To really go back to their roots, they'd have to do a lot more than just revamp their product line. Even things as basic as their strategy for locating and sizing stores doesn't quite fit that model. Maintaining a thousand little shops in malls sandwiched in between shoe stores, women's clothing, and sleepnumber bed shops (or whatever else is in a particular mall) doesn't work well for catering to that kind of DIY market.
DIY electronics/Maker support needs to stock lots of different small items that no one person might need to buy in a given day, so I'd bet you can't split your inventory as many ways as they do and survive as a business. How many storefronts could MakerShed support, for example? Plus rental of prominent store-frontage like mall space is probably some of the most expensive. For an Apple store with high product turnover, sure, but not for a reinvented RadioShack. Or if you do, maybe pick one single mall in a big metropolitan city, put a glitzy outlet there, and make it larger so it can hold the inventory people want and actually be a convenience compared to online ordering (rather than an inconvenience when you have to chase down which branch actually has a particular part in stock).
What's the sacrifice though? Having cars that either get really excellent fuel economy or run on battery power? Forcing electrical utilities to switch to separate billing for grid-tie and power consumption, so that customers that want to put solar panels on their roofs aren't shafted in order to have overnight electrical service from base-load power? Mandating emissions inspections based on original standards at the time of manufacture on all vehicles newer than 30 years, so that gross-polluting vehicles that are not running right are either fixed or taken off the road?
Most of these things don't have all that much cost, and for some of them, they're a cost that the individual should have borne anyway.
So basically you don't see people having to sacrifice what they want, because you expect to decide for them what they should want. Anything that begins with "forcing people to do X" or "mandating X" is the antithesis of freedom. You may argue that it's in a good cause, but you can't simply redefine sacrifice to only mean sacrifice from those desires that you prefer to impose on others.
With less people voting it takes fewer for anomalous results to happen. Whether that's good or bad depends on your point of view.
Example 1: In Maryland there was an election held one year in which a particular (fairly low level) elected position was being eliminated mid-year, so nobody ran for it. Some guy noticed and wrote himself in, and was elected. Bingo, salary for half a year, with no particular duties, since there was no expectation of someone actually holding the office.
Example 2: International Planetary Society annual conference. Several of the scientists who favored a gravitationally-based definition of a planet (gravitationally cleared its orbital path) rather than a mass-based definition (massive enough to form a spherical shape) waited until the end of the convention, when most of their opponents had left, to hold a vote on redefining planets. Bingo, got what they want, Pluto is no longer a planet.
A couple of options here, depending on what the boss is into, and wants to shell out for.
One, try an iMac plus a laptop with a mini-displayport output (or a Macbook pro). You can offload some processing to the iMac when you need, plus you can start it up in "target display mode" and use it as a second big monitor with your laptop.
Or, less expensive but still in the "looks portable to the boss" category, get a laptop plus a cube PC to offload some processing to. Remote desktop to the cube just like it's a server. And possibly the Macbook pros will run in target-display mode too, I haven't looked--in which case it could double for the monitor for the cube, keeping your desk more open if that's a priority. Or just get a big monitor anyway (lots of screen real-estate) that can switch inputs between the cube and the laptop. And you always still have the laptop for real portability.
This is partly because Foundation was kind of an experimental attempt to write a story where the story line was carried in the dialog and the action took place off camera. That might make it a bit challenging to make into a script, since key action scenes don't actually occur and would have to be created from whole cloth.
...it doesn't prove a single thing about how black holes behave - because he did not create one.
Um, good?
The research value may be lower, but discouraging physicists from creating actual black holes on the surface of the earth (or really anywhere near the solar system) seems like a sound idea.
Corsairs are good too, but they have a shorter than average key throw that doesn't sit quite as well with my typing habits; my fingers always want to keep pressing even when the key is already all the way down. (I learned on the old Model M's we had in my high school AP Comp Sci class, back in the 80s when the IBM PS/2s were a new thing). Otherwise I agree it's a solid product, and we have one attached to an old iMac our son uses.
I didn't know about the Razer driver issue; the last Razer mouse and keyboard I had didn't need a driver installed at all; they seemed to work out fine of the box.
Das Keyboard is another option, with a good typing feel, and I use one of these at work, but I tend to rate it just a step down from the Decks, because the keycaps are printed on instead of two-color molded plastic.
Yes, but it was Apple that led the charge in choosing the IBM PC jr. as its ideal keyboard model to follow (chicklet keys, small, and wireless) for desktop PCs. They picked the right company's keyboard to follow, but completely the wrong model.
