Learn it for yourselves because this would be great as a resume padder and/or to develop some real work experience. Learn how to be a system admin. There is plenty of on-line documentation available and the best way to learn it would be to slog your way through documentation and fiddling with it for yourselves. Set up part of it and manage it as a web server and get some real security/firewall/etc. experience.
There currently is a good job market for these kind of skills.
You didn't mention how lucrative your job is, but the tax deductable part of an IRA contribution declines with your gross adjusted salary.
If you are hell-bent on robbing Peter to pay Paul and you want to raid your retirement, if you can set up a 401k with your employer because I believe (check this out to make sure) that you can withdrawl penalty-free for education with those too. However, the smart thing to do is to set up your IRA/401k now with your current job and contribute the maximum you are allowed and don't touch it until you are ready to retire. Remember the 8th wonder of the world: compounding interest!!! You'd be surprised how much difference there is starting your retirement savings in your early 20s vs. your early 30s.
If you are already saving for retirement and you are trying to save for grad school, good for you. If you are planning on going to grad school in a relatively short period of time (five years or so), then I doubt in terms of growth it makes a whole lot of difference where you put your money. The safe thing is in CDs or bonds because at least you know what you'll be getting.
Your perception of space telescopes vs particle accelerators is probably affected by the amount of press NASA provides. NASA has (for many reasons) a very good PR machine and they do a very good job of getting beautiful pictures out to the public. Fermilab, CERN, etc. also cranks out a lot of good stuff, but it isn't the kind of thing that is going to make the evening news or the cover of popular magazines.
Additionally, it also depends on your perspective. Particle accelerators have done much more to advance our understanding of the physical laws than telescopes (or most other instruments). On the other hand, nothing has given us a better sense of the grandeur of the Universe and our part in it than telescopes. There are probably more "gee-wiz" discoveries to be made by telescopes because we have only recently been able to escape the bounds of our atmosphere which has opened up a whole new realm of wavelengths to our eyes. However, particle accelerators have already made all the easy discoveries and they are now probing the heart and soul of the physical laws.
You can purchase one of these and put it on your phone, but it is most effective if you have your copper bracelet on your left wrist while your magnet bracelet is on your right wrist. Also, don't forget to take your anti-radiation homeopathic pills.
Some people would scoff at a product like that then go out and put magnets in their shoes to relieve pain. It is like that joke saying: "My numerologist told me that only fools believe in astrology."
If you are going to buy one, steer clear of the HP DeskJet 7x0, 820, and 1000 printers as they are WinPrinters.
If you are unfortunate enough to own one of these, a nice driver (pnm2ppa) has been figured out and you can find it on SourceForge. Actually it isn't really a driver, but rather a print filter that works with GhostScript to print PostScript files.
I like your comment about hams and Linux advocates. There are many similarities between a Hamvention or repeater club meeting and a LUG meeting.
The reason that hams "mindlessly" follow "arbitrary" rules is that it is a self-policing community. The amateur community has a very good relationship with the FCC as well as the the ITU (which you can think of as the "international FCC"), and this relationship is based on respect that goes both ways. In the US, the FCC largely takes a hands-off approach towards hams because the FCC allows hams to monitor themselves, and one important monitoring activity is locating and reporting the law breakers. The FCC only steps when it needs to, such as for cases of malicious interference. The last thing the FCC and the amateur community wants is for things to get so unruly that the FCC has to step in and actively monitor and enforce the amateur airwaves like they have to do on the broadcast bands. Hams don't want them looking over their shoulders, and the FCC doesn't want to have to expend the time, money, and manpower. There really aren't that many restrictions; stay in your allocated bands and be respectful that others are on the air too.
One reason hams "mindlessly follow" the morse requirements is because that is the law, not only in the US but around the world. Hams mindlessly follow language regulations because not only is it the civil and polite way to communicate, but because the FCC and just about everyone listening doesn't want to hear it. If you don't like the fact that you can't legally use a CB for long distance communication, then that is one reason to become a ham (don't equate CB radio with amateur radio because they are not the same---the first you don't need a license where the other you do (and you are allowed much more bandwidth with the latter)).
