Farnsworth did get license money from RCA. RCA did its best to write him out of the history of TV, and he spent a lot of time at oblivion thereafter. After selling out most of his interests in TV, Farnsworth got to work on something called the Farnsworth Fusor, or something like that. Supposed to be nuclear fusion in a bottle, or something like that. Some of them are still used in labs, but they don't have any high-value commercial applications, as far as is known.
A Russian presented a paper back in 1909 that pretty well outlined how modern TV would work.
Baird invented (mechanical) TV. Farnsworth got credit for electronic TV. EMI came out with 405 line TV in England in 1936; RCA topped them soon after in the US with 441 lines. The British system succeeded sooner because the British government was expecting a war and subsidized development of TV (broadcasting in England being government controlled) so that development of high-frequency + high-power RF tubes, antennas, and know-how would be accelerated to help their national defense. The British investment worked and helped development of early radar, which was very important. But the Germans, who had the worst pre-war TV system, had the best early radars, and the klystron, which made much better radar possible, was invented in the US in 1937.
No. The 1936 RCA system was 100% electronic. Zworkin came up with the idea of the iconoscope in 1923, and CRT tubes were available to hobbyists in the 1930's, too. (A 3-inch tube cost about a month's wages) The Baird system in England was mechanical. There were only two significant mechanical TV systems in the US. One was sold mail-order by an American ham who was transmitting slow-scan pictures on his amateur station in the 1920's. He got shut down for promoting a commercial business with his amateur station. The second was the CBS color system, which was the first color TV on the air in the US in early 1950. It was used for only a brief trial, and it worked very well to produce a small color picture, but there were virtually no receivers for this system (one spinning wheel with three colored sections) in the hands of the public. The US got involved in the Korean war right about the time of the initial test, and ex-general Sarnoff used his political connections to get the government to declare a moratorium on color TV in the name of the war effort. This gave Sarnoff the time to browbeat his geeks into developing the poor but much-better-than-it-ought-to-be system that we still use.
The color wheel has been used successfully in the movie business in recent years. Digitally produced movies are made by taking pictures of computer graphics on a CRT. The highest resolution (closest to theatre film resolution) CRT's are black and white. A color wheel has been used to add color to some of these movies, and it doesn't have to run at real-time speeds to create the film.
The 525-line standard for TV transmissions in the
US was not put in place until the end of 1941. The number of lines per image for the original iconoscope was 240 and images per second (sometime
around 1936 RCA went up to 441 lines) might have been low enough that the total video bandwidth was around 1 MHz. WCAU (mentioned in another message) was a Farnsworth station, and Farnsworth and RCA were (intense) competitors at that time, so the technoloby would not necessarily have been very similar. Farnsworth had turned down an offer to sell out to RCA. Frequency was probably 30-40 MHz. Four years later, RCA agreed to license Farnsworth's technology and pay him royalties. His were the only patents for which RCA ever agreed to pay royalties. They got everything else they needed either through reciprocal licensing or by buying out those who were afraid to compete with them. The mention of the iconoscope suggests that this was before Zworkin's image orthicon, which was RCA's great contribution to TV.
http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_timeline . tm
We knew that intellectual activity was increasing according to an exponential curve, but useful and true information was increasing only linearly. This means that the useful and true information becomes a very small fraction of what is available in the information age. The internet makes this obvious. For any crackpot idea, be it a religion, a pseudo-science health fad or swindle, extremist political party, a conspiracy theory, or an ineffable New Age world view, you will find ten sites in favor for every one opposed.
You may find this frustrating. I can read my
dashboard, but it takes several seconds for my
eyes to adjust to dash distance from road distance. I couldn't possibly think about fighting with a UI like that.
BTW, the UIs for autos were not standardized in their current form very early on. I got the explanation how to drive a 1920 Ford truck a couple of weeks ago. These were very strange to the modern driver. I'm not sure if anything besides the steering wheel was in the same place as it is on typical cars of today. I think there was a brake pedal, but it was rightmost. Other pedals did different things to the gears, but there were assorted levers involved in gear-shifting, too. So, it takes time for these things to get worked out. Nowadays, that means thousands of lawsuits while things get worked out.
