When I was on Kazaa, files were only shared from specific directories (Folders in Windows) - If I didn't want to share something, I didn't put it in the directories.
If you just want to download/share public domain files and not distribute your ripped mp3s, wouldn't you keep them from these directories?
I feel like this "feature" is going to make or break Lindows. I can see there being a problem with updating that will screw up all the users and kill Lindows forever.
Sadly, when Microsoft does this several times a year people just shrug and wait for the patch of the patch.
I just don't know if Lindows will be able to survive if they don't implement the update process in any way less than perfect - they don't have the acceptance and power of the Redmond giant.
When Java was first announced, it was to be the language for everything cell phones, appliances, games, databases and web access. Over time, Java has become a much more focused application development tool.
But, Microsoft has not looked at tools that could be used by everything in a processor in it - instead it just focused on the Java's core market, while Java was trying to figure out what it was.
It seems like both Java and C#, (.NET) have all been developed over the same period. It's just that Java has done it publicly, while C# and.NET did it in the bowels of Redmond outside of the public eye.
Interesting product, I don't think I'll ever buy one (I have a Kyocera smartphone and the integration of a Palm Pilot to a cel phone seems to be a much more likely combination than a Pilot to a watch), but I'm sure I'll take a look at Amazon.com periodically to see what people think of it. It will also get him some free press when the product is reviewed and discussed.
And, thinking of this device as well as the Segway, I wonder if this is why Bezos is supporting these "out there" products. Many people will just click in to take a look at it to find out more while it may cost him some money in supporting the designers/manufacturers, but it's advertising for him that shows up in various magazines and newspapers (I'll bet it shows up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal) that he just can't pay for. This is, by the way, the worst case; the best case is that the product sells and with Amazon as the recognized retailer, megabucks can be made.
Either way, Bezos wins and gets more people to Amazon.com. It's this kind of thinking that makes Jeff Bezos worth more than the entire collective/. community.
When I read the account of the meeting, my impression of Steve Jobs was similar to that of what I have received of other effective senior executives of large companies.
1. He is a very quick study and he came in prepared. It was a bit strange that he had notes written on his hand but he knew what he wanted to say.
2. He had an agenda. He clearly didn't like the design and had issues with the lack of an introduction plan and the idea to manufacture on their own.
3. He's been around the block and part of his questions and statements are really tests to see how well everybody is prepared. I'm sure if anybody knows how quickly something could be copied, it would be Jobs.
4. It's interesting to me to hear that people think that he is an arrogant prick - I guess I've worked with a lot of them over the years.
From my experience with this type of executive (as well as my own experiences over the years), what I walked away from this article is that Kamen and the company that he produced aren't in the league they need to be for the product to be a success. They clearly weren't prepared for businessmen of the calibre Bezos and Jobs.
This article probably explains to me why the Segway hasn't been a great success - instead of Kamen, who's a great product idea man, they needed some kind of arrogant prick like Jobs to control the project.
This isn't the first time of heard of a case like this. I seem to remember a case where a guy hit a school bus and the insurance company recovered the EDR from the car and showed that the driver was going over 60 when the accident happened.
Note that along with speed, EDRs also record the position of the steering wheel and whether or not the brakes are being engaged. Apparently, they can give investigators a pretty good idea what was happening up to and including the instant of the crash.
I have been told (by a "friend of a friend") that the EDRs are put in to protect the manufacturer; say if the driver/passenger was killed and it turns out they weren't wearing seat belts, travelling too fast, etc. A quick google search yielded the existence of NHTSA-02-13546, which is the standard for EDRs in cars. The EDR must be tamper resistant in terms of case, hardware and software.
EDRs are an integral part of the vehicle's safety system (air-bags, seatbelts, anti-lock brakes and so on) and tampering with them will a) void any warranties and guarantees and b) probably be interpreted by insurance companies and the courts as you operating a vehicle in which its safety systems are compromised.
So, if you have modded your EDR and are in an accident where the insurance company/police pull the EDR at the accident scene to understand what happened, you are, to use the legal term, "fucked".
myke
Re:NIMBY - There Actually ARE a few Negatives
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
A guy I worked with was trying to prevent a wind farm being placed in a small bay in Toronto. His reasoning was that there were a couple of safety issues that hadn't been considered:
1. Ice. In Toronto (and I suspect New England), ice will form on the blades and when there is too much or it melts, it will get thrown. Several kilometers, in fact, and with a lot of energy.
