There are huge security implications to outsourcing and use of guest-workers. Customer backlash and the possibility legislation will change soon aside, we have CIO's passing mission critical customer data into environments where they have no capability to run a background check and may have little understanding of the local culture.
It is one thing to outsource unskilled work-it is quite another to outsource the "command and control" infrastructure of a company-companies that do that have effectively reliquished their autonomy.
What folks really want to know is how does OS choice affect security for their organization. This study doesn't give them that information.
1) You need to get a sense of reporting bias. 2) you need to make sure you are comparing
servers in similar situations
(i.e. Linux servers at major, unpopular
corporations vs. Windows servers at major,
unpopular corporations)--and make sure they
are equally interesting targets.
I can believe that ISP's that service
certain neighborhoods are especially vulnerable
to attack--and that ISP's don't use Windows. 3) I would compare how setting affects this. I
could believe for example that Linux/BSD
are much more secure in the hands of
a professional and Linux is less secure in the
hands of a novice.
Well, Bob Bussard(co-founder of the government fusion program) thinks you are wrong on that one. I don't claim to be an expert in this field, but I would tend to take Bussard's word over an anonymous source.
I've read that on the average a company gets a 300 fold return on investment for political contributions. The abuse of justice we've just seen didn't occur under the older rules-basically the major media companies have bought major changes in copyright law.
Personally, I think we need a major revamping of copyright laws and reconsideration of how we provide incentives for science and the arts(i.e. lots of federal funds are basically wasted in this area and wiser direction of funds could create a bank of popular material people might actually listen to that could be availble for free download--as well as stuff as free curriculum materials for education. This is just basic infrastructure for an information age.
However, these kind of issues aren't going to get on the table in a society with the best government money can buy.
Sun has lost over 95% of its shareholders' non-cash equity the last 3 years. More importantly, McNealy has lost serious credibility. I worked at Sun as a contractor for 2 years 10 years ago. Sun had a collection of really bright people, but the decision making process was flawed even then. McNealy had aspect of a class act. Unlike many Silicon Valley execs, he actually worked to be visible. The basic problem here though: the old guard that made these guys has largely been booted or is horribly demoralized(at least the Sun employees/alumni I've kept in touch with). Furthermore, Sun has no process for spotting the folks that are right even when it means being unpopular-which in a highly competitive business is just plain deadly. McNealy just hasn't been able to resist surrounding himself with a bunch of yes-men.
Last time I checked, liability insurance was provided via the taxpayers in the US and other countries.
I can believe that hot fusion might be developed into a practical power source(The Farnsworth Fusor might actually be made to work). We have yet to see fission plants really stand on their own without various indirect subsidies from government.
C# and Java will beat each other bloody
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
The winner in this war may be other technologies like Python and Jscript/Javascript(this language is used as an alternative language in the Windows Script Host but isn't under ECMA-not Microsoft- control). Managers tend to invest in stuff like Java and C# because they think the language is stable and is going to be around. If there is no clear leader then these managers may become open to considering other technologies.
In nature, viruses generally arise by mutation-and new viruses are relatively frequent.
In computers, viruses are a relatively less frequent event and arise by conscious intent.
I tend to think the right way to handle this: create a controlled test bed for virus propagation. Offer rewards for folks that can get a virus to propagate in that environment-and use that information to immunize the OS. Personally, I would love it if Redhat would do something like this with the goal of making the stock installs more resistant to newer viruses. Basically, I would get a team involved and reward the team based on how long the mainstream release goes without a virus vulnerability.
Corporate Tech Money got there first
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you check out www.opensecrets.org, you'll see the big increase in donations from computer companies happened in the mid-late 90's(from something like $4 Million/year to $38/million per year in 2-4 years). It is arguable that much of the increased interest in politics on the part of technical people is because when tech managment used their newfound political muscle in ways that weren't really to the advantage others participating in the industry(i.e. buying the H-1b Visa legislation).
Is the classic book on this general topic. Now things haven't been happening quite as fast as Marshall Burns thought they might, but there is an amazing amount of stuff happening-driven by things like the need of the military to reduce parts inventory on battle ships/aircraft carriers.
