I think there could be a little bit of a language barrier due to this, especially after reading your example of an app vs. a program. We need to educate the layman if they make mistakes thinking they are separate things. App, program, application, widget, are really all synonymous, but I would qualify that a widget could describe a mini-version of a full-fledged program, but it is a program nonetheless. Google Docs is simply a program that runs on a remote server, in the cloud, and it doesn't make it less of a program, app, or what have you.
You and Neal both made some good points. I do think that path dependency and lock-in are very much present in the space industry, at least in my experience, but some of the changes he's proposing may be in fantasyland at this point. Space missions have a certain objective in mind, whether it's to sell phone time, sell imagery, or study geysers on a moon. The group that wants to do these things usually don't overly care how it's achieved as long as the objective is achieved, and it's as cheap as possible.
Rarely are aerospace companies in the business of trying out radical new designs because of the huge expense involved (typically). They want to make their shareholders happy, because it is a business after all. One word that is hugely important in the space business is the word legacy. When some satellite, rocket, or component has legacy, it means that it has flown before with mission-accomplishing results, and thus instills confidence in the product, and it will be a lot cheaper to build than the alternative. Program managers and board members would love nothing more than to have your spacecraft, rocket, and overall mission to be completely legacy-based. When something is completely legacy-based, it lacks innovation.
I think Neal's point is that rockets and satellites do not see huge amounts of innovation because of the crazy expense for the customer, so we tend to be path-dependent and locked-in to tried and true designs.
The real innovation is going to come from an ambitious young group that can find someone crazy enough to back them for years on end and make a business out of it. It's not going to come from big aerospace companies since all of those are held accountable by their shareholders. So yeah, this is in the sci-fi fantasyland category for now... until it happens.
On my m15x, there were no stickers below the keyboard, unlike one you would buy from Best Buy or NewEgg. I think there's a Windows ID sticker underneath that is ugly and likes to flake off over time. Alienware's laptops aren't quite as sleek as Apple's, nor are they quite as robust-feeling, but they are doing some things right. The amount of crapware loaded on the laptop was also very minimal, akin to Apple's method, which I appreciate wholeheartedly. I still put Ubuntu on it though.;)
I will second this, from experience. Being a games tester really sucks. It was one of my first jobs after college, and I got paid 20k a year to test an MMO to get it ready for prime time. What could be better than that (besides the money), right? Well, it turns out that I'd rather do manual labor out in the hot sun than do that job again. The environment was cool, not unlike a big frat house, but actual work really sucks because the monotony set in on me quickly after the novelty of the cool game ideas wore off. You have to continually try to break the game (which was highly broken anyway), and document your findings so the engineers can use the info and fix the code. Rinse and repeat, a lot. You don't get to play the game as would want to play it, as Sycraft said, but you do get some creative freedom in "how to break it" in the beta stages of the game. I had a dick boss who literally sat behind me literally looking over my shoulder, so that made it all the more unpleasant. After the game was released, I would pull shifts doing online tech support. After the game tanked, I luckily was one of the first to get laid off. This turned out to be a blessing, as I believe it steered me toward my career doing space operations. Now I troubleshoot real problems with real spacecraft in orbit, and thank god my video game career didn't pan out. It is such a brutal industry (competing for consumer's purchases), looking back on it.
I still love playing games, but I laugh every time I see Sony advertising "The Tester," a reality show on the PSN competing for the next game tester position. Those poor poor sods... Ha!
Most systems engineers in the space industry know that it's difficult to completely use metric for space missions. There are usually many components and subsystems that are designed by different vendors that have their own paradigms set up. These paradigms are usually kept do a legacy of proven use, and engineers will agree with me that if a product works well on-orbit, why on earth would you want to change a product simply due to unit conversions. You simply take note of the units and move on. I never thought I'd have to deal with microinches, to be honest, but it's no big deal since everyone knows 1 uin = 0.0254 microns.
Do they allow you choose whether the baby will have red irises, pre-painted black fingernails, a perm that needs no hair spray, and "Whitesnake" pre-tattooed on its chest?
I read a great article from National Geographic that helps illustrate some of the effects of light pollution. I'm an amateur astronomer because I find it more stimulating than television, and I feel that attempting to understand the universe we live in is something we ought to do as human beings. But I still have to drive 2 hours to find an astronomically dark sky. Light pollution is fixable and would be a trivial decision when lighting a building if folks think about it. I just simply don't turn on my house lights at night. "Earth Hour" is 24/7 for me.
