The simple answer is you can't "manage" or plan innovation. A reasonable plan would be to hire a bunch of hackers, preferably ones seen at work at 2 AM, give them each a private office and a $30,000 yearly budget for gadgetry, and a mandate to do something fun and maybe useful. And that's it.
Of course no manager would allow this, so that might explain the paucity of results.
Just like your typical USA-Today article, long on human interest, real short on accuracy.
(1) The Boeing 377 StratoCruiser was roomier, with sleeping berths and a bar on the lower level.
(2) The 747 was not suggested by any airline president, but by the development of large high-bypass turbofan engines.
(3) The 747 was not a success for many, many years. The early models had many delays and glitches and the airlines lost tons of money on each one for many years.
(4) Putting your wife by the runway on a first-time takeoff might not be a show of affection.
There have been breathtaking departures from the ubiquitous file-->I/O-->Object-->variables-->Registers-->CPU juggling act. Some like the IBM 38 said fuck all that, the CPU works on data objects directly, with no registers, variables, or I/O.
Problem is you have to get everybody to drink this Kool-Aid, from the compiler writers, DB implementors, OS designers, programmers, and end users. IBM was a big enough gorilla to try to force this, but in todays world that's not likely to happen.
ANd for the first few generations performance will be an issue. One will always be able to point to some other system that runs faster cause it does not have some of the overhead that the general object system has.
Microsoft when asked why Vista was late the reason given was that they wrote several thousand person-years of code in.NET and once they saw how slow it was, they junked almost all of it. I'd call that abandonment.
to the casual observer, a copy of a not very successful proprietary virtual machine and framework that has been partially abandoned by its own masters-- it does not sound like a super idea.
You might recall Microsoft spent like three years rewriting parts of Windows in.NET and then gave up on it, for all the obvious reasons. Maybe we can learn from their very expensive learning experience?
In 1962 you could shell out $29.95 for a Heathkit "Two'er", a 5-tube 2-meter transceiver, quite capable of contacting another Two'er 100 miles away with just a coathanger for an antenna. And you did not make headlines for having assembled the kit or pressed the mike button.
Hmmm, if we can't build lasers and power supplies like that on Earth, even given tens of years and billions of $, how soon will these be doable in outer space, with 100% reliability.
The old project Orion looked into atomic kabang propulsion. There were a few major showstoppers-- two dud impulses in a row and the pusher plate goes flying off into space. No way on Earth to test it. Which is kinda important for a device that has to be 100% reliable with no misfires.
Also the idea of discharging all those Joules in 10 nanoseconds is mighty ambitious-- just the inductance of the objects limits the rate of current rise to a whole lot more than that.
Talk about slow... matter has this undesireable property of "thermal inertia". Your basic thermal wire is going to have a hard time making very many transitions per second. We're talking centihertz.
They'll have to speed up Vista by a factor of several gazillion to run well on this CPU.
That's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Nobody cares that a heatsink is running "more effectively" the hotter it gets. That's like saying don't take aspirin cause your red glow looks so nice.
Peltier devices dissipate about 5 watts for every watt they move. And they have a limited deltac across their sides, so it's really easy to end up worse off temperature wise if the extra 5 watts heats up the heatsink more than the peltier device cools the other side.
It's slow. We're talking about a reaction that is doubling in intensity every 10 nanoseconds, the mean free path of a fast neutron.
If you're inserting rod into a cylinder, the reactivity goes up not a lot faster than linearly, and spread out over the whole insertion distance, many centimeters. A long distance and a long time for a fizzle to develop.
If you have a cone-shaped target and mating projectile, the reactivity goes up much more quickly.
Well a cylinder and rod sound like a really poor design. You want a quick transition to super-criticality, not a slow linear slide. Much more likely they were a conical target and a mating projectile.
Maybe this guy is trying to disinform certain rogue scientists?
The Hiroshima bomb was a very simple "gun" design. Plenty of published info on it. It used a navy gun barrel cut down to size, a U235 doughnut target, a polonium initiator, and a U235 projectile. Mighty simple. Any chopper shop could build one, with the exception of getting the Polonium and U235.
This design was abandoned as it had many drawbacks-- it used about 8 times more U235 than absolutely necessary, there was a 7% chance of a fizzle, and there was no way to make it safe. But it had the advantage that it was dead-simple and guaranteed to work, well 93% of the time.
Now if he made a replica of Fat Man, that would really be something.
NASA does PR about as well as the old AT&T did commercials. The saying went, if AT&T tried to sell KFC, they'd advertise it as "murdered, knifed and scalded dead birds".
This video in particular is particularly mind-numbing. No script, no patter, no information-- just "This is the FQZ rack, next to the XTY rack". I turned it off before my heart stopped from boredom.