The folks like that utility CEO are obsessing about the risks involved in an information-rich society. Still, at the same time, they and their peers are massively hiring hundreds of thousands of people from places like India and China via the H-1b and the L-1a program--and via agencies that have rather loose attitudes on immigration rules. Regardless of the intent here, a young man, a long way from home, in a new culture is vulnerable to all kinds of pressures--as are his relatives back home. Can these folks really do a good background check anywhere in the world? I don't think so.
I've personally worked in financial environments in which organized fraud rings were active--these gangs are quite adept at exploiting all kinds of vulnerabilities. I honestly think that stuff like Gorman's document is down on their list of priorities (they tend to do stuff more like threaten to kill someone's relatives back home where they can get away with it or gather material for blackmail).
I'm personally much more concerned about the tendency of companies to violate the Pentagon guidelines and use foreign nationals--or outsourcing firms to manage critical US infracture than I am about the release of what Gorman did. If the CEO's are really worried about security, they can start hiring people on whom they really can do background checks, locate their facilities in places with good physical security and start worrying about their basic processes.
All too often, the attitude in corporate America is that if a risk doesn't show up in an insurance premium it must not exist. To often, CEO's grossly neglects public safety and national security and their actions deserve close scrutiny here--and in many cases these corporate captains should be forcibly relieved of their office and property or placed in prison. Classifying Gorman's dissertation isn't going to protect them or the public--they have much more basic work to do.
Stuff like ASP.NET really isn't all that bad. I personally like being able to do both client and server-side programming in Javascript(for clients with less experienced people it makes for a less steep learning curve in situations in which minimal server-side coding is needed). Jscript is a nice language-especially some of the stuff they are doing with type inference are worthwhile ideas worth incorporating into other ECMA implementations.
I suspect that Micro$oft management can't afford for.NET to be a failure(from a standpoint of looking face)-they'll throw money at the problem until they have something inspiring technically. Do they really want to be a big joke like the eSpeak Project had Rajiv Gupta running? (i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it) Carly Fiorina burnt up quite a bit of credibility promising all sorts of stuff there that just didn't happen. The big significance of the.Net delays is Micro$soft have lost a lot of their lead here.
By the time the folks in Redmond get it together,.NET won't be nearly as proprietary as it was at first--if MicroSoft does set some worthwhile standards(and that is something where big companies can play a constructive role) they just won't be able to shut the Linux community out of that standard for very long. Micro$oft is caught between a rock and a hardplace here. Either they fall flat on their face or they produce a standard that compares Linux/FreeBSD with NT Server head-to-head(i.e. NT server will most likely come out looking like a dog).
Mozart-Oz is an example of a language that goes way beyond a simple OO paradign(and incorporates features of Functional, Logic and Constraint programming. The thing that most language designers (including the Mozart-Oz folks) miss is that much of business programming is built around _relational_ semantics(i.e. the basis of SQL).
I really appreciate that the government and corporate leadership of Singapore is taking this epidemic seriously and acting responsibly-more responsibly IMHO than governmental and corporate leaders in my own country of residence, the United States, which has more cases of SARS than Singapore--and which is moving to slow on putting quarentine measures in place. I'm surprised that Singapore has such a low fine for endangering public health by breaking quarentine though--I suspect they'll soon correct that.
A lot of folks have focused on Microsoft as the company that ought to be put out of business by Open Source development. I would suggest though that some other companies are in a lot more immediate danger.
Now, most Oracle revenue comes from sevices and various accounting programs-but there are also starting to emerge various Open Source Accounting packages(i.e. SQL Ledger) that might in time start to hit Oracle more directly in the pocketbook.
I was rather favorably surprised that the US government would create a contest like this. Prize awards have an excellent track record of facilitating major technical innovation(i.e. plastics, longitude).
I noticed that some of the posters here were disturbed that this was a military funded prize. I would argue that robotics could have an enormously positive effect on the security of the United States in various indirect manners other than weapons production--it is thus a very appropriate concern for those concerned with the security of the United States.
I would like to see a wider range of contests/prizes here. In particular, I think that some prizes that would focus on rules that would be more appropriate for smaller, less well-funded teams would be a good idea here.
The last 100 years, we've already seen asteroids that caused significant property damage(that one in Russia). It strikes me that the odds of asteroids causing at least _some_ significant property damage/loss of human life is greater than that of an extinction event--and once those can be anticipated the chance of loss of human life goes way down.