There are still good alternatives that have the keys and the feel and heft, even beyond the Unicomps. Deck keyboards with Cherry Blue switches, for example. Or maybe Razer (they have the switches, don't know about the weight). Or for Macs, the Matias keyboards.
From personal experience, our son was able to learn and use a Starblast 4.5" pretty easily in 4th grade. My wife and I are both members of our local astronomy club, and have been into astronomy a long time, so we were able to give him help when needed, but also we took him to some of the public events for the club, and let him go to it. He enjoyed one project in particular where he tracked the galilean moons of Jupiter over several nights, sketching out their positions in a notebook, and he still likes using it to show planets to other kids at these sorts of events a couple of years later.
Binoculars are a good starting place for adults, but harder to work with kids with, in my opinion, because you can't point them at something and then show it to the child, nor can they really get your help interpreting what they're seeing.
I remember this discussion when I was playing violin in high school and college (quite a while back), but it seemed like professors and violin teachers talked about surpassing Strads as a goal that might be reached someday, and that people were working toward. It never seemed to me like something the music community thought could never be achieved, like there was something mystical about it. So I'd chalk it up to time, not gullibility.
Since at least the 80s, modern instrument makers have been trying to duplicate and reverse engineer the Strads and try and make a modern instrument that's equally good. And there were tests like this, but when they were performed, the Strads would win out consistently. But now it looks like they finally succeeded. And we're entering the age where even outside blind tests, performers are starting to recognize this, like Yo Yo Ma and his professed affinity for carbon fiber cellos (I think he appeared on "How it's Made" a couple of years ago when they were demonstrating their construction).
I think you're right that it's not amazing that we'd get here eventually. In any theoretically achievable goal, where you're not trying to break fundamental physical laws, time, effort, and innovation win out. It's just like building better computers and programming them to beat chessmasters. At first, the technology and the programming just wasn't there, and computers lost. Now it is, and they win.
What this test doesn't say, however, is that the best of the modern violins are cheap. They aren't. They may not be the historical artifacts that Strads are, but they aren't something your average highly ranked college student performer could afford to perform on. I remember how prices ran, even for decently good modern instruments. This may bring the cost down from the tens of millions to the tens or hundreds of thousands, but the instruments they're comparing with are still astronomically priced, from most people's perspectives. They're the product of decades of research and mastery of the craft by modern luthiers, where the work is one part art and one part science. Good progress, and a big milestone, but they're still probably decades from making the same kind of qualities common and affordable.
Kind of sad that NASA's suit R&D rollout to the public seems to be focused on case modding the exterior.
That said, they clearly need a "retro" cover. First look at the NASA design reminded me of a book I read as a kid, "Tom Swift and his Jetmarine," where he built escape suits for his submarine in the shape of giant eggs, like Humpty-Dumpty.
Depends on battery chemistry. Most electric/hybrid cars seem to be congregating around Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries, which generally shouldn't be charged in the cold... it can cause lithium plating to accumulate on the anodes and if done repeatedly can eventually compromise the safety of the battery packs. Discharging (using) them below freezing is OK, but charging is not.
It's an impressive amateur engineering feat, but its performance as a telescope might not be anything to write home about. It probably shares one quality with the hubble that you wouldn't want: a problem with gravity.
Remember how when it first went up, the hubble had problems focusing clearly? The designers forgot that its mirrors would be deformed/reshaped by the lack of gravity. Essentially, the hubble's primary mirror was optically designed to work as a telescope mirror on earth, not in space. It wasn't until the later mission to fix it with some corrective optics that it really achieved its best capabilities.
Now, since the surplus 70" mirror this guy used was designed to work on a satellite, it would very likely have the same problem but in reverse. If the mirror was designed to be shaped properly in a microgravity environment, it would also be deformed when on earth (as it is when used in the amateur telescope.) That might make the images from it quite a bit worse than one might hope for from a 70" instrument.
Swearing and calling people names is one thing. But legitimate verbal threats can still be short of actually showing up at your door with a baseball bat. If a guy tells you he's going to show up at your door with a baseball bat, that qualifies.
I took AP computer science in high school, myself, and it really wasn't programming, it was pretty much the same as a college data structures class (arrays, linked lists, trees, sparse matrices, searching and sorting, etc.) Going straight into that without some earlier programming foundation doesn't really work so well. We need to start kids earlier to really get proficient.
