Computers were first used to solve heavy-duty computational problems which arose from the mathematics of ballistics and nuclear physics and such. The people who accomplished the work were those who madly wanted the *answers* to their problems. Pretty much everything I know about computing I taught myself while in graduate school studying quantum chemistry. My graduate dissertation depended entirely on presenting and analyzing a series of computed numbers, each of which required ~8 hours of solid computation. I had to learn about computing and programming because my results depended on it! In particular, I was interested in how to make the computing go faster -- and for that, some mathematics played a big role, particularly the theory of symmetrical groups (but that was more about the physics, not the computing). Subsequently I went on to a 38-year career in mainly software design and development.
As I recall, one of the great gods of computing in the 60s & 70s was F J Corbato, of Multics fame, who was first a quantum chemist. There were others in that vein, notably from U of Illinois. At my own alma mater, U Texas Austin, the first computer on campus was brought in by the quantum chemist professor (my advisor) in his younger days.
No need to feel stupid. The comment was pretty lame in the first place. I did not *get* it either, and would just as soon not have bothered to find out.
The agency is NZSIS, not NZIS, anyway. And in NZ, it is always just referred to as SIS.
Studies were made, primarily by IBM, back in the 60s & 70s to find out what kind of work environment resulted in the best productivity for software development. Among the results of those studies were points 1 & 2 above. IBM even acted on those results, building the Santa Teresa Labs in San Jose to embody the "best" practices for software development.
During my one short stint at IBM, I worked at Santa Teresa. In many ways, it was like cubicles with walls and a door, little 8x8 boxes with built-in worktop and shelves. I found the isolation from my co-workers was hard to take.
As far as music goes, I found it a definite enhancement to getting things done. It put my mind into a quieter, more organized state so I could concentrate. I liked to listen to classical music streamed over the net.
I can remember a time (back before 1970) when anyone who worked with or on computers, be it hardware, software, or maintenance, was known as "the guy who works on IBM machines". There were no PCs, no computers in homes, and the average person had no clue that any company other than IBM made computers. I knew a Control Data maintenance guy who was quite miffed that his mother proudly told all her friends that her son worked on IBM machines. His story was kind of funny at the time.
As someone who has traveled, AND migrated from one country to another, these are very serious subjects. I have seen comments similar to your "joke" made in all seriousness elsewhere by people who were ignorant.
The OP asked a serious question, and given his apparent naivete on the topic, I thought to bring up another consideration that noobs might not think of. But then, he did mention only going to London, so I was inappropriate in the end anyway.
Having an American passport is as good as a birth certificate, as you had to provide that or its equivalent to get the passport in the first place.
And depending on where you want to go, you might check whether you need to get a visa beforehand. That should be no problem for Europe, but traveling around Asia or Africa may find you in places where a visa is needed and you might be asked to cough up some relatively serious US$. I reside in NZ and travel on a US passport. Although any NZ citizen can freely go to Australia to visit, or to move in, I had to buy a visa before I could go.
A post-doc appointment is not a "real job". It is a transitional time to continue research after graduate school before one is then cast into a "real job" which has requirements, schedules, work product expectations, etc. In a post-doc one gets to continue research work probably begun in graduate school with a modest stipend to allow for living expenses. A post-doc appointment is short-term and has no long-term prospects. It is simply not a "real job", and really should not be compared with one.
I did a couple of post-docs myself back in the day, and my Mom always nagged me about getting a "real job".
I don't plan to read any more of these comments, but I am surprised so far in reading them that there has been no reference to the giant push begun in the Eisenhower administration to boost science and engineering in the post-Sputnik era. At that time, the US felt embarrassed that the Soviets had "won the space race", and US weakness in science and engineering education was blamed. The government programs to change that at the time were very pervasive in the schools, and seemed to work well. (I was a student, and feel that I benefited directly) All over America, schools were upgraded with state of the art equipment, new government-generated curriculum plans and teaching aids, and gobs and gobs of scholarship and fellowship money to fund students in the sciences and engineering. It was a heady time for geeks.
