I have heard a claim that Wally Schirra, in response to a press conference question along the lines of "What are you thinking about, sitting on the rocket, waiting for launch?" His reply, except for the nuke part, was essentially that attributed to "Rockhound" in the parent post.
If you really wanted near-simultaneous binocular imaging to capture some 'fast' event, maybe you would want two cameras in solar orbit. At Earth's orbital radius (9 light minutes), for example, that would give you about 18 light minutes of separation.
Sounds close to my own progression, except that after my undergrad days (at UCSD, 1978-82) I went into assembly language and CMS-2 (pre-Ada HLL for the Navy's embedded systems; inspired by Algol, great at handling packed data structures back in the day when memory topped out at a few hundred Kbytes).
Trivia I seem to remember:
UCSD used Apple IIs networked to a hard disk in the lab that supported the two big lower division CS classes, EECS 61 and 63. The disk contained system code, your program was on a 5 1/4" floppy.
For 'honors' lower division (what would you call EECS 65?) and upper division work, standalone Teraks with LSI-11 processor boards were used. The compiler was recursive-descent, and on the Terak the stack was dumped into the 1-bit-deep graphics buffer, which provided some entertainment while waiting for the compile to finish.
Computer resources are far more plentiful, but good instructors are scarce. Maybe that is why UCSD's CS majors are impacted, as they were 25 years ago.
Thanks. I first thought of using a rocket sled, then realized the g-force profile would not be a good match. Other ground-based g-tests seemed unlikely. My brain then went to "shuttle" without thinking "sounding rocket" or something like that.
Of course, a careful review of the design is cheapest.
A while back, there was a San Jose Mercury News editorial that argued along these lines. They wanted, IIRC, training to allow highly trained tech workers to migrate to another tech field: software engineering to biotech, say.
Wage arbitrage (part of point 2) will not be a permanent condition.
Point 5: Hmmm, I'm making $60 an hour now for C and C++ embedded work, and that's my best rate ever. I must have forgotten what they taught me in brown-nosing class...
All it takes is one ass-umption to make the great space systems contractor to look like an ass.
Of course, they usually do get it right, in near-heroic fashion. But didn't it occur to anyone to try this out by, say, building a unit without the science part, bringing it along on a pre-scheduled Shuttle flight, and de-orbiting it? (IIRC, design and test pre-dated the Coulmbia accident). That way, they get a real re-entry at low (for NASA) cost.
Well, I used to do molecular dynamics simulations that were, but that's just the exception that proves the rule.
I tried to run Seti@home on a 2.8 GHz P4. Wonderful speed, but that damn fan noise (quiet - Ramp Up - REALLY LOUD - Ramp Down - quiet) bugged me, so I got rid of it.
It seems like every few years, someone trots out an idea to use airships for some mission requiring heavy lift or long loiter time (say, roadless logging or maritime sensor platform). After a while, the idea vanishes.
I've seen a Goodyear blimp flying along the California coast in a strong crosswind. It was barely under control.
Until such issues can be answered, airships have no future.
You'd be better off wrapping structural elements in sheets of carbon fiber. It's been tested at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering as a way to retrofit against earthquakes and has been considered, at least, to add protection against bomb blast.
My point exactly -- you have to accomodate yourself to the tool. I didn't mention that, on the system I was working on, memory (core; yes, in the 1980s, core) was tight, 384 Kbytes.
I have a set of those knives, and IIRC they have a thin layer of diamond film to give them their hardness. I tossed the wrapper with the information long ago, though.
The closest I've been to this was doing software engineering for defense avionics for the Navy, back in the 1980s. Since Ada compilers weren't ready for prime time, we kept working in the "interim" (in the sense that Steve Jobs was "interim" CEO at Apple) language CMS-2. The target computer had memory protection (read, write, execute) flags on every page, which were set, IIRC, from tables generated by the linker.
Now, CMS-2 was glaringly constrained in two areas I remember: no recursive calls and no dynamic memory allocation. But we never had the problem of the program running off into never-never land, i.e. of trying to execute data, because you'd get a memory exception. Going from that to C was a big step backwards.
If we in software want to be treated as legitimate engineers, we need to move past hackerdom.
If any species has its genetic diversity reduced below some cutoff value, the genetically nearly-identical offspring will be statistically vulnerable to some other challenge to their genome.
We may see (or may have seen) this in the case of endangered species restoration, although of course the workers in this field know of the risk and do their best to keep the gene pool as diverse as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they meant that plutonium-based atomic bombs could not exist until reactors that could convert U-238 into Pu-239 existed.
I have heard a claim that Wally Schirra, in response to a press conference question along the lines of "What are you thinking about, sitting on the rocket, waiting for launch?" His reply, except for the nuke part, was essentially that attributed to "Rockhound" in the parent post.
Here's a page of links to various synchrotrons around the world:
h tm l
http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/synchrotron_sources.
Defragmentation wasn't merely an optimization, it was often required to get a large enough block of free space to actually use!