The logic skills needed to code can be developed, too, but it needs support much earlier, including in elementary school math. I remember in 2nd-4th grade, our textbook was called "sets and numbers," and we did a lot with set theory, which my son's school hasn't. There are tradeoffs: he was into algebraic equations in 4th grade, which I never did until at least middle school. But overall it seems like he's had less emphasis on logic and discrete math and more on general/continuous math. My wife and I have tried to supplement it, but it isn't really standard anymore, where we live.
Anyway, if kids get enough practice with sets and set operations in elementary school, then logic operations a bit later (which and teach them how it's really the same, AND = intersection, OR = union, etc.) and throw in a few other concepts like variables, then they should be ready to start getting some early programming classes in middle school, which will stick with them a long time.
That's too much like saying it re-enforces a simplistic worldview that there is such a thing as reality, whereas nothing is actually "real." After all, isn't "reality" just a stand-in for perception?
In an even more complex construct, it is equally simplistic to assume good and evil are not real as it is to assume they are. It all depends on how many levels of non-reality you want to contemplate, and how superior you want to consider yourself to those who adhere to "simplistic" world views.
Along similar lines, if you're dependent on a handful of apps most people have never heard of, because they drive something specific (like scientific equipment, or in my case, telescopes and cameras for amateur astrophotography) your chances of moving to Linux are poor. There's a lot of good open source effort devoted to making equivalents for things most people need, but when there aren't that many users, the community of potential open source developers is small.
My own list of boat anchors keeping me in the Windows pool includes MaximDL, PHD Guiding, PemPRO, FocusMax, and a bunch of drivers for things like telescope mounts, focusers, a CCD camera, etc.
And yes, there's virtualization, and such, but some of these programs and pieces of equipment are finicky enough to get to work together to start with, without that added level of complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
To really go back to their roots, they'd have to do a lot more than just revamp their product line. Even things as basic as their strategy for locating and sizing stores doesn't quite fit that model. Maintaining a thousand little shops in malls sandwiched in between shoe stores, women's clothing, and sleepnumber bed shops (or whatever else is in a particular mall) doesn't work well for catering to that kind of DIY market.
DIY electronics/Maker support needs to stock lots of different small items that no one person might need to buy in a given day, so I'd bet you can't split your inventory as many ways as they do and survive as a business. How many storefronts could MakerShed support, for example? Plus rental of prominent store-frontage like mall space is probably some of the most expensive. For an Apple store with high product turnover, sure, but not for a reinvented RadioShack. Or if you do, maybe pick one single mall in a big metropolitan city, put a glitzy outlet there, and make it larger so it can hold the inventory people want and actually be a convenience compared to online ordering (rather than an inconvenience when you have to chase down which branch actually has a particular part in stock).
What's the sacrifice though? Having cars that either get really excellent fuel economy or run on battery power? Forcing electrical utilities to switch to separate billing for grid-tie and power consumption, so that customers that want to put solar panels on their roofs aren't shafted in order to have overnight electrical service from base-load power? Mandating emissions inspections based on original standards at the time of manufacture on all vehicles newer than 30 years, so that gross-polluting vehicles that are not running right are either fixed or taken off the road? Most of these things don't have all that much cost, and for some of them, they're a cost that the individual should have borne anyway.
So basically you don't see people having to sacrifice what they want, because you expect to decide for them what they should want. Anything that begins with "forcing people to do X" or "mandating X" is the antithesis of freedom. You may argue that it's in a good cause, but you can't simply redefine sacrifice to only mean sacrifice from those desires that you prefer to impose on others.
With less people voting it takes fewer for anomalous results to happen. Whether that's good or bad depends on your point of view.
Example 1: In Maryland there was an election held one year in which a particular (fairly low level) elected position was being eliminated mid-year, so nobody ran for it. Some guy noticed and wrote himself in, and was elected. Bingo, salary for half a year, with no particular duties, since there was no expectation of someone actually holding the office.
Example 2: International Planetary Society annual conference. Several of the scientists who favored a gravitationally-based definition of a planet (gravitationally cleared its orbital path) rather than a mass-based definition (massive enough to form a spherical shape) waited until the end of the convention, when most of their opponents had left, to hold a vote on redefining planets. Bingo, got what they want, Pluto is no longer a planet.
A couple of options here, depending on what the boss is into, and wants to shell out for.
One, try an iMac plus a laptop with a mini-displayport output (or a Macbook pro). You can offload some processing to the iMac when you need, plus you can start it up in "target display mode" and use it as a second big monitor with your laptop.
