December 17, 1903
“Boldly going
where no man has gone before.”
The Wright Brothers make the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
On-line Opinion Magazine featuring annoyed rumblings from the leading edge of the Baby Boom firmly tied to a reality-based world.
Established: 21 November 2004
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4 comments
And they didn’t have to take off their shoes and walk through a metal detector to do it…
It’s still an impressive (and graceful-looking) bit of technology after all these years.
But you don’t see sippy cups, pudding, or carry-on bags.
Another great idea that is obvious… after someone else manages to do it.
It was, for me, one of those truly amazing feats of engineering particularly given the times. The only tools they had to work with were pen, paper, slide rule, trial & error. 🙂 I’m convinced that without all the computer technology today, most engineers would be hard pressed to design a paper clip.
It really pissed me off how much is taken for granted today (I once tutored some engineering grad’s. Made my head hurt trying to understand them! I quit after a few sessions. Wasn’t worth the lousy $20/hr I was getting (at the time, I was making $80-$100/hr as a consultant), considering the school was charging them a small fortune for the privilege of getting a practically worthless piece of paper so they could get a job). I took it on thinking I could impart some wisdom and experience. They only wanted to know how to pass exams and write a paper. The level of ignorance of basic principles was staggering.
That’s one of things that bugs me about a lot of the current IT programs, the graduates don’t really understand how computers work, which means they don’t understand the limitations have to be designed around when you are creating a solution.
OOP is fine, as long as the Objects are thoroughly debugged and do specifically what they are advertised as doing, but someone has to design and write the Objects, and where are those people coming from?
I appreciate all of the advances because I remember what it was like using toggle switches to manually create the program that would permit the next level of device to work.
The Wright Brothers built a type of wind tunnel to test their designs, and did the calculations by hand to determine the arc of the wings. A lot of work went into that short flight.