I would like to point out that Engineering is one giant exercise in communication. Through schematics, blueprints, and systems of equations we turn the chaos of reality into a working system. This includes the written word.
Do not mistake real Engineers for the MSCE down the hall. MSCE's are technicians by any other name. Engineers are not like the programmers you see squirreled away in a cubical.
Indeed, my only problem in communications with managment is that my prose is entirely too precise for their purposes. There is no wiggle room, no equivication. In a few paragraphs, a diagram, and a few data charts I can demonstrate to the layman any number of phenominon.
Where management goes wrong is thinking that by understanding these reports they understand the underlying phenominon. Hence the whole Crater debacle.
NASA more or less fell flat with the decision to persue the Space Shuttle. They did not have the backing to do the project right, so they ended up selling their soul to multiple competing interests and clodged together a camel of a spacecraft.
It was a big hauler for the Military, which required so much tweakage to the engines that they require complete rebuilds between flights. It contains parts made from congressional fiefdoms scattered around the country. For example, the O-Rings were needed because the boosters are built in Minnesota and flown in chunks to Florida. The size of the shuttle and short shrift Congress paid to its budget led to useful items like atmospheric propulsion for landing to be scrapped during development.
The best thing NASA can do for itself is to just let the Shuttles sit in a hanger. They cost too much to launch and keep running. If the money that went into keeping the fleet running went into R&D they could have a replacement in a few years.
What sort of replacement? The shuttle has 3 almost mutually exclusive roles.
A manned orbital shuttle, needing proven engines, endless testing, and tons of life-safety equipment for takeoff and landing.
A high-performance heavy-lifter, where every pound is accounted for.
An orbital space platform for short term experiments.
NASA has no shortage of heavy lift rockets. What they can't hurl into space, the Russians surely can. The ISS is in orbit 24/7, it can take over the "can ants in space sort tiny screws" experiments. So the only the part that NASA needs is the getting people to and from orbit part.
Once you strip the need to carry cargo, the shuttle suddenly shrinks. Every pound you don't have to launch is 3 pounds of propellent. You also save weight on the structure of the craft itself, it's landing gear, brakes, etc. The engines can be de-rated back to a range where they don't tear themselves apart every liftoff. Or better yet, just design them to use a cheap, quickly replaced, and disposable motor.
Since you are not riding the edge of performance, you can also utilize easier to handle hydrocarbon based fuels like aircraft Kerosene. Sure it's not as efficient, but it is readily available and simpler to store.
Even though you do have a permanent orbital platform, I do see some merit to keeping the ability to orbit for several weeks, not to mention the robot arm. EVA protocols will have to be adapted working without the cargo bay, but it could be done.
In short, by reducing the requirements of the shuttle you end up with the very simple spacecraft NASA had originally intended.
LOL. This is only typical if the admin is too stupid to set stuff up right and creates complex useless help systems. Most admin's I know spend all day reading web comics, downloading porn, reading slashdot, and reading bugtraq. Once in a while some crisis comes along, but most of the time things are planned to handle failures or other problems.
Alas you are forgetting scope creap. How a System Administrator gradually morphs from a professional to one who runs powerpoint presentations for board meetings. After all, he's good with computers. He can run and install anything we buy...
Then the architect said, let there be on. He seperated the on from the off state, calling the on 1 and the off zero. He flipped one and zero, and declared the first clock cycle.
In the next clock cycle, the architect created the concept of fluid and static. The fluid was imparted with the forces of change, and the static those of structure and order. This was the end of the second clock cycle.
The Architect then executed programs in the Universe. The programs ran in their own space, generating and modifying data. This was the end of the fourth day.
The Architect then grouped programs into application and kernel routines. He introduced inheritance and object reuse. This was the end of the fifth cycle.
Finally the Architect devise the User. He imparted into the user to oversee the operation of his software and data. To organize, input, and output information. This was the end of the sixth cycle.
Having created the Universe, he sat back in bemusement and watched the ensuing chaos. This was the end of the seventh cycle.
