Assembler? What a wimp! In my days of the Altair, we entered code in hex with toggle switches and looked at blinking lights for output. None of this stinkin' keyboards and CRTs. That's when real men programmed, not quiche eaters.
No,no. It's far batter to progress in steady and stable baby steps than in glamorous bouts of insane ones.
Doubtless true.
I think you [the OP] have a rather silly and romantic view of how real science works. It's almost never about some pointy-haired lab coated mad scientist who is ridiculed by everybody who performs a great experiment using spit and bailing wire and proves the whole world wrong.
True, but to raise a related point that might have been the OP's original motivation, theoreticians sometimes don't have the benefit of disturbing experiments like the photoelectric effect or the Michelson-Morley experiment that are an obvious prod to a paradigm change. What they often have are unaccounted-for data that look amenable to a "small tweak" in the model, but that really can open whole new areas of physics (like the Raman effect). Of course, these most often don't mean a change to fundamental physics, but they do require a leap of some kind. I'll confess I haven't read Kuhn's book - only the Cliff's notes;) - but from other disciplines we see that progress often requires an intuitive jump followed by a step-by-step methodical re-tracing of that leap to ground it in solid theory.
Bear in mind that Physics has gone through THREE such revolutions in the twentieth century (relativity, quantum mechanics, standard model of elementary particles/partial unification of the fundamental forces) withoutdiverting from this methodology.
Yes and no. They all involved leaps and THEN a rigorous methodology.
In the particular case of the TFA, I don't think we're talking about insane amounts of money or effort. I think it might be kinda interesting and fun.
Many companies just pander to Wall Street without long term business sense. Idiot MBAs with no domain knowledge jump in, rake in a few bucks by playing numbers games, jump ship and leave the company to fold or be propped up temporarily by the next hustler.
It certainly looks like a house of cards waiting to fall.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions just based on this web page.
This guy works for one section at JPL, which has no centralized desktop management. JPL is just a part of NASA. Now some guy at a web site interviews one guy in one part of NASA and waves his arms to make it look like "NASA prefers Mandriva".
That's like the National Enquirer interviewing a janitor somwhere in NASA and concluding that there are 3 eyed aliens among us.
I worked at JPL for 10 years and cringed every time I saw some mom-and-pop newsrag interview some low-level grunt who everyone thought "spoke for NASA".
Not saying TFA might not turn out to be correct, just pointing out the need to take it cum grano salis.
No it isn't. You should learn about BREEDER REACTORS. They make more fuel than they consume! There are several trillions of tons of otherwise useless Thorium-232 and Uranium-238 that can be turned into reactor fuel for essentially free.
I'm too lazy to do research and IANANS, but something has to be wrong here. You don't manufacture energy out of nothing. There are perhaps other fuels that breeder reactors need. Any "experts"?
Jobs has a reputation of beings hands-on in some things, but he either knows where to delegate on tech features, has great instincts, or has more nuts-and-bolts knowledge than I suspect. I don't quite get how he pulls it off. He must listen to techies at least some, wouldn't you think?
Though I never owned one, by all accounts the NeXT was great. Jobs probably knows a few technical things, but how much input does he make about some of the lower level technical details?
Interesting. When I last studied energy utilization, most was for transportation (good old cars, trucks, and trains), second, I think, was lighting (!?).
I remember debates about whether electric cars really are greener since they rely on things like coal generated electricity to charge them. It's something to think about.
Arguments pro generally said that large scale electricity generators were more efficient per unit energy than a single internal combustion engine and that their pollution controls were also better per unit of energy.
Can't remember arguments con.
Even more interesting is if you figure in the costs of pollution, which the producer and consumer don't really see directly. Some farmer is paying more to grow crops, and some private citizens, insurance companies, and hospitals are paying more for health care. These all filter down to consumers and tax payers.
Unfortunately, we also have to figure in the effects of poverty and the benefits of cheap, but short-term polluting energy sources. Lost human potential also costs us something.
Also how do you quantify quality of life? Makes your head spin.
I can see restricting something not already overwhelmingly in the public, such as an F22/A fighter, but a commercial product that is easily duplicated? That's dumb. Anyone can easily get a copy illegally or, with some trouble, some smart people can make their own.
All this does is hurt companies like Symantec.
For the most part, I'm not a Bush hater, but I think this is unrealistic and short-sighted.