HP used to have engineers in the sales department for its minicomputers, etc. They would help the customers figure out what to buy, what connected to what, how to put together and order, how to check on when it was coming, how to modify the order while it was still in the works, etc. It was insanely complicated, but with engineers holding the customers hands, it was successful. Then, they decided that the market was too competitive to have engineers out selling. They cut out all the marketing engineers, but they didn't simplify the system. The customers were loyal, but they had one complaint, they couldn't figure out what to order, how to order it, when it would show up, or what else they would need. That was quite a blow to a successful business.
That's about when they started with all this abrasive-in-the-toner crap and microchip in the ink ribbon kind of silliness. Any business that treats customers like captives instead of customers is circling the bowl. It may take a generation to go down the tube, but it will.
Now that three lawyers get involved with everything a coder touches, it is regrettably likely that coders will wind up being named as defendants and codefendants in various lawsuits if they do anything questionable. You can easily see PHB's dodging responsibility by saying "We never told him to do _that_." If it's just a lawsuit, you can probably feel safe if you have a written spec signed by your boss and it hasn't gone into the shredder. A coder should have some right to request a written spec signed by the boss, which you don't. But even if you do, you don't have the right to take a copy off premises, do you? And if some lawyer or prosecutor takes a more aggressive position and spins your work into a criminal or DMCA violation, now what? What happy coder boy has money to defend crap like that? Look at Skylarov and Randall Schwartz for examples of guys who got their pocket protectors caught in the legal machinery. I assure you this is a game of chance. Who'll be the next to try their skill?
Abiword is mentioned as one piece of quality software. I use it, but now only to read new word docs that my MS-Office 95 can't read. Why? Last time I tried to print a 2-page letter with Abiword, it came out on 3 pages. First page and last page were just about normal, except that the
middle page contained just 1 line that should have
come out on the first page but didn't quite fit. I was using a popular HP printer, so it wasn't oddball equipment. The Abiword site admits that they are small and of limited capabilities vs the bigger vendors of WP software. What they have done is very good for a small team, but why make a poster child out of something that is only a usually adequate second choice? The hassles of one document screwed up like mine just about cancel all the savings of going to a free package for one desktop in a large business.
Four years ago, the difficulties of debugging STL under gcc (djgpp) was one major factor that killed
a project I was on. Maybe it's better now.
The ugliness of the generated code is also a minus. You can write C++ like a COBOL programmer, as I do, eg, useLongTypeNamesLikeThisOne. When you try to use an iterator for an STL collection of those buggers, you've got 3/4 of a lethal dose of ugly.
Overall, I recommend STL strongly without reservations -- it stringently abates the lines of code -- but it's gotta work or you're hurting. Find someone who has successfully done something like what you want to do and copy their style with it.
I'm past 50. It isn't paying off too well for me. I've been in management, but only implementing, managing, and consulting in a declining industry, and because I worked 30 years in the same industry, other industries don't want me. I was always ahead of the curve, advocating things like relational databases, SQL, perl, etc, etc, before anyone else in my industry was ready to accept them. Now the industry is dead, the job market is dead, and I'm too old to find much to do.
I see these trends:(1) more offshore work, (2)much more packaged software instead of homegrown application development by businesses,(3)more use of Excel and similar instead of homegrown application development by businesses, (4) perpetual stream of new buzzwords from vendors looking for sales angles in a saturated market (entry into the software market is pretty cheap).
The buzzwords give you a choice -- either (a) invest 25% of your time forever trying to stay up-to-date, or (b) make some decent money applying what you already know and plan to find another profession in a few years. I went option (b), and I'm in a predicament for sure.
