What part of this fiasco worked? The craft itself is clearly unstable. And the rat's nest of chutes they deployed implies some contractor is getting paid by the chute. This program is starting to show how much engineering talent we've lost since the sixties.
Bring back the geezers who designed Apollo's chutes, and give them a slide rule and million dollars each just to stuff it to the Orion Program Managers who are clearly more politically skilled than technical.
In the long run this will be hundreds of times cheaper and safer for whoever draws the short straw and has to ride in this cow chip.
Have you worked in corporate (non-government) IT very long? Wonder why the big vendors screw your company for Million$ when your existing team could deliver a better system, quicker, for next to nothing in cost? (comparatively...)
Ever consider offering your IT VP a trip to Aruba? Down payment on a ski cabin? The cash back from their new war room of dozens of do-nothing H1-Bs billed at $150+/hr and fly-in "Project Managers" at $250+/hr makes it pretty easy for them to build their well-deserved retirement fund from one big ERP or CRM project. "Idiot" non-technical bosses? WE ALL KNOW it's a BEST PRACTICE and "lower risk" to select an industry-leading vendor...
The FBI hauled a director out of my big bank for being too obvious at this, or perhaps not well connected enough...
Wake up! This is why your proposal to save bucks, use existing people (idealistic engineers) and resources is never approved.
Worked in corporate (non-government) IT very long? Wonder why the big vendors screw your bosses for Million$ when your existing team could deliver a better system, quicker, for next to nothing in cost? (comparatively...)
Ever consider offering your IT VP a trip to Aruba? Down payment on a ski cabin? "Cash back" from the war room filled with dozens of do-nothing H1-Bs billed at $150+/hr and "Project Manager" fly-in consultants at $200+/hr + expenses? Your boss can fill their well-deserved retirement fund from one big ERP or CRM project. Of course, WE ALL KNOW it is ALWAYS a BEST PRACTICE and "lower risk" to select a respected, industry-leading vendor! (at 10 to 100 times the cost...) Not your inexperienced band of idealistic engineers.
The FBI hauled a director out of my big bank for being too obvious, or perhaps not well-connected enough...
Wake up! This is why your proposal to save bucks and use your existing talented people and resources is never approved by your rich "idiot" bosses.
Try a long lunch and kickbacks with the "idiot" next time...
This has always been the plan and was a guiding principal in the Cell's design. Amortize the cost of a very usefull (To federal customers) chip over the estimated 40-60M playstations that will use a very similar (But not identical) design. From the beginning the chip was dual-purpose designed with very high speed interconnects and protocols for massive parallel-ism.
$29/chip x 64k chips = more ops per buck than ever - thanks to the world's gamers...
The problem for both PS3 and the NSA, etc is IBM's 10-20% yields. PS3 for Christmas? They better get up the curve fast...
BTW - Anyone remember back to when the Soviets used to buy up Ataris and canabilize their chips for sonobouys?
Checked at the local supermarket. I think it's because it can be used to manufacture meth. I wanted it for the model fuel cell car bought at Fry's. Checkout computer threw up an exception. Had to show my Driver's license for water. Land of the Free! Glad I wasn't shopping in the dynamite aisle.... LOL!
You already have what you seek, grasshopper. People misunderstand the spec to require something ponderous. Maybe that's appropriate for an Airbus flight control system or my anti-lock brakes, but you said you design research systems. Presumably your CUSTOMERS (The ISO key) favor development speed over a few bugs and flexibility over reliablilty (assuming no one gets killed)
So reread the spec - it's asking you a question, not giving you a rulebook. What do your customers really want? What tradeoffs do you plan for to meet their needs? Everything in the spec is a question. The audit process is establishing how well you meet your organizations own unique goals.
He wrote "The Body Electric" decades ago. (still in print on Amazon, etc.) He did grounbreaking research at a Veterans Hospital demonstrating that very weak currents had profound practical effects on real patients. This book is fascinating... Everything from why our arms and legs develop to the same lengths (Ever wonder how?) to knitting bones that won't fuse and cancer.