I think ham radio has very much to offer. It curious that you think there is a higher signal to noise level on usenet and Slashdot. You don't get much spamming on the radio. Plus, usenet and Slashdot are topic-specific forums where ham radio (except for radio nets) is like walking into a room full of people; you aren't going to be locked into the same topic of conversation. Ham radio allows you to talk to people all over the world, whether it be about your foot problems or not (besides, how many of your daily telephone conversations are much deeper than that?). Ham radio is a world-wide community; there are some great people to meet, and there are jerks. I stay a ham because of the great people and friendships I have made over the air, and I also love the technical challenge. Others do it for the support it gives to the community (disaster communication assistance, public event communication, etc). You get out of it what you want.
Personally I feel that this is a great time to get into Ham radio because we are at the point where more and more hardware and software are being used in radios.
As it was true in the past, one can still build their own radios because the parts are not that expensive and are relatively easy to get a hold of (that is, as long as you are not trying to build old tube-based radios because finding the old tubes and air-variable capacitors are pretty tough these days). In particular, radios are relying much more on software in EPROMS to do their work (much like the WinModems pass things off to the CPU). If you don't want to build your own, there are still companies cranking them out all the time.
Another great area of interest for the technically-oriented person is in the upper bands (above 1 GHz). Everything is going wireless these days and the GHz regions are very fertile grounds for experimentation. Have some fun figuring out new ways for network traffic over RF.
I think the internet has taken attention away from many people that might have been interested in Ham radio in the past, but if you are the kind of person that not only likes to program your computer, but also crack it open and diddle with the hardware, then you can go nuts as a Ham (with both a radio and a computer).
DE N3UKS
Re:Good News: An End To Morse Code Testing in Sigh
on
Is Ham Radio Dead??
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· Score: 1
I'm sure you're well aware of the can of worms you can open with the WPM issue, as there are some very loud voices on both sides of the issue.:)
I do think there is something to be said for rewarding dedication to the hobby. The WPM requirement only affected the HF bands and these days the hot ground for development seems to be up in the VHF, UHF, and GHz regions, so maybe lowering the Morse speeds will not have that big of an effect anyway (with some of the language being used on the 80m band, one wonders why you'd want to hang out there anyway).
The physics of a nuclear blast lends itself to needing the most powerful computer you can get. Besides, with the limitations on nuclear testing, you are forced to depend on computer simulations which naturally directs your budget into obtaining larger and larger computers.
By the way, the weather service did get themselves their own parallel computing cluster (running Linux, by the way). Incidentially, the progress made in simulating nuclear blasts carries directly over to astronomers who simulate supernovae.
Very fast computers are certainly important for nuclear detonation simulations, but one must keep in mind that the simulation is only useful if you can compare it to what you are trying to simulate. Though banning all testing has its political merits, eventually if you want to know whether your model is any good, you're going to have to compare it to experiment.
Some aerospace critics lay some of the blame of recent rocket failures on just this point, that too much emphasis is being put on rocket simulation at the expense of actually building prototypes and testing them. Certainly it is cheaper to simulate them, but you can't skip too many prototype iterations in the design phase.
I think this point is true in principle, but not in practice. There still is a lot of lip service to how the internet gives everyone a voice and everyone can be an editor and how wonderful this is. Unfortunately this doesn't end up to be the case as most people will get their on-line news from the same portals (CNN.com, Yahoo, etc). You are free to set up your own news page and report on items with your own slant on the issues, but it won't be easy to get people to come visit your page. Although one may feel that certain newspapers distort the truth or push their own political agenda, you end up in the same situation on the net.
You might find somebody on the net who will cover the "other" side of the story, but in the same manner you can go to most large cities and find alternative views being printed up on small mom-and-pop newspapers out of someone's garage. For every Drudge out there who is lucky enough to find success in their web site, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of the others are just ignored.
One problem with this idea is that there would have to be somebody or some organization to determine whether something is sufficiently in the public good to be considered freely available, or whether it is "non-essential." In other words, you would have to set up an organization like the Patent Office (or allow them to do it) to make these decisions. Then you are back to square one and the argument is now about whether this organization has the technical knowledge to make these decisions.
I think the Patent Office just needs to go back to what the Constitution seemed to intend for the transfer of knowledge to society as a whole and not this useless lifetime plus some very large number of years timeframe.
It is hard to think of too many other people you could choose over him to sit on the advisory panel. For all that is written about his personality and whether he can or cannot play well with others, who else knows more about software development and the importance of public benefits from its intellectual use.
I wouldn't count the GPL case out because it may require new law, or treading into new legal territory. That is happening all the time now because of the on-line explosion. It must be an exciting time to be a young lawyer coming out of law school because the Internet has opened a whole new legal terrain to be explored.
