I think what you're trying to point out is that the TFS is misleading, if the submitter intended to imply that interferometry improves both aperture and resolution. With interferometry, of course, one gets the resolution of the baseline (in this case 130m), but the aperture remains the same as the telescopes themselves. Meaning that one can improve the resolution of images, but not their sensitivity -- the light photons that fall onto the ground between the telescopes are still lost, whether or not interferometry is being used.
The women on the assembly line could not grasp why you would stick a bolt in upside down.
H'mm. Referring to the assembly line person who put the bolt in incorrectly, my version of the book says "Nobody told him how many pilots he had killed."
I was going to write this scathing comment about Internet illiteracy, when another comment in this thread had me look up the Wikipedia entry for Emperor Norton I. There I read:
The 1870 U.S. census lists Joshua Norton as 50 years old and residing at 624 Commercial Street; his occupation was "Emporer" [sic].
So it seems there is precedent for this error, if not the occupation. No word on "assinated," "toght," or "talke," though.
Well, one thing's for sure: The film is going to be very good, or very bad. I can't imagine seeing a combined CGI-and-live-action sci-fi film with substantially all of the Python crew, plus Robin William's voice for "a wry talking dog named Dennis," and walking out unmoved one way or the other.
It seems the idea of actually writing good, fast, and power efficient code is a dying art
Boy, give this guy a gold star. Exactly for the reason he states (most people today learn programming by programming for desktop computers), finding a good embedded software person for battery-powered, portable applications is becoming a unicorn search.
Every time I hear someone say that they're burned out on software, and can't stand the thought of writing another line of server or game or PC code, I always suggest a change of venue from desktop to embedded software -- a change that, once (s)he adapts to the realities of life on a AAA or hearing-aid battery, will typically take a programmer from project commodity to project savior.
2 years is typically more than enough to bring that idea to market
Yeah, but that's not what you said. You said, "That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market." Bringing that idea to market is only the beginning. Recouping your R&D costs, and successfully competing against entrenched multinational corporations, after entering the market is the difficult part to do in two years.
Dyson has been hugely successful despite not having a patent stopping competitors from copying
Oh, no -- he has many patents stopping competitors from copying his products -- in fact, he won US$5 million from Hoover in a patent infringement case. The point is, his patents have forced his competitors to innovate, and produce different products, that do not read on his patents, thereby giving consumers more choice, and improving the state of the art.
If the answer is one to two years then that is probably the lead time on designing a good product in that sector even when you are reverse engineering the design. That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market.
Go in business for yourself, try to do all this in 24 months, succeed, then come back and say it's "enough time." Otherwise . . . recall that Dyson has been working on the cyclonic vacuum idea since the late 1970s, and introduced his first cyclonic vacuum in 1983. He's been at it a while. Two years' lead time? Pfft.
Besides, why shouldn't somebody be able to compete on innovation and better ways to do things? Why should everyone be "forced to compete on quality, value, and other traditional differentiators"? Personally, I like new, improved ways of doing things, and besides, isn't innovation a traditional differentiator, anyway?
Don't forget that Dyson neither invented nor patented the basic cyclonic separation principle used in his vacuums. It's an old idea, and hasn't been under patent protection for many decades; many other companies were free to implement the idea once Dyson showed that there was a market for it. He did patent some variations, in particular, "a vacuum cleaning appliance compris[ing] a lower efficiency cyclone unit and a high efficiency cyclone unit connected in series [that] enables both large and fine dirt particles to be dealt with." However, none of these patents seem to be constricting the market, since today at least five other major manufacturers make cyclonic vacuum cleaners for home use.
Reverse engineering is always trivial, compared to engineering from scratch. The tricks on engineering from scratch are (a) working on the right problem in the first place; (b) convincing yourself that the problem does, in fact, have a solution; (c) finding the solution; and (d) getting the solution into the market. Holding someone else's innovation in your hand does parts (a) through (c) for you; all you have to do is (d).
Aurora occur in rings centered on the magnetic poles, not at the magnetic poles themselves. As activity intensifies, the radius of these rings increases, in parallel with lines of geomagnetic latitude, but even in periods of very low solar activity their radius never goes to near zero -- meaning, there are few aurora near the magnetic poles themselves.
My brother-in-law is a film director, and this subject makes up the bulk of the family Thanksgiving dinner discussions every year.