Likewise, I would anticipate the odds of an asteroid killing of 99.9% of all humanity is greater than killing of 100% of humanity. I don't see that kind of analysis in the articles I read here. The other question is what _could_ be done with 1,2,20 days of notice. If facilities were prepared, 1 days notice could mean that 50 people-a decent breeding population-could preserve humanity in the event the rest were doomed. I personally think that is a better expenditure than a lot of stuff governments spend money on-particularly if some prepartions were made for preservation of additional flora and fauna.
Re:Didn't Sun Benefit From Its Leading H-1B Use?
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I used to work at Sun years ago-I was there when the company hit its first $1 Billion in sales. Basically Sun started off as a rip-off of Apollo that got enough access to capital to hire quite a bit of really good hardware and networking talent early on.
The problem that Sun has aways had is the "reality distortion field". The Sun marketing department seriously thought that they were going to eat Microsoft's lunch early on--even though the Sun management just didn't get what GUI intensive systems(i.e. Macintosh and Windows) were about. I wrote one of the early reports for the directors to explain what stuff like Hypercard and Visual Basic were going to do--they just didn't get it. Another big problem Sun had was when Linux started to get developed. The Sun management just didn't get how Linux would impact the market.
Sun was in serious trouble years ago. The H-1b exansion at Sun was largely a means of covering up the problems that Sun management had created for themselves over time. The poor track record of Sun management had created a situation where Sun just couldn't hire the best younger American talent--Sun management rolled the dice bringing in the H-1b's and guess what, they rolled snake-eyes. The H-1b experiment at Sun has gone on 5 years--it just didn't help the company. Now what it _may_ have done is enabled the large shareholders from 5 years ago to sell their stock and leave someone else holding the bag.
I see no particular reason why folks like Scott McNealy, Vinod Kholsa and John Doehr(the CEO, co-cofounder and venture capitalist the funded Sun) should have any serious credibility with anyone. What is the real track record of these guys? What really happened to the folks that listened to these folks(investing their money and/or careers)? The real lasting legacy that I can see from this whole period is that Vinod Kholsa helped get a lot of his co-nationals green cards.
I attended a college that had relatively modest grade inflation--the University of Chicago. The year I graduated-1981, the average GPA was 2.74--when you consider that quite a few folks dropped out, this meant that the average grade for a class was somewhat lower(i.e. maybe a 2.5 or so).
My sense is that there were some pluses and minuses to this approach
You just didn't see the more extreme examples goofing off in classes. Folks really did work.
Reasonable standards combined with a core curriculum meant at the end of the process, you really could assume your classmates knew something in advanced courses.
Sadly, cheating was VERY widespread from what I could see.
There wasn't a lot of teamwork-there were cases of things like people sabotaging other folks lab experiments and such.
There _were_ different standards in the sciences and social sciences/humanities--and this pushed a lot of folks out of the sciences.
Personally, if i were running a academic institution:
I would make the standards much, much stiffer in areas that didn't have clear practical value(i.e. if there isn't much demand for archaelogists, only give the students dedicated enough to actually get work in the field an A). If there is a high demand for engineers, lookat what it actually takes to produce a reasonable engineer-and give those folks B's.
Secondly, I would reconsider seriously what it means to repeat a course. I'd move more towards a certification concept in the basic science/math/engineering courses. One big problem I saw was the a lot of the superstars in science courses were more exceptionally well-prepared for the course going in rather than exceptionally smart. My point is that whether it takes a person 6 or 9 months to learn calculus, linear algebra etc. isn't such a big deal--the real question is do they know it at the end of the process--and what is their ability to learn advanced material at the end of the process.
One of the Instructors at CMU(where I'm now taking courses via distance ed) has that concept. He gives folks a chance to redo all homework assignments-and the assignments are _tough_ but his _goal_ to get get as many people through the end of the process as he can. His class has been around long enough he has a pretty dang objective standard-and he really does work to get people up to that standard. (My own personal sense CMU cares more about the students that U of Chicago did--a famous quote there from an aministrator was that the University of Chicago didn't really need students!).
Why is this all significant? Well, major portions of the world have religious sentiments that date after these cities existed. Islam tends to discourage too much emphasis on history before Islam arose. Similarly, the mindset of Christianity has largely been that nothing important happened until about 6000 years ago.
These findings are very graphic evidence that humanity has a history much older than either Islam or Christianity. Even the academic orthodoxy today tends to be that everything of value came of of the middle east-this now appears to be that everything important came out of the middle east. This appears to be far from true.