And the guy's not a crackpot... Real MD. Must read!
Don't know why people are so sceptical about this. Sony shipped a nice developers kit with hardrive, keyboard and mouse for $199 for the PS2 more than three years ago.
Cells have another older ancestor besides the Cray. Job's Next cubes had an integrated DSP/Vector unit. And, lest we forget, Steve Jobs produced the Mach operating system for his Next Cubes. And Mach is the spiritual godfather of OS X.
He also sold tens of thousands of these boxes to a government agency who's name is Not Said Aloud. Seems their early APU-like design was very good at some important things.
Cells are the Next big thing. PS3 will indeed kick ass - real time virtual video - and so will future Macs. Maybe they'll be the same thing, eventually.
Oh, BTW, was that Sony's head on stage at MacWorld?
This is big and deserves duping. But we'll wait for the next time its/. to consider what you'd do if you were Sun, Intel, or Microsoft
You said it right. Beautifully expressed. I have never heard anyone else articulate, as you did before Congress, the case for space exploration as an American ideal more clearly and persuasively.
The cost is all in the intellectual work to create the design and prove it works. The airframe itself is on the order of $1 to 3 million for materials and labor.
IT IS INTERESTING that a brilliant engineer like Rutan would be moving to a completely new 9 passenger SpaceShip2 instead of putting airframe #1 of SS1 into the Smithsonian and selling hops on her sister ships.Though he does seem to reveal there was an internal discussion...
Flying the design again has nothing to do with any of the previous posts regarding 'history'. Make a fresh copy and put it into service. Unless you're worried it's lack of redundancy makes it unsuitable for non-test pilot passneger flight. Paul Allen may not want to expose himself to some pin-head real estate mogul's wife's tort attorneys.
Or, maybe they feel good to get up and down safely a few times in this frontier expanding design (There where some close calls, after all.) Hughes flew the Spruce Goose once and ordered it mothballed. Some designs proudly push the limits but aren't great for everyday use...
I was present (as a consultant) when the 500lb gorilla of the EDA jungle decided to try an "open" version of its sophisticated mixed signal, zillion component, object oriented, full design flow, database. I saw it mentioned tangentially in one post above.
Does the Cadence license through Open EDA org work for the community? Will gEDA's ASCII based text files allow us to pick and choose from workflow tools, handle complex, high device count designs, and hand off finished designs to current fabs?
Am I too ambitious to hope that smart, open source folks can take Cadence up on its offer, and build robust (if slightly bell-and-whistle less) EDA tools on top of this (I can't believe they let it go open) db? After all the db is the essential component of any sophisticated EDA design flow system...
Obviously, the $250k + licenses for commerical tools keep a lot of folks out of the fabless EDA world, now...
I wonder if someone reading this is going to screw things up further by hacking the electronic voting machines? I still can't believe we don't require paper receipts. What if Nader has 99% of the vote in every electronic precinct?
You've seen the convention delegates. A lot of them are just little old ladies in straw hats with red, white, and blue LEDs blinking in their corny jewelry. Remind me of my mom...
Even if you feel they are seriously misguided, if you want to influence them you do it with kindness and respect. Whether they are really being put at some risk by having their names, hotel rooms and phone numbers posted really depends on the random action (Or hopefully lack of action) by some crazy wingnut. Would you want your mother getting a threatening call at 3am? The secret Service has a legitimate concern for their wellfare.
As a protest action it was stupid and arguablly endangering. About as self-indulgent and counter-productive as breaking windows and setting fires at the WTO.
Certainly, it seems to me to be pointlessly cruel. The fact that the perpetrators hide behind anonymity rather than stand up and explain themselves betrays a coward's conscience.
As Gandhi, King and Mandella proved - effective change is possible... RTFM!
"Administration of the list clearly needs to be changed and consolidated to be government-managed," Hatfield said. "This points out the weakness in having the names checked against passengers at hundreds of different airlines at thousands of different airline counters across the country."
Sounds like Hatfield's idea of a fix is to centralize the no-fly into a central database with automatic checking. When this is in place even a supervisor who recognizes the esteemed Senator would probably not be allowed to let him board...