Or, less expensive but still in the "looks portable to the boss" category, get a laptop plus a cube PC to offload some processing to. Remote desktop to the cube just like it's a server. And possibly the Macbook pros will run in target-display mode too, I haven't looked--in which case it could double for the monitor for the cube, keeping your desk more open if that's a priority. Or just get a big monitor anyway (lots of screen real-estate) that can switch inputs between the cube and the laptop. And you always still have the laptop for real portability.
This is partly because Foundation was kind of an experimental attempt to write a story where the story line was carried in the dialog and the action took place off camera. That might make it a bit challenging to make into a script, since key action scenes don't actually occur and would have to be created from whole cloth.
Jar Jar Binks is simply evidence that George Lucas got his studio projects mixed up, and somehow Roger Rabbit ended up in Star Wars.
+1 for Ocean's 11.
And don't forget that before Peter Jackson, the best available movie version of Lord of the Rings was an animated musical.
And finally, does anyone seriously believe Adam West was better as Batman in the 1960s than any of the more recent movies?
I think that's three.
I'm an amateur astronomer, I want as many hours of darkness in the evening as I can get.
Compactly isn't the issue, it's capacity per weight that matters more.
And, not exploding.
...it doesn't prove a single thing about how black holes behave - because he did not create one.
Um, good?
The research value may be lower, but discouraging physicists from creating actual black holes on the surface of the earth (or really anywhere near the solar system) seems like a sound idea.
Corsairs are good too, but they have a shorter than average key throw that doesn't sit quite as well with my typing habits; my fingers always want to keep pressing even when the key is already all the way down. (I learned on the old Model M's we had in my high school AP Comp Sci class, back in the 80s when the IBM PS/2s were a new thing). Otherwise I agree it's a solid product, and we have one attached to an old iMac our son uses.
I didn't know about the Razer driver issue; the last Razer mouse and keyboard I had didn't need a driver installed at all; they seemed to work out fine of the box.
Das Keyboard is another option, with a good typing feel, and I use one of these at work, but I tend to rate it just a step down from the Decks, because the keycaps are printed on instead of two-color molded plastic.
Yes, but it was Apple that led the charge in choosing the IBM PC jr. as its ideal keyboard model to follow (chicklet keys, small, and wireless) for desktop PCs. They picked the right company's keyboard to follow, but completely the wrong model.
There are still good alternatives that have the keys and the feel and heft, even beyond the Unicomps. Deck keyboards with Cherry Blue switches, for example. Or maybe Razer (they have the switches, don't know about the weight). Or for Macs, the Matias keyboards.
From personal experience, our son was able to learn and use a Starblast 4.5" pretty easily in 4th grade. My wife and I are both members of our local astronomy club, and have been into astronomy a long time, so we were able to give him help when needed, but also we took him to some of the public events for the club, and let him go to it. He enjoyed one project in particular where he tracked the galilean moons of Jupiter over several nights, sketching out their positions in a notebook, and he still likes using it to show planets to other kids at these sorts of events a couple of years later.
Binoculars are a good starting place for adults, but harder to work with kids with, in my opinion, because you can't point them at something and then show it to the child, nor can they really get your help interpreting what they're seeing.
That's my vote, but there are all kinds of great possibilities: Gallifrey, Alderan, Tatooine, Romulus, Mordor, Asgard, Manticore, Beowulf...
I remember this discussion when I was playing violin in high school and college (quite a while back), but it seemed like professors and violin teachers talked about surpassing Strads as a goal that might be reached someday, and that people were working toward. It never seemed to me like something the music community thought could never be achieved, like there was something mystical about it. So I'd chalk it up to time, not gullibility.
Since at least the 80s, modern instrument makers have been trying to duplicate and reverse engineer the Strads and try and make a modern instrument that's equally good. And there were tests like this, but when they were performed, the Strads would win out consistently. But now it looks like they finally succeeded. And we're entering the age where even outside blind tests, performers are starting to recognize this, like Yo Yo Ma and his professed affinity for carbon fiber cellos (I think he appeared on "How it's Made" a couple of years ago when they were demonstrating their construction).
I think you're right that it's not amazing that we'd get here eventually. In any theoretically achievable goal, where you're not trying to break fundamental physical laws, time, effort, and innovation win out. It's just like building better computers and programming them to beat chessmasters. At first, the technology and the programming just wasn't there, and computers lost. Now it is, and they win.