No, you're wrong. See those dots? They're keys on a keyboard! It's a picture of a frustrated slashdot user who nobody understands. None of his submissions make it and he doesn't have enough karma points. And not only that trolls are probably out to get him.
People who might have been brought calmly into the business of improving the encyclopedia are goaded instead into becoming pests.
I don't buy that. If they are the type to vandalize a page, they already have severe problems. Take a look on Yahoo message boards. You repeatedly see the most atrocious posts. Sometimes it seems like 90% of posts are from neanderthals who now feel significant because there is a place that won't have them thrown out.
Now I will agree that giving stupid vandals attention probably intensifies their behavior, but I don't know about tolerating neo-nazi's posting their hate on an encyclopedia site. Somehow having a little harder moderation on Wikipedia seems more appropriate.
Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
I agree that insults and backhanded punishments make the situation worse. Admins need to be mature.
Once you've gotten outside most of the earth's gravitational well, what you're really interested in is impulse (force times time). Most of the SSME's short burn goes to just lifting all that fuel. When you're in space not fighting the near-earth gravity, little forces on the comparatively tiny spacecraft add up over time.
TFA doesn't say how long they think this ion engine might burn, nor what size spacecraft it might be used for. But just for fun let's take a wild guess stab in the dark and say 10 years on a spacecraft weight of 1000 kg. Maybe I'm off by a factor of 10 or 100 overall. IANARS.
1000 kg . v . v / 2 = 100000 Watts * 365.25 * 10 * 24 * 3600 sec
v = 250000 m / sec or half a million miles an hour.
A lot better than my Saturn SL1 (that's the car, not a version of the Saturn V rocket!)
For construction, baking... etc, the English system makes perfect sense. Many operations consist of halving, doubling or even trebling. Less common is dividing or multiplying by 10.
Actually, the only advantage I see to metric, a big one I'll admit, is that the rest of the world uses it. For scientific stuff, we can as easily perform any mathematical operation in feet/pound/seconds as we can in cm/gm/sec. Who says 1 decimeter instead of 10 cm or.1 m anyway?
Long live the King!
Well, no one is expert enough on everything to not start with trust in at least someone. Of course, once your trust is broken, you have to re-evaluate it and perhaps begin again somewhere else. Think doctors, lawyers, CPAs... etc. The average person doesn't have the time to drop their life and go to medical school to diagnose a pain in their side. Sure, they can make some guesses for common causes and try them out, but at some point some people have to trust another person. Sure, they'll find some doctors are better than others.
Now, how culpable should a publisher be for misinformation they publish? That's another question. If they published something like, "drink sulfuric acid to cure a cold", well that's negligence coupled with malice. If they said, "the moon is made of green cheese", so what?
For some published material, we can just vote with our pocketbooks. Spread the word that the book or article is BS and don't buy it. For free material like the Wikipedia, heck, I agree with you - just lighten up. You get what you pay for.
Geophysics? Largely funded by DoD. They want a basic understanding of earthquakes and an ability to distinguish them from underground nuclear tests.
Solar physics? Largely funded by the Air Force. They want to predict solar flares that may interfere with communication.
Astrophysics? Not by a majority percentage, but at least some funding will piggy back on laboratory duplication of the high temperatures and pressures that occur in nuclear weapons.
Internet? No further remarks necessary.
I will agree that it's a shame, but companies (and sadly to a growing degree universities) these days don't seem to want to invest in high risk long term research. Few things provide the motivation for these big and basic projects that war does. If people are all that concerned, they should put their money where their mouths are instead of rewarding companies that look good to Wall Street.
An interesting aside: a significant amount of university research in the U.S. is funded by foreign countries - Japan being one of the bigger contributers.
I have to say, though, that I don't understand the disconnect between critics and the rosy picture painted by ICANN. For example:
Q1.2 Why is it appropriate for VeriSign to be allowed to raise its prices by up to 7% per year?
A1.2 In order to provide for a transition to allowing market forces to determine prices, ICANN and VeriSign agreed to relax the current price cap, which has remained unchanged since ICANN came into existence, on a graduated basis.
... blah, blah, blah. The gist of their rational seems include the fact that prices haven't been raised yet and that ICANN has to approve any increase.
"Market forces" seems to imply competition, whereas critics are crying "monopoly". For the layman, what gives?
Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips or to pass them off as more valuable processors. "I tell them the truth," he said.