I found UC Berkeley's Extension semiconductor coursework very helpfull. Ranges from great Intro to Fab to Discrete Device Design and layout, etc. One or two nights a week for ten weeks with really good instructors...
Anyway, Good luck. I think this is the single toughest tech skillset out there - particularly Physical Verification of chip design.
So, if you live in the Bay Area check out UCB Extension...
I work for a big bank. For small web based apps we put the sql inline with the ASP or JSP page code. Makes the web page essentially self documenting if you have an ER diagram.
But for big apps - say like www.bigbankxyz.com - what really matters is robust stability and the abilty to tune app performance over time. To do this you need to build a layer of data access objects that abstract and wrap around the SQL or SP.
With a data object layer your frontend folks can then use these objects to do things like:
accountbalance.retrieve acctno
in the page code.
The big advantages in addition to simple productivity are:
1) If the underlying data source or even the source system changes you can update the data access objects and the frontend folks are fine and oblivious
2) If your site has performance issues you can selectively build data caching into slow objects (queries) after deployment and the frontend code runs faster without any code changes
3) You can apply a number of load balancing, regionalization, clustering, fail over etc strategies across frontend servers by manipulating the objects while the page code, again, stays the same
On the other hand, it's not worth the effort if you're always going to have only a few developers running a two server (webserver and DB) setup.
Aren't patents unavailable to trivial and obvious inventions? And mere ideas? Transparent GIFs and Sprites have been around for decades. What about the semi transparent layers in Photoshop, etc?
Design patents for look and feel aesthetics (transperancy being trivial prior art) and copyrights for code is OK, but basically I believe software ideas should not be patentable...
There is a hidden bias in this study that, I believe, invalidates the results. US developers have a cultural problem saying no to users who reject the app as spec'd once the users see it run. We go back and code it again in response to feedback.
Offshore developers are less invested in their users. They rely formal spec's and adherance to "Best Practices" to defend themselves, very politely, of course, against user dissatisfaction with the app as originally (mis) spec'd. No more dollars, sorry... but no recoding...
Name an elegant app that was spec'd right from the start... No? Name any number of awkward apps that meet their spec's but are unusable... No problem!
US users are independent, demanding and coddled. They know what they said they wanted, but now that they see it on the screen what they really want is...RECODING!
These are just the expeiences of a pragmatic old US developer...
As mentioned in the Had This post, in the late sixties there was a very well designed and elegant educational toy called Lectron. It deserves a little more complete description than has been gicen because it was so coool!
One inch by one inch plastic cubes had magnets to hold them to a metal backplane. On top was the symbol for the component they contained. Transistors, Photocells, variable resistors, etc.
Connections out were to the sides of the cubes. Each conetion had a magnet, and through very well thought through design, the polarity of the magnets made right design easy.
All a young nerd had to do was rearrange the blocks on backplane and whatever circuit was on the top of the designs was functional.
It was like a real world, analog circuitry version of the simulaor. (The simulator by the way is very sweet.) Lego and this guy should get together and revive this concept. The IP is probably out there now.
Great work! Need help getting these kits to market?
Let's clarify some of the some snap judgements and misinformation previously posted on this subject...(Some have been addressed individually in other postings but let's get them out in one place)
"Getting more energy out violates the second law..."
The energy comes from hydrogen fusion inside our sun. The solar radiation which results is absorbed by plants and converted by photosythesis into the complex molecules that eventually are converted into ethanol. In short, it's a solar power scheme.
"the efficiency of ethanol production is low..."
So long as more energy comes out than goes in the process is fine. Estimates range from 25% excess to 2.5 times.
"it takes fossil fuels..."
Anyone should be able to imagine that eventually the tractors, etc will be powered by ethanol, biodiesel and hydrogen.
"the catalyst must be heated to 800C"
The rhodium catalyst heats itself as a byproduct of the reaction with the ethanol.