Yes. And we call FAT crude...
If you really wanted near-simultaneous binocular imaging to capture some 'fast' event, maybe you would want two cameras in solar orbit. At Earth's orbital radius (9 light minutes), for example, that would give you about 18 light minutes of separation.
I doubt there's a burning need for this, though.
Way back when I was doing I/O development in assembly language in Hawaii, they had the place air-conditioned to the point that I'd bring a coat in.
Sounds close to my own progression, except that after my undergrad days (at UCSD, 1978-82) I went into assembly language and CMS-2 (pre-Ada HLL for the Navy's embedded systems; inspired by Algol, great at handling packed data structures back in the day when memory topped out at a few hundred Kbytes).
Trivia I seem to remember:
UCSD used Apple IIs networked to a hard disk in the lab that supported the two big lower division CS classes, EECS 61 and 63. The disk contained system code, your program was on a 5 1/4" floppy.
For 'honors' lower division (what would you call EECS 65?) and upper division work, standalone Teraks with LSI-11 processor boards were used. The compiler was recursive-descent, and on the Terak the stack was dumped into the 1-bit-deep graphics buffer, which provided some entertainment while waiting for the compile to finish.
Computer resources are far more plentiful, but good instructors are scarce. Maybe that is why UCSD's CS majors are impacted, as they were 25 years ago.
Mark Schaeffer
Thanks. I first thought of using a rocket sled, then realized the g-force profile would not be a good match. Other ground-based g-tests seemed unlikely. My brain then went to "shuttle" without thinking "sounding rocket" or something like that.
Of course, a careful review of the design is cheapest.
A while back, there was a San Jose Mercury News editorial that argued along these lines. They wanted, IIRC, training to allow highly trained tech workers to migrate to another tech field: software engineering to biotech, say.
Silicon Valley is dying because of imported labor.
1998 == No imported workers
Badly off, and racist to boot. TiE (tiesv.org) was founded in the Valley in 1992. Non-tech Indians (physicians, for example) were here earlier.
Shopping Cart may be FIFO buffer
Point 1 (SEI level) is management-driven.
Wage arbitrage (part of point 2) will not be a permanent condition.
Point 5: Hmmm, I'm making $60 an hour now for C and C++ embedded work, and that's my best rate ever. I must have forgotten what they taught me in brown-nosing class...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.
All it takes is one ass-umption to make the great space systems contractor to look like an ass.
Of course, they usually do get it right, in near-heroic fashion. But didn't it occur to anyone to try this out by, say, building a unit without the science part, bringing it along on a pre-scheduled Shuttle flight, and de-orbiting it? (IIRC, design and test pre-dated the Coulmbia accident). That way, they get a real re-entry at low (for NASA) cost.
Well, I used to do molecular dynamics simulations that were, but that's just the exception that proves the rule.
I tried to run Seti@home on a 2.8 GHz P4. Wonderful speed, but that damn fan noise (quiet - Ramp Up - REALLY LOUD - Ramp Down - quiet) bugged me, so I got rid of it.
It seems like every few years, someone trots out an idea to use airships for some mission requiring heavy lift or long loiter time (say, roadless logging or maritime sensor platform). After a while, the idea vanishes.
I've seen a Goodyear blimp flying along the California coast in a strong crosswind. It was barely under control.
Until such issues can be answered, airships have no future.
It would be like hydrogen, or water in a reservoir: an energy storage medium.
You'd be better off wrapping structural elements in sheets of carbon fiber. It's been tested at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering as a way to retrofit against earthquakes and has been considered, at least, to add protection against bomb blast.
My point exactly -- you have to accomodate yourself to the tool. I didn't mention that, on the system I was working on, memory (core; yes, in the 1980s, core) was tight, 384 Kbytes.
I have a set of those knives, and IIRC they have a thin layer of diamond film to give them their hardness. I tossed the wrapper with the information long ago, though.
Google effect, not Slashdot...
The closest I've been to this was doing software engineering for defense avionics for the Navy, back in the 1980s. Since Ada compilers weren't ready for prime time, we kept working in the "interim" (in the sense that Steve Jobs was "interim" CEO at Apple) language CMS-2. The target computer had memory protection (read, write, execute) flags on every page, which were set, IIRC, from tables generated by the linker.
Now, CMS-2 was glaringly constrained in two areas I remember: no recursive calls and no dynamic memory allocation. But we never had the problem of the program running off into never-never land, i.e. of trying to execute data, because you'd get a memory exception. Going from that to C was a big step backwards.
If we in software want to be treated as legitimate engineers, we need to move past hackerdom.
If any species has its genetic diversity reduced below some cutoff value, the genetically nearly-identical offspring will be statistically vulnerable to some other challenge to their genome.
We may see (or may have seen) this in the case of endangered species restoration, although of course the workers in this field know of the risk and do their best to keep the gene pool as diverse as possible.
It's spelled "Rowland." I used to work in his lab.