How hard is it to make the move? I would point you to http://www.immigration.govt.nz/ where you can find out a lot about the process. That site has all the rules, all the forms you need, and lots of information.
I retired and moved here, which is not easy to do for most folks unless they have buckets of money (I don't). I happen to be married to a NZ citizen and was able to ride in on her coattails. Being retired, I have not personally dipped my toe into the job market here. There are lists of "needed" skills which the government keeps, and you will need to fit one or more of those to get residence.
The worldwide recession has bit NZ, too, though apparently not as bad as the US. The job market is very tight now. The newspapers report signs of recovery, but it is slow. On a brighter note, housing is cheaper than it has been in several years and mortgage rates are lower right now.
Don't even think about moving to NZ until you have visited, and more than once. Each visit should be minimum 3 weeks, else you will not see enough different aspects of the country.
I am pretty sure that NZ is not the place you are looking for, given this description. The norm in NZ is extreme interest in sports. In most bars you would have to put up with the ever-present TV showing the sports event of the day with most folks paying rapt attention.
The video did indicate the launch site would be very far south on the South Island. There is certainly a lot of empty land down there which could be used. I just wonder how many years it would take to get the necessary building and operating consents from the local council(s).
I did migrate from the US to NZ, and it is a lovely place. But to label ANYTHING in NZ as like New York would get you ridden out of the country on a rail, I think. Ugh, what a nasty thought. Queenstown is only about 12000-15000 people (permanent population, swelling to ~50000 in tourist season), so New York it is not. More like Tokyo if you look at the faces.
But to give Queenstown some credit, it is the only place in NZ where I have been able to buy my favorite beer: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
This thread started by talking about what is going to happen in New Zealand, where I live. From what I can tell, much of the cellphone problem with driving in NZ is the *huge* number of people who TEXT while driving. When you talk on a phone you don't have to look at it to get it to work. To TEXT, how can you do that and not look, drawing attention away from the road. Last year, 4 or 5 young drivers died while texting on NZ roads (and while that does not seem very many, consider that NZ has 4 million people to the US's 300 million). The telcos pricing structures make voice calls much more expensive than texting, so kids, in particular, do literally nothing else. I would not be surprised if there were lots of teenagers who don't even know one can talk on a cellphone.
When I first saw this pop up on Slashdot, I thought it would be about getting ready for the 2010 census.
Every 10 years in the US, a huge government bureaucracy lurches into life to once again perform the constitutionally-mandated counting of the population. Back in 1980 I was close to someone who worked in the effort, and came to know a bit about how it was organized and supplied -- and I assume it has not changed a lot in the intervening years.
The Census Bureau opened hundreds of offices all over the US, and each was supplied with cardboard desks, chairs, shelves, cabinets, etc. The ingenuity of creating serviceable, disposable equipment for short-term use was quite astounding. When the census activity was done, off to the dump with it all!
When I saw the blurb about cardboard computer case, I was thinking laptop, not desktop, and I figured the census might be wanting to use thousands of laptops temporarily. Therefore cardboard laptop to fit with all else cardboard.
If it turns out that today the cardboard furnishings are no longer in use, then I would shed a nostalgic tear. Sigh.
How does putting touch-typing BACK into schools involve introducing new "technology"? I took touch-typing in high school back in about 1958, along with all the girls who were preparing to be secretaries. The teacher was not sure what to do with a college-track student in the class -- I don't think it had happened before. We banged away on manual typewriters, nothing electronic, not even anything with an electric motor to assist. I don't think that qualifies as technology.
I had no thought that typing would be career-useful; I just was thinking about the term papers I would have to do in university. I was preparing for a science or engineering career, and in those days that did not imply using a keyboard. But, like the original poster of this article, I have marveled at how much that one lowly course in high school had an impact on my ultimate career in software development.
I actually don't know much about high school curricula these days. Has typing actually been eliminated? Or is it simply not mandatory?
I think the idea of everyone being required to be proficient at typing is a good thing, but I am not sure it should be done as a course. I imagine in today's world many people are just picking it up.
That is not a spelling problem. If anything, it is a typing problem.
