I must be old by now, but I was programming a PDP-10 in assembly language in high school. I wanted to do that to be naughty (it was the school district's PDP-10), and the best way to be naughty on a PDP-10 was to learn assembly language. I also learned to program our family's homebrew 6800 in machine language since that was the only way to make it do stuff with less than 1K of RAM.
So yes, things have changed a bit since the good old days.
I think you're wrong about it being X+1 technology. The other video tape recording techniques simply didn't work, so they don't count as X. Kinescope could not play back immediately or be erased (and the picture quality really sucked), so it doesn't count either. There truly was nothing like the VTR before Ampex made one. Otherwise they wouldn't have received such a deafening round of applause and 70 orders in a weekend.
The cell phone was a similar technology revolution. There truly was nothing like it - a portable phone that could dial anyone in the world - before Motorola made those big bricks in 1983. Any cellphone since is evolutionary.
I lived in Mexico 30 years ago, and was very impressed with the ability of the locals to fix things. I'm glad to hear that it's still done that way there. I was thinking of that problem the other day as I resoldered the video output connector on my DVD player that cost me $50. It would have been garbage if I wasn't a competent electronics repair person, since there's no way I would have paid a shop $50 to fix it, and that's what they all charge! It was five minutes of work.
Money isn't everything, although it's nice to have some for long enough to buy a house.
I'm in the same situation as above. I used to work at a very good-paying job but the work turned into designing computers for to kill people more efficiently (and it became very Dilbertesque), so I left and now earn one third of the money in the astronomy world. But I'm happier! The university environment is much more relaxed than industry, and I was given a chance to design and built a large project which actually got completed. My old job had me too distracted and headless-chickenlike to ever do finish anything that I started except the well-defined military things. Plus, I work part time so have time to spend with family and design silly wristwatches etc.
"Piracy" has two uses in relation to software/books/other information. The first use, the one that is as old as the printing press, is that of people making money by printing unauthorized copies of published works.
The second use, which is what this whole Slashdot article started over, is that of making and distributing for free, unauthorized copies of software/music/other ones and zeroes.
Not many people will disagree with the idea that making money by copying stuff without permission is wrong.
However, increasing the distribution of digital information with no money changing hands is a grey area, and that which is currently being discussed. It's only within the last 30 years that this form of "piracy" has become possible, since ones and zeroes had no cheap method of being duplicated before then.
Telegrams cost a LOT of money. I looked into sending one a few years back, and it was about the same cost as an Express Mail envelope - $10. You don't get much spam/junk sent via express mail either, I bet.
The reason is that it's easier to redesign a gizmo to be just a bit smaller or faster than the current version. It's much harder to design something that's 10x better. The incremental improvements in technology are usually about 20-30%, which is a small enough improvement that the manufacturing people don't have to change their process too much. Think of it as an iterative process of making it just a little better; after 30 iterations you have an astounding increase in performance.
The folks who are into time are now realizing that the leap second was a sorta bad idea, since it is inserted with little advance notice and is not deterministic.The leap hour idea is being considered and would indeed solve the problem.
The big argument about leap seconds is that the computer folks want to eliminate them, but the astronomers are upset because the useful bit of information that tells how many seconds TAI is off from UTC is transmitted in a field that can only hold a number up to +/- one second in some time transmission protocols. So after a missed leap second, asatronomical time wil lbe off from UTC by an unspecified amount, which could be bad for anyone who uses UTC time to do astronomy. (Since UTC is the time that's transmitted around the world, this is important.)
Good question. I don't believe in them for mom-n-pop inventions. They take too much time, cost too much money, and then you have to go to court, spending way more money, to defend them. What's more, they are vehicles of abuse, as I found out many years ago with the Cadtrak bitmap exclusive-OR patent.
That said, my name is on a couple patents, but others did the filing for me. [Note: I'm profiled in the Makers book.]
Perhaps you meant to say "some random microwave receiver expert", not "some random dude". This is not everyday work - I build stuff like this for radiotelescopes. But I'm surprised that he used a tiny 1 meter diameter dish to receive the signal - I was expecting at least a standard old-fashioned 3 meter satellite dish to have been used to improve the signal level at the receiver.
I am waiting patiently for the equipment webpage to load so that I can see what sort of filters he used. That's the main tricky part for doing such an experiment - you need to build a custom filter to reject everything that isn't in the spacecraft's frequency band. The rest of the equipment is apparently a modified satellite TV receiver and a generic software radio.
I've worn it through an airport several times. No problem. It seemsto be ignored by the TSA goons. But the checkout lady is always curious about it. [disclaimer: I am the creator of this gadget.]
Tee hee... I'll bite. A millimeter is 300 Gigahertz. A large millimeter is the Imperial equivalent, roughly equal to 265 Gigahertz.
[Disclaimer - I work on the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona.]