My position is that Hollywood alienates a large fraction of the potential movie-going public with such inaccuracies: The IT guys give up in disgust from the computer inaccuracies in the first scene, the airplane pilots from the aviation inaccuracies in the second scene, the gardeners from the floral inaccuracies in the third scene, until finally the only people left to watch the film are 12-year-olds, who don't know anything to be disgusted from. As proof of my position I note that the largest demographic of most major films is young teens.
My brother responds that the film industry is the perfect example of the Darwinian process of natural selection, and that if the studios could make more money from "accurate" films than from the kind they shoot today, they would in a heartbeat.
As to "corrupting a purer art form": competitive fencing and fencing that looks good on film (to non-fencers) are completely different animals.
Yes, but that's my question -- they are completely different animals. Did it bother him that he couldn't choreograph a competitive fencing example for the screen, but instead had to have people quite literally swing from the rafters to get the mass public to watch?
I only ask because there are many fields -- IT being one of them -- in which the cinematic version is markedly different from the "real" version. Many of us, I think, if asked by a Hollywood film director to establish an IT character for the screen, would be troubled by the changes from real life needed for the film -- white lab coats and nutty screen displays being just two that come to mind.
From your description, it sounds like Bob could do so without apparent effort; it would be nice to understand his reasoning so that I could, for example, enjoy the next Hollywood blockbuster without throwing my hands up in disgust part-way through at the technical inaccuracies.
It would be interesting to know what he considered to be his greatest professional achievement -- something he did in films, or representing Britain in the 1952 Olympics (where he finished around the median in the Men's Individual Sabre competition, and was on Britain's Men's Sabre Team, which finished tied for fifth place). Or maybe something else.
Did he view his cinema work positively (e.g., in that he was "bringing fencing to the masses, who otherwise would never see it," or some such), or did he view the work as corrupting a purer art form, that he had to do to support his family? It would be interesting to have heard his thoughts on the matter.
My brother went through this. The crack in the wall turned out to be a software testing position at a defense contractor. There, his military experience was seen as an advantage (knowing how the customer thought and worked), and his lack of recent code experience not a liability: He didn't have the same groupthink as the younger guys who wrote the code, and therefore was a better tester.
Once in, he was able to advance rapidly into other positions inside the company, and eventually the industry as a whole.
What even a modest carrier can do in the near term caught the Chinese by surprise in early 2005,when they watched in horror as Indian and Japanese carriers conducted post-tsunami relief operations. Thus, in reconceptualizing the PLAN carrier, China’s two potential role models—and competitors—are not the United States and the former Soviet Union but rather India and Japan. [Andrew S. Erickson and Andrew R.Wilson, "China's aircraft carrier dilemma," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2006, Vol. 59, No. 4, p. 36.]
Would that this were true -- it would be nice to see countries build military weapons platforms to compete with each other to provide the best humanitarian assistance possible. [/pollyanna] However. . . .
No, back in the day it was exactly the opposite. Everyone was totally focused on one goal -- getting to the Moon by 31 December 1969. Since neither the task at hand nor the time to complete it were changing, plenty of people were hired and plenty of money was spent, to be sure, but that situation also meant that any bureaucratic baloney was ignored, sidestepped, or waived. People's reputations were on the line, and nobody wanted to be part of the group/division/company/organization that kept the country from reaching the moon first. Whoever was deemed responsible for that could look forward to a lifetime of testimony before congressional investigative committees, not to mention the nation on a never-ending series of Walter Cronkite prime time Special Reports.
Not to mention not being able to get another job in your profession for the rest of your life. Being Steve Bartman would be a step up.
After 1973, however, NASA was a different entity. When a pie is growing, as NASA was in the 1960s, nobody bothers to erect any bureaucratic fences, since there's plenty of work for everyone. When the pie shrinks, however, people start trying to stake out their remaining territory, and the end is near.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what you're trying to point out is that the TFS is misleading, if the submitter intended to imply that interferometry improves both aperture and resolution. With interferometry, of course, one gets the resolution of the baseline (in this case 130m), but the aperture remains the same as the telescopes themselves. Meaning that one can improve the resolution of images, but not their sensitivity -- the light photons that fall onto the ground between the telescopes are still lost, whether or not interferometry is being used.
The women on the assembly line could not grasp why you would stick a bolt in upside down.