"you're still putting CO2 into the environment"
There is no net increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the next corn crop (or whatever green crop is grown) reconsumes the carbon dioxide byproduct of the previous hydrogen production. In other words the CO2 is self recycling.
Finally:
This kind of research is a good thing! Just because some big corporations want to profit from it doesn't mean it's fraudulent or a violation of the laws of physics and chemistry... and code geeks who skipped the chemistry and physics curriculum should be smart enough to know what they don't know... hehe
I've got robotics stuff, wall warts, video gear, and electronics, computer stuff, and cables up the ying yang. The newest and best way (IMHO) to keep it all girlfriend friendly is in the Kids section of IKEA. It's like a pinewood bookshelf (4 or six feet high), but it stores plastic tubs with tupperware-like tops of varying sizes that slide in on rails (Like oven racks, sorta)
It looks good. Can be resorted by just moving the tubs from rack to rack.
Cheap, too. shelf is $39 to 59. Tubs are $2. Also a good way to get Kid's toys sorted (Obviously) Don't expect them to get the tubs at the top of the six-footers, of course!
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What part of this fiasco worked? The craft itself is clearly unstable. And the rat's nest of chutes they deployed implies some contractor is getting paid by the chute. This program is starting to show how much engineering talent we've lost since the sixties.
Bring back the geezers who designed Apollo's chutes, and give them a slide rule and million dollars each just to stuff it to the Orion Program Managers who are clearly more politically skilled than technical.
In the long run this will be hundreds of times cheaper and safer for whoever draws the short straw and has to ride in this cow chip.
Google it...
or check this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1458238&from=rss
Ever consider offering your IT VP a trip to Aruba? Down payment on a ski cabin? The cash back from their new war room of dozens of do-nothing H1-Bs billed at $150+/hr and fly-in "Project Managers" at $250+/hr makes it pretty easy for them to build their well-deserved retirement fund from one big ERP or CRM project. "Idiot" non-technical bosses? WE ALL KNOW it's a BEST PRACTICE and "lower risk" to select an industry-leading vendor...
The FBI hauled a director out of my big bank for being too obvious at this, or perhaps not well connected enough...
Wake up! This is why your proposal to save bucks, use existing people (idealistic engineers) and resources is never approved.
Try the long lunch and kickbacks...
Wake up! It's the new EXtreme methodology....
Ever consider offering your IT VP a trip to Aruba? Down payment on a ski cabin? "Cash back" from the war room filled with dozens of do-nothing H1-Bs billed at $150+/hr and "Project Manager" fly-in consultants at $200+/hr + expenses? Your boss can fill their well-deserved retirement fund from one big ERP or CRM project. Of course, WE ALL KNOW it is ALWAYS a BEST PRACTICE and "lower risk" to select a respected, industry-leading vendor! (at 10 to 100 times the cost...) Not your inexperienced band of idealistic engineers.
The FBI hauled a director out of my big bank for being too obvious, or perhaps not well-connected enough...
Wake up! This is why your proposal to save bucks and use your existing talented people and resources is never approved by your rich "idiot" bosses.
Try a long lunch and kickbacks with the "idiot" next time...
Wake up! It's the new EXtreme methodology...
Great point! I don't think many outside the chip community understand how yields are calculated and chips are requalified and sold.
This has always been the plan and was a guiding principal in the Cell's design. Amortize the cost of a very usefull (To federal customers) chip over the estimated 40-60M playstations that will use a very similar (But not identical) design. From the beginning the chip was dual-purpose designed with very high speed interconnects and protocols for massive parallel-ism.
$29/chip x 64k chips = more ops per buck than ever - thanks to the world's gamers...
The problem for both PS3 and the NSA, etc is IBM's 10-20% yields. PS3 for Christmas? They better get up the curve fast...
BTW - Anyone remember back to when the Soviets used to buy up Ataris and canabilize their chips for sonobouys?
Checked at the local supermarket. I think it's because it can be used to manufacture meth. I wanted it for the model fuel cell car bought at Fry's. Checkout computer threw up an exception. Had to show my Driver's license for water. Land of the Free! Glad I wasn't shopping in the dynamite aisle.... LOL!