Yet, in truth, I don't think it is any kind of problem. Seems to me the author made those "misspellings" deliberately to catch our eyes. The body of the post is spelled/typed correctly.
Isn't it the case that past projects to resurrect old computers have sometimes built vacuum-tube emulators out of solid-state technology and inserted them into the circuit when the particular vacuum tubes could not be found?
In my early days of computing, computers were very large machines which resided in purpose-built computer rooms with large glass walls allowing passersby to observe the whirling tapes and the blinking lights so as to properly "ooh" and "aah" over the marvels of cutting-edge technology. Thank goodness those days are long-gone.
In the latter half of the '60s I had the good fortune to be able to use the most super-duper supercomputer of the time, the CDC 6600. For those who may not remember, the 6600 was one of the creations of the genius mind of Seymour Cray while he worked for Control Data Corp. I was going to write a tome about the machine, but I find the Wikipedia description (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600) is actually very good.
Suffice it to say that with a max of 1.3million characters main memory, and a 10MHz clock frequency, it was the biggest, fastest computer on the block in its day. The computations I was doing for my thesis at the time went from 8 hours per point (CDC 1604) to 1 hour per point. That was a really significant boost.
However, even back in the '90s, desktop PC hardware had improved (in capability and price) such that even a typical PC system would have a lot more power and capability than the 6600. Viva la difference!
One would be hard-pressed to claim that the VIC-20 was ever at "the top of the curve". It was always aimed at the home user/hobbyist, and was inexpensive at the time. Nonetheless, much more capable machines can be had today for seriously less money, particularly considering inflation.
I can only speak for what happens in New Zealand. I would imagine it is similar to many other non-US contries in the broadband regard. First, in NZ, broadband begins at 256K, and many users are happy to have that as compared to dialup speeds, and since many Kiwis are very price-conscious, they settle for that. However, one can get much faster speeds, up to 4-5MB or so via ADSL. There is virtually no cable service in the country except for the biggest metropolitan areas, so cable does not play a significant role. ADSL2 is slowly being rolled out over the country and the new government has announced an initiative to significantly improve broadband availability and speed during the next 5 years or so. Most accounts are data-capped, with 1, 2, 5, and 10G limits being popularly offered. When one exceeds his data cap, some providers offer to sell additional data for a price while other providers simply throttle the speed back to dialup speed for the remainder of the month. Except for the 256K and 512K tier, most accounts are wide-open, providing whatever speed the system will give at any moment. It is possible with some providers to get unlimited accounts, with no data caps. I have one, but the speed ranges from ~4MB to ~100KB depending on the time of day, etc.
Although I am reasonably happy with what I have, I will never think of it as being as good as what I had in California.
Slashdot Mirror
Never did I see more petty backstabbing peer-to-peer as I encountered in my relatively short stint as an academic. Talk about nasty!
And only peer-reviewed publication counts toward tenure!
In what way is this not research? "looking at existing principles from a different direction" is as good a definition of research as any, I think.
"Research" is not confined to performing physical experiments, with great giant machines and masses of people, which seems to be your definition.
Computers were first used to solve heavy-duty computational problems which arose from the mathematics of ballistics and nuclear physics and such. The people who accomplished the work were those who madly wanted the *answers* to their problems. Pretty much everything I know about computing I taught myself while in graduate school studying quantum chemistry. My graduate dissertation depended entirely on presenting and analyzing a series of computed numbers, each of which required ~8 hours of solid computation. I had to learn about computing and programming because my results depended on it! In particular, I was interested in how to make the computing go faster -- and for that, some mathematics played a big role, particularly the theory of symmetrical groups (but that was more about the physics, not the computing). Subsequently I went on to a 38-year career in mainly software design and development.
As I recall, one of the great gods of computing in the 60s & 70s was F J Corbato, of Multics fame, who was first a quantum chemist. There were others in that vein, notably from U of Illinois. At my own alma mater, U Texas Austin, the first computer on campus was brought in by the quantum chemist professor (my advisor) in his younger days.
