Actually, the problem is that the frame rate is not an exact integer multiple of the 60Hz AC power frequency, which is usually the largest source of electrical noise. It's off by a fraction of a percent; that's why you often see a distortion slowly creeping up the screen about once per minute as the frame rate beats against the power line sine wave. If the frame rate were exactly locked to the power line frequency, the distortion wouldn't move, so you wouldn't notice it.
IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier. Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.
(I think that color TVs only became truly usable in the 80s when they introduced decent automatic color correction. Before that, it seemed you could only watch in one of two colors: purple or green. No matter how much you fiddled with the knobs on old color TVs, it never looked quite right.)
Re:1 Trillion Dollars
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't care what the experts say. It should be patently obvious to anyone that after the inevitable cost overruns and schedule slips, a manned mission to mars will cost at least 1 $Trillion.
Every little mistake adds to the cost. There is almost no opportunity to reduce the cost figures, but there is no limit on increased costs. Both the space shuttle and the ISS cost more than an order of magnitude more than initial estimates. The article seems to think that the Mars cost estimate should be < 10% of a $Trillion. Fine. After the cost overruns, it will be > $1 Trillion.
I do think it would be worth $1T, even if only for the entertainment value. (Governments have been arranging big entertainment for the masses since the times of the caesars.) I'm just not so naive as to assume that it will somehow get done for less than that.
Education: Asians average an extra 150+ hours of K12 education a year. Most school systems teach responsibility from day one by assigning class leaders and having the students clean their own classrooms.
I say that's BS. I went to high school in the 70s; it was incredibly lax. I used to make a point of doing all of my homework each day in the 25-minute study hall at lunch hour. I could do it because they just didn't give us that much work.
When I look on the news I always see people saying that we need to pile more and more work on students, and that they need to spend more time learning math and science and computers. Well, my high school had exactly one PDP-8 shared by 2000 students, and (much to my dismay) physical education was the top priority class (8 semesters required). My math and science classes were a breeze for most of the students.
I went to one of the top engineering universities in the US and graduated in the top 1%. There were plenty of others like me there who did well despite not having been subjected to a fascist K-12 regime. While I was there I often saw groups of those highly-educated foreign students huddling at tables struggling to do their studies communally. Their background allowed them to eventually crank through their work, but without much imagination or independence. In contrast, I often figured out a unique shortcut to get the work done quickly so that I could get out to happy hour.
How could this be? I think that it was because the culture in the USA promoted experimentation and self-initiative. I learned more playing around on my own with soldering irons, model rockets, home-built pyrotechnics, my teenage-punk muscle car, etc. than any high-school lab could have taught.
I think that if we're having problems cranking out good engineers today, it's because we've lost that edge in instilling self-initiative in kids. Maybe it's because everything is so pre-fab today, like the way it's hard to find a set of generic Lego bricks, and kids don't have to use their imaginations as much. Maybe it's because there are fewer areas left where a guy tinkering in his garage could make a breakthrough like the original Apple computer, so people just don't try. Maybe it's because parents don't spend as much time with their kids; I learned a huge amount of stuff doing projects with my dad. I don't know, but I sure don't think that cramming more work onto school children is going to fix it. Creating a top-notch engineer is a much more complex process than a bunch of school assignments.
OK, since you're the second person to "correct" me on the rudder question, I'll quote from the article:
A potentially disastrous problem with a space shuttle rudder went undetected for two decades, NASA has revealed. However, the problem can be fixed in time for the shuttle's planned return to flight in March 2005.
When a shuttle returns to Earth, the rudder brakes the craft to a speed that is safe for landing. Shuttle program manager Bill Parsons told a press conference on Monday that a gear in one of four actuators that move the two-part rudder was installed backwards on Discovery.
...
That could have disabling the rudder by jamming it open or closed. "Loss of the rudder speed brake would mean loss of vehicle and loss of crew," said Parsons.
Maybe the author was just using the word "rudder" as a codeword for "not rudder". I don't know.
If I create a work for personal benefit, and then others benefit but I do not - then copyright has failed.
