Actually it is a very large customer and many millions of dollars at stake (tens of thousands of end users licenses) for the vendor. What I figure happened is they sold the contract with some smoke and mirrors with confidence they could work things out...now the working things out is a bit of a panic.
revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?
From my experience, when a project is past its planned deployment date and the team and/or leadership is revisiting questions that should have been settled before coding started success is unlikely. They are THRASHING.
Just this week I am observing an unnamed COTS data management system 2 weeks from deployment, several million dollars worth of hardware waiting for it, and the software just plain doesn't work. It is one thing when they audit the config looking for packaging/install bugs, quite another when the flown in experts are proposing a complete shakeup of the entire application and physical architecture.
It should be evident by recent performance of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA all of the billions spent to be ensure biological WMD stay under wraps.
and finally....stopping nuclear proliferation by convincing the world we're crazy enough to start a nuclear winter (may this is our answer to Kyoto)
This bunch of 5 gallon cowboys in 10 gallon are going to leave this country in a real mess. Watch real closely once Karl Rove's think tanks come up with the catch phrase (probably "Operation Compasion" or something) who ponies up to the trough following Katrina...Haliburton and the usual suspects are already there. REALLY pay close attention when the word for the day is mentioned 14 times in a carefully test grouped speech and displayed on a big blue screen behind the President. It's worked for 6 years...why not now.
I second this one! My favorite test question of all time (from graduate school) estimate the power of a thunderstorm, express your answer in race car engines would serve to highlight the impracticality of this nonsense. If I recall correctly, a 10km wide thunderstorm would have the power of many millions of racecars. A hurricane is as much as 100 times the scale and power goes by volume so...1,000,000 times one thunderstorm....thats thousands of trillions of race car engines of power!!!
Whatever chemical/physical jujitsu you want to try a "reasonableness test" isn't passed with this.
So from a human perspective it would be pissing in the wind trying to change a hurricane. You might as well have the population near the gulf coast go to the beach and yell and the storms to stay away.
They are now able to detect this swelling...how do we know it isn't normal. Maybe the Earth's crust swells and ripples all the time and it is only 5% of this activity that manifests itself in earthquakes and volcanos.
Pretty cool either way though. If there is a correlation it could be very useful predictive data.
The first posts identified this for what it was...a cute joke. If only they had put miniature hamster wheels powered by pet roaches in the power bay...
If you trouble yourself to view other posts you will not dozens of idiot geek wanna-bees shocked that slashdot editors did not spot the technical errors of this article. I imagine they are outraged by the obvious political bias of The Onion and Madd Magazine?
NOTE - never use the term "energy source" when referring to hydrogen because it only carries energy that has to come from somewhere else
In this in a nutshell is why oil/coal companies and their friends at conservative think tanks haven't killed this yet. On the plus side it moves the pollution to point sources (e.g. coal fired power plants and mountian leveling extraction methods...). Bush has even advocated a hydrogen economy (which could be a good thing)....if policy shifts around to reducing emissions from these point sources rather than undoing 35 years of clean air and water regulation the world could be a better place.
In my job about 80% of the work is rather tedious. Another 15% is interesting. The remaining 5% is spent on the opportunities that would be missed by others without my vantage point. So far this year that 5% of my time has come out to a net of about $5M in new business for my company. The 4 days in 5 spent on tedious work nets $20K/month.
Call it lazy, but I am going to do my "job" good-nuf to stay in a rather strategic position to spot the really juicy stuff.
In many instances secret=embarassing/politically damaging. With the exception of the Manhattan project what could still be tactically or strategically damaging?
Democracy dies in the dark! The current administration held the tightest control of information BEFORE 9/11/01. Senate and congressional aids from both parties commented that requests for information to the White House were completely ignored. Prior admistrations since Truman would respond in days and if the answer would require more time, a memo to that effect was typically sent within a week. I remember in the summer of 2001 Republican congressman hearing nothing after repeated requests over months. I can't imagine how tight the reign is on information now!
The Carter administration set a record back in the late '70's declassifying documents. One of the first thing Reagan did when elected was to reclassify many of them...I would guess it was more to eliminate the embarrasing rather than a matter of national security.