No need to feel stupid. The comment was pretty lame in the first place. I did not *get* it either, and would just as soon not have bothered to find out. The agency is NZSIS, not NZIS, anyway. And in NZ, it is always just referred to as SIS.
Studies were made, primarily by IBM, back in the 60s & 70s to find out what kind of work environment resulted in the best productivity for software development. Among the results of those studies were points 1 & 2 above. IBM even acted on those results, building the Santa Teresa Labs in San Jose to embody the "best" practices for software development.
During my one short stint at IBM, I worked at Santa Teresa. In many ways, it was like cubicles with walls and a door, little 8x8 boxes with built-in worktop and shelves. I found the isolation from my co-workers was hard to take.
As far as music goes, I found it a definite enhancement to getting things done. It put my mind into a quieter, more organized state so I could concentrate. I liked to listen to classical music streamed over the net.
I can remember a time (back before 1970) when anyone who worked with or on computers, be it hardware, software, or maintenance, was known as "the guy who works on IBM machines". There were no PCs, no computers in homes, and the average person had no clue that any company other than IBM made computers. I knew a Control Data maintenance guy who was quite miffed that his mother proudly told all her friends that her son worked on IBM machines. His story was kind of funny at the time.
As someone who has traveled, AND migrated from one country to another, these are very serious subjects. I have seen comments similar to your "joke" made in all seriousness elsewhere by people who were ignorant.
The OP asked a serious question, and given his apparent naivete on the topic, I thought to bring up another consideration that noobs might not think of. But then, he did mention only going to London, so I was inappropriate in the end anyway.
Uh, he is just planning to visit, not immigrate!
Having an American passport is as good as a birth certificate, as you had to provide that or its equivalent to get the passport in the first place.
And depending on where you want to go, you might check whether you need to get a visa beforehand. That should be no problem for Europe, but traveling around Asia or Africa may find you in places where a visa is needed and you might be asked to cough up some relatively serious US$. I reside in NZ and travel on a US passport. Although any NZ citizen can freely go to Australia to visit, or to move in, I had to buy a visa before I could go.
A post-doc appointment is not a "real job". It is a transitional time to continue research after graduate school before one is then cast into a "real job" which has requirements, schedules, work product expectations, etc. In a post-doc one gets to continue research work probably begun in graduate school with a modest stipend to allow for living expenses. A post-doc appointment is short-term and has no long-term prospects. It is simply not a "real job", and really should not be compared with one.
I did a couple of post-docs myself back in the day, and my Mom always nagged me about getting a "real job".
I don't plan to read any more of these comments, but I am surprised so far in reading them that there has been no reference to the giant push begun in the Eisenhower administration to boost science and engineering in the post-Sputnik era. At that time, the US felt embarrassed that the Soviets had "won the space race", and US weakness in science and engineering education was blamed. The government programs to change that at the time were very pervasive in the schools, and seemed to work well. (I was a student, and feel that I benefited directly) All over America, schools were upgraded with state of the art equipment, new government-generated curriculum plans and teaching aids, and gobs and gobs of scholarship and fellowship money to fund students in the sciences and engineering. It was a heady time for geeks.
I retired and moved here, which is not easy to do for most folks unless they have buckets of money (I don't). I happen to be married to a NZ citizen and was able to ride in on her coattails. Being retired, I have not personally dipped my toe into the job market here. There are lists of "needed" skills which the government keeps, and you will need to fit one or more of those to get residence.
The worldwide recession has bit NZ, too, though apparently not as bad as the US. The job market is very tight now. The newspapers report signs of recovery, but it is slow. On a brighter note, housing is cheaper than it has been in several years and mortgage rates are lower right now.
Don't even think about moving to NZ until you have visited, and more than once. Each visit should be minimum 3 weeks, else you will not see enough different aspects of the country.
I am pretty sure that NZ is not the place you are looking for, given this description. The norm in NZ is extreme interest in sports. In most bars you would have to put up with the ever-present TV showing the sports event of the day with most folks paying rapt attention.
The video did indicate the launch site would be very far south on the South Island. There is certainly a lot of empty land down there which could be used. I just wonder how many years it would take to get the necessary building and operating consents from the local council(s).