H'mm. Referring to the assembly line person who put the bolt in incorrectly, my version of the book says "Nobody told him how many pilots he had killed."
What, btw, is an emporer?
I was going to write this scathing comment about Internet illiteracy, when another comment in this thread had me look up the Wikipedia entry for Emperor Norton I. There I read:
The 1870 U.S. census lists Joshua Norton as 50 years old and residing at 624 Commercial Street; his occupation was "Emporer" [sic].
So it seems there is precedent for this error, if not the occupation. No word on "assinated," "toght," or "talke," though.
Well, one thing's for sure: The film is going to be very good, or very bad. I can't imagine seeing a combined CGI-and-live-action sci-fi film with substantially all of the Python crew, plus Robin William's voice for "a wry talking dog named Dennis," and walking out unmoved one way or the other.
Um, no. J.C.R. Licklider.
I think the submitter copied the typo in the title of this blog. But really! It's not like he's some unknown guy.
It seems the idea of actually writing good, fast, and power efficient code is a dying art
Boy, give this guy a gold star. Exactly for the reason he states (most people today learn programming by programming for desktop computers), finding a good embedded software person for battery-powered, portable applications is becoming a unicorn search.
Every time I hear someone say that they're burned out on software, and can't stand the thought of writing another line of server or game or PC code, I always suggest a change of venue from desktop to embedded software -- a change that, once (s)he adapts to the realities of life on a AAA or hearing-aid battery, will typically take a programmer from project commodity to project savior.
when the college's data security monitoring service finally detected an unusual pattern of computer traffic. . .
FTFY.
I sit corrected. Thanks.
2 years is typically more than enough to bring that idea to market
Yeah, but that's not what you said. You said, "That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market." Bringing that idea to market is only the beginning. Recouping your R&D costs, and successfully competing against entrenched multinational corporations, after entering the market is the difficult part to do in two years.
Dyson has been hugely successful despite not having a patent stopping competitors from copying
Oh, no -- he has many patents stopping competitors from copying his products -- in fact, he won US$5 million from Hoover in a patent infringement case. The point is, his patents have forced his competitors to innovate, and produce different products, that do not read on his patents, thereby giving consumers more choice, and improving the state of the art.
If the answer is one to two years then that is probably the lead time on designing a good product in that sector even when you are reverse engineering the design. That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market.
Go in business for yourself, try to do all this in 24 months, succeed, then come back and say it's "enough time." Otherwise . . . recall that Dyson has been working on the cyclonic vacuum idea since the late 1970s, and introduced his first cyclonic vacuum in 1983. He's been at it a while. Two years' lead time? Pfft.
Besides, why shouldn't somebody be able to compete on innovation and better ways to do things? Why should everyone be "forced to compete on quality, value, and other traditional differentiators"? Personally, I like new, improved ways of doing things, and besides, isn't innovation a traditional differentiator, anyway?
Don't forget that Dyson neither invented nor patented the basic cyclonic separation principle used in his vacuums. It's an old idea, and hasn't been under patent protection for many decades; many other companies were free to implement the idea once Dyson showed that there was a market for it. He did patent some variations, in particular, "a vacuum cleaning appliance compris[ing] a lower efficiency cyclone unit and a high efficiency cyclone unit connected in series [that] enables both large and fine dirt particles to be dealt with." However, none of these patents seem to be constricting the market, since today at least five other major manufacturers make cyclonic vacuum cleaners for home use.
Reverse engineering is always trivial, compared to engineering from scratch. The tricks on engineering from scratch are (a) working on the right problem in the first place; (b) convincing yourself that the problem does, in fact, have a solution; (c) finding the solution; and (d) getting the solution into the market. Holding someone else's innovation in your hand does parts (a) through (c) for you; all you have to do is (d).
and you don't have to deal with crossing the North Atlantic.
Well . . . from some places. Getting to Scandinavia from North America without crossing the North Atlantic would be quite an ordeal.
Aurora occur in rings centered on the magnetic poles, not at the magnetic poles themselves. As activity intensifies, the radius of these rings increases, in parallel with lines of geomagnetic latitude, but even in periods of very low solar activity their radius never goes to near zero -- meaning, there are few aurora near the magnetic poles themselves.
My brother-in-law is a film director, and this subject makes up the bulk of the family Thanksgiving dinner discussions every year.