And as we are finding out from the tax cuts & Iraq war versus FIMA funding, some cost benefit analysis misses major "intangibles" such as dead and displaced people, lawlessness, rampant 3rd world disease outbreaks etc...
How much is transparency in government and an open forum worth? I think open standards for public documents is a no brainer regardless of any bean counter fiscal analysis.
Sure they won't REFUSE to sell you equipment, but they could have it void warranty, guarantee or violate lease terms. I think this is a good thing. Suppose you are HP leasing a half million dollar pair of DB servers and the bozo's deploying them have inadequate HVAC...the server room spikes to 95 degrees every time the sun thinks of shining and the servers shut themselves down based on thermal protection on CPU's. Would you guarantee the uptime of those servers? How thrilled would you be replacing fried components on them? Would they be reliable machines when they come off lease?
I think that you hit the nail on the head. The value of most certifications begins and ends in the HR department.
My previous employer pushed for certifications. I observed that the worst project managers were PMP certified, the least infrastructure savvy admins were MS certified...
If I am hiring a person, I want to know their ability to solve problems. I would not trust an HR department to ask the right sort of questions to determine that.
In one interview I conducted a person explain at length the previous 3 projects they had led that never made it to production. He was very proud of the 18 months and thousands of pages of training materials that the customer never deployed. I understand that sometimes projects go south, but this guy started his career on the Titanic and more recently move from sea to air in the Hindenburg....
My funniest movie going experience was back in Minnesota in about 1984. On Friday nights a local theater ran Midnight Madness at...well midnight. They projected Pink Floyd the Wall, Heavy Metal, Rocky Horror, Dawn of the Dead...etc.
I don't even remember what was screening, but this guy about 6'8" with a mess of hair and a 10 gallon cowboy hat complete with a great big turkey feather walked with all deliberate speed down the aisle and sat right up front 5 minutes after the movie started. There was a wave of laughter as he did so that busted the whole place up.
I don't imagine it hurt that more than half the people there were probably drunk or stoned though.
Movies used to be a special event. People dressed up. Theaters were palaces. Now that they crank out cookie cutter films and offer an environment with all the charm of an inner city bus terminal it is no surprise people are staying away.
And a rotor is a wing that has a very high yaw rate...I know he was refering to a rotor. I was sharing a bit of 7 years of fluid mechanic education and years of applied industry experience.
The 90 degree projection you reference can also be seen on a Boeing 747-400 or an Airbus A320. The principle is to increase the effective span of the wing. The higher pressure air on the lower surface of the wing wants to get to the lower pressure area on top of the wing. If you are clever about it the increased lift (or decreased lift induced drag depending on how you want to do your bookkeeping) is more than the increased skin friction and weight of additional structure.
By changing shape you may be talking about the mechanisms that change the angle of attack of the rotors as they spin, as the blade travels back, it experiences lower relative airspeed if the helicopter is moving forward. In some instances this is accomlished at the hub, but it could also be done by generating a twist in the blade.
I have seen people run aground whenever they focus on the tool rather than the task:
A good woodworker thinks in terms of what they are going to accomlish. If you are making a drawer with dovetail joinery you could use a fancy jig, a CNC milling machine, or basic hand tools. As soon as a woodworker starts spending their time and money looking for the perfect dovetail jigs in magazines and catalogs they have lost the opportunity to practice making them.
If a CAD operator takes the place of a designer you have lost the focus of your core competency. Rather than designing a better car or snow shovel you are making bits and bytes that my be expensive to build and undesirable in the marketplace.
If a speaker places their focus on creating the "perfect" Powerpoint presentation they may present a boring, unfocused message while the attendee is hypnotized with display objects swooping into view on the screen.
Structural engineer doing a state of the art fatigue analysis on a non-critical component made of a material unlikely to fatigue (this is a real example). A four day answer when a 30 second one is sufficient demonstrates skill with NASTRAN but ignorance of material science and is a waste of the most precious resource...time.
I would contend that proficiency with "technology" will come naturally if used as a tool to do another task.