I did migrate from the US to NZ, and it is a lovely place. But to label ANYTHING in NZ as like New York would get you ridden out of the country on a rail, I think. Ugh, what a nasty thought. Queenstown is only about 12000-15000 people (permanent population, swelling to ~50000 in tourist season), so New York it is not. More like Tokyo if you look at the faces. But to give Queenstown some credit, it is the only place in NZ where I have been able to buy my favorite beer: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
This thread started by talking about what is going to happen in New Zealand, where I live. From what I can tell, much of the cellphone problem with driving in NZ is the *huge* number of people who TEXT while driving. When you talk on a phone you don't have to look at it to get it to work. To TEXT, how can you do that and not look, drawing attention away from the road. Last year, 4 or 5 young drivers died while texting on NZ roads (and while that does not seem very many, consider that NZ has 4 million people to the US's 300 million). The telcos pricing structures make voice calls much more expensive than texting, so kids, in particular, do literally nothing else. I would not be surprised if there were lots of teenagers who don't even know one can talk on a cellphone.
Of course I did. I am old enough to have read it in first edition. The old masters like Bradbury are very hard to beat.
Every 10 years in the US, a huge government bureaucracy lurches into life to once again perform the constitutionally-mandated counting of the population. Back in 1980 I was close to someone who worked in the effort, and came to know a bit about how it was organized and supplied -- and I assume it has not changed a lot in the intervening years.
The Census Bureau opened hundreds of offices all over the US, and each was supplied with cardboard desks, chairs, shelves, cabinets, etc. The ingenuity of creating serviceable, disposable equipment for short-term use was quite astounding. When the census activity was done, off to the dump with it all!
When I saw the blurb about cardboard computer case, I was thinking laptop, not desktop, and I figured the census might be wanting to use thousands of laptops temporarily. Therefore cardboard laptop to fit with all else cardboard.
If it turns out that today the cardboard furnishings are no longer in use, then I would shed a nostalgic tear. Sigh.
218-246C is ~424-474F, so that encompasses 451F nicely indeed.
I had no thought that typing would be career-useful; I just was thinking about the term papers I would have to do in university. I was preparing for a science or engineering career, and in those days that did not imply using a keyboard. But, like the original poster of this article, I have marveled at how much that one lowly course in high school had an impact on my ultimate career in software development.
I actually don't know much about high school curricula these days. Has typing actually been eliminated? Or is it simply not mandatory? I think the idea of everyone being required to be proficient at typing is a good thing, but I am not sure it should be done as a course. I imagine in today's world many people are just picking it up.
That is not a spelling problem. If anything, it is a typing problem. Yet, in truth, I don't think it is any kind of problem. Seems to me the author made those "misspellings" deliberately to catch our eyes. The body of the post is spelled/typed correctly.
Isn't it the case that past projects to resurrect old computers have sometimes built vacuum-tube emulators out of solid-state technology and inserted them into the circuit when the particular vacuum tubes could not be found?
In the latter half of the '60s I had the good fortune to be able to use the most super-duper supercomputer of the time, the CDC 6600. For those who may not remember, the 6600 was one of the creations of the genius mind of Seymour Cray while he worked for Control Data Corp. I was going to write a tome about the machine, but I find the Wikipedia description (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600) is actually very good.
Suffice it to say that with a max of 1.3million characters main memory, and a 10MHz clock frequency, it was the biggest, fastest computer on the block in its day. The computations I was doing for my thesis at the time went from 8 hours per point (CDC 1604) to 1 hour per point. That was a really significant boost.
However, even back in the '90s, desktop PC hardware had improved (in capability and price) such that even a typical PC system would have a lot more power and capability than the 6600. Viva la difference!
One would be hard-pressed to claim that the VIC-20 was ever at "the top of the curve". It was always aimed at the home user/hobbyist, and was inexpensive at the time. Nonetheless, much more capable machines can be had today for seriously less money, particularly considering inflation.
Although I am reasonably happy with what I have, I will never think of it as being as good as what I had in California.