You've got that right about the small budget affecting the way they do the launch. I work in radio astronomy and some of our people are building a balloon-borne telescope much like the one reported on here. They cobble together bits of this and that that they have lying around, rather than build a completely new instrument. They can't afford to do it the big NASA way, as is done for the billion-dollar space launches. So an occasional failure is going to happen.
It landed on the 4WD in front of theirs, so they just missed being clobbered by the telescope. But they were a bit shaken by the whole thing. I guess they didn't realize that parking downwind of a balloon launch might be an unwise thing to do.
Tape really is unreliable. Spinning media, never more than a couple years old and replicated over a network to more spinning media in distant places, is the most reliable thing we've got. And it has to be kept on a current software system!
There are plenty of quotes from Steve Jobs about products that have he claims to have no future, that go on to become billion-dollar sellers after he introduces them 6 months later. He's fond of poo-pooing an idea that he's secretly working on - the iPhone and iPad are prime examples. He may or may not have been pulling our leg. Or has he just learned that it's safer to lower people's expectations?
Bill Gates actually could program - he wrote a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 that worked, even though his development system was 2000 miles away form the target system, which he had no access to for debugging. That's quite a programming feat! Jobs had the Woz to do the engineering work, and Zuckerberg, I have no idea what he did.
Yeah, the amount of power used in any commercial or government building is astonishing when illustrated by the size of the solar array needed to generate it. A local (Tucson) solar panel factory installed a system big enough to power one shift of production - it dwarfed the factory building and parking lot.
Yeah, the old FORTRAN game played on the decsystem10.
I remember staring at the source code, trying to figure out the database to work out the map.
It was rather convoluted, as all code designed to run on a computer with hardly any core had to be.
Don't do it. The FCC changed the way television works, and look what we have now... none of my old TVs work anymore! I dread the day when my 1936 Western Electric 202 desk set stops working just because some kid wanted to listen to his girlfriend yammer in Hi-Fi.
but it will use Nixie tubes for the display, just to make it interesting. It's fun to do the CAD design. Someone else will have to help me with the software, as I'm more of a hardware guy.
They aren't predictable in advance. They are basically the noise in the solar system's timekeeping. It's impossible to write code that knows in advance when they will occur, since they are only announced six months ahead of time. So any clock that wants to stay in sync with UTC must be connected to either NTP or GPS or similar timekeeping service.
If only those darn astronomers didn't care so much about keeping the sun at Greenwich precisely at the meridian at high noon, we wouldn't have this problem.
I use 30 year old test equipment at home, and my employer buys 30 year old equipment for our lab. The newer test equipment we have bought breaks at least as often and is not repairable like the older stuff is. However, I work on radio telescopes, which have rather unique requirements for test equipment. Back when I did high-speed digital work, then the employer was my best source of late-model test equipment.
I love that scope's distributed amplifier, with the dozen tubes each working on a few MHz of the input signal bandwidth, but the only part of it that I could fit in my lab was the manual.
Accuracy is too vague a term to use when describing a telescope.
The adaptive optics increases the resolution of the telescope by eliminating the
refractive errors caused by atmospheric turbulence. And the basic resolution of the LBT is better
because its 8.4m mirrors are over 3 times the diameter of the 2.4m Hubble mirror.
The ideal would be a larger mirror in space, such as the James Webb telescope is to be if it works.
[Disclaimer: I eat lunch with LBT engineers, so I know way too much about the gory details
of getting 600 magnetic actuators to work together without breaking glass.]
The amount of light collected is proportional to the area of the mirrors times the transmissivity of the atmosphere.The LST has about 20 times the light gathering area, so it can outperform the Hubble when using its adaptive optics. The mitigating factor in the LST's usefulness is that the atmosphere absorbs certain spectral components.
It certainly does. I live in the middle of town, on the rich end of the local state university, and my iPhone 3G reception in my house is two bars. Our son's friend lives in an even more tony neighborhood two miles away and I get zero bars there.
But it will get five bars in most smalls town in Idaho on a tiny two-lane highway.
It's not that he didn't say that there was a problem at all, it's that he attempted to minimize the problem. Customers don't want to hear that. They want to hear him go all-out to admit the problem and provide a solution. If he had said *only* that there was a problem and here's how he'll make it better, then I'd be fine with it.
Steve goes out of his way to claim that it's really just a trifling little problem. That's not how to win customers. The way to win customers is to say, "We admit that screwed up, and bad. We'll make it right. Here's how."
Tee hee. Unfortunately, that joke doesn't actually work, since each of them is using the other's time reference before they generate their own. The watchmaker would have to reset the grandfather clock BEFORE he saw the admiral, which would be before the cannon sounded, so it wouldn't work. Nice try, though.
To be truly pedantic, one would write the actual units being compared, but engineers are lazy. In the pedantically-correct universe, dBm would be dBmW, the dB you refer to would be written dBW, etc.
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You've got that right about the small budget affecting the way they do the launch. I work in radio astronomy and some of our people are building a balloon-borne telescope much like the one reported on here. They cobble together bits of this and that that they have lying around, rather than build a completely new instrument. They can't afford to do it the big NASA way, as is done for the billion-dollar space launches. So an occasional failure is going to happen.