The decision to have a parent stay at home (one we made by the way) requires choices. We don't take expensive vacations, we don't live in a 3,600 sq ft McMansion, we drive cars into the ground, we don't buy mountains of toys to make up for stuffing kids in daycare...
Much of that 25% from a second income goes toward supporting expensive choices.
I am 37 and have heard our generation refered to by some as the last "free range" generation. Some kids got out of line and ended up in trouble, but in balance kids learned where reasonable limits were and were held responsible for their behavior. I later observed in college as a Resident Assistant that the kids to watch out for were the ones who's parents tightly controlled them. The ones that had a longer leash growing up knew how to negotiate the wild wild world without going bonkers. I think the key was that other adults (besides your parents):
where around (more stay at home moms)
knew who the kids around the neighborhood were
cared what they were doing
were outside
people used to open windows and go outside
people would mow their own lawns
more people had gardens
people walked to places (yesterday a neighbor drove to our house from 5 doors down the street!)
could step in and discipline someone else's kid (within reason) without fear of
kid shooting them
parent shooting them
parent filing lawsuit
being arrested for assault for hauling a kid home by the scruff of the neck
It will never be the same, but I hope to provide for my 4 kids some of the life experience I had that I feel is critical.
I would hardly call the moon a "problem". Rather a gravity assist with the moon would save a considerable amount of energy. I don't have it anymore, but my astrodynamics book from college was not all that expensive ($25 paperback). The equations are a hell of a lot simpler than fluid mechanics.
For an amatuer you could get by with the Earth and Moon (even exclude Sun...although it is large it is much further away) for initial trajectory, then consolidate Earth and Moon and add the Sun, drop the Earth out of the equation for a bit, then for the approach add Mars. Really by the time you add Mars back into the equation you are 99.xxx% of the way there. Most likely the errors in your equation would be bigger.
The tricky part of this is integrating over time with the changing position of the planets. The good news is you are only interested in the trajectory of the vehicle and it has an infintesimal effect on the other bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it is a very large customer and many millions of dollars at stake (tens of thousands of end users licenses) for the vendor. What I figure happened is they sold the contract with some smoke and mirrors with confidence they could work things out...now the working things out is a bit of a panic.
I would say I switched to Vista for a small fraction of that amount...how about a piddling 0.01%?
From my experience, when a project is past its planned deployment date and the team and/or leadership is revisiting questions that should have been settled before coding started success is unlikely. They are THRASHING.
Just this week I am observing an unnamed COTS data management system 2 weeks from deployment, several million dollars worth of hardware waiting for it, and the software just plain doesn't work. It is one thing when they audit the config looking for packaging/install bugs, quite another when the flown in experts are proposing a complete shakeup of the entire application and physical architecture.
As GW would say..."They're doing a great job!"
Would that be to grind the stone of the building to sand destroyed or render the works contained in it unreadable?
This bunch of 5 gallon cowboys in 10 gallon are going to leave this country in a real mess. Watch real closely once Karl Rove's think tanks come up with the catch phrase (probably "Operation Compasion" or something) who ponies up to the trough following Katrina...Haliburton and the usual suspects are already there. REALLY pay close attention when the word for the day is mentioned 14 times in a carefully test grouped speech and displayed on a big blue screen behind the President. It's worked for 6 years...why not now.
But then 32GB appears to be fabricated by conventional means rather the new unobtanium substrates used by AtomChip.
Whatever chemical/physical jujitsu you want to try a "reasonableness test" isn't passed with this.
So from a human perspective it would be pissing in the wind trying to change a hurricane. You might as well have the population near the gulf coast go to the beach and yell and the storms to stay away.
Pretty cool either way though. If there is a correlation it could be very useful predictive data.
If you trouble yourself to view other posts you will not dozens of idiot geek wanna-bees shocked that slashdot editors did not spot the technical errors of this article. I imagine they are outraged by the obvious political bias of The Onion and Madd Magazine?
In this in a nutshell is why oil/coal companies and their friends at conservative think tanks haven't killed this yet. On the plus side it moves the pollution to point sources (e.g. coal fired power plants and mountian leveling extraction methods...). Bush has even advocated a hydrogen economy (which could be a good thing)....if policy shifts around to reducing emissions from these point sources rather than undoing 35 years of clean air and water regulation the world could be a better place.