What this test doesn't say, however, is that the best of the modern violins are cheap. They aren't. They may not be the historical artifacts that Strads are, but they aren't something your average highly ranked college student performer could afford to perform on. I remember how prices ran, even for decently good modern instruments. This may bring the cost down from the tens of millions to the tens or hundreds of thousands, but the instruments they're comparing with are still astronomically priced, from most people's perspectives. They're the product of decades of research and mastery of the craft by modern luthiers, where the work is one part art and one part science. Good progress, and a big milestone, but they're still probably decades from making the same kind of qualities common and affordable.
Kind of sad that NASA's suit R&D rollout to the public seems to be focused on case modding the exterior.
That said, they clearly need a "retro" cover. First look at the NASA design reminded me of a book I read as a kid, "Tom Swift and his Jetmarine," where he built escape suits for his submarine in the shape of giant eggs, like Humpty-Dumpty.
Depends on battery chemistry. Most electric/hybrid cars seem to be congregating around Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries, which generally shouldn't be charged in the cold... it can cause lithium plating to accumulate on the anodes and if done repeatedly can eventually compromise the safety of the battery packs. Discharging (using) them below freezing is OK, but charging is not.
It's an impressive amateur engineering feat, but its performance as a telescope might not be anything to write home about. It probably shares one quality with the hubble that you wouldn't want: a problem with gravity.
Remember how when it first went up, the hubble had problems focusing clearly? The designers forgot that its mirrors would be deformed/reshaped by the lack of gravity. Essentially, the hubble's primary mirror was optically designed to work as a telescope mirror on earth, not in space. It wasn't until the later mission to fix it with some corrective optics that it really achieved its best capabilities.
Now, since the surplus 70" mirror this guy used was designed to work on a satellite, it would very likely have the same problem but in reverse. If the mirror was designed to be shaped properly in a microgravity environment, it would also be deformed when on earth (as it is when used in the amateur telescope.) That might make the images from it quite a bit worse than one might hope for from a 70" instrument.
Cool! I guess it's ending at Andrew Henry's Meadow... I loved that book when I was very little.
Swearing and calling people names is one thing. But legitimate verbal threats can still be short of actually showing up at your door with a baseball bat. If a guy tells you he's going to show up at your door with a baseball bat, that qualifies.
I took AP computer science in high school, myself, and it really wasn't programming, it was pretty much the same as a college data structures class (arrays, linked lists, trees, sparse matrices, searching and sorting, etc.) Going straight into that without some earlier programming foundation doesn't really work so well. We need to start kids earlier to really get proficient.
The logic skills needed to code can be developed, too, but it needs support much earlier, including in elementary school math. I remember in 2nd-4th grade, our textbook was called "sets and numbers," and we did a lot with set theory, which my son's school hasn't. There are tradeoffs: he was into algebraic equations in 4th grade, which I never did until at least middle school. But overall it seems like he's had less emphasis on logic and discrete math and more on general/continuous math. My wife and I have tried to supplement it, but it isn't really standard anymore, where we live.
Anyway, if kids get enough practice with sets and set operations in elementary school, then logic operations a bit later (which and teach them how it's really the same, AND = intersection, OR = union, etc.) and throw in a few other concepts like variables, then they should be ready to start getting some early programming classes in middle school, which will stick with them a long time.
That's too much like saying it re-enforces a simplistic worldview that there is such a thing as reality, whereas nothing is actually "real." After all, isn't "reality" just a stand-in for perception?
In an even more complex construct, it is equally simplistic to assume good and evil are not real as it is to assume they are. It all depends on how many levels of non-reality you want to contemplate, and how superior you want to consider yourself to those who adhere to "simplistic" world views.
Specifically it looks like a NeXT cube. Something tells me that's the wrong link, and that it doesn't look like that.
Along similar lines, if you're dependent on a handful of apps most people have never heard of, because they drive something specific (like scientific equipment, or in my case, telescopes and cameras for amateur astrophotography) your chances of moving to Linux are poor. There's a lot of good open source effort devoted to making equivalents for things most people need, but when there aren't that many users, the community of potential open source developers is small.
My own list of boat anchors keeping me in the Windows pool includes MaximDL, PHD Guiding, PemPRO, FocusMax, and a bunch of drivers for things like telescope mounts, focusers, a CCD camera, etc.
And yes, there's virtualization, and such, but some of these programs and pieces of equipment are finicky enough to get to work together to start with, without that added level of complexity.