It landed on the 4WD in front of theirs, so they just missed being clobbered by the telescope. But they were a bit shaken by the whole thing. I guess they didn't realize that parking downwind of a balloon launch might be an unwise thing to do.
Tape really is unreliable. Spinning media, never more than a couple years old and replicated over a network to more spinning media in distant places, is the most reliable thing we've got. And it has to be kept on a current software system!
There are plenty of quotes from Steve Jobs about products that have he claims to have no future, that go on to become billion-dollar sellers after he introduces them 6 months later. He's fond of poo-pooing an idea that he's secretly working on - the iPhone and iPad are prime examples. He may or may not have been pulling our leg. Or has he just learned that it's safer to lower people's expectations?
Bill Gates actually could program - he wrote a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 that worked, even though his development system was 2000 miles away form the target system, which he had no access to for debugging. That's quite a programming feat! Jobs had the Woz to do the engineering work, and Zuckerberg, I have no idea what he did.
They worked very well for 100 years. If your editor complains that it's too hard to get the words into a computer file, then introduce her to OCR.
That sure looks like a cartoon of an IBM 650, a "low-cost" business computer of the late fifties. Why it's in this movie, I have no clue.
Yeah, the amount of power used in any commercial or government building is astonishing when illustrated by the size of the solar array needed to generate it. A local (Tucson) solar panel factory installed a system big enough to power one shift of production - it dwarfed the factory building and parking lot.
Yeah, the old FORTRAN game played on the decsystem10.
I remember staring at the source code, trying to figure out the database to work out the map. It was rather convoluted, as all code designed to run on a computer with hardly any core had to be.
Don't do it. The FCC changed the way television works, and look what we have now... none of my old TVs work anymore! I dread the day when my 1936 Western Electric 202 desk set stops working just because some kid wanted to listen to his girlfriend yammer in Hi-Fi.
but it will use Nixie tubes for the display, just to make it interesting. It's fun to do the CAD design. Someone else will have to help me with the software, as I'm more of a hardware guy.
They aren't predictable in advance. They are basically the noise in the solar system's timekeeping. It's impossible to write code that knows in advance when they will occur, since they are only announced six months ahead of time. So any clock that wants to stay in sync with UTC must be connected to either NTP or GPS or similar timekeeping service.
If only those darn astronomers didn't care so much about keeping the sun at Greenwich precisely at the meridian at high noon, we wouldn't have this problem.
My brother did this as part of his IBM XT media center PC. He added a 4 digit clock in one full-height 5" bay.
For sure. Even gravity can't be specified to that many significant digits, and it's a bit more knowable than the number of books in the world.
I use 30 year old test equipment at home, and my employer buys 30 year old equipment for our lab. The newer test equipment we have bought breaks at least as often and is not repairable like the older stuff is. However, I work on radio telescopes, which have rather unique requirements for test equipment.
Back when I did high-speed digital work, then the employer was my best source of late-model test equipment.
When I throw out an electronic gizmo, it's highly likely that it's not easily repairable. I've tried.
I love that scope's distributed amplifier, with the dozen tubes each working on a few MHz of the input signal bandwidth, but the only part of it that I could fit in my lab was the manual.
I use an R7704 at home, and a 7633 at the office.
Accuracy is too vague a term to use when describing a telescope.
The adaptive optics increases the resolution of the telescope by eliminating the refractive errors caused by atmospheric turbulence. And the basic resolution of the LBT is better because its 8.4m mirrors are over 3 times the diameter of the 2.4m Hubble mirror.
The ideal would be a larger mirror in space, such as the James Webb telescope is to be if it works.
[Disclaimer: I eat lunch with LBT engineers, so I know way too much about the gory details of getting 600 magnetic actuators to work together without breaking glass.]
The amount of light collected is proportional to the area of the mirrors times the transmissivity of the atmosphere.The LST has about 20 times the light gathering area, so it can outperform the Hubble when using its adaptive optics. The mitigating factor in the LST's usefulness is that the atmosphere absorbs certain spectral components.
It certainly does. I live in the middle of town, on the rich end of the local state university, and my iPhone 3G reception in my house is two bars. Our son's friend lives in an even more tony neighborhood two miles away and I get zero bars there.
But it will get five bars in most smalls town in Idaho on a tiny two-lane highway.
It's not that he didn't say that there was a problem at all, it's that he attempted to minimize the problem.
Customers don't want to hear that. They want to hear him go all-out to admit the problem and provide a solution. If he had said *only* that there was a problem and here's how he'll make it better, then I'd be fine with it.
Steve goes out of his way to claim that it's really just a trifling little problem. That's not how to win customers.
The way to win customers is to say, "We admit that screwed up, and bad. We'll make it right. Here's how."
Tee hee.
Unfortunately, that joke doesn't actually work, since each of them is using the other's time reference before they generate their own. The watchmaker would have to reset the grandfather clock BEFORE he saw the admiral, which would be before the cannon sounded, so it wouldn't work.
Nice try, though.
To be truly pedantic, one would write the actual units being compared, but engineers are lazy. In the pedantically-correct universe, dBm would be dBmW, the dB you refer to would be written dBW, etc.