Call it lazy, but I am going to do my "job" good-nuf to stay in a rather strategic position to spot the really juicy stuff.
Democracy dies in the dark! The current administration held the tightest control of information BEFORE 9/11/01. Senate and congressional aids from both parties commented that requests for information to the White House were completely ignored. Prior admistrations since Truman would respond in days and if the answer would require more time, a memo to that effect was typically sent within a week. I remember in the summer of 2001 Republican congressman hearing nothing after repeated requests over months. I can't imagine how tight the reign is on information now!
The Carter administration set a record back in the late '70's declassifying documents. One of the first thing Reagan did when elected was to reclassify many of them...I would guess it was more to eliminate the embarrasing rather than a matter of national security.
How much is transparency in government and an open forum worth? I think open standards for public documents is a no brainer regardless of any bean counter fiscal analysis.
Sure they won't REFUSE to sell you equipment, but they could have it void warranty, guarantee or violate lease terms. I think this is a good thing. Suppose you are HP leasing a half million dollar pair of DB servers and the bozo's deploying them have inadequate HVAC...the server room spikes to 95 degrees every time the sun thinks of shining and the servers shut themselves down based on thermal protection on CPU's. Would you guarantee the uptime of those servers? How thrilled would you be replacing fried components on them? Would they be reliable machines when they come off lease?
My previous employer pushed for certifications. I observed that the worst project managers were PMP certified, the least infrastructure savvy admins were MS certified...
If I am hiring a person, I want to know their ability to solve problems. I would not trust an HR department to ask the right sort of questions to determine that.
In one interview I conducted a person explain at length the previous 3 projects they had led that never made it to production. He was very proud of the 18 months and thousands of pages of training materials that the customer never deployed. I understand that sometimes projects go south, but this guy started his career on the Titanic and more recently move from sea to air in the Hindenburg ....
I don't even remember what was screening, but this guy about 6'8" with a mess of hair and a 10 gallon cowboy hat complete with a great big turkey feather walked with all deliberate speed down the aisle and sat right up front 5 minutes after the movie started. There was a wave of laughter as he did so that busted the whole place up.
I don't imagine it hurt that more than half the people there were probably drunk or stoned though.
Movies used to be a special event. People dressed up. Theaters were palaces. Now that they crank out cookie cutter films and offer an environment with all the charm of an inner city bus terminal it is no surprise people are staying away.
For larger than micro-organisms the problem is supplying nutrients (oxygen, protiens, sugars...) to the spinning bits.
And a rotor is a wing that has a very high yaw rate...I know he was refering to a rotor. I was sharing a bit of 7 years of fluid mechanic education and years of applied industry experience.
Heck, I haven't even seen any living thing with an rotary parts.
By changing shape you may be talking about the mechanisms that change the angle of attack of the rotors as they spin, as the blade travels back, it experiences lower relative airspeed if the helicopter is moving forward. In some instances this is accomlished at the hub, but it could also be done by generating a twist in the blade.
I would contend that proficiency with "technology" will come naturally if used as a tool to do another task.
Much of that 25% from a second income goes toward supporting expensive choices.
I am 37 and have heard our generation refered to by some as the last "free range" generation. Some kids got out of line and ended up in trouble, but in balance kids learned where reasonable limits were and were held responsible for their behavior. I later observed in college as a Resident Assistant that the kids to watch out for were the ones who's parents tightly controlled them. The ones that had a longer leash growing up knew how to negotiate the wild wild world without going bonkers. I think the key was that other adults (besides your parents):
It will never be the same, but I hope to provide for my 4 kids some of the life experience I had that I feel is critical.
For an amatuer you could get by with the Earth and Moon (even exclude Sun...although it is large it is much further away) for initial trajectory, then consolidate Earth and Moon and add the Sun, drop the Earth out of the equation for a bit, then for the approach add Mars. Really by the time you add Mars back into the equation you are 99.xxx% of the way there. Most likely the errors in your equation would be bigger.
The tricky part of this is integrating over time with the changing position of the planets. The good news is you are only interested in the trajectory of the vehicle and it has an infintesimal effect on the other bodies.