It's been a while since I've played FFXI, but I always loved the strategies and character building involved in it. The storytelling was better than all the other mainstream MMORPGs I had played. Chains of Promathia, while very difficult, was truly epic when finished. The other expansions since then were less so.
Battle strategies were intricate and were balanced very well, in my opinion. The elements played a big role, like in most FF games, and even weather plays a part. The job/sub-job system was amazing. I loved being able to change my main job from a dark knight one moment to a white mage, and by the end I was using both when I soloed instead of the usual sub jobs. I had perfected my Souleater - Hexa Strike combo with my white mage by the end.
There were some things holding the game back. The biggest problem for a newcomer was the initial learning curve. FFXI, while charming, is hard to get into. If you're more comfortable with a mouse than a keyboard, you'll probably want to stay away. I loved the game because I never had to touch the mouse. Macros are nearly essential to play the game, and even mentioning the word macro to some gamers will turn them off to it. The PC version was limited to what the PS2 was capable of. Even though the PC and Xbox 360 versions deserved updated interfaces and textures, the bottleneck was the PS2.
Even though I don't play MMORPGs anymore, I am looking forward to what FFXIV. I have tried many others in the past, even since having quit FFXI, and I still can't find one with the depth and appeal of FFXI. I miss it, but I think I'll just wait for 14 instead now.
FFXIII looks amazing, especially from the high-def screens that I've seen of the game. I hope they kept some semblance of the gambit system from FFXII in tact. I loved being able to tell the AI how to behave. I'm a control freak when it comes to games, and there's a high level of satisfaction when one constructs a squad that can essentially sustain themselves if you left the room for a few minutes. That said, the boss battles were generally so often and so difficult that gambits + lots of human intervention was necessary. It was a neat spectacle to watch these battles unfold at times. I enjoyed FFXII immensely for the gameplay, and much less for the story.
The EXP loss was shocking to me at first, but after playing WoW and its armor-repair game design, I much prefer the EXP loss. In MMORPGs, gaining wealth is always harder for me than gaining experience points, at least if the game community has a complex economy within.
My fear with this series at this point is that it may go the way of Frank Herbert or Robert Jordan with the way it's taking so long. As much as I loved Dune, it was unfortunate that the original author could not finish his story. I hope that Martin is able to finish his epic tale with an epic ending, like Asimov was able to do before he passed away. (Although some would say that Second Foundation was already a great stopping point.)
Just a quick note even though you're an AC, a Ritchey-Chretien optical system is a Cassegrain design, so your criticism here is wrong. The TMT is actually an aplanatic variation of the RC design.
FWIW, some of the best mirrors on the consumer market are handmade, but obviously the TMT is far from being this type of mirror.
This was not the case for me. I got my B.A. in mathematics from a small school and was hired by an aerospace company to operations in an entry-level, but well-paying job. I showed some initiative and moved up the ladder and became a satellite engineer within a few years, and I continue to progress. Most of my colleagues have a Master's in aerospace, but I was able to get there without having an undergraduate in engineering, let alone a Master's (my math degree had a completely theoretical emphasis, even). On top of this I have a better understanding of the business now since I moved up the ranks a little bit over the years.
There are a few engineering classes that I wouldn't mind taking at this point for my own enrichment, but I think a Master's would be overkill for me.
Nowadays, I would never say to someone that a Master's degree is essential to arrive at the job he or she wants. It just takes a bit of hard work and a little luck.
Blaming bad sales on piracy seems like a cop-out to me. I own a PSP and I only download demos and movies to my memory stick. I don't pirate anything, and I have purchased several games over the years that I've owned it. I really enjoy using the system now more for playing PS1 games remotely from the PS3 than anything else. That's because PSP games generally aren't very good. I have several of the "big name" titles like Metal Gear Solid Portable, Crisis Core, Vice City Stories, SOCOM, and so on. All of these are scaled-down versions of what the genres were intended to be, although Vice City Stories bares the closest resemblance to its big brother. I thought Crisis Core would finally be the RPG fix I had been waiting for on the PSP, but sadly that void still has yet to be filled as far as I'm concerned.
Why can't we get a Chrono Cross or a Baldur's Gate type of game on the PSP? Cheap knock-offs don't sell well anymore, and Sony must have some expectation here since Nintendo gets away with it many times.
It's kind of ironic that although the DS has inferior hardware, it has better and more substantial games.