My position is that Hollywood alienates a large fraction of the potential movie-going public with such inaccuracies: The IT guys give up in disgust from the computer inaccuracies in the first scene, the airplane pilots from the aviation inaccuracies in the second scene, the gardeners from the floral inaccuracies in the third scene, until finally the only people left to watch the film are 12-year-olds, who don't know anything to be disgusted from. As proof of my position I note that the largest demographic of most major films is young teens.
My brother responds that the film industry is the perfect example of the Darwinian process of natural selection, and that if the studios could make more money from "accurate" films than from the kind they shoot today, they would in a heartbeat.
And he's probably right.
As are you.
Yes, but that's my question -- they are completely different animals. Did it bother him that he couldn't choreograph a competitive fencing example for the screen, but instead had to have people quite literally swing from the rafters to get the mass public to watch?
I only ask because there are many fields -- IT being one of them -- in which the cinematic version is markedly different from the "real" version. Many of us, I think, if asked by a Hollywood film director to establish an IT character for the screen, would be troubled by the changes from real life needed for the film -- white lab coats and nutty screen displays being just two that come to mind.
From your description, it sounds like Bob could do so without apparent effort; it would be nice to understand his reasoning so that I could, for example, enjoy the next Hollywood blockbuster without throwing my hands up in disgust part-way through at the technical inaccuracies.
It would be interesting to know what he considered to be his greatest professional achievement -- something he did in films, or representing Britain in the 1952 Olympics (where he finished around the median in the Men's Individual Sabre competition, and was on Britain's Men's Sabre Team, which finished tied for fifth place). Or maybe something else.
Did he view his cinema work positively (e.g., in that he was "bringing fencing to the masses, who otherwise would never see it," or some such), or did he view the work as corrupting a purer art form, that he had to do to support his family? It would be interesting to have heard his thoughts on the matter.
My brother went through this. The crack in the wall turned out to be a software testing position at a defense contractor. There, his military experience was seen as an advantage (knowing how the customer thought and worked), and his lack of recent code experience not a liability: He didn't have the same groupthink as the younger guys who wrote the code, and therefore was a better tester.
Once in, he was able to advance rapidly into other positions inside the company, and eventually the industry as a whole.
For once, a CEO thought beyond the next quarterly report. Be careful what you complain about.
Quite true. See Figure 1.
Nah -- this was Morse code. The DMCA itself applies.
Yeah. My dad came home shattered, like his own parents had died. Stared at the walls.
People are hired in June, after graduating, and after company introductions their first code is completed in September?
we could have easily landed on the moon with Apollo 1, no testing, just go.
Although development of the LEM wasn't ready until Apollo 5 (22 January 1968). The LEM was on the critical path for the Apollo program.
Fuel oil.
What even a modest carrier can do in the near term caught the Chinese by surprise in early 2005,when they watched in horror as Indian and Japanese carriers conducted post-tsunami relief operations. Thus, in reconceptualizing the PLAN carrier, China’s two potential role models—and competitors—are not the United States and the former Soviet Union but rather India and Japan. [Andrew S. Erickson and Andrew R.Wilson, "China's aircraft carrier dilemma," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2006, Vol. 59, No. 4, p. 36.]
Would that this were true -- it would be nice to see countries build military weapons platforms to compete with each other to provide the best humanitarian assistance possible. [/pollyanna] However. . . .
No, back in the day it was exactly the opposite. Everyone was totally focused on one goal -- getting to the Moon by 31 December 1969. Since neither the task at hand nor the time to complete it were changing, plenty of people were hired and plenty of money was spent, to be sure, but that situation also meant that any bureaucratic baloney was ignored, sidestepped, or waived. People's reputations were on the line, and nobody wanted to be part of the group/division/company/organization that kept the country from reaching the moon first. Whoever was deemed responsible for that could look forward to a lifetime of testimony before congressional investigative committees, not to mention the nation on a never-ending series of Walter Cronkite prime time Special Reports.
Not to mention not being able to get another job in your profession for the rest of your life. Being Steve Bartman would be a step up.
After 1973, however, NASA was a different entity. When a pie is growing, as NASA was in the 1960s, nobody bothers to erect any bureaucratic fences, since there's plenty of work for everyone. When the pie shrinks, however, people start trying to stake out their remaining territory, and the end is near.