2. Blades will break and get thrown periodically. With the proposed wind mills for Toronto, it would be expected that one blade would be thrown each year. These blades are massive and could conceivably do a lot of damage.
The solution, put them further out in the water away from the city; kind of like what is being proposed here. It was interesting to see that in the concerns regarding the Nantucket Wind Farm that these two points weren't brought up.
Personally, I would think that a wind farm out in the water would be attractive (at least a lot more attractive than a traditional power plant) and a good feeling that somewhere, there isn't coal being burnt or nuclear waste being produced to fuel my lifestyle.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC : as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. [E.W. Dijkstra]
As soon as I saw the topic, I knew this quote was going to come up.
It's unfortunate, but I would like to see the context of where it actually comes from. Was Dijkstra talking about structured programming? OOP? Somehow I can't help but feel that the quote isn't complete or there is a background to it that hasn't been explained.
What BASIC and other simple programming languages (I would have to think that assembly language progamming comes under this umbrella as well) teach is the mindset needed for programming. They teach thinking about requirements, planning on instruction sequences, understanding conditional execution, etc. etc. etc.
To be fair, I can see where programmers would learn a lot language bending tricks to get their BASIC applications to work but these are simply rules to working with the (specific implementation of BASIC) language and platform. As structured and OO programming is taught, these tricks (and the thought process behind them) can be discussed and shown to be inappropriate for these environments.
This may be sacreligeous, but maybe the problem with Dijkstra not being able to teach students that already have experience with BASIC doesn't lie with BASIC...
All Bill has to do is buy up one record label, one movie studio and one TV network. Maybe a book publisher for good measure. If he wanted to do it in one fell swoop, he could buy Disney.
Once he has them under his control, he can then offer their content under a single pricing model in which all of the content would be available anywhere in the home just by a clicking on a selection.
By doing this, the consumer has no need to buy, copy, sell, trade, etc. content and, as the content owner, the money just rolls in. Make the assumption that a household could only absorb, say 2,000 Hours per month of content, distribute royalties based on the percentage of time the consumer is accessing the material (or from the total number of hours and keep everything over 2,000 hours).
As for independent content developers, they could submit material to the network and get paid a royalty based on its popularity. This could spur on many more small projects like the "Blair Witch Projects" and "Clerks". Maybe music would become much more varied because just a few suits aren't deciding what gets played.
This creates a problem for the major content owners. Consumers are happy, producers and artists are (very) happy and Bill is not only an Entertainment God, he is richer than Him. So, they have no other choice but to offer their content to Bill for distribution on his network. They will get royalties for their material and hopefully a much larger customer base.
I agree, this is a classic quote and does seem to sum up the attitude of the RIAA.
It reminded me of the famous two quotes by Alfred Hitchcock. When asked what he thought of actors, he said "they were like cattle". When asked to clarify his remark, he said he was misquoted, what he meant was "actors should be treated like cattle."
Maybe its time for some renegotiation of where everybody is in the food chain or, barring that, maybe some musicians should read "Animal Farm".
At the time, I seemed to be the only person in the world that noticed Microsoft paid $12 Million for a song with the chorus "You make a grown man cry..."
This was a satisfying counterbalance to the wait and the hype... (not to mention being surprisingly prescient)
Nobody would argue that it is critical for companies to announce where they are going, both for developers and customers.
However, I have a big problem when a company says something exists or can do something when it doesn't. This is fraud.
I don't see any issue for noting on advertisements and product packaging that a product will be able to support a given feature with an expected firmware upgrade or additional feature/download/whatever. The Internet is ideal for telling customers what is happening with their product and when/how/where updates will be available which will add the missing features.
The carrot and stick for Vendors? I know that in my own case when I've bought something that didn't work as advertised, I make sure that people hear about the issues - while they sold one to a sucker (me), there is a net loss of all the people I can influence.
The technology used in the Apollo Guidance Computers (GCs) were more a function of what their manufacturer (IBM) was comfortable with than what was available at the time. The GC's used IBM "Solid Logic Technology" (SLT) which was primarily a Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL) technology in which discrete resistors and transistors were bonded to ceramic carriers which were then soldered to PCBs using traditional pin through hole manufacturing techniques. At the time, this was IBM's primary method of manufacturing computers (they did not start using integrated circuits in their computers until the early 1970s). IBM never gave up on SLT until the late 1980s.