But Zhan acknowledged that Chuanghui has no control over how its customers represent the remarked chips when they resell them.
Uh, nice acknowledgement there, Zhan. How about a little scruples?
Honest, officer. I was just peeling my apple with my knife and that guy came running around the corner right into my knife (cough)... 14 times... Backwards.
Reminds me of Jimmy Carter's visit to Poland. The translater they hired made one goof after another - something US officials suspected as they saw smiles and laughs from the audience. One gaffe I remember is that Carter said, "I have a great love for the Polish people" and it came out as "I have a great lust for the Polish people."
What we need to consider is when cooperating works, and when it doesn't.
Actually, I think two ideas are more fundamental than cooperation: motivation and valuation.
In our imperfect world, most people are most motivated by money. Sure, a great many talk about other values, but when push comes to shove, they place their sense of security and safety into something tangible. Secondly, money fundamentally represents a unit of exchange. It enables us to say item X is worth 1.2 times item Y. Again in our imperfect world, no measure of exchange seems quite as objective and resistant to arbitrary whims as money. Hey, I don't like the idea either.
I remember a documentary titled "Greed" - ugh, repulsive title. But it compared volunteer life guards versus those who were paid and their salary tied to their performance. Guess who gave a greater effort? Sadly, the paid ones.
Consider also when you volunteered something to a friend. A good friend reciprocates, but sometimes a stranger takes advantage of you and you are left with that nasty feeling that, though volunteering feels good, being taken advantage doesn't.
Despite the considerable dark side to Capitalism, the takers in the world seem to destroy more noble "isms".
Well, guess what? People still drive to work by car, all the while complaining that driving is so expensive and that the government should do something about traffic jams.
There have been quite a few debates about public transportation in the context of free market economics. In the U.S., at least, no public transit system is self-supporting. I think I remember hearing that only 1 or 2 in the world are self-supporting. If memory serves, Mexico City is one of them because they keep their trains so jam packed all day.
Regardless of whether public transportation is self-supporting, many say uit is a Good Thing (TM) anyway. Unfortunately you are asking others who do not use your public transit to subsidize it.
Now I personally don't mind subsidizing the Metro in Washington D.C. even though I live in Houston, but someone poorer than I would certainly resent it.
Ask a Chinese peasant who is barely keeping himself and his family fed if he minds getting taxed to give public transportation to someone in Shanghai.
I hope they've used newer software and computing hardware. From Feynman's article:
There is not enough room in the memory of the main line computers for all the programs of ascent, descent, and payload programs in flight, so the memory is loaded about four time from tapes, by the astronauts.
Because of the enormous effort required to replace the software for such an elaborate system, and for checking a new system out, no change has been made to the hardware since the system began about fifteen years ago. The actual hardware is obsolete; for example, the memories are of the old ferrite core type.
Slashdot Mirror
Assembler? What a wimp! In my days of the Altair, we entered code in hex with toggle switches and looked at blinking lights for output. None of this stinkin' keyboards and CRTs. That's when real men programmed, not quiche eaters.
Doubtless true.
I think you [the OP] have a rather silly and romantic view of how real science works. It's almost never about some pointy-haired lab coated mad scientist who is ridiculed by everybody who performs a great experiment using spit and bailing wire and proves the whole world wrong.
True, but to raise a related point that might have been the OP's original motivation, theoreticians sometimes don't have the benefit of disturbing experiments like the photoelectric effect or the Michelson-Morley experiment that are an obvious prod to a paradigm change. What they often have are unaccounted-for data that look amenable to a "small tweak" in the model, but that really can open whole new areas of physics (like the Raman effect). Of course, these most often don't mean a change to fundamental physics, but they do require a leap of some kind. I'll confess I haven't read Kuhn's book - only the Cliff's notes ;) - but from other disciplines we see that progress often requires an intuitive jump followed by a step-by-step methodical re-tracing of that leap to ground it in solid theory.
Bear in mind that Physics has gone through THREE such revolutions in the twentieth century (relativity, quantum mechanics, standard model of elementary particles/partial unification of the fundamental forces) withoutdiverting from this methodology.
Yes and no. They all involved leaps and THEN a rigorous methodology.
In the particular case of the TFA, I don't think we're talking about insane amounts of money or effort. I think it might be kinda interesting and fun.
It certainly looks like a house of cards waiting to fall.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions just based on this web page.