The buzzwords are death to me. Much of software is pretty easy, point and click. That's what all the products are, point and click with integrated help. The learning curve can't possibly be more than a week for someone with a grasp of the underlying concepts. (I'm talking development, not system administration or database administration and tuning here, I know those do have a learning curve) If you can manage a project with one project management tool, you can probably do it with most of the others. If you can design a database with one data modeling program, or even with a pencil and paper, you can probably do it with most of the data modeling programs.
But look at the job postings; most of them want 2, 3, or five years experience with 6-20 specific tools (and often specific versions of those tools). That's why 80% lie on their resumes, I suppose -- very few will have the exact combination any of these jobs requires. I guess they figure that the young guys can learn and they will make exceptions for someone young and eager, but old and eager is not a combination that anyone can even imagine to exist. I've had two interviews recently in which I was told that the company was expecting to hire someone younger and I was asked why they should hire an old guy instead of a young guy. This is illegal, but they do it.
Keep your buzzwords up to date and be a manager before you are 30.
Washington County ESD covers Hillsboro. They were one of the first to go all Windows, all the time. It would be a sorry stab in the back for MS to go after Washington County ESD after their ESD network guy bragged so much about how he was succeeding at managing a network connecting every math and science teacher who was a self-appointed computer expert from the West Hills of Portland out to the coast by requiring all things MS. The ESD refused to support anything else from back around ten years ago. Intel is in Hillsboro and they are generous with hardware, IIRC. And Hillsboro does have some full-time hardware and network management, so they might not be as fubared of software licenses as Portland.
Compared to the way that Portland taxpayers got screwed by M$ #2 shareholder, Paul Allen, richest team owner of the NBA. The year we spent around $100 million to build him a new basketball arena, we fired about 100 teachers. So another million bucks and ten more teachers, what's new?
He told us that he couldn't afford to build his own arena, but he found a way to buy up the land around the arena that we built.
We get a sorry return on that investment in his sports team. Besides this Windows software, he imports to Portland a frequently disgraceful bunch of athletes to amuse himself. His big acquisition this year was a convicted sex offender. They've had about three with notorious drug problems over the past few years, one found in bed with a 14-year old girl, and many reckless driving problems, including one who flips a Mercedes on the freeway at 100+ MPH and another with a 95 MPH ticket. (There is no place near Portland where that's safe.) Well, his company is a convicted anti-trust violator, so what do you expect, good character? Compassionate marketing? When our kids have role models like that, why bother educating them at all?
Not only is the current superintendent ousted, all of the candidates to replace him have withdrawn. Nobody wants the job. The school system is such a financially-starved tragedy. Class size will be up around 40 in my daughter's high school next year, even without this hickey.
I don't know if they can nail the ESD for computers found in Portland Public Schools, however. The ESD is an Educational Services District, it just gives services to the school districts within its range. Portland has its own school district that gets some services from the ESD, but the people who donated computers probably thought that they were giving them to their kid's school, not to the ESD. It's all very confusing. Portland has allowed parents of kids in particular schools to donate to that particular school so that teachers aren't fired, plumbing is repaired, etc.
You can't just roll in linux and tell MS to drop dead, it would be way too big a mess. There is educational software paid for, and many of the teachers do presentations on Powerpoint on home PC's. They won't figure out how to make those talk on Linux, no way. It would be a tremendous disruption in the middle of the year. School ends in about six weeks. If they can stall until then and then switch over the summer, that would be better. But MS doesn't seem to be leaving any middle ground -- it's either pay or get audited. The only other option is to pitch all the computers out of the schools instanter.
The schools in Oregon do likely take some liberties in licensing. I've seen one school district where the computer in the office boots NT with the name of the school district 30 miles down the road on the login screen. But with no money in a cash-starved community and only 85 kids in the district, that's about what you'd expect, I guess. Oregon has much in common with the third world sometimes.
I was always aghast over the past few years when the PTA had MS sales reps come to meetings and gave us the hard-but-slick sell on MS software. Here's the payback for that.
The government agencies are overloaded with resumes since they started posting on-line. They don't have adequate staff to evealuate all the applicants. They are screening by buzzword bingo just like all the private sector employers.