No, actually Microsoft needs to stop making bloated packages that require constant "improvements". A PC should be a hell of a lot simpler than it is. If you were popping parts in and out of your car as often as your computer is updating components, you would probably sue the manufacturer.
People want a bloody appliance. That's it. They don't want to learn how it works. They feel ripped off about having to replace a perfectly working machine because no modern peripherals will work with it. They hate throwing out old peripherals because their new computer won't work with it.
Industry needs to sit down and design "A" scanner. It needs to design "A" mouse. It needs to design "A" computer. They need to be black boxes. They can pop in and out whatever parts they want or desire. The interface should never change.
Now I can hear folks, but what about Industry? Well industry falls into 2 categories. The first are generic users who have been crying for commodization for decades. The other are folks who are so on the bleeding edge that they design their own components and/or write their own software.
A big-rig truck is designed differently than a mini-van. Industrial users are different than office and home users.
Think about it, parents don't want kids on the internet anyway. We could add Internet Access to the rights of passage into adulthood.
We could design a class of computing appliance that is utterly stripped down and does not require a license. Read-only OS, hardwired into the system. USB-Flash drive data storage. A ROM device for adding additional programs.
I also think that Network Engineers should be licensed like civil engineers. There are things that a clueless Linux admin can do that will utterly frell a larger network.
Where will we get our next incoming crop of Hackers? Give them a sandbox to play in. Bring back BASIC, or some sufficiently "minute to learn, lifetime to master" scripting language. I'm partial to TCL/TK myself. Let them play in that environment, swap programs back and forth with other proto-hackers, and let them study the real langauges in a more structured setting.
I'm picturing a hacker apprenticeship type program. Someone expressing an interest in learning the business teams up with someone in industry to learn the trade, taking a series of qualifying exams along the way. Yes, this would imply a hacker's union or a guild of some sort.
But when you think about it, for all of our openness, there is still a few entry requirements to be taken seriously on the net. One is a stated interest in learning the Net. The other is a demonstration of how a person is willing to learn independently.
The funny thing is if these same people were running Linux they would be logged in as root and still execute whatever script someone sent them.
I definitely hear that. In fact Lindows operates in precisely this manner.
I am increasingly convinced that our enemy is not Microsoft, or even SCO. Our enemy is cluelessness. If we could somehow impart the masses with an infantessimal fraction of our sense of the big picture most of our problems would disappear.
When I say "our" I mean all computer professionals. I don't give a rat's ass what kind of Guru you are, Networking, Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac, or PDP-11. We all share a chunk of "the clue". It is our duty to impart "the clue" onto others, without bias, and without favoring any particular implementation.
What is the best way? I don't know. I can only shoot off a few half-baked ideas. My front-running suggestion is take an example from Mythology.
Think about it. How many people do you know who never change their oil, yet decorate for Christmas, throw salt over their shoulder after spilling it, and avoid black cats and ladders? Imagine a computer mythology complete with ritual, dogma, and superstition. The masses already have developed their own misguided rituals, we should just go ahead and publish a book on the proper ones.
Think about how complete a job all of the Greek god did to explain about weather, war, death, and fate. These are REALLY tough concepts even today. And yet, but putting names on them, giving them personalities, and endowing these creations with a sense of power people bought into it.
Of course, you should encourage those who show a natural aptitude to study computers in the conventional hacker sense. More or less the same way wizards always seemed to be operating on a different level than average folk.
The Linux Community is committing Suicide at the gates of Bagdad. We will be victorious.
In other news IBM negotiators discovered SCO using some bargaining tactics employed by the North Koreans. All of the IBM representative's chairs were sawed down 6 inches.
All the rice boys around here drag race. In fact, every month or so a bunch of them get busted on a straight chunk of road by the waterfront, about 3 blocks from my house.
Hey wait a minute. I remember companies spending millions on backup generators and such. Even news bits about some companies finding it cheaper to generate their own power. Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
The problem with power distribution is an imbalance between supply and demand. More efficient switching systems are like tossing a coffee can tailpipe on a honda. Sure you get a few extra horses out of it, but a Taurus with a 3.6 liter V6 is going to leave you in the dirt.
We either need more power plants, to curb demand, or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer.
