Perhaps you are correct. It could be that The Sarnoff Institute simply developed the interlace scheme and signal format (and electronic techniques to generate and decode same) to be used as the standard system for commercial broadcast/receiving in the U.S.
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
Oops - I had it backwards. The U.S. TV standards were developed in the RCA Labs, which was later (when it was bought by GE) renamed The David Sarnoff Laboratories in honor of the man considered the greatest U.S. TV pioneer who worked in the RCA Labs.
Waxing nostalgic here, but in the late 80's/early 90's, I worked on Shuttle/Space Station project in which we need to incorporate ruggedized LCD screens into the shuttle for remote manual control of a robotic arm. Problem was, the only people even close to making such a thing were the Japanese. A consortium of U.S. companies, cashing in on the prestigious name of the Sarnoff Labs in TV technology, set up research operations under the name of the David Sarnoff Labs for the purpose of trying to catch up to and supplant the Japanese in LCD technology. Our dilemma was that it was clear that the U.S. consortium was wasting a lot of money and getting nowhere fast, yet, politically, it was absolutely forbidden for us to incorporate Japanese technology into the U.S. space program.
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
Your thinking the film camera which Edison was involved in.
A TV receiver isn't useful unless there's a transmitter, and a transmitter isn't useful unless theres content to feed it. If you look at the history of TV you will find that the large corporations had to dump a huge amount of money into building an infrastructure of broadcast stations and antennas and such, for years before any significant number of sets existed. And if they hadn't done that, TV would have remained a lab curiosity. Quite different from movies, which didn't require anywhere near that kind of infrastructure to be instantly desired as a consumer product.
Ted
Ah, if your that individual I think you would be asking yourself that if you were that valuable to them, why on earth would they let you leave once they got ahold of you. A guilded cage is still a cage. Besides, if your that key a person, there's going to be plenty of other places offering you equally high amounts of money.
I would think that someone who couldn't comprehend all this in advance probably wouldn't be possessing of the brain capacity that would represent any kind of threat to the US in the scientific advancement realm.
Ted
Not in the technology stabilized world - only where the ones who are behind and need to catch up - they will offer a bit more to make giant leaps rather than incremental improvements for simply keeping up with competition.
Maybe only in the movies - the mad scientist types (a character like the guy who played Newman in Seinfeld played in Jurasic Park). I suspect their are plenty of technical geniuses who have very blind spots in real-life areas of their brains - autistics, idiot-savants...
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
As a result of massive investment in fiber optic communucation networks, it is no longer necessary to relocate to work (according to thois article):
I don't think I am, though my terminology might have been 'inaccurate' in your view. (I also don't think in the early days "a huge amount of money" was dumped on infrastructure.)
Call it the transmission of images, or the remote reproduction of a 'picture' of reality. As another poster already mentioned, John Logie Baird is the man.
However, there were other independent developers at work, too.
DAS
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
Ah, right. As I work in that industry I'll tell you the article is dead wrong.
Sure, there's a lot of comm capacity. The problem isn't technological, never has been. The problem is the ossified thinking of most managers in business and those business owners. They do not know how to manage people by setting goals and checking up to see if those are met. Instead they manage by wandering around and looking at what people are doing. If the employee is talking on the phone, instant messaging their friends, whatever, then to the manager they aren't productive. If the employee is quietly intent on working, they are productive. It doesen't matter that the first employee might be bringing in 2 million a year in sales, and the second employee is working on his doctoral thesis and hasn't done a lick of real work all week long.
You can't do that kind of managing when the employees are all 500 to 1000 miles away behind the end of a fiber pipe.
All day long I see customers who are small businesses who can barely afford to pay their leases on really crude, low quality office space, tell me that there's no way they could afford to pay for employee DSL connections so the employee can work at home, even when the employee wants to, let alone decent office Internet connections and VPN server hardware. Despite the fact that doing so would allow them to move into quarters an eighth of the size and save 5 times the money all that network infrastructure would cost.
And I see these same small and medium sized businesses go out and hire street-level system admin consultants at $50 an hour, who don't know anything about what they are doing, and who charge a minimum of an hours time every time you call them, and charge travel time as well. However when you propose an app server located at a colocate were you scrap all their desktops and slap down thin clients (like winterms) in place of that, and the app server is up 24x7 and has an experienced staff watching it, they nak those proposals since the hourly rate of people who actually know what they are doing is $100 per - but no travel time billing, and 90% of the problems are fixed within an hour, vs 20% of the problems the street level guy can't get fixed in a half-day.
You can site exhaustive study after exhaustive study that shows that businesses that are primariarly offices with partition farms in them, could go 80-90% virtual, and save a ton of money. But most of the business owners out there and managers will fight you tooth and nail because they do not really understand how their business works, and going virtual actually requires them to start measuring employees by the real work they do, rather than the perception that the employee is working.
And of course, the other catch-22 is that the handful of businesses and people that do understand all of this, these are the ones who are really successful, and shit money out of their asses, and so can afford to indulge their fancy of building a big office campus (like Microsoft's in Redmond) to impress the plebians, and frankly can afford to not go virtual. But most of the businesses that don't understand going virtual are the ones scratching around who can barely keep the bills paid, who really need the money that going virtual would give them.
Ted
Excellent points. Some years ago I read that a office cubicle in a high rise costs about $15,000 a year. Add to that the costs of driving, parking, office acceptable clothing, constructing highway and rail systems and other infrastructure, traffic congestion, pollution, waste of time commuting etc., etc. to support of an obsolete way of doing business. IMO a staggering amount of waste.
It is interesting to note that the discussion of how to achieve energy independence almost never includes the virtual workplace.
Question: What will it take to change the paradigm?
Interesting links - got them book marked now. Thanks!
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
I think that there is a lot of truth in in this idea, but overlooked are some very important factors why remote working isn't more widespread.
An office is a social place, where people get together, where people perhaps even motivate each other, where people also bounce ideas off each other, etc. Many people need other people near them during the working day.
In many cases meetings need to be in person, something no amount of fancy videoconferencing equipment can replace.
DAS
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
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