The way the article used the car example (saying our brain says it either is or it isn't a car) is the same as saying that my odds of winning the state lottery are half because either I win or I don't.
But this has been Apple's selling point for quite a while now. "Get the new iMac and be up, running, and connected to the net right out of the box." I doubt the people who don't want to learn about computers will flock to it because they are already happy with their Macs (unless there is a niche market to be filled by Windows refugees who have an anti-Mac bias and are too intimidated by the rest of the OS choices, but I imagine this would be a very small market).
I would have to agree with some of the other posters that these days the Amiga people really would have to bring something to the table to get people to take notice (e.g., make it free, make it open-source, make it somehow marketably different).
I suppose it depends on what you consider the "thing" is. I don't think safety was the driving factor in the decision because the Goddard engineers figured out a way to do a controlled re-entry without the use of any gyros. Unfortunately the NASA brass didn't want to hear it. I'm guessing that budget reasons probably had more to do with it.
After reading the article it got me wondering what the QA process for kernel mods are? Is there a beat the hell out of the new driver process that goes on, or is it a release into a beta and see if anyone has problems? I assume there aren't official QA testers, but are there any guidelines that before something is accepted into the kernel, it should at least be tested for X, Y, and Z?
First off, the link to the page that describes how the process works contains an excellent description of nuclear decay. The author should be congratulated.
The only problem with this method that I see is it is not suited for providing very large numbers of random numbers. The shortfall to the pseudo-random number sequences you get from your computer is that the numbers are not truely random because they repeat after a (very long) sequence. This is a problem when one is running a very long simulation program that is using many many calls to a random number generator. For instance, you might be running a Monte Carlo particle detector model that simulates a million events, and each event requires thousands and thousands of random number function calls. The nuclear decay random number generator would take a very long time to generate that many random numbers. The link mentioned that you can build up a buffer of random numbers, but all this means is that it would require a long time between when you could run your model.
The method is a beautiful use and demonstration of nuclear physics, but in my opinion it appears only useful for when you only need small numbers of random numbers, and in these cases the random numbers you get from your computer are probably quite good enough.
(Of course one way to generate more abundant random numbers using the nuclear decay method would be to use "hotter" sources, but then I wouldn't want one of those things sitting by my computer!)
It is true that you could probably build one, but as one poster pointed out, you'd have to crank out a lot of power over a broad frequency spectrum. This of course makes the device *very* easy to locate using very simple directional antennae. Turn one of these things on and wait for the local FCC enforcer to show up on your doorstep (as well as an angry mob of people who have interference on their cell phones, cordless phones, and anything else that could easily pick up broadband interference). How does a warning followed by a $15k or greater fine grab you?
You can get the development software (VBasic, VC++, etc.) deeply discounted at colleges and universities. About a year ago the educational price for the Visual Developer Suite 6.0 Professional (VB, VC++, J++, FoxPro, and one other) was $250. The pro editions of VB or VC++ were on the order of $100. I recall seeing them advertised outside of the university for about 2-4 times these prices, so in some sense they do provide "dirt cheap" copies in the sense that the discounts are up to 75%.
In a relative sense these are huge discounts. Of course, in an absolute sense this is a whole lot more expensive than gcc, et al.
Dr. Lederman, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. I know you are an active voice for physics and physics research and education. I was wondering what your thoughts are regarding the attitudes towards non-academic physics Ph.D.s? While the old-line attitudes are slowly changing with the realization that there are more Ph.D.s than potentially permanent academic positions, there is still a stigma that if one doesn't follow their academic advisor into academe, then they either weren't good enough to get an academic job or they are "selling-out" and chasing the big $$ elsewhere. From a funding standpoint it is rare for a person to have an opportunity to be a PI on a project unless they are either in academe or a government facility (apart from very large contractors such as JPL, Lockheed, etc.). Do you think research money should mainly go only to universities and national labs (i.e., should physicists give up hope to do their own research if they leave academe)?
Slashdot Mirror
There currently is a good job market for these kind of skills.
If you are hell-bent on robbing Peter to pay Paul and you want to raid your retirement, if you can set up a 401k with your employer because I believe (check this out to make sure) that you can withdrawl penalty-free for education with those too. However, the smart thing to do is to set up your IRA/401k now with your current job and contribute the maximum you are allowed and don't touch it until you are ready to retire. Remember the 8th wonder of the world: compounding interest!!! You'd be surprised how much difference there is starting your retirement savings in your early 20s vs. your early 30s.