The GCs read only memory consisted of a series of peg-boards into which the code was wire wrapped (by hand). There were 74,000, 16-bit instructions that could be programmed in this way. There was 4k iron-core memory in the computer. There were two GCs used in Apollo. The CSM one was responsible for leaving earth orbit, mid-course correction(s), entering lunar orbit, etc. The LM GC controlled descent and ascent as well as autopilot functions for lunar orbit docking. The computers ran the programs for these manuevers from ROM, but using astronaut input parameters using the "noun-verb" input methodology.
The software was actually very sophisticated and did not consist of simple control loops - joystick feedback was actually processed to ensure commands kept the spacecraft within limits. The most important parameter was keeping the antennae pointed at the Earth.
AFAIK, there are no space-qualified Intel built '486s. There are space-qualified computer systems with '486s in them, which may seem like semantics, but these systems typically employed multiple '486s, with bus operations and data continually compared to look for differences indicating upsets. This is a point that always confuses people because at one point IBM/NASA indicated the AP101 Block IIs had the same amount of power as a '486 - this seems to be misinterpreted as the AP101s have '486s built into them.
Half a lifetime ago, I helped with some hardware failure analysis for the IBM Orbiter Computer Systems Group (It was an intermittently failing memory board on STS-4) and I have to say that they were the most impressive software group that I have ever been associated with. They learned their skills with the Apollo CSM/LM GCs and Apollo Instrumentation Ring - you just don't make mistakes when the instructions are wire wrapped. The software engineers that worked on the shuttle software didn't have a problem with going with the (relatively) complex AP101s (originally designed for the B-1). Going from wire wrapped ROM to battery backed RAM was seen as a good thing, but it did not mean that the software development process changed in any way.
I'm trying to remember if there were two or three support binders for each module of software in which the requirements were clearly defined, the science and reference information provided, all calculations/constants defined to support the software binder. Coding is always the last thing that is done and only if the support binders are complete and signed off. This process is very expensive, but the software produced is essentially perfect (I believe that there has been one non-safety of flight software error in shuttle history and several hundred thousand lines of code). Complexity isn't the issue.
I think the issue is, is there a software development methodology/process that fits in with NASA's "smaller, better, cheaper" and produces the same quality as the Shuttle/Apollo?
I've had an iRiver iFP-395TC for about three months now ( http://www.iriveramerica.com). It is an 512MB MP3 player with FM receiver/recorder and memo recorder.
The higher end of the iFP line has these features with varying amounts of Flash. Memos and recordings can be uploaded into a PC. It doesn't have a "pause" feature, like you would want on a "PAR". I've been using it to record "The House of Blues" on the weekend and then listen to it at my desk at work.
Nice box and I highly recommend it. Too bad its so hard to find (rumour has it Best Buy stocks different models of the iFP line but I have never seen them in stock). I ended up buying mine directly from iRiver.
The impression that I am getting (from this article as well as others) is that intuitively the engineers didn't think the foam collision could cause any damage. I haven't seen anything written indicating that there was any past history with pieces of foam striking the leading edge of the orbiter's wings. I have seen articles indicating that foam has struck the underside tiles and damaged one of the landing gear doors and while the tiles were damaged, none in such a way that the shuttle was ever in danger.
I would think that the line of thinking was, when the foam separated, it was moving at the same speed as the shuttle itself. Since the shuttle, at time of impact was at 50,000+ feet, the force of air drag on the foam would be negligible and the piece of foam would approximately maintain its speed.
I seem to remember that it is about 30 feet from the bipod to where the foam struck the orbiter's leading edge, so assuming that the foam travels at approximately the same velocity as when it came off and the shuttle was accellerating at 2.5 Gs, it would take about 1.4 seconds for the foam to hit the leading edge. Using these assumptions, the velocity of the foam at impact, relative to the leading edge, would be 110 ft/sec or roughly 75 mph.
This doesn't sound too bad - after all, it's foam. Getting hit by a Nerf football that has been thrown hard by somebody close by stings, but it won't break bones or even come close to breaking the skin. If you don't think it could do more than bruise you, then it would be hard to accept that the carbon-carbon leading edge of the orbiter could be damaged.