Everything else might buy you time, but it is only delaying the inevitable.
I've never thought life was a closed loop. And for the record I do realize that Thermo is a "bit more then plugging numbers from tables into formulas." Given that I don't use it on a day to day basis, I cut it down to the essential bits that DO help me on a day to day basis:
Energy can change state, but it is never created or destroyed
You lose energy in every conversion through entropy.
The entropy of a pure crystal at absolute zero is zero.
Now everything beyond those 3 principles is application. The statistical method of solving thermo problems is application. The differentail equations are application. The tables and units are application.
Whatever else you are eluding to is either jargon, beyond the scope of the layman (like me), or bullshit.
Hey, the villans and heroes are determined by the folks who wrote history. Look at Moses and his exploits. You've got a murderer and Egyptian collaborator who leads a people on a journey that ends in genocide on a mass scale. His troops rolled over Caanan, slaughtering everything that moved. Yet he is all sorts of "Holy".
I guess 4 years of engineering isn't enough for anyone these days. Granted I was an EE, but I had to slog through Thermo classes well into my third year.
And exactly how much "understanding" is there to slogging through a mismash of differntial equations and yanking numbers from tables. Can I solve problems with thermo, Yes. Could I design a jet engine, No.
How you can extrapolate a lack of understanding on the subject from a few sentences in a slashdot post? Beat's me. As far as I know you ARE a rocket scientist.
Physics does not aknowledge the existance of "art". The second law of thermodynamics: Entropy always increases. Life on earth has a nasty habit of taking disorder and forming order.
A pile of dirt, a few tons of gasses, and a few megawatts of solar electricity form into Oak trees. Explain that process in thermo.
The "Preditory System" has nothing to do with Physics. It has to do with control. What makes Free Software so powerful is that it was created BY the community FOR the community. No ONE controls it.
Contrast that with, say, Unix. Bell labs at first thought it was cute, but not sellable, and let the community play with it. They did, refined it, and made it useful. Bell Labs then thought, "hey we can sell this now", and promptly pulled the rug out from under the community. What was free (and largely community developed) now required a liscence from AT&T. It is no coincidence that immediately after this debacle in the late 70's that Open Source was born.
Just deserts. Ha. There is more that motivates man than money.
Freedom is relative. He is exercising his freedom to have nothing to do with those who would subvert his cause.
Let me put it to you another way. I can only think of 2 software companies that have survived in their present form as long as Stallman has been cutting code. Microsoft and Apple. And Apple is a bit iffy. Everyone else has morphed into something else, been bought out, or simply disappeared.
Now against that track record rephrase your question with something a little more telling. Why doesn't Stallman BOTHER to associate with proprietary software vendors. Simple, they have a habit of dying.
History is littered with the forgotten corpses of men who compromised on their principles. We only remember the truely unflexible souls who insisted on changing the world around them. Unstable people like Socrates, Martin Luther, Ghandi fought like hell for their beliefs. We remember them preciesly because they did not waver against the winds of change.
One man's nutcase is history's next great thinker.
Slashdot Mirror
Do not mistake real Engineers for the MSCE down the hall. MSCE's are technicians by any other name. Engineers are not like the programmers you see squirreled away in a cubical.
Indeed, my only problem in communications with managment is that my prose is entirely too precise for their purposes. There is no wiggle room, no equivication. In a few paragraphs, a diagram, and a few data charts I can demonstrate to the layman any number of phenominon.
Where management goes wrong is thinking that by understanding these reports they understand the underlying phenominon. Hence the whole Crater debacle.
It was a big hauler for the Military, which required so much tweakage to the engines that they require complete rebuilds between flights. It contains parts made from congressional fiefdoms scattered around the country. For example, the O-Rings were needed because the boosters are built in Minnesota and flown in chunks to Florida. The size of the shuttle and short shrift Congress paid to its budget led to useful items like atmospheric propulsion for landing to be scrapped during development.
The best thing NASA can do for itself is to just let the Shuttles sit in a hanger. They cost too much to launch and keep running. If the money that went into keeping the fleet running went into R&D they could have a replacement in a few years.
