31 Dec
2001
31 Dec
'01
11:55 a.m.
Well from what I've heard about the "father of electricity" and Henry Ford
for
that matter, he would hire a bunch of "promising" engineers like Tesla,
take what they've already discovered, claim them as products of his own
and become a wold-famous inventor. And of course, like Marconi, become the
"inventor of Radio" which we are now celebrating, despite the fact that Tesla
won a court decision in US courts to his primacy with it. History is written by
the Victors.
Lawrence
On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:
Reply to:
lgwalker(a)mts.net
Ahh, those "engineers" who don't
know which end of a soldering iron
gets hot.
A fond memory from around 1991, while working for a small defense
contractor in NJ, talking with a 2nd-year "summer slave" on loan from
MIT (of all places!). I'd assigned him to write some data reduction
code in FORTRAN for a remote sensing project, and later wound up
having to do it myself: . . .
Me: "No. You're fired."
I catch a lot of flack at the college for teaching real-world programming,
instead of UCBerkeley academic style. (such as teaching students to NOT
use scanf() for keyboard input (According to Ritchie, it was NEVER
intended for keyboard)).
There is a classic old story about Edison.
He had a college intern one summer. He handed the intern an empty
lightbulb and asked him to find out what the volume was. The intern
proceeded to calculate an equation for the shape, and integrate that
around the rotational axis. After a few hours, Edison took the bulb away
from him, filled it with water from the sink, and poured that into a
graduated beaker.
OB_CC: That makes the old Apple ad exceptionally out of line. Apple's ad said
that if Edison were to have had an Apple, he could have simulated everything,
instead of actually having to try things out in his workshop. Would he?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com