This thread was pointed out to me by a former co-worker. I am the parent of a nine year old autistic child. Autistic in this case means he has no useful vocabulary and some behavior problems-and it has taken enormous work (with a stay-at-home mom) to keep him at home.
A few facts here:
My son was a part of a cluster in Silicon Valley. I was working at a company with around 100 employees about there were about 10 small children. Four of these children had autism diagnosis. I've tried to get the interest of a researcher on this-but I've never been able to do so.
The range of scientific theory of autism is _much_ more complex than the discussion here would indicate- it is also a politically charged topic(i.e. even folks as prominent as Hugh Fudenberg, M.D.-at one time one of the 10 most cited researchers in the medical literature- have been crucified for suggesting a link between vaccines and autism).
As far as the genetics issues: I have personally seen pairs of identical twins that differed markedly in their degree of autistic symptoms. When looking at the parents, I've noticed that there are two camps 1) folks that have a family history of autism and have kids that are like those described in the older literature 2) Kids that have no family history of autism and are much more social than those described in the older literature.
I've seen figures that claim about 70% of all autistic children are the type A blood type-it appears rather unlikely that the disease is evenly distributed accross all ethnic groups.
>Fact: Good engineering is EXPENSIVE.
It is interesting how far these folks are getting with pretty minimal financing:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/
I wonder why the GOP can't seem to live up to its reputation and do what it can and make a little less red tape for private space ventures.
Last time I checked, there was no private insurance company that was willing to insure nuclear power plants. I suspect the same thing might apply to nuclear rockets. To me, that means that we don't really have a good assessment of the risk here. Talk is cheap. When folks are willing to put their money down, to guarentee that this stuff is safe(and I mean _their_ money, not that of the taxpayers), then I'll think we'll have some real risk management in place here.
I'm as anxious as anyone to see space open up. I have real doubts about whether a government agency like Nasa is the right way to do this. In the early days of aviation, the US government provided a bounty on for aerial photographs that were used for mapping. Private companies stepped up and got the bounties. Something similar could be done in basic space research(say a bounty for photographs of Mars or various asteroids).
I would start out with getting these kids more capable of using the web:
first give them a guided tour of the web--how to use a search engine, how to establish a free web account, use messaging.
show them a bit about the top grossing web pages, and the most commonly used web pages(slashdot!).
Another web page that I think might be a hit is
www.ideosphere.com(i.e. a lot of folks I've known from the South Side of Chicago really liked competitive activities).
Then introduce some basic HTML/Javascript to show them how programing works.
I'd expect you have some budding musicians,writers and artists in your crew--showing how they can get their stuff on the web without spending bucks might get some folks really jazzed, really fast.
Seriously, after 8 weeks, I'd expect some of these folks could go back home and help their schools, local business folks or churches establish a web presence where none existed.
My own background here:
I grew up in a not-so-prosperous rural area and live in the South Side of Chicago for 4 years during college-and in Hunters Point/Western Addition in San Francisco, and East Palo Alto.
I think you have a real opportunity to make a really positive impact on the lives of a community here. Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
It is one thing to outsource unskilled work-it is quite another to outsource the "command and control" infrastructure of a company-companies that do that have effectively reliquished their autonomy.
What folks really want to know is how does OS choice affect security for their organization. This study doesn't give them that information.
1) You need to get a sense of reporting bias.
2) you need to make sure you are comparing
servers in similar situations
(i.e. Linux servers at major, unpopular
corporations vs. Windows servers at major,
unpopular corporations)--and make sure they
are equally interesting targets.
I can believe that ISP's that service
certain neighborhoods are especially vulnerable
to attack--and that ISP's don't use Windows.
3) I would compare how setting affects this. I
could believe for example that Linux/BSD
are much more secure in the hands of
a professional and Linux is less secure in the
hands of a novice.
This is an important article. I've written about similar topics at:
http://www.outlander.com/policy/h1b.htm
RJB
Well, Bob Bussard(co-founder of the government fusion program) thinks you are wrong on that one. I don't claim to be an expert in this field, but I would tend to take Bussard's word over an anonymous source.
In this election cycle, Top recipients include Kerry, Bush, Dean, Gephardt, Boxer, Edwards, Lieberman, McCain. If you are a constituent, let these public servants you don't like the company they keep.
