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See Chanute, Lilienthal. Hang gliders are the original form.
The engines of the day couldn't deliver the horsepower
to overcome the weight. That was an essential contribution
of the Wright's. They squeezed the design until they
got one that worked inside the weight regime, and even
then, they aimed it into the wind for that extra lift
and did not take off halfway down the field. They
did not build worse: they tested, reformulated, and
even designed the first wind tunnels. Most of the
folks who tried it the other way ended up dead in a
mass of piano wire and silk. The Wright discovery
of wing warping made controlled turns doable. Curtis
had to steal from them to get that working and even
then, he couldn't beat them in a race because he
didn't understand the lift principles the Wright's
had discovered working in their wind tunnel.
Research, directed evolution, and well-documented
tests with verifiable results: slow but that is
the way aircraft are designed. Shirky can go
fly a kite.
Scalar or vector, I need the assertions of the
vendor, not the opinions of its competitors. I
can discover a business with Google and then go
to its web page. That much Google has.
Still, I'm not a believer in software that
automatically hooks up. I am a believer that
given a contract, I can get services on a menu
and drag and drop them onto a form, but before
I will do that, I will have it in writing somewhere
that the software does what is advertised or
otherwise, remediation is available. I can't
get that from Google. I can get
"Sorry, I can't swallow statements that put "MS" and "reliability"
in the same vicinity, not even from self-proclaimed Thralls."
but I can't use that for more than heresay.
If Google used RFPs as source, MS still wins by virtue
of the number of times it is cited in procurements.
Maybe what Google has to have is a means of credentialling
based on the document type that is the citation source.
The IETMers are still avoiding IE as a common delivery platform
because they can't vette the code. So if I have
to check those documents, Google would return
that for that problem, there is no commercial solution.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" scripsit:
> Do we want Google to "evolve" into a business
> registry where the opinions of the competitors
> determine the ranking instead of the registered
> assertions of the vendor so registered?
Google counts the scalar number of opinions, not the vector sum of their
intensities.
> I believe hang gliders can evolve into airplanes
> as long as their is **some form of memory** involved.
Didn't airplanes, on the contrary, evolve into hang gliders? It seems
clear that lungs evolved into fish swim-bladders, not vice versa: the
common ancestor had lungs, and swim bladders evolved two separate times.
The alternative, that swim bladders are ancestral and lungs evolved four
separate times, is far more unpalatable.
> Memory of results is key. If you don't have a
> benevolent dictator, you need documentation.
http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?Elephant which will be next year's project.
> A successful design organization that can effectively
> turn complex designs into reliable systems focuses
> on team building as the first job of management. MS
> beats their competitors every time that way.
Sorry, I can't swallow statements that put "MS" and "reliability"
in the same vicinity, not even from self-proclaimed Thralls.
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