What sort of replacement? The shuttle has 3 almost mutually exclusive roles.
NASA has no shortage of heavy lift rockets. What they can't hurl into space, the Russians surely can. The ISS is in orbit 24/7, it can take over the "can ants in space sort tiny screws" experiments. So the only the part that NASA needs is the getting people to and from orbit part.
Once you strip the need to carry cargo, the shuttle suddenly shrinks. Every pound you don't have to launch is 3 pounds of propellent. You also save weight on the structure of the craft itself, it's landing gear, brakes, etc. The engines can be de-rated back to a range where they don't tear themselves apart every liftoff. Or better yet, just design them to use a cheap, quickly replaced, and disposable motor.
Since you are not riding the edge of performance, you can also utilize easier to handle hydrocarbon based fuels like aircraft Kerosene. Sure it's not as efficient, but it is readily available and simpler to store.
Even though you do have a permanent orbital platform, I do see some merit to keeping the ability to orbit for several weeks, not to mention the robot arm. EVA protocols will have to be adapted working without the cargo bay, but it could be done.
In short, by reducing the requirements of the shuttle you end up with the very simple spacecraft NASA had originally intended.
Nope. This was simply turning the power off to the CRT.
That's OK. Someone was relating to me how a PHD thought turning the local system console off (physically) on a Sun server increased security.
Alas you are forgetting scope creap. How a System Administrator gradually morphs from a professional to one who runs powerpoint presentations for board meetings. After all, he's good with computers. He can run and install anything we buy...
Bonus points if he has his hand-carved clue-by-four with him. Just don't ask about the red-brown stain on the one side.
What, does that only happen around here?
WHAT? Porn isn't real! Santa was bad enough to find out.
Then the architect said, let there be on. He seperated the on from the off state, calling the on 1 and the off zero. He flipped one and zero, and declared the first clock cycle.
In the next clock cycle, the architect created the concept of fluid and static. The fluid was imparted with the forces of change, and the static those of structure and order. This was the end of the second clock cycle.
The Architect then executed programs in the Universe. The programs ran in their own space, generating and modifying data. This was the end of the fourth day.
The Architect then grouped programs into application and kernel routines. He introduced inheritance and object reuse. This was the end of the fifth cycle.
Finally the Architect devise the User. He imparted into the user to oversee the operation of his software and data. To organize, input, and output information. This was the end of the sixth cycle.
Having created the Universe, he sat back in bemusement and watched the ensuing chaos. This was the end of the seventh cycle.
People want a bloody appliance. That's it. They don't want to learn how it works. They feel ripped off about having to replace a perfectly working machine because no modern peripherals will work with it. They hate throwing out old peripherals because their new computer won't work with it.
Industry needs to sit down and design "A" scanner. It needs to design "A" mouse. It needs to design "A" computer. They need to be black boxes. They can pop in and out whatever parts they want or desire. The interface should never change.
Now I can hear folks, but what about Industry? Well industry falls into 2 categories. The first are generic users who have been crying for commodization for decades. The other are folks who are so on the bleeding edge that they design their own components and/or write their own software.
A big-rig truck is designed differently than a mini-van. Industrial users are different than office and home users.
We could design a class of computing appliance that is utterly stripped down and does not require a license. Read-only OS, hardwired into the system. USB-Flash drive data storage. A ROM device for adding additional programs.
I also think that Network Engineers should be licensed like civil engineers. There are things that a clueless Linux admin can do that will utterly frell a larger network.
Where will we get our next incoming crop of Hackers? Give them a sandbox to play in. Bring back BASIC, or some sufficiently "minute to learn, lifetime to master" scripting language. I'm partial to TCL/TK myself. Let them play in that environment, swap programs back and forth with other proto-hackers, and let them study the real langauges in a more structured setting.
I'm picturing a hacker apprenticeship type program. Someone expressing an interest in learning the business teams up with someone in industry to learn the trade, taking a series of qualifying exams along the way. Yes, this would imply a hacker's union or a guild of some sort.
But when you think about it, for all of our openness, there is still a few entry requirements to be taken seriously on the net. One is a stated interest in learning the Net. The other is a demonstration of how a person is willing to learn independently.