I've read that on the average a company gets a 300 fold return on investment for political contributions. The abuse of justice we've just seen didn't occur under the older rules-basically the major media companies have bought major changes in copyright law.
Personally, I think we need a major revamping of copyright laws and reconsideration of how we provide incentives for science and the arts(i.e. lots of federal funds are basically wasted in this area and wiser direction of funds could create a bank of popular material people might actually listen to that could be availble for free download--as well as stuff as free curriculum materials for education. This is just basic infrastructure for an information age.
However, these kind of issues aren't going to get on the table in a society with the best government money can buy.
Sun has lost over 95% of its shareholders' non-cash equity the last 3 years. More importantly, McNealy has lost serious credibility. I worked at Sun as a contractor for 2 years 10 years ago. Sun had a collection of really bright people, but the decision making process was flawed even then. McNealy had aspect of a class act. Unlike many Silicon Valley execs, he actually worked to be visible. The basic problem here though: the old guard that made these guys has largely been booted or is horribly demoralized(at least the Sun employees/alumni I've kept in touch with). Furthermore, Sun has no process for spotting the folks that are right even when it means being unpopular-which in a highly competitive business is just plain deadly. McNealy just hasn't been able to resist surrounding himself with a bunch of yes-men.
I can believe that hot fusion might be developed into a practical power source(The Farnsworth Fusor might actually be made to work). We have yet to see fission plants really stand on their own without various indirect subsidies from government.
The winner in this war may be other technologies like Python and Jscript/Javascript(this language is used as an alternative language in the Windows Script Host but isn't under ECMA-not Microsoft- control). Managers tend to invest in stuff like Java and C# because they think the language is stable and is going to be around. If there is no clear leader then these managers may become open to considering other technologies.
In nature, viruses generally arise by mutation-and new viruses are relatively frequent.
In computers, viruses are a relatively less frequent event and arise by conscious intent.
I tend to think the right way to handle this:
create a controlled test bed for virus propagation. Offer rewards for folks that can get a virus to propagate in that environment-and use that information to immunize the OS. Personally, I would love it if Redhat would do something like this with the goal of making the stock installs more resistant to newer viruses. Basically, I would get a team involved and reward the team based on how long the mainstream release goes without a virus vulnerability.
If you check out www.opensecrets.org, you'll see the big increase in donations from computer companies happened in the mid-late 90's(from something like $4 Million/year to $38/million per year in 2-4 years). It is arguable that much of the increased interest in politics on the part of technical people is because when tech managment used their newfound political muscle in ways that weren't really to the advantage others participating in the industry(i.e. buying the H-1b Visa legislation).
Is the classic book on this general topic. Now things haven't been happening quite as fast as Marshall Burns thought they might, but there is an amazing amount of stuff happening-driven by things like the need of the military to reduce parts inventory on battle ships/aircraft carriers.
The folks like that utility CEO are obsessing about the risks involved in an information-rich society. Still, at the same time, they and their peers are massively hiring hundreds of thousands of people from places like India and China via the H-1b and the L-1a program--and via agencies that have rather loose attitudes on immigration rules. Regardless of the intent here, a young man, a long way from home, in a new culture is vulnerable to all kinds of pressures--as are his relatives back home. Can these folks really do a good background check anywhere in the world? I don't think so.
I've personally worked in financial environments in which organized fraud rings were active--these gangs are quite adept at exploiting all kinds of vulnerabilities. I honestly think that stuff like Gorman's document is down on their list of priorities (they tend to do stuff more like threaten to kill someone's relatives back home where they can get away with it or gather material for blackmail).
I'm personally much more concerned about the tendency of companies to violate the Pentagon guidelines and use foreign nationals--or outsourcing firms to manage critical US infracture than I am about the release of what Gorman did. If the CEO's are really worried about security, they can start hiring people on whom they really can do background checks, locate their facilities in places with good physical security and start worrying about their basic processes.
All too often, the attitude in corporate America is that if a risk doesn't show up in an insurance premium it must not exist. To often, CEO's grossly neglects public safety and national security and their actions deserve close scrutiny here--and in many cases these corporate captains should be forcibly relieved of their office and property or placed in prison. Classifying Gorman's dissertation isn't going to protect them or the public--they have much more basic work to do.
