Can you imagine a world where the only calculator you could buy came with 100 buttons and a graphic/plotting display?
Many persons find a use for a simple four function calculator with a one line display. So what has happened to the simple PDA with a black and white display that uses AAA batteries?
Neither Palm nor Sony nor anyone else makes an inexpensive 'commodity' PDA anymore. Lightweight and thin with a display large enough for my old eyes to read 16 lines of text. Runs weeks on cheap AAA batteries. Is this too much to ask?
When I was working at JPL in the early 80s I spoke to a researcher who had published a number of papers on experimental General Relativity and was well regarded in the field. He told me privately that the expected results of Gravity Probe B were the same for Einstein's theory and virtually every other proposed theory of gravity, and that if the results conflicted with these theories most researchers would conclude that the measurement was incorrect.
I guess my point is that there is a reason this mission has been postponed so many times: most investigators believe it is pointless.
I was a young engineer at JPL when Voyager 2 encountered Saturn, and I remember when the first photos of the spokes in the rings were displayed in real time on the monitors in the cafeteria. The work on other projects had pretty much ground to a halt while everyone watched the data come in.
Of course, the real time data had no captions, no explanations of what we were seeing, so we had all sorts of guesses - density waves, camera artifact, etc. Once it was apparent that the waves were holding together as the rings rotated and were not being sheared apart, it was clear they were not due to any gravitational effect. Since they moved with the rotation of the planet, the accepted explanation is the magnetic field of Saturn causing the charged dust in the rings to concentrate into visible spokes. As I understand it, the spokes are not a wave phenomenon at all.
Re:Yes, but is one of them Richard Feynman?
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It has been a long time, but if I recall correctly one of the first things Feynman did upon accepting was to get a closed door meeting with a team of engineers from the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL).
Although JPL is a NASA facility, it is run by Caltech, and every employee's paycheck is signed by the president of Caltech (at least in the 1980s when I worked there.) These engineers wanted to give a Caltech professor the real story: the problem was most likely the main shuttle engine or the booster O-ring.
Feynman was smart enough to go into the first meeting of the committee knowing where to look.
Before anyone panics there are several things to consider:
1. Unless the receiver can determine the distance to the RFID tag (and this is usually not the case), the tag's location cannot be determined with any greater accuracy that the distance to the nearest receiver. To "locate" a tag, there must be many expensive receivers no how many cheap tags there are. Remember, we live in three dimensions.
2. The range of passively powered tags is only a few meters, and they all tend to reply at the same time when a bunch are pinged, causing interference.
I wrote my first program using punch cards in 1973, and I've seen a lot of changes.
The two most significant are structured programming and the widespread use of interpreted (as opposed to compiled) languages.
When I ask an old-timer like myself to compare the introduction of objected oriented programming to structured programming, he usually agrees that, while OOP can be useful in many cases, structured programming is always useful and was a huge step forward.
Using a computer monitor beats the hell out of using punch cards, too.
LIGO confirms that Einstein was right the same way that Radio Astronomy confirms that Maxwell was right.
There is a lot more going on here than just proof of concept. I have been hearing that gravitational wave astronomy will "open a new window to the Universe" for almost twenty years now, but that doesn't make it any less true.
"NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation..."
This quote is from http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric. 02/index.html
See also http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990930.html where NASA tactfully avoids pointing the finger at Lockheed Martin.
Anyone who bothers to check would find that NASA has used only metric units for decades.
When I was working for NASA at JPL in the early 1980s the decision was made to send only one Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter instead of two as JPL orignally proposed. Most engineers believed this was a mistake.
Several persons have mentioned the feet / meters error that caused the Mars spacecraft to fail. It should be noted that the error was found quickly, and, had there been a second spacecraft, there would have been time to correct it. In previous missions with dual spacecraft the two spacecraft have been timed to arrive months apart so that only one ground crew was needed for both missions (another reason why the cost is not doubled.)
Nothing needs to be changed; no numbers need to be recrunched.
Even back in the early eighties when I worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab the values of GM for the sun, Moon, Earth, and all the major planets were known to high precision. The Orbit Determination Program (ODP) automatically adjusted these values as part of spacecraft navigation and trajectory reconstruction.
Scientists associated with this work include J.D. Anderson and W.L. Sjogren and just about every person who ever worked in Navigation Systems at JPL.
AT&T and SWB provide cable modem and DSL, respectively, in my home town, and if they were not competeing in the high speed internet access business, I believe both would cost quite a bit more.
Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the cost in real dollars of a beat up but running car around 1960 was about the same as a new motherbaord + CPU + memory is now, i.e., cheap enough to be a hobby. And you get something useful when you are done.
In addition, working on a car was (and is) a learning experience, as is putting together your own computer system. (You get dirtier working on a car, however.)
I am sick and tired of reading "scientists have discovered..." or "scientists now know that...". Individual people (sometimes working together, somtimes alone) make discoveries, not "scientists"!