If you are already saving for retirement and you are trying to save for grad school, good for you. If you are planning on going to grad school in a relatively short period of time (five years or so), then I doubt in terms of growth it makes a whole lot of difference where you put your money. The safe thing is in CDs or bonds because at least you know what you'll be getting.
Additionally, it also depends on your perspective. Particle accelerators have done much more to advance our understanding of the physical laws than telescopes (or most other instruments). On the other hand, nothing has given us a better sense of the grandeur of the Universe and our part in it than telescopes. There are probably more "gee-wiz" discoveries to be made by telescopes because we have only recently been able to escape the bounds of our atmosphere which has opened up a whole new realm of wavelengths to our eyes. However, particle accelerators have already made all the easy discoveries and they are now probing the heart and soul of the physical laws.
It is a very exciting time for either field.
Some people would scoff at a product like that then go out and put magnets in their shoes to relieve pain. It is like that joke saying: "My numerologist told me that only fools believe in astrology."
If you are unfortunate enough to own one of these, a nice driver (pnm2ppa) has been figured out and you can find it on SourceForge. Actually it isn't really a driver, but rather a print filter that works with GhostScript to print PostScript files.
The reason that hams "mindlessly" follow "arbitrary" rules is that it is a self-policing community. The amateur community has a very good relationship with the FCC as well as the the ITU (which you can think of as the "international FCC"), and this relationship is based on respect that goes both ways. In the US, the FCC largely takes a hands-off approach towards hams because the FCC allows hams to monitor themselves, and one important monitoring activity is locating and reporting the law breakers. The FCC only steps when it needs to, such as for cases of malicious interference. The last thing the FCC and the amateur community wants is for things to get so unruly that the FCC has to step in and actively monitor and enforce the amateur airwaves like they have to do on the broadcast bands. Hams don't want them looking over their shoulders, and the FCC doesn't want to have to expend the time, money, and manpower. There really aren't that many restrictions; stay in your allocated bands and be respectful that others are on the air too.
One reason hams "mindlessly follow" the morse requirements is because that is the law, not only in the US but around the world. Hams mindlessly follow language regulations because not only is it the civil and polite way to communicate, but because the FCC and just about everyone listening doesn't want to hear it. If you don't like the fact that you can't legally use a CB for long distance communication, then that is one reason to become a ham (don't equate CB radio with amateur radio because they are not the same---the first you don't need a license where the other you do (and you are allowed much more bandwidth with the latter)).
I think ham radio has very much to offer. It curious that you think there is a higher signal to noise level on usenet and Slashdot. You don't get much spamming on the radio. Plus, usenet and Slashdot are topic-specific forums where ham radio (except for radio nets) is like walking into a room full of people; you aren't going to be locked into the same topic of conversation. Ham radio allows you to talk to people all over the world, whether it be about your foot problems or not (besides, how many of your daily telephone conversations are much deeper than that?). Ham radio is a world-wide community; there are some great people to meet, and there are jerks. I stay a ham because of the great people and friendships I have made over the air, and I also love the technical challenge. Others do it for the support it gives to the community (disaster communication assistance, public event communication, etc). You get out of it what you want.
As it was true in the past, one can still build their own radios because the parts are not that expensive and are relatively easy to get a hold of (that is, as long as you are not trying to build old tube-based radios because finding the old tubes and air-variable capacitors are pretty tough these days). In particular, radios are relying much more on software in EPROMS to do their work (much like the WinModems pass things off to the CPU). If you don't want to build your own, there are still companies cranking them out all the time.
Another great area of interest for the technically-oriented person is in the upper bands (above 1 GHz). Everything is going wireless these days and the GHz regions are very fertile grounds for experimentation. Have some fun figuring out new ways for network traffic over RF.
I think the internet has taken attention away from many people that might have been interested in Ham radio in the past, but if you are the kind of person that not only likes to program your computer, but also crack it open and diddle with the hardware, then you can go nuts as a Ham (with both a radio and a computer).
DE N3UKS
I do think there is something to be said for rewarding dedication to the hobby. The WPM requirement only affected the HF bands and these days the hot ground for development seems to be up in the VHF, UHF, and GHz regions, so maybe lowering the Morse speeds will not have that big of an effect anyway (with some of the language being used on the 80m band, one wonders why you'd want to hang out there anyway).
DE N3UKS
By the way, the weather service did get themselves their own parallel computing cluster (running Linux, by the way). Incidentially, the progress made in simulating nuclear blasts carries directly over to astronomers who simulate supernovae.