Stuff like ASP.NET really isn't all that bad. I personally like being able to do both client and server-side programming in Javascript(for clients with less experienced people it makes for a less steep learning curve in situations in which minimal server-side coding is needed). Jscript is a nice language-especially some of the stuff they are doing with type inference are worthwhile ideas worth incorporating into other ECMA implementations.
.NET to be a failure(from a standpoint of looking face)-they'll throw money at the problem until they have something inspiring technically. .Net delays is Micro$soft have lost a lot of their lead here.
.NET won't be nearly as proprietary as it was at first--if MicroSoft does set some worthwhile standards(and that is something where big companies can play a constructive role) they just won't be able to shut the Linux community out of that standard for very long. Micro$oft is caught between a rock and a hardplace here. Either they fall flat on their face or they produce a standard that compares Linux/FreeBSD with NT Server head-to-head(i.e. NT server will most likely come out looking like a dog).
I suspect that Micro$oft management can't afford for
Do they really want to be a big joke like the eSpeak Project had Rajiv Gupta running? (i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it) Carly Fiorina burnt up quite a bit of credibility promising all sorts of stuff there that just didn't happen. The big significance of the
By the time the folks in Redmond get it together,
Mozart-Oz is an example of a language that goes way beyond a simple OO paradign(and incorporates features of Functional, Logic and Constraint programming. The thing that most language designers (including the Mozart-Oz folks) miss is that much of business programming is built around _relational_ semantics(i.e. the basis of SQL).
BEA is already competing against an Open Source product-and loosing the battle. Oracle could be a fairly early casualty. A big chunk of the appeal of Oracle rests on its ability to compete in industry standard benchmarks. Open Source products have historically tended lang behind in having "glitzy" interfaces-but have tended to excel in reliabilitly and performance. It is clearly a logical development that in the next few years, the Oracle database will find itself replaced by an Open Source Database-this will be a tremendous blow to the prestige of Oracle as a company.
Now, most Oracle revenue comes from sevices and various accounting programs-but there are also starting to emerge various Open Source Accounting packages(i.e. SQL Ledger) that might in time start to hit Oracle more directly in the pocketbook.
Prize awards have an excellent track record of facilitating major technical innovation(i.e. plastics, longitude).
I noticed that some of the posters here were disturbed that this was a military funded prize. I would argue that robotics could have an enormously positive effect on the security of the United States in various indirect manners other than weapons production--it is thus a very appropriate concern for those concerned with the security of the United States.
I would like to see a wider range of contests/prizes here. In particular, I think that some prizes that would focus on rules that would be more appropriate for smaller, less well-funded teams would be a good idea here.
Likewise, I would anticipate the odds of an asteroid killing of 99.9% of all humanity is greater than killing of 100% of humanity. I don't see that kind of analysis in the articles I read here. The other question is what _could_ be done with 1,2,20 days of notice. If facilities were prepared, 1 days notice could mean that 50 people-a decent breeding population-could preserve humanity in the event the rest were doomed. I personally think that is a better expenditure than a lot of stuff governments spend money on-particularly if some prepartions were made for preservation of additional flora and fauna.
The problem that Sun has aways had is the "reality distortion field". The Sun marketing department seriously thought that they were going to eat Microsoft's lunch early on--even though the Sun management just didn't get what GUI intensive systems(i.e. Macintosh and Windows) were about. I wrote one of the early reports for the directors to explain what stuff like Hypercard and Visual Basic were going to do--they just didn't get it. Another big problem Sun had was when Linux started to get developed. The Sun management just didn't get how Linux would impact the market.
Sun was in serious trouble years ago. The H-1b exansion at Sun was largely a means of covering up the problems that Sun management had created for themselves over time. The poor track record of Sun management had created a situation where Sun just couldn't hire the best younger American talent--Sun management rolled the dice bringing in the H-1b's and guess what, they rolled snake-eyes. The H-1b experiment at Sun has gone on 5 years--it just didn't help the company. Now what it _may_ have done is enabled the large shareholders from 5 years ago to sell their stock and leave someone else holding the bag.
I see no particular reason why folks like Scott McNealy, Vinod Kholsa and John Doehr(the CEO, co-cofounder and venture capitalist the funded Sun) should have any serious credibility with anyone. What is the real track record of these guys? What really happened to the folks that listened to these folks(investing their money and/or careers)? The real lasting legacy that I can see from this whole period is that Vinod Kholsa helped get a lot of his co-nationals green cards.