Most (ca 95%) of the government tech jobs open are in defense-related areas and with the DoD being the biggest poster of jobs. If you are out in the boondocks (more than 100 miles from DC) with no big military base around, not much chance of a good local job with the feds for you.
Note that this job fair is for applicants around DC or for applicants who figure that they can relocate anywhere and often.
The Bush Administration is also trying to cut government employment by using a process called "competitive sourcing", because it is a good way of replacing unionized federal employees with non-union private sector wage earners. (Union employees seem to vote Democratic all the time, you know.) Competitive sourcing goes back over 40 years, but it is now being cranked up more aggressively. Competitive sourcing means that government employees have to write up their own jobs as if they were up for bids, because they are, and then bid on them in competition with private contractors. About half the time the private contractors win and the government employees lose their jobs or get offered a new job at a different "location nationwide". Currently, the entire Interior Department is scheduled to go through competive sourcing procedures over the next two years, so not all federal government jobs come with the job security that many people associate with joining a bureaucracy.
In addition, the old "double dip" benefits to those who spent part of their career in the government and part in private industry (being covered by and getting separate pensions from both Civil Service retirement and Social Security) have been eliminated by coordinating the benefits from the two plans. You might know some retirees who are very happily receiving the double dip, but it doesn't happen anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
The story about Sarnoff and the Titanic is a myth, a legend out of the mind of ... Sarnoff.
Farnsworth did get license money from RCA. RCA did its best to write him out of the history of TV, and he spent a lot of time at oblivion thereafter. After selling out most of his interests in TV, Farnsworth got to work on something called the Farnsworth Fusor, or something like that. Supposed to be nuclear fusion in a bottle, or something like that. Some of them are still used in labs, but they don't have any high-value commercial applications, as far as is known.
A Russian presented a paper back in 1909 that pretty well outlined how modern TV would work. Baird invented (mechanical) TV. Farnsworth got credit for electronic TV. EMI came out with 405 line TV in England in 1936; RCA topped them soon after in the US with 441 lines. The British system succeeded sooner because the British government was expecting a war and subsidized development of TV (broadcasting in England being government controlled) so that development of high-frequency + high-power RF tubes, antennas, and know-how would be accelerated to help their national defense. The British investment worked and helped development of early radar, which was very important. But the Germans, who had the worst pre-war TV system, had the best early radars, and the klystron, which made much better radar possible, was invented in the US in 1937.
The color wheel has been used successfully in the movie business in recent years. Digitally produced movies are made by taking pictures of computer graphics on a CRT. The highest resolution (closest to theatre film resolution) CRT's are black and white. A color wheel has been used to add color to some of these movies, and it doesn't have to run at real-time speeds to create the film.
The 525-line standard for TV transmissions in the US was not put in place until the end of 1941. The number of lines per image for the original iconoscope was 240 and images per second (sometime around 1936 RCA went up to 441 lines) might have been low enough that the total video bandwidth was around 1 MHz. WCAU (mentioned in another message) was a Farnsworth station, and Farnsworth and RCA were (intense) competitors at that time, so the technoloby would not necessarily have been very similar. Farnsworth had turned down an offer to sell out to RCA. Frequency was probably 30-40 MHz. Four years later, RCA agreed to license Farnsworth's technology and pay him royalties. His were the only patents for which RCA ever agreed to pay royalties. They got everything else they needed either through reciprocal licensing or by buying out those who were afraid to compete with them. The mention of the iconoscope suggests that this was before Zworkin's image orthicon, which was RCA's great contribution to TV. http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_timeline . tm
We knew that intellectual activity was increasing according to an exponential curve, but useful and true information was increasing only linearly. This means that the useful and true information becomes a very small fraction of what is available in the information age. The internet makes this obvious. For any crackpot idea, be it a religion, a pseudo-science health fad or swindle, extremist political party, a conspiracy theory, or an ineffable New Age world view, you will find ten sites in favor for every one opposed.