Some aerospace critics lay some of the blame of recent rocket failures on just this point, that too much emphasis is being put on rocket simulation at the expense of actually building prototypes and testing them. Certainly it is cheaper to simulate them, but you can't skip too many prototype iterations in the design phase.
You might find somebody on the net who will cover the "other" side of the story, but in the same manner you can go to most large cities and find alternative views being printed up on small mom-and-pop newspapers out of someone's garage. For every Drudge out there who is lucky enough to find success in their web site, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of the others are just ignored.
I think the Patent Office just needs to go back to what the Constitution seemed to intend for the transfer of knowledge to society as a whole and not this useless lifetime plus some very large number of years timeframe.
It is hard to think of too many other people you could choose over him to sit on the advisory panel. For all that is written about his personality and whether he can or cannot play well with others, who else knows more about software development and the importance of public benefits from its intellectual use.
I wouldn't count the GPL case out because it may require new law, or treading into new legal territory. That is happening all the time now because of the on-line explosion. It must be an exciting time to be a young lawyer coming out of law school because the Internet has opened a whole new legal terrain to be explored.
The way the article used the car example (saying our brain says it either is or it isn't a car) is the same as saying that my odds of winning the state lottery are half because either I win or I don't.
I would have to agree with some of the other posters that these days the Amiga people really would have to bring something to the table to get people to take notice (e.g., make it free, make it open-source, make it somehow marketably different).
I suppose it depends on what you consider the "thing" is. I don't think safety was the driving factor in the decision because the Goddard engineers figured out a way to do a controlled re-entry without the use of any gyros. Unfortunately the NASA brass didn't want to hear it. I'm guessing that budget reasons probably had more to do with it.
If you want to buy MS Windows 98 from ComputerStrippers.com, apparently MS only allows them to sell the OS if the purchase also includes either a hard drive, CPU, or motherboard.
After reading the article it got me wondering what the QA process for kernel mods are? Is there a beat the hell out of the new driver process that goes on, or is it a release into a beta and see if anyone has problems? I assume there aren't official QA testers, but are there any guidelines that before something is accepted into the kernel, it should at least be tested for X, Y, and Z?
The only problem with this method that I see is it is not suited for providing very large numbers of random numbers. The shortfall to the pseudo-random number sequences you get from your computer is that the numbers are not truely random because they repeat after a (very long) sequence. This is a problem when one is running a very long simulation program that is using many many calls to a random number generator. For instance, you might be running a Monte Carlo particle detector model that simulates a million events, and each event requires thousands and thousands of random number function calls. The nuclear decay random number generator would take a very long time to generate that many random numbers. The link mentioned that you can build up a buffer of random numbers, but all this means is that it would require a long time between when you could run your model.
The method is a beautiful use and demonstration of nuclear physics, but in my opinion it appears only useful for when you only need small numbers of random numbers, and in these cases the random numbers you get from your computer are probably quite good enough.
(Of course one way to generate more abundant random numbers using the nuclear decay method would be to use "hotter" sources, but then I wouldn't want one of those things sitting by my computer!)
It is true that you could probably build one, but as one poster pointed out, you'd have to crank out a lot of power over a broad frequency spectrum. This of course makes the device *very* easy to locate using very simple directional antennae. Turn one of these things on and wait for the local FCC enforcer to show up on your doorstep (as well as an angry mob of people who have interference on their cell phones, cordless phones, and anything else that could easily pick up broadband interference). How does a warning followed by a $15k or greater fine grab you?
The package list is at www.redhat.com/commerce/package_list.html .
Isn't TiVo an embedded Linux box that has made it to the market?
In a relative sense these are huge discounts. Of course, in an absolute sense this is a whole lot more expensive than gcc, et al.
Dr. Lederman, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. I know you are an active voice for physics and physics research and education. I was wondering what your thoughts are regarding the attitudes towards non-academic physics Ph.D.s? While the old-line attitudes are slowly changing with the realization that there are more Ph.D.s than potentially permanent academic positions, there is still a stigma that if one doesn't follow their academic advisor into academe, then they either weren't good enough to get an academic job or they are "selling-out" and chasing the big $$ elsewhere. From a funding standpoint it is rare for a person to have an opportunity to be a PI on a project unless they are either in academe or a government facility (apart from very large contractors such as JPL, Lockheed, etc.). Do you think research money should mainly go only to universities and national labs (i.e., should physicists give up hope to do their own research if they leave academe)?