Wrong. The US constitution says what copyright is for -- to promote "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If you choose to sit on your work and keep it unavailable decades after you made it, that's not "useful"; copyright has failed.
I simply would not create any more work.
What a baby. "Somebody might copy my work 28 years from now and I won't be able to stop them. I'm just going to be a used car salesman instead. That'll show 'em!"
Yes, the Soviets flew unmanned test missions of these quite a few times in the 1970s. The program was cancelled, however, and they stayed with Soyuz. I've seen recent news reports that a Russian firm wants to bring back the reusable capsule idea.
Besides, when have the rudders ever "jammed"?
That's what the article said. If the faulty actuator had been installed in the higher-stress lower position instead of the upper one, it would likely have jammed and doomed the spacecraft.
I think that this choice of approaches to programming is similar to the choice in electrical engineering between solving problems in the time domain vs. frequency domain.
To me, functional programming is similar to the frequency domain. There are certain problems that are almost impossible to solve in the time domain that are trivial to solve in the frequency domain. However, the frequency domain is harder to understand, and the real universe actually operates in the time domain. Moreover, some problems that are trivial in the time domain blow up when analyzed in the frequency domain.
There few if any EEs who would advocate discarding all time domain calculations in favor of the alternative. That also applies to tools; few people would throw away their oscilliscopes just because they have a spectrum analyzer available.
That's what bothers me about "pure" languages of any form. You're intentionally throwing away some of the available tools to prove a point.
Sometimes a functional approach can provide an extremely powerful way to solve a problem with a tiny amount of code. However, sometimes another part of the same program would be better done in a more mundane fashion. The functional style's tendency to make you think about every problem "inside out" and to make you solve every problem in a "clever" way can get to be grating. I like to keep the option to use each style as needed, so I prefer languages that support features from a variety of programming styles.
I think that you haven't picked engines that are very representative if the two categories. A '93 Ford truck engine is not going to be a very advanced example of computer control. It was early in the history of computerized engines, and there were minimal requirements on economy and emmissions of trucks. Ford wasn't going to put much effort into that system.
OTOH, your custom Lincoln engine has mods that may have been too expensive for a car manufacturer to put in any high-volume production car, old or modern. You can't take that as an example that proves that computers are worthless. Maybe the computers achieve the same goals at a lower cost than fancy machining and manifolds. Production engines made for the general market also need to satisfy more goals than one put in a moster truck; they need to run quiet and idle smoothly, for example.
Maybe you should try again, comparing a stock 73 Lincoln motor vs. a 2004 Cadillac Northstar, for example.
I think that you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses. I had a Camaro in the 70s, and compared to today's cars it was a total piece of garbage. It had dangerous handling, it broke down constantly, it was shoddily constructed, and chunks were falling off of it when it was only 8 years old.
Maybe a few cars from back then claimed more horsepower than what you can get today. (I kind of doubt it with cars like the Dodge Viper on the market). Keep in mind that horsepower numbers were inflated back then, and the drivetrains and suspensions were not capable of utilizing the horsepower that they had.
If you read any car magazine, there are plenty of aftermarket shops that do modify today's cars, and they manage to keep them legal as well.
It offers no protection for those people--essentially you either do as they say or your hard work is fair game for everyone else.
So? If copyright law were to be changed so that an ASCAP-like system were the way people got paid, then that would be the way people get paid. Prospective artists could evaluate that before they decided to try to make a living by making recorded music. If they don't want to participate in that system, they are free to become a stock broker instead.
At any rate, it would likely end up being better for more artists than the current system with its de-facto monopoly on distribution. Today, if an artist doesn't want to participate in the recording industry system, they have little prospect of getting much income from recordings. If they do participate, then they still have little chance of making very much income.
The bottom line would be that the public would pay less total money for entertainment, and the artists would receive more total money. The only people who would lose out would be the coke-snorting leeches who currently siphon off most of the money.
You can get cars today with as much horsepower as ever. The main difference is that they produce far less pollution and get considerably better fuel economy as 60s muscle cars of similar proportions. They are also much safer, more reliable, easier to start, require less regular maintenence, and they automatically keep themselves in tune.