I think that this was the level of intuitive analysis that was done. Unfortunately, it wasn't backed up by any kind of quantitative analysis using known facts (such as estimating the speed of the impact from the film and checking it against the intuitive speed of impact) to test whether or not there were grounds for concern.
I just can't wait for McCall to take their lead from Madonna and put on the Internet some of their own "designs" to help thwart pirating of their intellectual property.
The whole pattern pirating industry would be shut down in an instant as soon as some grandmother that downloaded a pattern called "Playful Kittens" and spent hours stitching it out, ended up with a pillow that says "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"
This is why when people complain about the plots of the prequels, I take them with a grain of salt. We know what's going to happen - I doubt that there are going to be any great surprises.
It's Saturday afternoon kids' fare - so don't worry about the story, just sit back and be amazed by the effects.
Is it just me or does it look like there is a) a dead body washing up or b) a frogman infiltrating using a rock for cover on the beach in the lower left of the image?
In either case, the taking of the picture is much less of a concern than what's in it.
I graduated in 1985 and at the time, I was appalled at the number of my fellow students had never picked up a soldering iron before (although one woman had when she did some stained glass). I can't count the number of graduates I have seen over the past 18 years that didn't know how to create a simple test circuit to save their lives. This is analogous to a doctor graduating without ever touching a patience while at school - would you want to be looked after by somebody that just used text books and computer simulations?
From the student perspective, I've never understood how somebody could enroll in something like Electrical Engineering without actually having built a circuit before. To any prospective students: This is for the rest of your life - why don't you see if you are actually interested in it?
Sorry, but I'm tired of explaining how an oscilloscope works to recent grads with a GP of 4.0.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was on Kazaa, files were only shared from specific directories (Folders in Windows) - If I didn't want to share something, I didn't put it in the directories.
If you just want to download/share public domain files and not distribute your ripped mp3s, wouldn't you keep them from these directories?
I must be missing something here...
myke
That's what I thought - I'm sure his personal spam filter gets flogged in the same way as his personal grape-peeler, when he misses a pit.
myke
I can see it now along with this, on the cover of the card, a beautiful elfin face looking longingly into a CRT...
and when you open card it says, "See why you were a dumb shit for buying Microsoft?"
myke
It will come back, stronger and more faithful than ever?
myke
Wow, I never would have guess that Spam would be the new Millenium's great equalizer - like everyone having to put on their pants, one leg at a time.
myke
I feel like this "feature" is going to make or break Lindows. I can see there being a problem with updating that will screw up all the users and kill Lindows forever.
Sadly, when Microsoft does this several times a year people just shrug and wait for the patch of the patch.
I just don't know if Lindows will be able to survive if they don't implement the update process in any way less than perfect - they don't have the acceptance and power of the Redmond giant.
myke
When Java was first announced, it was to be the language for everything cell phones, appliances, games, databases and web access. Over time, Java has become a much more focused application development tool.
.NET did it in the bowels of Redmond outside of the public eye.
But, Microsoft has not looked at tools that could be used by everything in a processor in it - instead it just focused on the Java's core market, while Java was trying to figure out what it was.
It seems like both Java and C#, (.NET) have all been developed over the same period. It's just that Java has done it publicly, while C# and
myke
Interesting product, I don't think I'll ever buy one (I have a Kyocera smartphone and the integration of a Palm Pilot to a cel phone seems to be a much more likely combination than a Pilot to a watch), but I'm sure I'll take a look at Amazon.com periodically to see what people think of it. It will also get him some free press when the product is reviewed and discussed.
/. community.
And, thinking of this device as well as the Segway, I wonder if this is why Bezos is supporting these "out there" products. Many people will just click in to take a look at it to find out more while it may cost him some money in supporting the designers/manufacturers, but it's advertising for him that shows up in various magazines and newspapers (I'll bet it shows up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal) that he just can't pay for. This is, by the way, the worst case; the best case is that the product sells and with Amazon as the recognized retailer, megabucks can be made.
Either way, Bezos wins and gets more people to Amazon.com. It's this kind of thinking that makes Jeff Bezos worth more than the entire collective
myke
When I read the account of the meeting, my impression of Steve Jobs was similar to that of what I have received of other effective senior executives of large companies.
