot back "and you have done just that." That's what we Americans seem to excel at.
My parrot, who weighs about 5 pounds soaking wet, has that same expression. It's just a birdism.
Badda-Badda-BING.
I did not know what U3 was when I got my 512 MB SanDisk, which I got simply because it was the cheapest per MB available at the time. When I plugged it in I noticed that it wanted to install a bunch of garbage. So I unplugged it, held shift down, plugged it back in, and watched it install itself as a normal flash drive. I deleted all the pre-existing crap on the drive, and never had another problem with it.
This is not so. I occasionally do work for a sugar refinery that supplies over 10% of the US supply. A manager there told me that their sales dropped steadily as the original sugar-sweetened Coke Classic was phased out for New Coke, and did not resurge when HFCS-sweetened Coke "Classic" was "reintroduced." New Coke was, in fact, a spectacular feint which got the old taste of Coke out of peoples' mouths while preserving their market share and keeping demand up. People would have noticed and most likely pitched the same uproar over the old Classic to new Classic transition that they did over old Classic to new Coke. But New Coke was deliberately designed to be a lot like Pepsi, so that for people who hadn't had the old stuff for several months generally couldn't tell the difference.