To achieve all of this, computers had to be put in the cars. A car without computers wouldn't be competitive in today's market, and it wouldn't be able to produce high power outputs while staying within today's mandated pollution limits.
Whichever side's unmanned vehicles ran out first would likely be forced to surrender, given the alternative of certain and pointless death for any human sent to combat the machines.
At this point, the victorious unmanned vehicles realize that they hold the upper hand, and they turn on their creators. Before long, the planet will be swept clean of those puny blobs of meat and a new race of gleaming metal super-beings will reign supreme! Bwahahahah!!
Those big juicy June bugs (which show up every year, and not just in June) have to be the stupidest creatures on this planet. Their entire brain can be implemented in a few lines of code:
begin:
start uncontrolled flight
crash hard into random object
fall to ground and land on back
take 10 minutes to flip onto legs
goto begin
I really don't know what they're trying to accomplish, or why they bother when they're so bad at it.
I think it mainly means that the construction industry has made great progress in creating low-cost building materials. For example, a good portion of my house, including some large support beams, is basically made out of glue and sawdust. Much of the rest is made out of extruded plastic, refined dirt (gypsum) and paper. Computers have undoubtedly helped the construction companies streamline their inventory, scheduling and manpower to significantly lower the cost of building a house relative to the average wage.
This new ability to crank out more and bigger houses for less money makes it possible for a lot of people to buy houses, but it doesn't say that much about economic policy in general.
So is it a better idea to allow software copyright, or to allow software patents? Patents expire (soon-ish), while copyrights go on seemingly forever (lifetimes++).
Yes, because nobody cares about a 17-year old program; they often care about 17-year old technologies. Patents have a much broader scope than copyrights. A 1980s vintage image editor that could write GIFs is of little consequence today, but the GIF patent was a big burden on entire segment of the computer industry until just recently.
(Of course, this assumes that SCO doesn't succeed in expanding the concept of copyright to include header constants and API interfaces. That would not be a good thing.)
Like the article says, these codes were introduced in 1993.
Ahh, that would explain the "Turbo" thing: It comes from the era of Borland compilers and 486 clone boxes. If it were invented today, it would surely be called something like "iCodes".
Is it worth $1G to service Hubble with a shuttle flight? No
My question is: why service the Hubble with a super-expensive shuttle flight? How much would it cost to build a replacement and launch it on a standard rocket?
We always hear about how much the Hubble cost, but I'm guessing that a lot of that was development costs. They still have the blueprints; how much could it cost to dust them off and build a quick clone?
I would imagine that they could build a shiny new Hubble and launch it on an expendable rocket for less than the cost of a manned service mission to the old one. The key to keeping costs down would be to avoid the strong temptation to spend more money on "improving" the original design.
As an American I can't imagine giving my government half of my income.
Umm... add it all up. Federal income tax, state income tax, FICA (7.5% visible + 7.5% hidden), sales tax, property tax. You're already probably giving the government about half of your income. And you're already paying the staggering healthcare costs for a most of old the sick retired people who aren't even working.
Somehow you've let people convince you that you should pay high taxes for other peoples' health coverage, but it would be somehow to your disadvantage if you were eligible for benefits under this system that you're paying for.
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IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier. Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.
(I think that color TVs only became truly usable in the 80s when they introduced decent automatic color correction. Before that, it seemed you could only watch in one of two colors: purple or green. No matter how much you fiddled with the knobs on old color TVs, it never looked quite right.)
Every little mistake adds to the cost. There is almost no opportunity to reduce the cost figures, but there is no limit on increased costs. Both the space shuttle and the ISS cost more than an order of magnitude more than initial estimates. The article seems to think that the Mars cost estimate should be < 10% of a $Trillion. Fine. After the cost overruns, it will be > $1 Trillion.
I do think it would be worth $1T, even if only for the entertainment value. (Governments have been arranging big entertainment for the masses since the times of the caesars.) I'm just not so naive as to assume that it will somehow get done for less than that.
