Re:Long-feedback cycles and good design
on
A Deep Space Primer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not true. To design something very complicated like an aircraft or Mars rover there are *many* models and experimentation done, because almost all textbook equations are only approximations of reality. Since you used example of missile, there is NO WAY to model the turbulence, forces, torques, etc. involved with a real missile in flight, though we are getting better at approximating them. Any missile design will have many man-years of "twiddling, tweaking, and hacking" in the evolution of its design.
To use an even simpler exmple, what if one burns 2.00000 moles of hydrogn and 1.00000 moles of oxygen, how much water is produced? If you answer that question based on what you learned in freshman chemistry you'd be wrong. In the real world, reactions never go to 100%, reagents aren't pure, and other chemicals besides water (like hydrogen peroxide) would be produced. And the ONLY way to know how much water would be produced under given conditions would be to actually do it. And then, you'd find for repeated experiments the amount wouldn't quite be the same!
And finally, I'd point out that when systems fail aboard a Mars rover, they're very much back the realm of hacking, tweaking and fiddling.
You don't understand. The purpose of the Canadian Mars probe will be to determine if beer has ever existed on Mars, or if conditions favorable to the brewing of beer ever existed on Mars. To avoid possible contamination the probes will be assembled in special "sober-rooms" by foreign immigrants. Special instruments on the probe's robotic arm will include a MoisonBrador spectrometer and a 2000ml Erienmeyer yeast culturing flask.
Many major civilizations in the past 10,000 years (yup, gotta include those south african ones your history teacher never told you about) have fallen just because of draught...and we already know the average temperature of the earth has been MUCH HOTTER and MUCH COLDER in the past. 12,000 years ago we ended an ice age. Radical climate change has happened before, it'll happen again. Civilizations will collapse. Big deal. Insolation is the key to climate, not man's activities.
I know things are getting better in India, and it's fine with me if they one day become the greatest, wealthiest, freeist people on planet earth. Could happen in 25-50 years. In fact, I'd say it's either going to be China or India in the long term. But there are problems in the present, and I'm saying over next 3-4 years we'll see some of these problems manifest themselves (some are happening already)
1. the fact that India HAS a group of people that is called the "lower castes" pretty much ends the argument! Yes, things are improving
2. There are legal agreements and legal venue between some of the nations that the U.S.A. trades with.....in the case of U.S.A. and India there is going to be a problem for U.S. companies as things stand right now
3. Some Indian companies are GREAT. They do GREAT WORK. However, I have worked at companies where things did not go well with outsourced projects, and it takes a year or more for that to be realized in a major project
4.Yes, I have had my background checked prior to IT employment at several companies. There are very interesting reasons why it is impossible to do meaningful background check in S and SE asian countries.
5. Customer alienation has happened already with Dell & will happen with other companies.
6. Yes that's true, but I'm saying there will be U.S. companies who do not get what they thought they paid for
7. There are regions and people in India who are sympathetic to the major world terrorists and the governemts that support major world terrorists, It's a shorter path for high tech to get to them from there rather than here.
easygoing gets you eaten alive out in the real world
How does centralizing copyrights & more paperwork keep an improper contribution from happening? it doesn't. FSF software is just as vulnerable as the Linux kernel.....the only question is can the infringer be tracked down. The answer is yes for both the Linux kernel and FSF project.
Easygoing gets Linus a kernel with 1,000's of contributors that is used & growing in the real world......let's not talk about HURD.
Oh, 1/3 of the people there don't live in poverty in India as the U.N. measures things? or perhaps 3/4 of the population by the standards of someone in the "first world"?
Heck, in the 70's I had to read the same computer books as the adults did! How they worked, how to program them, how to make your own digital circuits....
1. drunks don't need to know what "clock time" it is. Drunken timekeeping needs are: Is it past closing time, or not? Is it light outside or dark? Don't need any kind of timepiece.
2. depends how much heat your wrist puts out, I should see if this is still an issue with my increased bulk compared to when younger.
