Archive: November 14, 2013

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engineering feats

Thursday,  11/14/13  11:51 PM

Spent the entire day in a meeting - but fortunately via Webex (!), so was able to get quite a lot of engineering done besides.  Yippee.

Here we have twenty-five of mankind's greatest engineering feats.  My favorite is the International Space Station, pictured above right... we actually made this, thought it looks like something from a movie :) 

So is this true?  Google's Android eclipses Apple to become MS-DOS of our time.  There are parallels ... but I don't know.  MS-DOS was the platform of choice for developers, and I don't think that is [yet?] true of Android. 

This is so excellent: Teen outfitted with first iLimb prosthetic hand.  Controlled via a bluetooth link to an iPhone, of course.  Wow, what a time to be alive, huh? 

Jeff Bezos thinks Amazon Web Services might be Amazon's biggest business.  He might be right.  Remember when they first launched this, it seemed so ... weird, right?  And now it's the most natural thing in the world.  If I had a startup I would totally use them to host my application.  Oh, wait... 

Keeping with today's engineering theme, here we have a photograph from the surface of Titan.  Unbelievable.  I can't wait to visit there myself, but in the meantime Cassini and it's satellite Huygens are supplying me with the experience vicariously. 

Related: Is Saturn's moon Titan even more Earthlike than we thought?

And this: New insights into Titan's 'chemical factory'.

If we're going to celebrate good engineering, we also have to admit there is bad engineering: Windows 8, the seven roads not taken.  At this point we can say Win 8 was a failure, it is going to be a release everyone skips, like Windows Vista.  Microsoft is going to have to work hard on Win 9 to recover.  First step would be to shed the cartoony Metro UI for the launcher.  Or at least make it optional... 

Related: Betting the company on Windows 8.

And finally: Windows 8 breaks with the past :)

You think you know what this is going to look like, but check it out, it's cooler than you think... Space X's Grasshopper reaches record heights.  How awesome too that this is being done by a private company (albeit with government support via their contract to resupply the International Space Station). 

Hehe ... Grumpy Cat wants a GNU Internet

And in the news you can use category: the physics of wine swirling

 

 
 

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