I say that's BS. I went to high school in the 70s; it was incredibly lax. I used to make a point of doing all of my homework each day in the 25-minute study hall at lunch hour. I could do it because they just didn't give us that much work.
When I look on the news I always see people saying that we need to pile more and more work on students, and that they need to spend more time learning math and science and computers. Well, my high school had exactly one PDP-8 shared by 2000 students, and (much to my dismay) physical education was the top priority class (8 semesters required). My math and science classes were a breeze for most of the students.
I went to one of the top engineering universities in the US and graduated in the top 1%. There were plenty of others like me there who did well despite not having been subjected to a fascist K-12 regime. While I was there I often saw groups of those highly-educated foreign students huddling at tables struggling to do their studies communally. Their background allowed them to eventually crank through their work, but without much imagination or independence. In contrast, I often figured out a unique shortcut to get the work done quickly so that I could get out to happy hour.
How could this be? I think that it was because the culture in the USA promoted experimentation and self-initiative. I learned more playing around on my own with soldering irons, model rockets, home-built pyrotechnics, my teenage-punk muscle car, etc. than any high-school lab could have taught.
I think that if we're having problems cranking out good engineers today, it's because we've lost that edge in instilling self-initiative in kids. Maybe it's because everything is so pre-fab today, like the way it's hard to find a set of generic Lego bricks, and kids don't have to use their imaginations as much. Maybe it's because there are fewer areas left where a guy tinkering in his garage could make a breakthrough like the original Apple computer, so people just don't try. Maybe it's because parents don't spend as much time with their kids; I learned a huge amount of stuff doing projects with my dad. I don't know, but I sure don't think that cramming more work onto school children is going to fix it. Creating a top-notch engineer is a much more complex process than a bunch of school assignments.
Maybe the author was just using the word "rudder" as a codeword for "not rudder". I don't know.
Wrong. The US constitution says what copyright is for -- to promote "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If you choose to sit on your work and keep it unavailable decades after you made it, that's not "useful"; copyright has failed.
I simply would not create any more work.
What a baby. "Somebody might copy my work 28 years from now and I won't be able to stop them. I'm just going to be a used car salesman instead. That'll show 'em!"
Yes, the Soviets flew unmanned test missions of these quite a few times in the 1970s. The program was cancelled, however, and they stayed with Soyuz. I've seen recent news reports that a Russian firm wants to bring back the reusable capsule idea.
Besides, when have the rudders ever "jammed"?
That's what the article said. If the faulty actuator had been installed in the higher-stress lower position instead of the upper one, it would likely have jammed and doomed the spacecraft.
This is yet another reason that manned missions should be using simple reusable capsules instead of winged orbiters. There are no rudders to jam.
Therefore, tomatoes are vegetables, just like apples, peas, and pine trees.
No, but I can imagine it...
Select system type:
- Apple
- Apple
- Apple
Select case color:Select case style:
Select mouse type:
[Abort] [Finish]
To me, functional programming is similar to the frequency domain. There are certain problems that are almost impossible to solve in the time domain that are trivial to solve in the frequency domain. However, the frequency domain is harder to understand, and the real universe actually operates in the time domain. Moreover, some problems that are trivial in the time domain blow up when analyzed in the frequency domain.
There few if any EEs who would advocate discarding all time domain calculations in favor of the alternative. That also applies to tools; few people would throw away their oscilliscopes just because they have a spectrum analyzer available.
That's what bothers me about "pure" languages of any form. You're intentionally throwing away some of the available tools to prove a point.
Sometimes a functional approach can provide an extremely powerful way to solve a problem with a tiny amount of code. However, sometimes another part of the same program would be better done in a more mundane fashion. The functional style's tendency to make you think about every problem "inside out" and to make you solve every problem in a "clever" way can get to be grating. I like to keep the option to use each style as needed, so I prefer languages that support features from a variety of programming styles.
OTOH, your custom Lincoln engine has mods that may have been too expensive for a car manufacturer to put in any high-volume production car, old or modern. You can't take that as an example that proves that computers are worthless. Maybe the computers achieve the same goals at a lower cost than fancy machining and manifolds. Production engines made for the general market also need to satisfy more goals than one put in a moster truck; they need to run quiet and idle smoothly, for example.