25 years and computers still don't boot any faster. A 8MHz 128k Mac would boot in about 20 seconds. Now computers are clocked about 500 times faster and it takes 10 times longer. What's a factor of 5000 among friends?
(1) Your hard disk gets a few bad blocks in commonly used directories, such as windows\system32 and the hard disk substitutes blocks way out on the edge.
(2) You have TeaTimer or McAfee or Norton or a combination of those all running.
(3) A virus or rootkit or dangling reference to a network drive.
If you do the math, the prospects for tiny motors is supremely dismal.
You see there's a basic problem-- the torque goes down as the cube of the motor's length, while the friction goes down as the square. In addition magnetics don't work well when you get down to the size of magnetic domains.
By the time you get down to the grain of salt size, motors can just barely overcome friction. Any smaller and they can't even turn over. You might notice in TFA there's no clear indication they've gotten one to rotate at all. Not surprising.
I would not bet any agricultural properties on this.
>It can be. The "wake-up" signal that the net, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth gives it could give it enough power to switch it back on.
Nice try, but no.
Twisted-pair Ethernet requires 2-way signalng, at about 1 volt across 200 ohms, 5 milliamps, 5 milliwatts. It's mighty hard to run a 100MBPS modem and ethernet frame detector on 5 milliwatts AND send 5 milliwatts back all the time.
Wi-fi and bluetooth deliver picowatts at best. Not enough to power the receivers.
Let's get real. It can't be ZERO watts and still be listening to the net, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Maybe less than one watt with custom CMOS net interfaces. But not ZERO.
Nice try, but it's all too easy to fool oneself even with what you think are hard and fast numbers.
First of all the solar panels provide episodic power at unpredictable times at unpredictable amounts. That kind of power is worth much, much less than steady reliable power. In most areas it's priced at about 3 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
So that's closer to $10/month, $120 per year. Not enough to even make a dent in the interest.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple answer is you can't "manage" or plan innovation. A reasonable plan would be to hire a bunch of hackers, preferably ones seen at work at 2 AM, give them each a private office and a $30,000 yearly budget for gadgetry, and a mandate to do something fun and maybe useful. And that's it.
Of course no manager would allow this, so that might explain the paucity of results.
Just like your typical USA-Today article, long on human interest, real short on accuracy.
(1) The Boeing 377 StratoCruiser was roomier, with sleeping berths and a bar on the lower level.
(2) The 747 was not suggested by any airline president, but by the development of large high-bypass turbofan engines.
(3) The 747 was not a success for many, many years. The early models had many delays and glitches and the airlines lost tons of money on each one for many years.
(4) Putting your wife by the runway on a first-time takeoff might not be a show of affection.
There have been breathtaking departures from the ubiquitous file-->I/O-->Object-->variables-->Registers-->CPU juggling act. Some like the IBM 38 said fuck all that, the CPU works on data objects directly, with no registers, variables, or I/O.
Problem is you have to get everybody to drink this Kool-Aid, from the compiler writers, DB implementors, OS designers, programmers, and end users. IBM was a big enough gorilla to try to force this, but in todays world that's not likely to happen.
ANd for the first few generations performance will be an issue. One will always be able to point to some other system that runs faster cause it does not have some of the overhead that the general object system has.
Sources:
with direct quotes from MSFT's Allchin, actual survey of .NET files in Vista versus Longhorn, and more.
http://tinyurl.com/cj8f4q
http://tinyurl.com/b4hw8c
http://tinyurl.com/nj5ds
Sources!
No hyperbole.
Microsoft when asked why Vista was late the reason given was that they wrote several thousand person-years of code in .NET and once they saw how slow it was, they junked almost all of it. I'd call that abandonment.
No hyperbole.
to the casual observer, a copy of a not very successful proprietary virtual machine and framework that has been partially abandoned by its own masters-- it does not sound like a super idea.
You might recall Microsoft spent like three years rewriting parts of Windows in .NET and then gave up on it, for all the obvious reasons. Maybe we can learn from their very expensive learning experience?
In 1962 you could shell out $29.95 for a Heathkit "Two'er", a 5-tube 2-meter transceiver, quite capable of contacting another Two'er 100 miles away with just a coathanger for an antenna. And you did not make headlines for having assembled the kit or pressed the mike button.
Hmmm, if we can't build lasers and power supplies like that on Earth, even given tens of years and billions of $, how soon will these be doable in outer space, with 100% reliability.
The old project Orion looked into atomic kabang propulsion. There were a few major showstoppers-- two dud impulses in a row and the pusher plate goes flying off into space. No way on Earth to test it. Which is kinda important for a device that has to be 100% reliable with no misfires.