You can get the Atmel AT98/90 series flash microcontroller starter kit (P/N/ STK200) for about $70. Each kit comes with a board, software, a parallel port cable (for programming), an 2343 microcontroller, and an 8515 microcontroller.
Open source development tools can be found on the "MicroTools for Linux" page (http://medo.fov.uni-mb.si/mapp/uTools/), and a Windows 95 port of these tools can be found on the "Atmel for Dummies" page (http://members.xoom.com/volkeroth/index_e.htm). You can program in gnu C or assembler.
Using the example C programs on these pages I was able to use the 8515 and an old LCD I had to make a functional clone of the LCD Proc device (http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/).
The board requires a power input of 9-15V DC or 7-12 AC ($7 extra for a power "brick"), and it is quite a nice board. It has a 9 pin serial port, a 14 pin LCD connector, 8 LEDs, 8 switches, sockets, jumpers, connectors, etc. Much fun for a reasonable price.
If science fiction is fiction about science, would Connie Willis' book Bellwether count as science fiction? It is a very funny novel about the chaos (pun intended) of performing science in a business environment, but I do not think I can call it science fiction.
Your essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" used fetchmail as an example of open source software development. Given the number of people who have examined the source code, one could argue that fetchmail is now one of the most mature applications in use anywhere.
You have discussed fetchmail's infancy. Is there anything to be learned from its "old age"?
Two functions I do not think anyone has mentioned: the Palm III makes a wonderful ebook, and, with the proper cable, a serial terminal.
So instead of carrying a pocket calculator, I have a Palm that is the same size and wieght as a calculator, an interactive ASCII chart, a serial terminal, and a collection of ebooks.
Although Mr. Feely's request seems to be for "Free speech" rather than "Free beer" software, I would like to point out that Andre Eisenbach is building a nice "Free beer" site for Palm software at palm.eisenbach.com.
I have not been able to find much in the way of open source software for the Palm.
Slashdot Mirror
Jonathan Corbet, the editor of Linux Weekly News (lwn.net).
Can you imagine a world where the only calculator you could buy came with 100 buttons and a graphic/plotting display?
Many persons find a use for a simple four function calculator with a one line display. So what has happened to the simple PDA with a black and white display that uses AAA batteries?
Neither Palm nor Sony nor anyone else makes an inexpensive 'commodity' PDA anymore. Lightweight and thin with a display large enough for my old eyes to read 16 lines of text. Runs weeks on cheap AAA batteries. Is this too much to ask?
When I was working at JPL in the early 80s I spoke to a researcher who had published a number of papers on experimental General Relativity and was well regarded in the field. He told me privately that the expected results of Gravity Probe B were the same for Einstein's theory and virtually every other proposed theory of gravity, and that if the results conflicted with these theories most researchers would conclude that the measurement was incorrect.
I guess my point is that there is a reason this mission has been postponed so many times: most investigators believe it is pointless.
I was a young engineer at JPL when Voyager 2 encountered Saturn, and I remember when the first photos of the spokes in the rings were displayed in real time on the monitors in the cafeteria. The work on other projects had pretty much ground to a halt while everyone watched the data come in.
Of course, the real time data had no captions, no explanations of what we were seeing, so we had all sorts of guesses - density waves, camera artifact, etc. Once it was apparent that the waves were holding together as the rings rotated and were not being sheared apart, it was clear they were not due to any gravitational effect. Since they moved with the rotation of the planet, the accepted explanation is the magnetic field of Saturn causing the charged dust in the rings to concentrate into visible spokes. As I understand it, the spokes are not a wave phenomenon at all.
Why doesn't BitTorrent come with a man page?
It has been a long time, but if I recall correctly one of the first things Feynman did upon accepting was to get a closed door meeting with a team of engineers from the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL).
Although JPL is a NASA facility, it is run by Caltech, and every employee's paycheck is signed by the president of Caltech (at least in the 1980s when I worked there.) These engineers wanted to give a Caltech professor the real story: the problem was most likely the main shuttle engine or the booster O-ring.
Feynman was smart enough to go into the first meeting of the committee knowing where to look.
Before anyone panics there are several things to consider:
1. Unless the receiver can determine the distance to the RFID tag (and this is usually not the case), the tag's location cannot be determined with any greater accuracy that the distance to the nearest receiver. To "locate" a tag, there must be many expensive receivers no how many cheap tags there are. Remember, we live in three dimensions.
2. The range of passively powered tags is only a few meters, and they all tend to reply at the same time when a bunch are pinged, causing interference.
These difficulties can be solved, but not soon.
I wrote my first program using punch cards in 1973, and I've seen a lot of changes.
The two most significant are structured programming and the widespread use of interpreted (as opposed to compiled) languages.
When I ask an old-timer like myself to compare the introduction of objected oriented programming to structured programming, he usually agrees that, while OOP can be useful in many cases, structured programming is always useful and was a huge step forward.