Maybe you should try again, comparing a stock 73 Lincoln motor vs. a 2004 Cadillac Northstar, for example.
Maybe a few cars from back then claimed more horsepower than what you can get today. (I kind of doubt it with cars like the Dodge Viper on the market). Keep in mind that horsepower numbers were inflated back then, and the drivetrains and suspensions were not capable of utilizing the horsepower that they had.
If you read any car magazine, there are plenty of aftermarket shops that do modify today's cars, and they manage to keep them legal as well.
So? If copyright law were to be changed so that an ASCAP-like system were the way people got paid, then that would be the way people get paid. Prospective artists could evaluate that before they decided to try to make a living by making recorded music. If they don't want to participate in that system, they are free to become a stock broker instead.
At any rate, it would likely end up being better for more artists than the current system with its de-facto monopoly on distribution. Today, if an artist doesn't want to participate in the recording industry system, they have little prospect of getting much income from recordings. If they do participate, then they still have little chance of making very much income.
The bottom line would be that the public would pay less total money for entertainment, and the artists would receive more total money. The only people who would lose out would be the coke-snorting leeches who currently siphon off most of the money.
To achieve all of this, computers had to be put in the cars. A car without computers wouldn't be competitive in today's market, and it wouldn't be able to produce high power outputs while staying within today's mandated pollution limits.
"The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris." -- Larry Wall
At this point, the victorious unmanned vehicles realize that they hold the upper hand, and they turn on their creators. Before long, the planet will be swept clean of those puny blobs of meat and a new race of gleaming metal super-beings will reign supreme! Bwahahahah!!
begin:
start uncontrolled flight
crash hard into random object
fall to ground and land on back
take 10 minutes to flip onto legs
goto begin
I really don't know what they're trying to accomplish, or why they bother when they're so bad at it.
I think it mainly means that the construction industry has made great progress in creating low-cost building materials. For example, a good portion of my house, including some large support beams, is basically made out of glue and sawdust. Much of the rest is made out of extruded plastic, refined dirt (gypsum) and paper. Computers have undoubtedly helped the construction companies streamline their inventory, scheduling and manpower to significantly lower the cost of building a house relative to the average wage.
This new ability to crank out more and bigger houses for less money makes it possible for a lot of people to buy houses, but it doesn't say that much about economic policy in general.
Yes, because nobody cares about a 17-year old program; they often care about 17-year old technologies. Patents have a much broader scope than copyrights. A 1980s vintage image editor that could write GIFs is of little consequence today, but the GIF patent was a big burden on entire segment of the computer industry until just recently.
(Of course, this assumes that SCO doesn't succeed in expanding the concept of copyright to include header constants and API interfaces. That would not be a good thing.)
Ahh, that would explain the "Turbo" thing: It comes from the era of Borland compilers and 486 clone boxes. If it were invented today, it would surely be called something like "iCodes".
My question is: why service the Hubble with a super-expensive shuttle flight? How much would it cost to build a replacement and launch it on a standard rocket?
We always hear about how much the Hubble cost, but I'm guessing that a lot of that was development costs. They still have the blueprints; how much could it cost to dust them off and build a quick clone?
I would imagine that they could build a shiny new Hubble and launch it on an expendable rocket for less than the cost of a manned service mission to the old one. The key to keeping costs down would be to avoid the strong temptation to spend more money on "improving" the original design.
Ironically, Kinison died in a desert auto crash driving between cities where Americans live in the desert.
Umm... add it all up. Federal income tax, state income tax, FICA (7.5% visible + 7.5% hidden), sales tax, property tax. You're already probably giving the government about half of your income. And you're already paying the staggering healthcare costs for a most of old the sick retired people who aren't even working.
Somehow you've let people convince you that you should pay high taxes for other peoples' health coverage, but it would be somehow to your disadvantage if you were eligible for benefits under this system that you're paying for.
So you're against copyrights and patents?
I think it's more likely that what they would see is flames and/or red glow from the graphite moderator burning in the air.