1. He is a very quick study and he came in prepared. It was a bit strange that he had notes written on his hand but he knew what he wanted to say.
2. He had an agenda. He clearly didn't like the design and had issues with the lack of an introduction plan and the idea to manufacture on their own.
3. He's been around the block and part of his questions and statements are really tests to see how well everybody is prepared. I'm sure if anybody knows how quickly something could be copied, it would be Jobs.
4. It's interesting to me to hear that people think that he is an arrogant prick - I guess I've worked with a lot of them over the years.
From my experience with this type of executive (as well as my own experiences over the years), what I walked away from this article is that Kamen and the company that he produced aren't in the league they need to be for the product to be a success. They clearly weren't prepared for businessmen of the calibre Bezos and Jobs.
This article probably explains to me why the Segway hasn't been a great success - instead of Kamen, who's a great product idea man, they needed some kind of arrogant prick like Jobs to control the project.
myke
This isn't the first time of heard of a case like this. I seem to remember a case where a guy hit a school bus and the insurance company recovered the EDR from the car and showed that the driver was going over 60 when the accident happened.
Note that along with speed, EDRs also record the position of the steering wheel and whether or not the brakes are being engaged. Apparently, they can give investigators a pretty good idea what was happening up to and including the instant of the crash.
I have been told (by a "friend of a friend") that the EDRs are put in to protect the manufacturer; say if the driver/passenger was killed and it turns out they weren't wearing seat belts, travelling too fast, etc. A quick google search yielded the existence of NHTSA-02-13546, which is the standard for EDRs in cars. The EDR must be tamper resistant in terms of case, hardware and software.
EDRs are an integral part of the vehicle's safety system (air-bags, seatbelts, anti-lock brakes and so on) and tampering with them will a) void any warranties and guarantees and b) probably be interpreted by insurance companies and the courts as you operating a vehicle in which its safety systems are compromised.
So, if you have modded your EDR and are in an accident where the insurance company/police pull the EDR at the accident scene to understand what happened, you are, to use the legal term, "fucked".
myke
A guy I worked with was trying to prevent a wind farm being placed in a small bay in Toronto. His reasoning was that there were a couple of safety issues that hadn't been considered:
1. Ice. In Toronto (and I suspect New England), ice will form on the blades and when there is too much or it melts, it will get thrown. Several kilometers, in fact, and with a lot of energy.
2. Blades will break and get thrown periodically. With the proposed wind mills for Toronto, it would be expected that one blade would be thrown each year. These blades are massive and could conceivably do a lot of damage.
The solution, put them further out in the water away from the city; kind of like what is being proposed here. It was interesting to see that in the concerns regarding the Nantucket Wind Farm that these two points weren't brought up.
Personally, I would think that a wind farm out in the water would be attractive (at least a lot more attractive than a traditional power plant) and a good feeling that somewhere, there isn't coal being burnt or nuclear waste being produced to fuel my lifestyle.
myke
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC : as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. [E.W. Dijkstra]
As soon as I saw the topic, I knew this quote was going to come up.
It's unfortunate, but I would like to see the context of where it actually comes from. Was Dijkstra talking about structured programming? OOP? Somehow I can't help but feel that the quote isn't complete or there is a background to it that hasn't been explained.
What BASIC and other simple programming languages (I would have to think that assembly language progamming comes under this umbrella as well) teach is the mindset needed for programming. They teach thinking about requirements, planning on instruction sequences, understanding conditional execution, etc. etc. etc.
To be fair, I can see where programmers would learn a lot language bending tricks to get their BASIC applications to work but these are simply rules to working with the (specific implementation of BASIC) language and platform. As structured and OO programming is taught, these tricks (and the thought process behind them) can be discussed and shown to be inappropriate for these environments.
This may be sacreligeous, but maybe the problem with Dijkstra not being able to teach students that already have experience with BASIC doesn't lie with BASIC...
myke
All Bill has to do is buy up one record label, one movie studio and one TV network. Maybe a book publisher for good measure. If he wanted to do it in one fell swoop, he could buy Disney.
Once he has them under his control, he can then offer their content under a single pricing model in which all of the content would be available anywhere in the home just by a clicking on a selection.