This guy works for one section at JPL, which has no centralized desktop management. JPL is just a part of NASA. Now some guy at a web site interviews one guy in one part of NASA and waves his arms to make it look like "NASA prefers Mandriva".
That's like the National Enquirer interviewing a janitor somwhere in NASA and concluding that there are 3 eyed aliens among us.
I worked at JPL for 10 years and cringed every time I saw some mom-and-pop newsrag interview some low-level grunt who everyone thought "spoke for NASA".
Not saying TFA might not turn out to be correct, just pointing out the need to take it cum grano salis.
I'm too lazy to do research and IANANS, but something has to be wrong here. You don't manufacture energy out of nothing. There are perhaps other fuels that breeder reactors need. Any "experts"?
Interesting. Any reference? Not doubting you, just hadn't heard it.
Jobs has a reputation of beings hands-on in some things, but he either knows where to delegate on tech features, has great instincts, or has more nuts-and-bolts knowledge than I suspect. I don't quite get how he pulls it off. He must listen to techies at least some, wouldn't you think?
Though I never owned one, by all accounts the NeXT was great. Jobs probably knows a few technical things, but how much input does he make about some of the lower level technical details?
Pretty sad.
I remember debates about whether electric cars really are greener since they rely on things like coal generated electricity to charge them. It's something to think about.
Arguments pro generally said that large scale electricity generators were more efficient per unit energy than a single internal combustion engine and that their pollution controls were also better per unit of energy.
Can't remember arguments con.
Even more interesting is if you figure in the costs of pollution, which the producer and consumer don't really see directly. Some farmer is paying more to grow crops, and some private citizens, insurance companies, and hospitals are paying more for health care. These all filter down to consumers and tax payers.
Unfortunately, we also have to figure in the effects of poverty and the benefits of cheap, but short-term polluting energy sources. Lost human potential also costs us something.
Also how do you quantify quality of life? Makes your head spin.
I can see restricting something not already overwhelmingly in the public, such as an F22/A fighter, but a commercial product that is easily duplicated? That's dumb. Anyone can easily get a copy illegally or, with some trouble, some smart people can make their own.
All this does is hurt companies like Symantec.
For the most part, I'm not a Bush hater, but I think this is unrealistic and short-sighted.
No, you're wrong. See those dots? They're keys on a keyboard! It's a picture of a frustrated slashdot user who nobody understands. None of his submissions make it and he doesn't have enough karma points. And not only that trolls are probably out to get him.
I don't buy that. If they are the type to vandalize a page, they already have severe problems. Take a look on Yahoo message boards. You repeatedly see the most atrocious posts. Sometimes it seems like 90% of posts are from neanderthals who now feel significant because there is a place that won't have them thrown out.
Now I will agree that giving stupid vandals attention probably intensifies their behavior, but I don't know about tolerating neo-nazi's posting their hate on an encyclopedia site. Somehow having a little harder moderation on Wikipedia seems more appropriate.
Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
I agree that insults and backhanded punishments make the situation worse. Admins need to be mature.
Once you've gotten outside most of the earth's gravitational well, what you're really interested in is impulse (force times time). Most of the SSME's short burn goes to just lifting all that fuel. When you're in space not fighting the near-earth gravity, little forces on the comparatively tiny spacecraft add up over time.
TFA doesn't say how long they think this ion engine might burn, nor what size spacecraft it might be used for. But just for fun let's take a wild guess stab in the dark and say 10 years on a spacecraft weight of 1000 kg. Maybe I'm off by a factor of 10 or 100 overall. IANARS.
1000 kg . v . v / 2 = 100000 Watts * 365.25 * 10 * 24 * 3600 sec
v = 250000 m / sec or half a million miles an hour.
A lot better than my Saturn SL1 (that's the car, not a version of the Saturn V rocket!)
For construction, baking ... etc, the English system makes perfect sense. Many operations consist of halving, doubling or even trebling. Less common is dividing or multiplying by 10.
Actually, the only advantage I see to metric, a big one I'll admit, is that the rest of the world uses it. For scientific stuff, we can as easily perform any mathematical operation in feet/pound/seconds as we can in cm/gm/sec. Who says 1 decimeter instead of 10 cm or .1 m anyway?
Long live the King!
Now, how culpable should a publisher be for misinformation they publish? That's another question. If they published something like, "drink sulfuric acid to cure a cold", well that's negligence coupled with malice. If they said, "the moon is made of green cheese", so what?