BTW, the UIs for autos were not standardized in their current form very early on. I got the explanation how to drive a 1920 Ford truck a couple of weeks ago. These were very strange to the modern driver. I'm not sure if anything besides the steering wheel was in the same place as it is on typical cars of today. I think there was a brake pedal, but it was rightmost. Other pedals did different things to the gears, but there were assorted levers involved in gear-shifting, too. So, it takes time for these things to get worked out. Nowadays, that means thousands of lawsuits while things get worked out.
That's about when they started with all this abrasive-in-the-toner crap and microchip in the ink ribbon kind of silliness. Any business that treats customers like captives instead of customers is circling the bowl. It may take a generation to go down the tube, but it will.
Now that three lawyers get involved with everything a coder touches, it is regrettably likely that coders will wind up being named as defendants and codefendants in various lawsuits if they do anything questionable. You can easily see PHB's dodging responsibility by saying "We never told him to do _that_." If it's just a lawsuit, you can probably feel safe if you have a written spec signed by your boss and it hasn't gone into the shredder. A coder should have some right to request a written spec signed by the boss, which you don't. But even if you do, you don't have the right to take a copy off premises, do you? And if some lawyer or prosecutor takes a more aggressive position and spins your work into a criminal or DMCA violation, now what? What happy coder boy has money to defend crap like that? Look at Skylarov and Randall Schwartz for examples of guys who got their pocket protectors caught in the legal machinery. I assure you this is a game of chance. Who'll be the next to try their skill?
Abiword is mentioned as one piece of quality software. I use it, but now only to read new word docs that my MS-Office 95 can't read. Why? Last time I tried to print a 2-page letter with Abiword, it came out on 3 pages. First page and last page were just about normal, except that the middle page contained just 1 line that should have come out on the first page but didn't quite fit. I was using a popular HP printer, so it wasn't oddball equipment. The Abiword site admits that they are small and of limited capabilities vs the bigger vendors of WP software. What they have done is very good for a small team, but why make a poster child out of something that is only a usually adequate second choice? The hassles of one document screwed up like mine just about cancel all the savings of going to a free package for one desktop in a large business.
The ugliness of the generated code is also a minus. You can write C++ like a COBOL programmer, as I do, eg, useLongTypeNamesLikeThisOne. When you try to use an iterator for an STL collection of those buggers, you've got 3/4 of a lethal dose of ugly.
Overall, I recommend STL strongly without reservations -- it stringently abates the lines of code -- but it's gotta work or you're hurting. Find someone who has successfully done something like what you want to do and copy their style with it.
I see these trends:(1) more offshore work, (2)much more packaged software instead of homegrown application development by businesses,(3)more use of Excel and similar instead of homegrown application development by businesses, (4) perpetual stream of new buzzwords from vendors looking for sales angles in a saturated market (entry into the software market is pretty cheap).
The buzzwords give you a choice -- either (a) invest 25% of your time forever trying to stay up-to-date, or (b) make some decent money applying what you already know and plan to find another profession in a few years. I went option (b), and I'm in a predicament for sure.
The buzzwords are death to me. Much of software is pretty easy, point and click. That's what all the products are, point and click with integrated help. The learning curve can't possibly be more than a week for someone with a grasp of the underlying concepts. (I'm talking development, not system administration or database administration and tuning here, I know those do have a learning curve) If you can manage a project with one project management tool, you can probably do it with most of the others. If you can design a database with one data modeling program, or even with a pencil and paper, you can probably do it with most of the data modeling programs.
But look at the job postings; most of them want 2, 3, or five years experience with 6-20 specific tools (and often specific versions of those tools). That's why 80% lie on their resumes, I suppose -- very few will have the exact combination any of these jobs requires. I guess they figure that the young guys can learn and they will make exceptions for someone young and eager, but old and eager is not a combination that anyone can even imagine to exist. I've had two interviews recently in which I was told that the company was expecting to hire someone younger and I was asked why they should hire an old guy instead of a young guy. This is illegal, but they do it.
