This week's cartoon: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one" - Occam's Razor
Hint: you can click on the image to enlarge it.
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http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Posted by: Alex Givant | October 17, 2007 at 05:01 AM
Light hearted as it may be, this comic is a good example of not understanding the requirements before finding a "solution".
A solution fulfills the requirements of the problem, anything else is a compromise.
There should be another frame with a notebook in a museum and the words smudged beyond recognition.
Posted by: Dan Roberts | October 17, 2007 at 07:34 AM
We got a lot of mails about the "Space Pen" being an Urban Legend.
However, even the snopes link says "the lesson of this anecdote is a valid one, that we sometimes expend a great deal of time, effort, and money to create a "high-tech" solution to a problem, when a perfectly good, cheap, and simple solution is right before our eyes".
To elaborate a bit more, I have seen many instances where a project is held hostage by a customer requirement or design decision that is very costly or complicated to implement, when the same problem could have been solved by the equivalent of 'using a pencil instead'.
However, it was a lot easier to illustrate this thought in cartoon form using the space pen story :)
Posted by: FridayReflections | October 17, 2007 at 07:56 AM