This is rather a cop-out. If the system will crash due to power supply airflow blockage caused by typical living-room use, then the product needs a big, fat orange sticker on the top of the brick that says so.
Also, I realize that it's a trade-off of cost vs usability, but game consoles generally live in the little empty space in the entertainment center cabinet next to the TV screen, so they must be designed to tolerate high temperatures without failure.
I suppose Microsoft will get to do an embarassing product recall or at least issue an embarassing announcement that the product requires its ugly power supply box to be visible to work properly.
Even if they did test the power supply in the oven, the ovens used for this purpose have very good airflow. Overheating caused by setting it on carpet (which blocks off the vent holes) requires a special test using carpet in the oven, and requires an astute QA team to realize that this test is necessary. (Presumably they would have such QA question-askers by now, after their fires with the original Xbox.)
Every big telescope that I know of is being planned for Chile. The air is so dry that the seeing is way better than any North American sites. They don't even have to go to great altitudes to get better seeing.
My dad spent many years doing site surveys for big scopes in the eighties and nineties, and I've been involved in building equipment for a couple site surveys in Chile in the last couple years.
The amusing thing about old machines is that you may have had to key in every byte of the assembler or BASIC interpreter in hex to get the thing to do anything useful - we're talking a couple thousand bytes usually. But darn it, the machine could actually *do* something with a couple thousand bytes of code!
I have noticed that pants come with a left pocket and a right pocket.
I put all my pointy metal things in my left pocket and the iPod in my right pocket by itself. After all, the stuff in my pointy-metal-things pocket has worn down the metal on my keys quite a bit; I'd expect it to pulverize an iPod in a few days.
The American phone companies introduced the E911 feature, a GPS receiver inside every phone, ostensibly to provide your precise whereabouts when you dial 911, the national emergency number. I don't recall people complaining about this too much, but it's a clever way to get the tracking feature implemented without too big a hue and cry from the populace.
I don't have a cellphone, and the more spy stuff that gets attached to them, the less motivated I am to get one.
That's not a problem. There is such thing as a pointing model that is used to compensate for the atmosphere and all the various machanical shortcomings of a telescope. They point the scope at a well-known star and see where the telescope drive is actually pointed to get the star centered in the camera, then use the measured errors in a polynomial that corrects for the atmosphere and drive imperfections.
The atmospheric distortion, or twinkling, is dealt with by adaptive optics. Google it.
The LBT in Arizona is soon to become the largest optical teelscope in terms of collecting area, after its second 8.4 meter mirror is installed. LBT stands for Large Binocular Telescope. The idea is that two big mirrors are mounted a ways apart, giving a total size in one axis of about 24 meters. This permits interferometric observation with 3 times the resolution (in one axis only) of a single 8.4 meter mirror. This telescope is being built on Mt. Graham in eastern Arizona. [I know a bunch of people building it, and I work on the radiotelescope down the road from it.]
The Giant Magellan Telescope will provide the same resolution as the LBT does, but in all directions at once. It will also have about 4 times the light-collecting area.
Adaptive optics takes care of that. The secondary mirror is very thin and held in place by hundreds of magnets suspended from hundreds of computer-controlled eletromagnets attached to the secondary support frame. These magnets allow a computer to warp the secondary mirror to compensate for the atmospheric distortion of the wavefront.
Now they just have to figure out how to make the secondary mirrors without breaking them - a 1 meter diameter, 1.6mm thick piece of curved glass is not exactly easy to work with.
Robert Noyce of Fairchild thought of it a few months later, so we would be pretty much where we are today except TI wouldn't be quite so big. (Noyce founded Intel later, so he's had no shortage of influence on the world.)
Slashdot Mirror
So yes, things have changed a bit since the good old days.
The cell phone was a similar technology revolution. There truly was nothing like it - a portable phone that could dial anyone in the world - before Motorola made those big bricks in 1983. Any cellphone since is evolutionary.
I lived in Mexico 30 years ago, and was very impressed with the ability of the locals to fix things. I'm glad to hear that it's still done that way there. I was thinking of that problem the other day as I resoldered the video output connector on my DVD player that cost me $50. It would have been garbage if I wasn't a competent electronics repair person, since there's no way I would have paid a shop $50 to fix it, and that's what they all charge! It was five minutes of work.
Sure it's blatant self-promotion, but it is a rather unique watch that is also easy to read. The chicks dig it!
I'm in the same situation as above. I used to work at a very good-paying job but the work turned into designing computers for to kill people more efficiently (and it became very Dilbertesque), so I left and now earn one third of the money in the astronomy world. But I'm happier! The university environment is much more relaxed than industry, and I was given a chance to design and built a large project which actually got completed. My old job had me too distracted and headless-chickenlike to ever do finish anything that I started except the well-defined military things. Plus, I work part time so have time to spend with family and design silly wristwatches etc.
The second use, which is what this whole Slashdot article started over, is that of making and distributing for free, unauthorized copies of software/music/other ones and zeroes.