This isn't rocket science. Do what I do every time I buy a disc from these places, whether it's new or used: Personally inspect the disc before they bag it up for you. They never mind it when I ask, and I feel good about the purchase afterwards. I don't mind that it's been opened as long as everything is in tact the way I expect it to be.
While the new headphones are not standards compliant, and therefore I wouldn't be able to listen to the new shuffle with my old Grado headphones, I appreciate Apple trying to move forward with design innovations in their screen-less mp3 player. Unfortunately, strictly adhering to standards is often a barrier to innovation. There is nothing stopping 3rd-party vendors from creating headphones now, which will hopefully help perpetuate innovation of this design concept. Perhaps in the future this will help define a standard that has yet to be established. Only time will tell.
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Ah yes, it could very well be an ANSI version. If the keys map properly, I'm sure it would make a decent Mac keyboard, as the "diamond" key could probably act as the command key and just about everything else would be similar. I'm not sure how the keys on the left would be mapped (the "cut," "paste," "undo," key, etc.).
I use the Type 6 here at work, and I like the feel of the keys when typing, but the key placement drives me crazy. The "`" and "\" keys are where the backspace key normally is, and backspace is immediately above the enter key. Caps Lock and control trade places from the usual keyboards. The craftsmenship of the keyboard isn't any better or worse than what I'm used to. I would say that if you're around Sun systems all of the time, the Type 6 would probably be a welcome interface for your home machine, but I would not recommend it to others since you would have to constantly remember key placement after you've used the keyboards at work.
If you do your homework, you'd realize that aerial imagery is MUCH more expensive than satellite imagery currently out. The coverage of a satellite's is extremely huge. One satellite can target nearly any place on the earth every day. One satellite can task hundreds of images daily all over the globe because it's up there 24/7.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there could be a little bit of a language barrier due to this, especially after reading your example of an app vs. a program. We need to educate the layman if they make mistakes thinking they are separate things. App, program, application, widget, are really all synonymous, but I would qualify that a widget could describe a mini-version of a full-fledged program, but it is a program nonetheless. Google Docs is simply a program that runs on a remote server, in the cloud, and it doesn't make it less of a program, app, or what have you.
You and Neal both made some good points. I do think that path dependency and lock-in are very much present in the space industry, at least in my experience, but some of the changes he's proposing may be in fantasyland at this point. Space missions have a certain objective in mind, whether it's to sell phone time, sell imagery, or study geysers on a moon. The group that wants to do these things usually don't overly care how it's achieved as long as the objective is achieved, and it's as cheap as possible.
Rarely are aerospace companies in the business of trying out radical new designs because of the huge expense involved (typically). They want to make their shareholders happy, because it is a business after all. One word that is hugely important in the space business is the word legacy. When some satellite, rocket, or component has legacy, it means that it has flown before with mission-accomplishing results, and thus instills confidence in the product, and it will be a lot cheaper to build than the alternative. Program managers and board members would love nothing more than to have your spacecraft, rocket, and overall mission to be completely legacy-based. When something is completely legacy-based, it lacks innovation.
I think Neal's point is that rockets and satellites do not see huge amounts of innovation because of the crazy expense for the customer, so we tend to be path-dependent and locked-in to tried and true designs.
The real innovation is going to come from an ambitious young group that can find someone crazy enough to back them for years on end and make a business out of it. It's not going to come from big aerospace companies since all of those are held accountable by their shareholders. So yeah, this is in the sci-fi fantasyland category for now... until it happens.
I wonder...
On my m15x, there were no stickers below the keyboard, unlike one you would buy from Best Buy or NewEgg. I think there's a Windows ID sticker underneath that is ugly and likes to flake off over time. Alienware's laptops aren't quite as sleek as Apple's, nor are they quite as robust-feeling, but they are doing some things right. The amount of crapware loaded on the laptop was also very minimal, akin to Apple's method, which I appreciate wholeheartedly. I still put Ubuntu on it though. ;)
Finally, the vacuum cleaner will actually do what it says it's going to do.