Using a computer monitor beats the hell out of using punch cards, too.
"...said in an interview that Wellington is the arsehole of the world..."
Then I guess he was just passing through.
---"So she replied, "I cannot recommend him too highly," and left it at that."---
Clearly she has read "Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations" by Robert Thornton.
From the book (on incompetence):
"I most enthusiastically recommend this man with no qualifications whatsoever."
"All in all, I cannot recommend this person too highly."
I would list Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A.S. Byatt, and Paul Theroux (nonfiction only!).
If I am allowed the recently deceased, add Patrick O'Brian and Penelope Fitzgerald.
LIGO confirms that Einstein was right the same way that Radio Astronomy confirms that Maxwell was right.
There is a lot more going on here than just proof of concept. I have been hearing that gravitational wave astronomy will "open a new window to the Universe" for almost twenty years now, but that doesn't make it any less true.
A most addictive game. GPL.
l
http://boris.qub.ac.uk/tube/Projects/index.shtm
"NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation..."
. 02/index.html
l where NASA tactfully avoids pointing the finger at Lockheed Martin.
This quote is from http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric
See also http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990930.htm
Anyone who bothers to check would find that NASA has used only metric units for decades.
When I was working for NASA at JPL in the early 1980s the decision was made to send only one Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter instead of two as JPL orignally proposed. Most engineers believed this was a mistake.
Several persons have mentioned the feet / meters error that caused the Mars spacecraft to fail. It should be noted that the error was found quickly, and, had there been a second spacecraft, there would have been time to correct it. In previous missions with dual spacecraft the two spacecraft have been timed to arrive months apart so that only one ground crew was needed for both missions (another reason why the cost is not doubled.)
Nothing needs to be changed; no numbers need to be recrunched.
Even back in the early eighties when I worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab the values of GM for the sun, Moon, Earth, and all the major planets were known to high precision. The Orbit Determination Program (ODP) automatically adjusted these values as part of spacecraft navigation and trajectory reconstruction.
Scientists associated with this work include J.D. Anderson and W.L. Sjogren and just about every person who ever worked in Navigation Systems at JPL.
AT&T and SWB provide cable modem and DSL, respectively, in my home town, and if they were not competeing in the high speed internet access business, I believe both would cost quite a bit more.
Just two quick comments:
Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the cost in real dollars of a beat up but running car around 1960 was about the same as a new motherbaord + CPU + memory is now, i.e., cheap enough to be a hobby. And you get something useful when you are done.
In addition, working on a car was (and is) a learning experience, as is putting together your own computer system. (You get dirtier working on a car, however.)
Thank you.
I am sick and tired of reading "scientists have discovered..." or "scientists now know that...". Individual people (sometimes working together, somtimes alone) make discoveries, not "scientists"!
RICHARD POGGE and PAUL MARTINI.
You can get the Atmel AT98/90 series flash microcontroller starter kit (P/N/ STK200) for about $70. Each kit comes with a board, software, a parallel port cable (for programming), an 2343 microcontroller, and an 8515 microcontroller.
Open source development tools can be found on the "MicroTools for Linux" page (http://medo.fov.uni-mb.si/mapp/uTools/), and a Windows 95 port of these tools can be found on the "Atmel for Dummies" page (http://members.xoom.com/volkeroth/index_e.htm). You can program in gnu C or assembler.
Using the example C programs on these pages I was able to use the 8515 and an old LCD I had to make a functional clone of the LCD Proc device (http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/).
The board requires a power input of 9-15V DC or 7-12 AC ($7 extra for a power "brick"), and it is quite a nice board. It has a 9 pin serial port, a 14 pin LCD connector, 8 LEDs, 8 switches, sockets, jumpers, connectors, etc. Much fun for a reasonable price.
If science fiction is fiction about science, would Connie Willis' book Bellwether
count as science fiction? It is a very funny novel about the chaos (pun intended) of performing science in a business environment, but I do not think I can call it science fiction.
Your essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" used fetchmail as an example of open source software development. Given the number of people who have examined the source code, one could argue that fetchmail is now one of the most mature applications in use anywhere.
You have discussed fetchmail's infancy. Is there anything to be learned from its "old age"?
I didn't like "Beginning Linux Programming" for pretty much the same reasons.
A much better book is "Linux Application Development" by M.K. Johnson and E.W. Troan.
Two functions I do not think anyone has mentioned: the Palm III makes a wonderful ebook, and, with the proper cable, a serial terminal.
So instead of carrying a pocket calculator, I have a Palm that is the same size and wieght as a calculator, an interactive ASCII chart, a serial terminal, and a collection of ebooks.
And this is a toy?
Although Mr. Feely's request seems to be for "Free speech" rather than "Free beer" software, I would like to point out that Andre Eisenbach is building a nice "Free beer" site for Palm software at palm.eisenbach.com.
I have not been able to find much in the way of open source software for the Palm.