Not many people will disagree with the idea that making money by copying stuff without permission is wrong.
However, increasing the distribution of digital information with no money changing hands is a grey area, and that which is currently being discussed. It's only within the last 30 years that this form of "piracy" has become possible, since ones and zeroes had no cheap method of being duplicated before then.
Telegrams cost a LOT of money. I looked into sending one a few years back, and it was about the same cost as an Express Mail envelope - $10. You don't get much spam/junk sent via express mail either, I bet.
The reason is that it's easier to redesign a gizmo to be just a bit smaller or faster than the current version. It's much harder to design something that's 10x better. The incremental improvements in technology are usually about 20-30%, which is a small enough improvement that the manufacturing people don't have to change their process too much. Think of it as an iterative process of making it just a little better; after 30 iterations you have an astounding increase in performance.
The big argument about leap seconds is that the computer folks want to eliminate them, but the astronomers are upset because the useful bit of information that tells how many seconds TAI is off from UTC is transmitted in a field that can only hold a number up to +/- one second in some time transmission protocols. So after a missed leap second, asatronomical time wil lbe off from UTC by an unspecified amount, which could be bad for anyone who uses UTC time to do astronomy. (Since UTC is the time that's transmitted around the world, this is important.)
That said, my name is on a couple patents, but others did the filing for me. [Note: I'm profiled in the Makers book.]
I am waiting patiently for the equipment webpage to load so that I can see what sort of filters he used. That's the main tricky part for doing such an experiment - you need to build a custom filter to reject everything that isn't in the spacecraft's frequency band. The rest of the equipment is apparently a modified satellite TV receiver and a generic software radio.
I've worn it through an airport several times. No problem. It seemsto be ignored by the TSA goons. But the checkout lady is always curious about it. [disclaimer: I am the creator of this gadget.]
Tee hee... I'll bite. A millimeter is 300 Gigahertz. A large millimeter is the Imperial equivalent, roughly equal to 265 Gigahertz. [Disclaimer - I work on the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona.]
Also, I realize that it's a trade-off of cost vs usability, but game consoles generally live in the little empty space in the entertainment center cabinet next to the TV screen, so they must be designed to tolerate high temperatures without failure.
I suppose Microsoft will get to do an embarassing product recall or at least issue an embarassing announcement that the product requires its ugly power supply box to be visible to work properly.
Even if they did test the power supply in the oven, the ovens used for this purpose have very good airflow. Overheating caused by setting it on carpet (which blocks off the vent holes) requires a special test using carpet in the oven, and requires an astute QA team to realize that this test is necessary. (Presumably they would have such QA question-askers by now, after their fires with the original Xbox.)
My dad spent many years doing site surveys for big scopes in the eighties and nineties, and I've been involved in building equipment for a couple site surveys in Chile in the last couple years.
And it's straight from Monty Python's Secret Policeman's [other] Ball.
The amusing thing about old machines is that you may have had to key in every byte of the assembler or BASIC interpreter in hex to get the thing to do anything useful - we're talking a couple thousand bytes usually. But darn it, the machine could actually *do* something with a couple thousand bytes of code!
I put all my pointy metal things in my left pocket and the iPod in my right pocket by itself. After all, the stuff in my pointy-metal-things pocket has worn down the metal on my keys quite a bit; I'd expect it to pulverize an iPod in a few days.
I don't have a cellphone, and the more spy stuff that gets attached to them, the less motivated I am to get one.
Helpful is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. Helping your PC crash is one thing Gator's stuff is known for.
The atmospheric distortion, or twinkling, is dealt with by adaptive optics. Google it.
The LBT in Arizona is soon to become the largest optical teelscope in terms of collecting area, after its second 8.4 meter mirror is installed. LBT stands for Large Binocular Telescope. The idea is that two big mirrors are mounted a ways apart, giving a total size in one axis of about 24 meters. This permits interferometric observation with 3 times the resolution (in one axis only) of a single 8.4 meter mirror. This telescope is being built on Mt. Graham in eastern Arizona. [I know a bunch of people building it, and I work on the radiotelescope down the road from it.] The Giant Magellan Telescope will provide the same resolution as the LBT does, but in all directions at once. It will also have about 4 times the light-collecting area.
Adaptive optics takes care of that. The secondary mirror is very thin and held in place by hundreds of magnets suspended from hundreds of computer-controlled eletromagnets attached to the secondary support frame. These magnets allow a computer to warp the secondary mirror to compensate for the atmospheric distortion of the wavefront. Now they just have to figure out how to make the secondary mirrors without breaking them - a 1 meter diameter, 1.6mm thick piece of curved glass is not exactly easy to work with.
Robert Noyce of Fairchild thought of it a few months later, so we would be pretty much where we are today except TI wouldn't be quite so big. (Noyce founded Intel later, so he's had no shortage of influence on the world.)