3. battery life really varies, some watches have stinky little battery that wears out in less than 2 years, others last 5+ years.
4. funny how I never had problem with being in habit of winding watch....picked it up at age 7 with my first watch
5. I was thinking of applications like timing heart rate & such. For laps & high accuracy in sports, a really nice analog stopwatch with BIG buttons is much easier to use ( and made for one-handed operation too!) than trying to hit button #2 on the far side of some microminiaturized wonder gizmo.
How about the low-caste people in India? do they have any rights? Are we really helping the masses in poverty in India, or just benefitting a small amount of upper-caste people and allowing them to continue their oligarchy? Is there any incentive for the Indian companies to be honest about their capabilities, to keep our information confidential, to subject themselves to our laws & ideas of legality?
I predict this will NOT work out in the long term:
Indian companies will lie about their competency to get work
They will sell proprietary information
They will take advantage of no legal venue to steal & commit fraud & breach of contract
they will employ people without regard to background problems, because there is no way to do meaningful background check in India
the commnication, time zone, and cultural differences will cause customer alienation
it will be found that the managers in the U.S. who recommended outsourcing are cooking the books to bury the true costs
it will be found that high technology is leaked, given, and sold to terrorist organiations
Of course, vacuum tubes are alive & well in every radio & television station, and every microwave oven across america. There are solid state devices that will do a similar job, but they are horribly expensive & not as robust.
Many cable channels come from satellite feeds anyway. Funny to see which channels become pixelated garbage in heavy weather here, or sometimes in heavy weather in some other part of the country. And a couple times this year the cable went dead altogether for a few days.
gee whizz bang phones
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
funny on my last consulting job the people I worked with had all these very high tech japanese phones that did everything, but when we went into the elevators or below ground at the Chicago Daley Center their phones would stop working, but my very basic butt-ugly Motorola V120 was the only thing that could work. I'd rather spend money on having low-signal strength sensitivity than web browsing, cameras, modem jack, games, custom ring tunes & all that other crap
it would be great to get rid of X11 altogether and go with something faster, leaner & better designed, like a display postscript system. I've been putting up with X (admin, config, programming) for over 14 years, enough with this crap already.
slashdot is really about letting people comment on articles that appear elsewhere - just one a month from wired? That's *low*. There's plenty of other online sources that get almost *daily* exposure in slashdot.
I was at what I believe is your web site, http://s87365085.onlinehome.us/, but didn't see any links to your resume. If you make one there, and then change the URL (maybe for just 1 month) to your top level home page that gets put into your slashdot, kuroshin, etc. postings, the search engines will then index you.
The way 80% of them found me was by my resume on my website - most hits from google. And yes I also use the lame meta http-equiv="keywords" content=" " tag because it works. The rest came from having my skills/resume on monster.com.
So I'd say your chances of getting a fulltime job soon just improved 10,000% - now I'm actually getting daily contacts from HR departments and headhunters, and have 2 job offers I soon have to act on......so what I'm saying is don't spend the money for renewing your certs just yet, get a job, maybe the employer forks out for it, or maybe you decide if it's then worthwhile for you to spend money on yourself.
8 whole bits??!!! geez, things sure have gone to pot since we got away from the perfectly servicable 4-bit Intel 4004 with 12 bit addressing. Who the heck needs more than 4kb of addressable memory? Cruft mongers, that's who. And look at the transistor count bloat, 2,300 in the 4004 to how many freaking millions in these 32+ bit hogs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. To design something very complicated like an aircraft or Mars rover there are *many* models and experimentation done, because almost all textbook equations are only approximations of reality. Since you used example of missile, there is NO WAY to model the turbulence, forces, torques, etc. involved with a real missile in flight, though we are getting better at approximating them. Any missile design will have many man-years of "twiddling, tweaking, and hacking" in the evolution of its design.