I will second this, from experience. Being a games tester really sucks. It was one of my first jobs after college, and I got paid 20k a year to test an MMO to get it ready for prime time. What could be better than that (besides the money), right? Well, it turns out that I'd rather do manual labor out in the hot sun than do that job again. The environment was cool, not unlike a big frat house, but actual work really sucks because the monotony set in on me quickly after the novelty of the cool game ideas wore off. You have to continually try to break the game (which was highly broken anyway), and document your findings so the engineers can use the info and fix the code. Rinse and repeat, a lot. You don't get to play the game as would want to play it, as Sycraft said, but you do get some creative freedom in "how to break it" in the beta stages of the game. I had a dick boss who literally sat behind me literally looking over my shoulder, so that made it all the more unpleasant. After the game was released, I would pull shifts doing online tech support. After the game tanked, I luckily was one of the first to get laid off. This turned out to be a blessing, as I believe it steered me toward my career doing space operations. Now I troubleshoot real problems with real spacecraft in orbit, and thank god my video game career didn't pan out. It is such a brutal industry (competing for consumer's purchases), looking back on it. I still love playing games, but I laugh every time I see Sony advertising "The Tester," a reality show on the PSN competing for the next game tester position. Those poor poor sods... Ha!
Most systems engineers in the space industry know that it's difficult to completely use metric for space missions. There are usually many components and subsystems that are designed by different vendors that have their own paradigms set up. These paradigms are usually kept do a legacy of proven use, and engineers will agree with me that if a product works well on-orbit, why on earth would you want to change a product simply due to unit conversions. You simply take note of the units and move on. I never thought I'd have to deal with microinches, to be honest, but it's no big deal since everyone knows 1 uin = 0.0254 microns.
Do they allow you choose whether the baby will have red irises, pre-painted black fingernails, a perm that needs no hair spray, and "Whitesnake" pre-tattooed on its chest?
I read a great article from National Geographic that helps illustrate some of the effects of light pollution. I'm an amateur astronomer because I find it more stimulating than television, and I feel that attempting to understand the universe we live in is something we ought to do as human beings. But I still have to drive 2 hours to find an astronomically dark sky. Light pollution is fixable and would be a trivial decision when lighting a building if folks think about it. I just simply don't turn on my house lights at night. "Earth Hour" is 24/7 for me.
It's been a while since I've played FFXI, but I always loved the strategies and character building involved in it. The storytelling was better than all the other mainstream MMORPGs I had played. Chains of Promathia, while very difficult, was truly epic when finished. The other expansions since then were less so.
Battle strategies were intricate and were balanced very well, in my opinion. The elements played a big role, like in most FF games, and even weather plays a part. The job/sub-job system was amazing. I loved being able to change my main job from a dark knight one moment to a white mage, and by the end I was using both when I soloed instead of the usual sub jobs. I had perfected my Souleater - Hexa Strike combo with my white mage by the end.
There were some things holding the game back. The biggest problem for a newcomer was the initial learning curve. FFXI, while charming, is hard to get into. If you're more comfortable with a mouse than a keyboard, you'll probably want to stay away. I loved the game because I never had to touch the mouse. Macros are nearly essential to play the game, and even mentioning the word macro to some gamers will turn them off to it. The PC version was limited to what the PS2 was capable of. Even though the PC and Xbox 360 versions deserved updated interfaces and textures, the bottleneck was the PS2.
Even though I don't play MMORPGs anymore, I am looking forward to what FFXIV. I have tried many others in the past, even since having quit FFXI, and I still can't find one with the depth and appeal of FFXI. I miss it, but I think I'll just wait for 14 instead now.
FFXIII looks amazing, especially from the high-def screens that I've seen of the game. I hope they kept some semblance of the gambit system from FFXII in tact. I loved being able to tell the AI how to behave. I'm a control freak when it comes to games, and there's a high level of satisfaction when one constructs a squad that can essentially sustain themselves if you left the room for a few minutes. That said, the boss battles were generally so often and so difficult that gambits + lots of human intervention was necessary. It was a neat spectacle to watch these battles unfold at times. I enjoyed FFXII immensely for the gameplay, and much less for the story.
The EXP loss was shocking to me at first, but after playing WoW and its armor-repair game design, I much prefer the EXP loss. In MMORPGs, gaining wealth is always harder for me than gaining experience points, at least if the game community has a complex economy within.
Check it out on NASA TV if you haven't had the chance yet. Viewing Hubble the way the astronauts see it is a neat experience.
Game Boy Micro: - 50Ã--101Ã--17.2 mm (86860 mm3)
Wow, 50-101 Angstroms is pretty small! I guess they named it Gameboy Micro for a reason!