I definitely hear that. In fact Lindows operates in precisely this manner.
I am increasingly convinced that our enemy is not Microsoft, or even SCO. Our enemy is cluelessness. If we could somehow impart the masses with an infantessimal fraction of our sense of the big picture most of our problems would disappear.
When I say "our" I mean all computer professionals. I don't give a rat's ass what kind of Guru you are, Networking, Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac, or PDP-11. We all share a chunk of "the clue". It is our duty to impart "the clue" onto others, without bias, and without favoring any particular implementation.
What is the best way? I don't know. I can only shoot off a few half-baked ideas. My front-running suggestion is take an example from Mythology.
Think about it. How many people do you know who never change their oil, yet decorate for Christmas, throw salt over their shoulder after spilling it, and avoid black cats and ladders? Imagine a computer mythology complete with ritual, dogma, and superstition. The masses already have developed their own misguided rituals, we should just go ahead and publish a book on the proper ones.
Think about how complete a job all of the Greek god did to explain about weather, war, death, and fate. These are REALLY tough concepts even today. And yet, but putting names on them, giving them personalities, and endowing these creations with a sense of power people bought into it.
Of course, you should encourage those who show a natural aptitude to study computers in the conventional hacker sense. More or less the same way wizards always seemed to be operating on a different level than average folk.
In other news IBM negotiators discovered SCO using some bargaining tactics employed by the North Koreans. All of the IBM representative's chairs were sawed down 6 inches.
God, I home you get cancer and die. That's something you are going to have to take up with God, man.
All the rice boys around here drag race. In fact, every month or so a bunch of them get busted on a straight chunk of road by the waterfront, about 3 blocks from my house.
Hey wait a minute. I remember companies spending millions on backup generators and such. Even news bits about some companies finding it cheaper to generate their own power. Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
We either need more power plants, to curb demand, or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer.
Everything else might buy you time, but it is only delaying the inevitable.
Now everything beyond those 3 principles is application. The statistical method of solving thermo problems is application. The differentail equations are application. The tables and units are application.
Whatever else you are eluding to is either jargon, beyond the scope of the layman (like me), or bullshit.
Hey, the villans and heroes are determined by the folks who wrote history. Look at Moses and his exploits. You've got a murderer and Egyptian collaborator who leads a people on a journey that ends in genocide on a mass scale. His troops rolled over Caanan, slaughtering everything that moved. Yet he is all sorts of "Holy".
And exactly how much "understanding" is there to slogging through a mismash of differntial equations and yanking numbers from tables. Can I solve problems with thermo, Yes. Could I design a jet engine, No.
How you can extrapolate a lack of understanding on the subject from a few sentences in a slashdot post? Beat's me. As far as I know you ARE a rocket scientist.
I'm running XFCE you insensitive clod!
A pile of dirt, a few tons of gasses, and a few megawatts of solar electricity form into Oak trees. Explain that process in thermo.
The "Preditory System" has nothing to do with Physics. It has to do with control. What makes Free Software so powerful is that it was created BY the community FOR the community. No ONE controls it.
Contrast that with, say, Unix. Bell labs at first thought it was cute, but not sellable, and let the community play with it. They did, refined it, and made it useful. Bell Labs then thought, "hey we can sell this now", and promptly pulled the rug out from under the community. What was free (and largely community developed) now required a liscence from AT&T. It is no coincidence that immediately after this debacle in the late 70's that Open Source was born.
Just deserts. Ha. There is more that motivates man than money.
Let me put it to you another way. I can only think of 2 software companies that have survived in their present form as long as Stallman has been cutting code. Microsoft and Apple. And Apple is a bit iffy. Everyone else has morphed into something else, been bought out, or simply disappeared.
Now against that track record rephrase your question with something a little more telling. Why doesn't Stallman BOTHER to associate with proprietary software vendors. Simple, they have a habit of dying.
One man's nutcase is history's next great thinker.
Like I'm any better: http://www.etoyoc.com/yoda/sean-headshot.jpg
Okay, Not nix on the fat part...