To use an even simpler exmple, what if one burns 2.00000 moles of hydrogn and 1.00000 moles of oxygen, how much water is produced? If you answer that question based on what you learned in freshman chemistry you'd be wrong. In the real world, reactions never go to 100%, reagents aren't pure, and other chemicals besides water (like hydrogen peroxide) would be produced. And the ONLY way to know how much water would be produced under given conditions would be to actually do it. And then, you'd find for repeated experiments the amount wouldn't quite be the same!
And finally, I'd point out that when systems fail aboard a Mars rover, they're very much back the realm of hacking, tweaking and fiddling.
You don't understand. The purpose of the Canadian Mars probe will be to determine if beer has ever existed on Mars, or if conditions favorable to the brewing of beer ever existed on Mars. To avoid possible contamination the probes will be assembled in special "sober-rooms" by foreign immigrants. Special instruments on the probe's robotic arm will include a MoisonBrador spectrometer and a 2000ml Erienmeyer yeast culturing flask.
Many major civilizations in the past 10,000 years (yup, gotta include those south african ones your history teacher never told you about) have fallen just because of draught...and we already know the average temperature of the earth has been MUCH HOTTER and MUCH COLDER in the past. 12,000 years ago we ended an ice age. Radical climate change has happened before, it'll happen again. Civilizations will collapse. Big deal. Insolation is the key to climate, not man's activities.
I know things are getting better in India, and it's fine with me if they one day become the greatest, wealthiest, freeist people on planet earth. Could happen in 25-50 years. In fact, I'd say it's either going to be China or India in the long term. But there are problems in the present, and I'm saying over next 3-4 years we'll see some of these problems manifest themselves (some are happening already)
1. the fact that India HAS a group of people that is called the "lower castes" pretty much ends the argument! Yes, things are improving
2. There are legal agreements and legal venue between some of the nations that the U.S.A. trades with.....in the case of U.S.A. and India there is going to be a problem for U.S. companies as things stand right now
3. Some Indian companies are GREAT. They do GREAT WORK. However, I have worked at companies where things did not go well with outsourced projects, and it takes a year or more for that to be realized in a major project
4.Yes, I have had my background checked prior to IT employment at several companies. There are very interesting reasons why it is impossible to do meaningful background check in S and SE asian countries.
5. Customer alienation has happened already with Dell & will happen with other companies.
6. Yes that's true, but I'm saying there will be U.S. companies who do not get what they thought they paid for
7. There are regions and people in India who are sympathetic to the major world terrorists and the governemts that support major world terrorists, It's a shorter path for high tech to get to them from there rather than here.
easygoing gets you eaten alive out in the real world
How does centralizing copyrights & more paperwork keep an improper contribution from happening? it doesn't. FSF software is just as vulnerable as the Linux kernel.....the only question is can the infringer be tracked down. The answer is yes for both the Linux kernel and FSF project.
Easygoing gets Linus a kernel with 1,000's of contributors that is used & growing in the real world......let's not talk about HURD.
Oh, 1/3 of the people there don't live in poverty in India as the U.N. measures things? or perhaps 3/4 of the population by the standards of someone in the "first world"?
Heck, in the 70's I had to read the same computer books as the adults did! How they worked, how to program them, how to make your own digital circuits....
1. drunks don't need to know what "clock time" it is. Drunken timekeeping needs are: Is it past closing time, or not? Is it light outside or dark? Don't need any kind of timepiece. 2. depends how much heat your wrist puts out, I should see if this is still an issue with my increased bulk compared to when younger. 3. battery life really varies, some watches have stinky little battery that wears out in less than 2 years, others last 5+ years. 4. funny how I never had problem with being in habit of winding watch....picked it up at age 7 with my first watch 5. I was thinking of applications like timing heart rate & such. For laps & high accuracy in sports, a really nice analog stopwatch with BIG buttons is much easier to use ( and made for one-handed operation too!) than trying to hit button #2 on the far side of some microminiaturized wonder gizmo.