Also the idea of discharging all those Joules in 10 nanoseconds is mighty ambitious-- just the inductance of the objects limits the rate of current rise to a whole lot more than that.
Replace /position/ with /velocity/ and the principle applies.
Talk about slow... matter has this undesireable property of "thermal inertia". Your basic thermal wire is going to have a hard time making very many transitions per second. We're talking centihertz.
They'll have to speed up Vista by a factor of several gazillion to run well on this CPU.
Your average chinese MP3 player or cellphone with an added keyboard could be repurposed as a very cheap "laptop".
If we assume the black hole swallows the world, there's no problem, is there?
After all, there won't be anybody around to complain about it.
Well, maybe the astronauts on the ISS.
That's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Nobody cares that a heatsink is running "more effectively" the hotter it gets. That's like saying don't take aspirin cause your red glow looks so nice.
Peltier devices dissipate about 5 watts for every watt they move. And they have a limited deltac across their sides, so it's really easy to end up worse off temperature wise if the extra 5 watts heats up the heatsink more than the peltier device cools the other side.
It's slow. We're talking about a reaction that is doubling in intensity every 10 nanoseconds, the mean free path of a fast neutron.
If you're inserting rod into a cylinder, the reactivity goes up not a lot faster than linearly, and spread out over the whole insertion distance, many centimeters. A long distance and a long time for a fizzle to develop.
If you have a cone-shaped target and mating projectile, the reactivity goes up much more quickly.
Simple geometry and physics.
Well a cylinder and rod sound like a really poor design. You want a quick transition to super-criticality, not a slow linear slide. Much more likely they were a conical target and a mating projectile.
Maybe this guy is trying to disinform certain rogue scientists?
The Hiroshima bomb was a very simple "gun" design. Plenty of published info on it. It used a navy gun barrel cut down to size, a U235 doughnut target, a polonium initiator, and a U235 projectile. Mighty simple. Any chopper shop could build one, with the exception of getting the Polonium and U235.
This design was abandoned as it had many drawbacks-- it used about 8 times more U235 than absolutely necessary, there was a 7% chance of a fizzle, and there was no way to make it safe.
But it had the advantage that it was dead-simple and guaranteed to work, well 93% of the time.
Now if he made a replica of Fat Man, that would really be something.
NASA does PR about as well as the old AT&T did commercials. The saying went, if AT&T tried to sell KFC, they'd advertise it as "murdered, knifed and scalded dead birds".
This video in particular is particularly mind-numbing. No script, no patter, no information-- just "This is the FQZ rack, next to the XTY rack". I turned it off before my heart stopped from boredom.
25 years and computers still don't boot any faster. A 8MHz 128k Mac would boot in about 20 seconds. Now computers are clocked about 500 times faster and it takes 10 times longer. What's a factor of 5000 among friends?
In Russia, system boots you!
Top offenders:
(1) Your hard disk gets a few bad blocks in commonly used directories, such as windows\system32 and the hard disk substitutes blocks way out on the edge.
(2) You have TeaTimer or McAfee or Norton or a combination of those all running.
(3) A virus or rootkit or dangling reference to a network drive.
If you do the math, the prospects for tiny motors is supremely dismal.
You see there's a basic problem-- the torque goes down as the cube of the motor's length, while the friction goes down as the square. In addition magnetics don't work well when you get down to the size of magnetic domains.
By the time you get down to the grain of salt size, motors can just barely overcome friction. Any smaller and they can't even turn over. You might notice in TFA there's no clear indication they've gotten one to rotate at all. Not surprising.
I would not bet any agricultural properties on this.
>It can be. The "wake-up" signal that the net, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth gives it could give it enough power to switch it back on.
Nice try, but no.
Twisted-pair Ethernet requires 2-way signalng, at about 1 volt across 200 ohms, 5 milliamps, 5 milliwatts. It's mighty hard to run a 100MBPS modem and ethernet frame detector on 5 milliwatts AND send 5 milliwatts back all the time.
Wi-fi and bluetooth deliver picowatts at best. Not enough to power the receivers.
Let's get real. It can't be ZERO watts and still be listening to the net, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Maybe less than one watt with custom CMOS net interfaces. But not ZERO.
Nice try, but it's all too easy to fool oneself even with what you think are hard and fast numbers.
First of all the solar panels provide episodic power at unpredictable times at unpredictable amounts. That kind of power is worth much, much less than steady reliable power. In most areas it's priced at about 3 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
So that's closer to $10/month, $120 per year. Not enough to even make a dent in the interest.
Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention the many bits of eye candy and Mac-like fribbles and features that Windows 3.11 should have had. My bad.
The point is that calling it "Windows 7" is misleading. It's 95% Vista. A honest name would have been "Vista 1.2".