By doing this, the consumer has no need to buy, copy, sell, trade, etc. content and, as the content owner, the money just rolls in. Make the assumption that a household could only absorb, say 2,000 Hours per month of content, distribute royalties based on the percentage of time the consumer is accessing the material (or from the total number of hours and keep everything over 2,000 hours).
As for independent content developers, they could submit material to the network and get paid a royalty based on its popularity. This could spur on many more small projects like the "Blair Witch Projects" and "Clerks". Maybe music would become much more varied because just a few suits aren't deciding what gets played.
This creates a problem for the major content owners. Consumers are happy, producers and artists are (very) happy and Bill is not only an Entertainment God, he is richer than Him. So, they have no other choice but to offer their content to Bill for distribution on his network. They will get royalties for their material and hopefully a much larger customer base.
Everybody's happy?
Of course, I could be smoking something,
myke
I agree, this is a classic quote and does seem to sum up the attitude of the RIAA.
It reminded me of the famous two quotes by Alfred Hitchcock. When asked what he thought of actors, he said "they were like cattle". When asked to clarify his remark, he said he was misquoted, what he meant was "actors should be treated like cattle."
Maybe its time for some renegotiation of where everybody is in the food chain or, barring that, maybe some musicians should read "Animal Farm".
myke
Okay - TWO people noticed it back then.
myke
At the time, I seemed to be the only person in the world that noticed Microsoft paid $12 Million for a song with the chorus "You make a grown man cry..."
This was a satisfying counterbalance to the wait and the hype... (not to mention being surprisingly prescient)
myke
Nobody would argue that it is critical for companies to announce where they are going, both for developers and customers.
However, I have a big problem when a company says something exists or can do something when it doesn't. This is fraud.
I don't see any issue for noting on advertisements and product packaging that a product will be able to support a given feature with an expected firmware upgrade or additional feature/download/whatever. The Internet is ideal for telling customers what is happening with their product and when/how/where updates will be available which will add the missing features.
The carrot and stick for Vendors? I know that in my own case when I've bought something that didn't work as advertised, I make sure that people hear about the issues - while they sold one to a sucker (me), there is a net loss of all the people I can influence.
myke
The technology used in the Apollo Guidance Computers (GCs) were more a function of what their manufacturer (IBM) was comfortable with than what was available at the time. The GC's used IBM "Solid Logic Technology" (SLT) which was primarily a Resistor-Transistor Logic (RTL) technology in which discrete resistors and transistors were bonded to ceramic carriers which were then soldered to PCBs using traditional pin through hole manufacturing techniques. At the time, this was IBM's primary method of manufacturing computers (they did not start using integrated circuits in their computers until the early 1970s). IBM never gave up on SLT until the late 1980s.
The GCs read only memory consisted of a series of peg-boards into which the code was wire wrapped (by hand). There were 74,000, 16-bit instructions that could be programmed in this way. There was 4k iron-core memory in the computer. There were two GCs used in Apollo. The CSM one was responsible for leaving earth orbit, mid-course correction(s), entering lunar orbit, etc. The LM GC controlled descent and ascent as well as autopilot functions for lunar orbit docking. The computers ran the programs for these manuevers from ROM, but using astronaut input parameters using the "noun-verb" input methodology.
The software was actually very sophisticated and did not consist of simple control loops - joystick feedback was actually processed to ensure commands kept the spacecraft within limits. The most important parameter was keeping the antennae pointed at the Earth.
AFAIK, there are no space-qualified Intel built '486s. There are space-qualified computer systems with '486s in them, which may seem like semantics, but these systems typically employed multiple '486s, with bus operations and data continually compared to look for differences indicating upsets. This is a point that always confuses people because at one point IBM/NASA indicated the AP101 Block IIs had the same amount of power as a '486 - this seems to be misinterpreted as the AP101s have '486s built into them.
Half a lifetime ago, I helped with some hardware failure analysis for the IBM Orbiter Computer Systems Group (It was an intermittently failing memory board on STS-4) and I have to say that they were the most impressive software group that I have ever been associated with. They learned their skills with the Apollo CSM/LM GCs and Apollo Instrumentation Ring - you just don't make mistakes when the instructions are wire wrapped. The software engineers that worked on the shuttle software didn't have a problem with going with the (relatively) complex AP101s (originally designed for the B-1). Going from wire wrapped ROM to battery backed RAM was seen as a good thing, but it did not mean that the software development process changed in any way.