Keep your buzzwords up to date and be a manager before you are 30.
Washington County ESD covers Hillsboro. They were one of the first to go all Windows, all the time. It would be a sorry stab in the back for MS to go after Washington County ESD after their ESD network guy bragged so much about how he was succeeding at managing a network connecting every math and science teacher who was a self-appointed computer expert from the West Hills of Portland out to the coast by requiring all things MS. The ESD refused to support anything else from back around ten years ago. Intel is in Hillsboro and they are generous with hardware, IIRC. And Hillsboro does have some full-time hardware and network management, so they might not be as fubared of software licenses as Portland.
He told us that he couldn't afford to build his own arena, but he found a way to buy up the land around the arena that we built.
We get a sorry return on that investment in his sports team. Besides this Windows software, he imports to Portland a frequently disgraceful bunch of athletes to amuse himself. His big acquisition this year was a convicted sex offender. They've had about three with notorious drug problems over the past few years, one found in bed with a 14-year old girl, and many reckless driving problems, including one who flips a Mercedes on the freeway at 100+ MPH and another with a 95 MPH ticket. (There is no place near Portland where that's safe.) Well, his company is a convicted anti-trust violator, so what do you expect, good character? Compassionate marketing? When our kids have role models like that, why bother educating them at all?
I don't know if they can nail the ESD for computers found in Portland Public Schools, however. The ESD is an Educational Services District, it just gives services to the school districts within its range. Portland has its own school district that gets some services from the ESD, but the people who donated computers probably thought that they were giving them to their kid's school, not to the ESD. It's all very confusing. Portland has allowed parents of kids in particular schools to donate to that particular school so that teachers aren't fired, plumbing is repaired, etc.
You can't just roll in linux and tell MS to drop dead, it would be way too big a mess. There is educational software paid for, and many of the teachers do presentations on Powerpoint on home PC's. They won't figure out how to make those talk on Linux, no way. It would be a tremendous disruption in the middle of the year. School ends in about six weeks. If they can stall until then and then switch over the summer, that would be better. But MS doesn't seem to be leaving any middle ground -- it's either pay or get audited. The only other option is to pitch all the computers out of the schools instanter.
The schools in Oregon do likely take some liberties in licensing. I've seen one school district where the computer in the office boots NT with the name of the school district 30 miles down the road on the login screen. But with no money in a cash-starved community and only 85 kids in the district, that's about what you'd expect, I guess. Oregon has much in common with the third world sometimes.
I was always aghast over the past few years when the PTA had MS sales reps come to meetings and gave us the hard-but-slick sell on MS software. Here's the payback for that.
Most (ca 95%) of the government tech jobs open are in defense-related areas and with the DoD being the biggest poster of jobs. If you are out in the boondocks (more than 100 miles from DC) with no big military base around, not much chance of a good local job with the feds for you.
Note that this job fair is for applicants around DC or for applicants who figure that they can relocate anywhere and often.
The Bush Administration is also trying to cut government employment by using a process called "competitive sourcing", because it is a good way of replacing unionized federal employees with non-union private sector wage earners. (Union employees seem to vote Democratic all the time, you know.) Competitive sourcing goes back over 40 years, but it is now being cranked up more aggressively. Competitive sourcing means that government employees have to write up their own jobs as if they were up for bids, because they are, and then bid on them in competition with private contractors. About half the time the private contractors win and the government employees lose their jobs or get offered a new job at a different "location nationwide". Currently, the entire Interior Department is scheduled to go through competive sourcing procedures over the next two years, so not all federal government jobs come with the job security that many people associate with joining a bureaucracy.
In addition, the old "double dip" benefits to those who spent part of their career in the government and part in private industry (being covered by and getting separate pensions from both Civil Service retirement and Social Security) have been eliminated by coordinating the benefits from the two plans. You might know some retirees who are very happily receiving the double dip, but it doesn't happen anymore.