You already have what you seek, grasshopper. People misunderstand the spec to require something ponderous. Maybe that's appropriate for an Airbus flight control system or my anti-lock brakes, but you said you design research systems. Presumably your CUSTOMERS (The ISO key) favor development speed over a few bugs and flexibility over reliablilty (assuming no one gets killed)
So reread the spec - it's asking you a question, not giving you a rulebook. What do your customers really want? What tradeoffs do you plan for to meet their needs? Everything in the spec is a question. The audit process is establishing how well you meet your organizations own unique goals.
He wrote "The Body Electric" decades ago. (still in print on Amazon, etc.) He did grounbreaking research at a Veterans Hospital demonstrating that very weak currents had profound practical effects on real patients. This book is fascinating... Everything from why our arms and legs develop to the same lengths (Ever wonder how?) to knitting bones that won't fuse and cancer. And the guy's not a crackpot... Real MD. Must read!
So I believe them, now.
Think of the possibilities...
He also sold tens of thousands of these boxes to a government agency who's name is Not Said Aloud. Seems their early APU-like design was very good at some important things.
Cells are the Next big thing. PS3 will indeed kick ass - real time virtual video - and so will future Macs. Maybe they'll be the same thing, eventually.
Oh, BTW, was that Sony's head on stage at MacWorld?
This is big and deserves duping. But we'll wait for the next time its /. to consider what you'd do if you were Sun, Intel, or Microsoft
Maybe, now, we're on our way, again.
IT IS INTERESTING that a brilliant engineer like Rutan would be moving to a completely new 9 passenger SpaceShip2 instead of putting airframe #1 of SS1 into the Smithsonian and selling hops on her sister ships.Though he does seem to reveal there was an internal discussion...
Flying the design again has nothing to do with any of the previous posts regarding 'history'. Make a fresh copy and put it into service. Unless you're worried it's lack of redundancy makes it unsuitable for non-test pilot passneger flight. Paul Allen may not want to expose himself to some pin-head real estate mogul's wife's tort attorneys.
Or, maybe they feel good to get up and down safely a few times in this frontier expanding design (There where some close calls, after all.) Hughes flew the Spruce Goose once and ordered it mothballed. Some designs proudly push the limits but aren't great for everyday use...
Does the Cadence license through Open EDA org work for the community? Will gEDA's ASCII based text files allow us to pick and choose from workflow tools, handle complex, high device count designs, and hand off finished designs to current fabs?
Am I too ambitious to hope that smart, open source folks can take Cadence up on its offer, and build robust (if slightly bell-and-whistle less) EDA tools on top of this (I can't believe they let it go open) db? After all the db is the essential component of any sophisticated EDA design flow system...
Obviously, the $250k + licenses for commerical tools keep a lot of folks out of the fabless EDA world, now...
This is a CF waiting to happen...
Even if you feel they are seriously misguided, if you want to influence them you do it with kindness and respect. Whether they are really being put at some risk by having their names, hotel rooms and phone numbers posted really depends on the random action (Or hopefully lack of action) by some crazy wingnut. Would you want your mother getting a threatening call at 3am? The secret Service has a legitimate concern for their wellfare.
As a protest action it was stupid and arguablly endangering. About as self-indulgent and counter-productive as breaking windows and setting fires at the WTO.
Certainly, it seems to me to be pointlessly cruel. The fact that the perpetrators hide behind anonymity rather than stand up and explain themselves betrays a coward's conscience.
As Gandhi, King and Mandella proved - effective change is possible... RTFM!
"Administration of the list clearly needs to be changed and consolidated to be government-managed," Hatfield said. "This points out the weakness in having the names checked against passengers at hundreds of different airlines at thousands of different airline counters across the country."
Sounds like Hatfield's idea of a fix is to centralize the no-fly into a central database with automatic checking. When this is in place even a supervisor who recognizes the esteemed Senator would probably not be allowed to let him board...
Anyway, Good luck. I think this is the single toughest tech skillset out there - particularly Physical Verification of chip design.