My fear with this series at this point is that it may go the way of Frank Herbert or Robert Jordan with the way it's taking so long. As much as I loved Dune, it was unfortunate that the original author could not finish his story. I hope that Martin is able to finish his epic tale with an epic ending, like Asimov was able to do before he passed away. (Although some would say that Second Foundation was already a great stopping point.)
Just a quick note even though you're an AC, a Ritchey-Chretien optical system is a Cassegrain design, so your criticism here is wrong. The TMT is actually an aplanatic variation of the RC design.
FWIW, some of the best mirrors on the consumer market are handmade, but obviously the TMT is far from being this type of mirror.
This was not the case for me. I got my B.A. in mathematics from a small school and was hired by an aerospace company to operations in an entry-level, but well-paying job. I showed some initiative and moved up the ladder and became a satellite engineer within a few years, and I continue to progress. Most of my colleagues have a Master's in aerospace, but I was able to get there without having an undergraduate in engineering, let alone a Master's (my math degree had a completely theoretical emphasis, even). On top of this I have a better understanding of the business now since I moved up the ranks a little bit over the years.
There are a few engineering classes that I wouldn't mind taking at this point for my own enrichment, but I think a Master's would be overkill for me.
Nowadays, I would never say to someone that a Master's degree is essential to arrive at the job he or she wants. It just takes a bit of hard work and a little luck.
The controller has already been released!
Blaming bad sales on piracy seems like a cop-out to me. I own a PSP and I only download demos and movies to my memory stick. I don't pirate anything, and I have purchased several games over the years that I've owned it. I really enjoy using the system now more for playing PS1 games remotely from the PS3 than anything else. That's because PSP games generally aren't very good. I have several of the "big name" titles like Metal Gear Solid Portable, Crisis Core, Vice City Stories, SOCOM, and so on. All of these are scaled-down versions of what the genres were intended to be, although Vice City Stories bares the closest resemblance to its big brother. I thought Crisis Core would finally be the RPG fix I had been waiting for on the PSP, but sadly that void still has yet to be filled as far as I'm concerned.
Why can't we get a Chrono Cross or a Baldur's Gate type of game on the PSP? Cheap knock-offs don't sell well anymore, and Sony must have some expectation here since Nintendo gets away with it many times.
It's kind of ironic that although the DS has inferior hardware, it has better and more substantial games.
This isn't rocket science. Do what I do every time I buy a disc from these places, whether it's new or used: Personally inspect the disc before they bag it up for you. They never mind it when I ask, and I feel good about the purchase afterwards. I don't mind that it's been opened as long as everything is in tact the way I expect it to be.
While the new headphones are not standards compliant, and therefore I wouldn't be able to listen to the new shuffle with my old Grado headphones, I appreciate Apple trying to move forward with design innovations in their screen-less mp3 player. Unfortunately, strictly adhering to standards is often a barrier to innovation. There is nothing stopping 3rd-party vendors from creating headphones now, which will hopefully help perpetuate innovation of this design concept. Perhaps in the future this will help define a standard that has yet to be established. Only time will tell.
On the TiVoToGo FAQ:
Are TiVoToGo(TM) transfers available for Apple Macintosh computers? At this time TiVoToGo transfers are not available for Apple Macintosh computers. TiVo is working hard to enable TiVoToGo features available on TiVo Desktop for Mac. We are currently working on ways to enable playback on Apple Macintosh computers. We will let our customers know in our newsletter as soon as this feature is available.
Ah yes, it could very well be an ANSI version. If the keys map properly, I'm sure it would make a decent Mac keyboard, as the "diamond" key could probably act as the command key and just about everything else would be similar. I'm not sure how the keys on the left would be mapped (the "cut," "paste," "undo," key, etc.).
I use the Type 6 here at work, and I like the feel of the keys when typing, but the key placement drives me crazy. The "`" and "\" keys are where the backspace key normally is, and backspace is immediately above the enter key. Caps Lock and control trade places from the usual keyboards. The craftsmenship of the keyboard isn't any better or worse than what I'm used to. I would say that if you're around Sun systems all of the time, the Type 6 would probably be a welcome interface for your home machine, but I would not recommend it to others since you would have to constantly remember key placement after you've used the keyboards at work.
If you do your homework, you'd realize that aerial imagery is MUCH more expensive than satellite imagery currently out. The coverage of a satellite's is extremely huge. One satellite can target nearly any place on the earth every day. One satellite can task hundreds of images daily all over the globe because it's up there 24/7.
I would love to go from Denver to New York in half the time... oh well.