How about the low-caste people in India? do they have any rights? Are we really helping the masses in poverty in India, or just benefitting a small amount of upper-caste people and allowing them to continue their oligarchy? Is there any incentive for the Indian companies to be honest about their capabilities, to keep our information confidential, to subject themselves to our laws & ideas of legality?
I predict this will NOT work out in the long term:
Indian companies will lie about their competency to get work
They will sell proprietary information
They will take advantage of no legal venue to steal & commit fraud & breach of contract
they will employ people without regard to background problems, because there is no way to do meaningful background check in India
the commnication, time zone, and cultural differences will cause customer alienation
it will be found that the managers in the U.S. who recommended outsourcing are cooking the books to bury the true costs
it will be found that high technology is leaked, given, and sold to terrorist organiations
1. Hard to quickly read while driving at night even with backlighting, give me glowing analog hands!
2. Display fades & hard to read when very cold
3. batteries are not standardized, store might not even have your size!
4. batteries are required; if your watch dies while you're traveling in third world country you're likely S.O.L.
5. using digital watch as stopwatch/timing requires pushing buttons, with analog can easily do just by looking
Of course, vacuum tubes are alive & well in every radio & television station, and every microwave oven across america. There are solid state devices that will do a similar job, but they are horribly expensive & not as robust.
ForTran is still the most optimizable & fastest language for vector supercomputers. The very best numeric libraries are those in ForTran;
I think you're just a poser - a *Real* Pirate - American would have concluded his sentences with a proper "Yarrrrrrrrrrrr!"
This was only the state department, choosing a font for correspondence. yeesh, even the submitters aren't reading the freakin articles.....
Many cable channels come from satellite feeds anyway. Funny to see which channels become pixelated garbage in heavy weather here, or sometimes in heavy weather in some other part of the country. And a couple times this year the cable went dead altogether for a few days.
funny on my last consulting job the people I worked with had all these very high tech japanese phones that did everything, but when we went into the elevators or below ground at the Chicago Daley Center their phones would stop working, but my very basic butt-ugly Motorola V120 was the only thing that could work. I'd rather spend money on having low-signal strength sensitivity than web browsing, cameras, modem jack, games, custom ring tunes & all that other crap
it would be great to get rid of X11 altogether and go with something faster, leaner & better designed, like a display postscript system. I've been putting up with X (admin, config, programming) for over 14 years, enough with this crap already.
ahhh, but then I can use a technique perfected by U.S. farmers to apply for a government subsidy to NOT grow gold like potatoes.
which Pavilion model is that? 5.2 works well on my HP Pavilion 6545C
slashdot is really about letting people comment on articles that appear elsewhere - just one a month from wired? That's *low*. There's plenty of other online sources that get almost *daily* exposure in slashdot.
I was at what I believe is your web site, http://s87365085.onlinehome.us/, but didn't see any links to your resume. If you make one there, and then change the URL (maybe for just 1 month) to your top level home page that gets put into your slashdot, kuroshin, etc. postings, the search engines will then index you.
simple - they have a set of color filters they can put in front of the lens.
The way 80% of them found me was by my resume on my website - most hits from google. And yes I also use the lame meta http-equiv="keywords" content=" " tag because it works. The rest came from having my skills/resume on monster.com.
So I'd say your chances of getting a fulltime job soon just improved 10,000% - now I'm actually getting daily contacts from HR departments and headhunters, and have 2 job offers I soon have to act on......so what I'm saying is don't spend the money for renewing your certs just yet, get a job, maybe the employer forks out for it, or maybe you decide if it's then worthwhile for you to spend money on yourself.
8 whole bits??!!! geez, things sure have gone to pot since we got away from the perfectly servicable 4-bit Intel 4004 with 12 bit addressing. Who the heck needs more than 4kb of addressable memory? Cruft mongers, that's who. And look at the transistor count bloat, 2,300 in the 4004 to how many freaking millions in these 32+ bit hogs.