For some published material, we can just vote with our pocketbooks. Spread the word that the book or article is BS and don't buy it. For free material like the Wikipedia, heck, I agree with you - just lighten up. You get what you pay for.
Geophysics? Largely funded by DoD. They want a basic understanding of earthquakes and an ability to distinguish them from underground nuclear tests.
Solar physics? Largely funded by the Air Force. They want to predict solar flares that may interfere with communication.
Astrophysics? Not by a majority percentage, but at least some funding will piggy back on laboratory duplication of the high temperatures and pressures that occur in nuclear weapons.
Internet? No further remarks necessary.
I will agree that it's a shame, but companies (and sadly to a growing degree universities) these days don't seem to want to invest in high risk long term research. Few things provide the motivation for these big and basic projects that war does. If people are all that concerned, they should put their money where their mouths are instead of rewarding companies that look good to Wall Street.
An interesting aside: a significant amount of university research in the U.S. is funded by foreign countries - Japan being one of the bigger contributers.
I have to say, though, that I don't understand the disconnect between critics and the rosy picture painted by ICANN. For example:
Q1.2 Why is it appropriate for VeriSign to be allowed to raise its prices by up to 7% per year?
A1.2 In order to provide for a transition to allowing market forces to determine prices, ICANN and VeriSign agreed to relax the current price cap, which has remained unchanged since ICANN came into existence, on a graduated basis.
"Market forces" seems to imply competition, whereas critics are crying "monopoly". For the layman, what gives?
Not thread-safe, but superstring safe.
On top of a pile of money, surrounded by many beautiful ladies.
I didn't know he was a martyr for Islam.
Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips or to pass them off as more valuable processors. "I tell them the truth," he said.
But Zhan acknowledged that Chuanghui has no control over how its customers represent the remarked chips when they resell them.
Uh, nice acknowledgement there, Zhan. How about a little scruples?
Honest, officer. I was just peeling my apple with my knife and that guy came running around the corner right into my knife (cough) ... 14 times ... Backwards.
Reminds me of Jimmy Carter's visit to Poland. The translater they hired made one goof after another - something US officials suspected as they saw smiles and laughs from the audience. One gaffe I remember is that Carter said, "I have a great love for the Polish people" and it came out as "I have a great lust for the Polish people."
Actually, I think two ideas are more fundamental than cooperation: motivation and valuation.
In our imperfect world, most people are most motivated by money. Sure, a great many talk about other values, but when push comes to shove, they place their sense of security and safety into something tangible. Secondly, money fundamentally represents a unit of exchange. It enables us to say item X is worth 1.2 times item Y. Again in our imperfect world, no measure of exchange seems quite as objective and resistant to arbitrary whims as money. Hey, I don't like the idea either.
I remember a documentary titled "Greed" - ugh, repulsive title. But it compared volunteer life guards versus those who were paid and their salary tied to their performance. Guess who gave a greater effort? Sadly, the paid ones.
Consider also when you volunteered something to a friend. A good friend reciprocates, but sometimes a stranger takes advantage of you and you are left with that nasty feeling that, though volunteering feels good, being taken advantage doesn't.
Despite the considerable dark side to Capitalism, the takers in the world seem to destroy more noble "isms".
And some say US scientists were born that way. We need temporal standards in this immoral world.
There have been quite a few debates about public transportation in the context of free market economics. In the U.S., at least, no public transit system is self-supporting. I think I remember hearing that only 1 or 2 in the world are self-supporting. If memory serves, Mexico City is one of them because they keep their trains so jam packed all day.
Regardless of whether public transportation is self-supporting, many say uit is a Good Thing (TM) anyway. Unfortunately you are asking others who do not use your public transit to subsidize it.
Now I personally don't mind subsidizing the Metro in Washington D.C. even though I live in Houston, but someone poorer than I would certainly resent it.
Ask a Chinese peasant who is barely keeping himself and his family fed if he minds getting taxed to give public transportation to someone in Shanghai.
There is not enough room in the memory of the main line computers for all the programs of ascent, descent, and payload programs in flight, so the memory is loaded about four time from tapes, by the astronauts.
Because of the enormous effort required to replace the software for such an elaborate system, and for checking a new system out, no change has been made to the hardware since the system began about fifteen years ago. The actual hardware is obsolete; for example, the memories are of the old ferrite core type.
Ferrite core memory?????