My sense is that there were some pluses and minuses to this approach
You just didn't see the more extreme examples
goofing off in classes. Folks really did work.
Reasonable standards combined with a core curriculum meant at the end of the process, you really could assume your classmates knew something in advanced courses.
Sadly, cheating was VERY widespread from what I could see.
There wasn't a lot of teamwork-there were cases of things like people sabotaging other folks lab experiments and such.
There _were_ different standards in the sciences and social sciences/humanities--and this pushed a lot of folks out of the sciences.
Personally, if i were running a academic institution:
I would make the standards much, much stiffer
in areas that didn't have clear practical
value(i.e. if there isn't much demand for
archaelogists, only give the students dedicated
enough to actually get work in the field an A).
If there is a high demand for engineers,
lookat what it actually takes to produce a
reasonable engineer-and give those folks B's.
Secondly, I would reconsider seriously what it means to repeat a course. I'd move more towards a certification concept in the basic science
One of the Instructors at CMU(where I'm now taking courses via distance ed) has that concept. He gives folks a chance to redo all homework assignments-and the assignments are _tough_ but his _goal_ to get get as many people through the end of the process as he can. His class has been around long enough he has a pretty dang objective standard-and he really does work to get people up to that standard. (My own personal sense CMU cares more about the students that U of Chicago did--a famous quote there from an aministrator was that the University of Chicago didn't really need students!).
Why is this all significant? Well, major portions of the world have religious sentiments that date after these cities existed. Islam tends to discourage too much emphasis on history before Islam arose. Similarly, the mindset of Christianity has largely been that nothing important happened until about 6000 years ago.
These findings are very graphic evidence that humanity has a history much older than either Islam or Christianity. Even the academic orthodoxy today tends to be that everything of value came of of the middle east-this now appears to be that everything important came out of the middle east. This appears to be far from true.
Randall Burns
A few facts here:
My son was a part of a cluster in Silicon Valley. I was working at a company with around 100 employees about there were about 10 small children. Four of these children had autism diagnosis. I've tried to get the interest of a researcher on this-but I've never been able to do so.
The range of scientific theory of autism is _much_ more complex than the discussion here would indicate- it is also a politically charged topic(i.e. even folks as prominent as Hugh Fudenberg, M.D.-at one time one of the 10 most cited researchers in the medical literature- have been crucified for suggesting a link between vaccines and autism).
As far as the genetics issues: I have personally seen pairs of identical twins that differed markedly in their degree of autistic symptoms. When looking at the parents, I've noticed that there are two camps 1) folks that have a family history of autism and have kids that are like those described in the older literature 2) Kids that have no family history of autism and are much more social than those described in the older literature.
I've seen figures that claim about 70% of all autistic children are the type A blood type-it appears rather unlikely that the disease is evenly distributed accross all ethnic groups.
>Fact: Good engineering is EXPENSIVE. It is interesting how far these folks are getting with pretty minimal financing: http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/ I wonder why the GOP can't seem to live up to its reputation and do what it can and make a little less red tape for private space ventures.
I'm as anxious as anyone to see space open up. I have real doubts about whether a government agency like Nasa is the right way to do this. In the early days of aviation, the US government provided a bounty on for aerial photographs that were used for mapping. Private companies stepped up and got the bounties. Something similar could be done in basic space research(say a bounty for photographs of Mars or various asteroids).
I would start out with getting these kids more capable of using the web: first give them a guided tour of the web--how to use a search engine, how to establish a free web account, use messaging. show them a bit about the top grossing web pages, and the most commonly used web pages(slashdot!). Another web page that I think might be a hit is www.ideosphere.com(i.e. a lot of folks I've known from the South Side of Chicago really liked competitive activities). Then introduce some basic HTML/Javascript to show them how programing works. I'd expect you have some budding musicians,writers and artists in your crew--showing how they can get their stuff on the web without spending bucks might get some folks really jazzed, really fast. Seriously, after 8 weeks, I'd expect some of these folks could go back home and help their schools, local business folks or churches establish a web presence where none existed. My own background here: I grew up in a not-so-prosperous rural area and live in the South Side of Chicago for 4 years during college-and in Hunters Point/Western Addition in San Francisco, and East Palo Alto. I think you have a real opportunity to make a really positive impact on the lives of a community here. Good luck!