DConf keynote speaker ideas

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Sat, 2015-11-21 at 23:28 -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> On 11/21/2015 6:32 PM, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> > On Saturday, 21 November 2015 at 22:21:48 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > > On 11/17/2015 10:48 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > > > I'm thinking of inviting a notable industry luminary to deliver
> > > > a conference
> > > > keynote. Please reply to this with ideas! -- Andrei
> > > 
> > > Maybe someone from JPL who can talk about software on space
> > > probes.

At PyConUK 2015 earlier this year we got Simon Sheridan from the team
that put some of the sensors on a comet (you know the one :-) to come
and tell us about it and the computing involved.

> > Sounds like someone just watched The Martian.
> 
> No, I'm waiting for it to appear on dvd.
> 
> It comes from 20 years ago I attended a seminar given by the lead on
> the Voyager 
> project, and his discussion on how they developed the software and
> fixed bugs in 
> it and drastically improved it while it was traveling was
> fascinating. For 
> example, they figured out how to boost the resolution of the cameras
> with a 
> software improvement.

Obviously these are somewhat history lessons since the devices were
built and fired off many, many years ago. So there is an element of
"ancient history" to the computing, but it indicates how IoT will have
to go to get things working. In these days of profligate use of an
excess of resources, even thinking about what they had to do so many
years ago to get the experiments run and results back was wonderful to
hear about.

Oh and they used special MCU chips that were programmed in Forth.

Simon's session was excellently good, and the attenders loved it. Geek.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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