So, if you live in the Bay Area check out UCB Extension...
But for big apps - say like www.bigbankxyz.com - what really matters is robust stability and the abilty to tune app performance over time. To do this you need to build a layer of data access objects that abstract and wrap around the SQL or SP.
With a data object layer your frontend folks can then use these objects to do things like:
accountbalance.retrieve acctno
in the page code.
The big advantages in addition to simple productivity are:
1) If the underlying data source or even the source system changes you can update the data access objects and the frontend folks are fine and oblivious
2) If your site has performance issues you can selectively build data caching into slow objects (queries) after deployment and the frontend code runs faster without any code changes
3) You can apply a number of load balancing, regionalization, clustering, fail over etc strategies across frontend servers by manipulating the objects while the page code, again, stays the same
On the other hand, it's not worth the effort if you're always going to have only a few developers running a two server (webserver and DB) setup.
Aren't patents unavailable to trivial and obvious inventions? And mere ideas? Transparent GIFs and Sprites have been around for decades. What about the semi transparent layers in Photoshop, etc? Design patents for look and feel aesthetics (transperancy being trivial prior art) and copyrights for code is OK, but basically I believe software ideas should not be patentable...
Offshore developers are less invested in their users. They rely formal spec's and adherance to "Best Practices" to defend themselves, very politely, of course, against user dissatisfaction with the app as originally (mis) spec'd. No more dollars, sorry... but no recoding...
Name an elegant app that was spec'd right from the start... No? Name any number of awkward apps that meet their spec's but are unusable... No problem!
US users are independent, demanding and coddled. They know what they said they wanted, but now that they see it on the screen what they really want is...RECODING!
These are just the expeiences of a pragmatic old US developer...
One inch by one inch plastic cubes had magnets to hold them to a metal backplane. On top was the symbol for the component they contained. Transistors, Photocells, variable resistors, etc. Connections out were to the sides of the cubes. Each conetion had a magnet, and through very well thought through design, the polarity of the magnets made right design easy.
All a young nerd had to do was rearrange the blocks on backplane and whatever circuit was on the top of the designs was functional.
It was like a real world, analog circuitry version of the simulaor. (The simulator by the way is very sweet.) Lego and this guy should get together and revive this concept. The IP is probably out there now.
Great work! Need help getting these kits to market?
"Getting more energy out violates the second law..."
The energy comes from hydrogen fusion inside our sun. The solar radiation which results is absorbed by plants and converted by photosythesis into the complex molecules that eventually are converted into ethanol. In short, it's a solar power scheme.
"the efficiency of ethanol production is low..."
So long as more energy comes out than goes in the process is fine. Estimates range from 25% excess to 2.5 times.
"it takes fossil fuels..."
Anyone should be able to imagine that eventually the tractors, etc will be powered by ethanol, biodiesel and hydrogen.
"the catalyst must be heated to 800C"
The rhodium catalyst heats itself as a byproduct of the reaction with the ethanol.
"you're still putting CO2 into the environment"
There is no net increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the next corn crop (or whatever green crop is grown) reconsumes the carbon dioxide byproduct of the previous hydrogen production. In other words the CO2 is self recycling.
Finally:
This kind of research is a good thing! Just because some big corporations want to profit from it doesn't mean it's fraudulent or a violation of the laws of physics and chemistry... and code geeks who skipped the chemistry and physics curriculum should be smart enough to know what they don't know... hehe
I've got robotics stuff, wall warts, video gear, and electronics, computer stuff, and cables up the ying yang. The newest and best way (IMHO) to keep it all girlfriend friendly is in the Kids section of IKEA. It's like a pinewood bookshelf (4 or six feet high), but it stores plastic tubs with tupperware-like tops of varying sizes that slide in on rails (Like oven racks, sorta) It looks good. Can be resorted by just moving the tubs from rack to rack. Cheap, too. shelf is $39 to 59. Tubs are $2. Also a good way to get Kid's toys sorted (Obviously) Don't expect them to get the tubs at the top of the six-footers, of course!