I'm trying to remember if there were two or three support binders for each module of software in which the requirements were clearly defined, the science and reference information provided, all calculations/constants defined to support the software binder. Coding is always the last thing that is done and only if the support binders are complete and signed off. This process is very expensive, but the software produced is essentially perfect (I believe that there has been one non-safety of flight software error in shuttle history and several hundred thousand lines of code). Complexity isn't the issue.
I think the issue is, is there a software development methodology/process that fits in with NASA's "smaller, better, cheaper" and produces the same quality as the Shuttle/Apollo?
myke
I've had an iRiver iFP-395TC for about three months now ( http://www.iriveramerica.com). It is an 512MB MP3 player with FM receiver/recorder and memo recorder.
The higher end of the iFP line has these features with varying amounts of Flash. Memos and recordings can be uploaded into a PC. It doesn't have a "pause" feature, like you would want on a "PAR". I've been using it to record "The House of Blues" on the weekend and then listen to it at my desk at work.
Nice box and I highly recommend it. Too bad its so hard to find (rumour has it Best Buy stocks different models of the iFP line but I have never seen them in stock). I ended up buying mine directly from iRiver.
myke
The impression that I am getting (from this article as well as others) is that intuitively the engineers didn't think the foam collision could cause any damage. I haven't seen anything written indicating that there was any past history with pieces of foam striking the leading edge of the orbiter's wings. I have seen articles indicating that foam has struck the underside tiles and damaged one of the landing gear doors and while the tiles were damaged, none in such a way that the shuttle was ever in danger.
I would think that the line of thinking was, when the foam separated, it was moving at the same speed as the shuttle itself. Since the shuttle, at time of impact was at 50,000+ feet, the force of air drag on the foam would be negligible and the piece of foam would approximately maintain its speed.
I seem to remember that it is about 30 feet from the bipod to where the foam struck the orbiter's leading edge, so assuming that the foam travels at approximately the same velocity as when it came off and the shuttle was accellerating at 2.5 Gs, it would take about 1.4 seconds for the foam to hit the leading edge. Using these assumptions, the velocity of the foam at impact, relative to the leading edge, would be 110 ft/sec or roughly 75 mph.
This doesn't sound too bad - after all, it's foam. Getting hit by a Nerf football that has been thrown hard by somebody close by stings, but it won't break bones or even come close to breaking the skin. If you don't think it could do more than bruise you, then it would be hard to accept that the carbon-carbon leading edge of the orbiter could be damaged.
I think that this was the level of intuitive analysis that was done. Unfortunately, it wasn't backed up by any kind of quantitative analysis using known facts (such as estimating the speed of the impact from the film and checking it against the intuitive speed of impact) to test whether or not there were grounds for concern.
myke
I would think he would just ask for his piece of the assction.
myke
I just can't wait for McCall to take their lead from Madonna and put on the Internet some of their own "designs" to help thwart pirating of their intellectual property.
The whole pattern pirating industry would be shut down in an instant as soon as some grandmother that downloaded a pattern called "Playful Kittens" and spent hours stitching it out, ended up with a pillow that says "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"
myke
This is why when people complain about the plots of the prequels, I take them with a grain of salt. We know what's going to happen - I doubt that there are going to be any great surprises.
It's Saturday afternoon kids' fare - so don't worry about the story, just sit back and be amazed by the effects.
myke
Is it just me or does it look like there is a) a dead body washing up or b) a frogman infiltrating using a rock for cover on the beach in the lower left of the image?
In either case, the taking of the picture is much less of a concern than what's in it.
myke
I graduated in 1985 and at the time, I was appalled at the number of my fellow students had never picked up a soldering iron before (although one woman had when she did some stained glass). I can't count the number of graduates I have seen over the past 18 years that didn't know how to create a simple test circuit to save their lives. This is analogous to a doctor graduating without ever touching a patience while at school - would you want to be looked after by somebody that just used text books and computer simulations?
From the student perspective, I've never understood how somebody could enroll in something like Electrical Engineering without actually having built a circuit before. To any prospective students: This is for the rest of your life - why don't you see if you are actually interested in it?
Sorry, but I'm tired of explaining how an oscilloscope works to recent grads with a GP of 4.0.
myke