The one who passes the license exam, the one whose design is approved by his superiors with many years of experience. What, you thought that just graduating was all you had to do? Please, you can bullshit your way through school but you won't last a month in the professional world.
Exactly, but University's don't care because they get their money either way.
There is a difference between he who knows his limitations, and he who just hides them and plays along with the game.
For every person like this gentleman, I knew at least 2 that copied each others homework, calluded on labs, and piggybacked on other students for projects. Most of the cheaters made it to graduation.
Now, whose bridge would YOU choose to drive over.
A degree is no measure of skill or fortitude, at least not in large cattle campuses.
As an clasically trained Electrical Engineering Dropout, I second that notion. I didn't finish the program, but I did walk away with a profoundly different approach to solving problems.
Dude, I don't like the guy either. That doesn't mean for a minute that I dispute he was elected president.
To do so would mean that every election could be called into question.
The other thing to remember is that we do not live in a Democracy. We live in a Republic. Actually a collection of 50 little Republics that band together for a common defense.
You have absolutely no say in how the government is operated. You DO however get to pick the folks who do run the joint. Anyone who tells you different is a despot, crackpot, or selling you something.
I also had another throught: imagine the world once we really get serious about robotics. Robot cars, domestic droids, etc. Software engineering could very well become a safety issue.
Our "designs" could very well take immediate shape in the blue room. Of course, we also start getting into matters like at which point responsibility for the actions of the programmer end, and the actions of the operator (or even the robot itself) start.
We really opened a can of worms with computers, let me tell you.
We have reporters traveling along with our armed forces, even so far as getting shot at.
Just think, people were fleeing to Canada to avoid the front lines with a gun in their hand, and we have 600 morons who decided to tag along with a camera?
Not only are these folks civilians, not only are they not armed, they picked the crankiest, self-rightious, blabbermouthiest population of poeple in the western world.
I would rather like it if we went back to some kind of skilled trade system.
Say what you will about the local 571, but it's rather nice to have someone to call who knows what the hell they are doing, and is making a comfortable enough living that he doesn't have to either screw you or cut corners.
By now I would consider myself a Master Network Engineer. Largely because I finally understand the areas I have no clue on, have no time for, or otherwise have the budget to call in the hired help.
Homeland secretary has raised the terror alert to code orange in response to overheating toaster coils...
The Bush administration points to a recent survey that nine out of ten americans thing their pests are psychic as proof of the resolve of the public on the Middle East invasion (oops) Iraq War....
I think we are also missing the point that civil engineers DESIGN roads. The don't build them.
Software engineers DESIGN programs. The don't usually code them, or at least the whole thing. Or at least not for any project of sufficient size and complexity to warrent a software engineer as opposed to a caffiene intoxicated teenager.
(As I sip in my caffiene... The spice must flow...)
Engineering is all about applying what you know and creating a working system.
Now scientists and mathemeticians work with very complex systems all the time. However, most if not all of it is theoretical.
Engineers take that theory and his own experience to build a useful system. This system has to withstand the rigors of the real world. It also has to be done on time, on budget, and actually do its job without killing someone.
A lot of "scientific" achievments in the past century are actually engineering achievments.
Powered Flight: The mechanics of powered flight were understood for hundreds of years. The stumbling block was a lightwieght power plant and a control system for rolling motion. Enter a pair of bicycle mechanics from Ohio.
The Apollo mission: no new scientific theories there, but a brilliant application of what theories we did know.
The Atomic Bomb: the theory can be grasped by a child, what keeps the dictators of the world from having the A-Bomb is the fact that they are devilishly hard to make.
The Internet: anyone who has read an RFC knows that there is no magic involved. The Internet is built on top of a body of standards, defined protocols, and the good faith of all parties involved.
Now the point I am trying to make is that programmers are always defining new things. Engineers can't responsibly design systems around parts with unknown properties.
Engineering and most programming endeavors are mutually exclusive. A good engineer can't afford to have an unknown in the process.
Look at the space shuttle. That was real software engineering. They designed the whole system, to do a specific task, within a specific set of parameters. Yes there was programming involved, but in this case the software was only a highly flexible control system in an aerodynamics problem.
Could some 14 year old given enough time and caffiene do the same thing? Probably. Would I trust that software with my life and a 4 billion dollar spacecraft? No. Odds are the kid would not have a grasp of the differential equations, Laplace transforms... ah... engineering school equations leave me now...
Do I have to develop a taste for banana and make those ooooo oooo ooooo aaaah aaahha aahhhha sounds?
Frankly, I'm a network engineer because I seem to the only person in the building who greps how ethernet switches operate, low-level network services operate, and can build, configure, and maintain all of the mission critical IT functions in the building.
And yes, I do it all from scratch using linux where appropriate.
And no, I have no intentions of going back to school at this point, I'm earning a comfortable living with a wife and kid on the way.
I think I rightly deserve my title as Senior Network Engineer. I've put in a lot of work to costantly keep learning new technologies and perfect my techniques.
Do I have a lot of formal pieces of paper? No.
Can I drag you bodily into my datacenter and show you what I've been up to? Yes.
Having interviewed countless IT folks to be my assistant, I can tell you there are a lot of folks that look great on paper, but they really don't know their stuff.
Perhaps we should really work on a way of judging people based on what they have actually done.
If some computers are already expressing self awareness. I've always thought that just about any reasonably complex system exhibits self-awarenes.
I've been developing an automated cluster managment too for my 9 linux rackmounts, and about 200 windows workstations. The code is written in TCL, so there is a lot of cases where some scripts were actually written by other scripts. The software patrolls the servers, and makes sure each on has the right settings for the state of the network, and it tries to adapt when a server is down.
Every once in a while, I find the system exhibiting a new behavior, in a matter I wasn't expecting. In those cases I generally have the phones ringing off the hook, so I end up writing a quick and dirty patch.
The programs is now so complicated, and klugdy I have a hard time telling what is doing what. Ever so often I will find a chunk of code that I really can't figure out why it's there.
In any case, since they are pulling ammonia from the water, that would lead me to believe that even if they pull beer from the water, someone drank it first.
Ok, YOU try to find beer in Saudi Arabia. Besides no cruise lines go to the Middle East.
Now I do know that beer is cheaper than water in the Carribean. At least in St. Maarten. They have some really interesting drinking and driving laws too. Basically as long as holding the bottle doesn't interfere with driving.
It doesn't help that the powers that be have cheaped out on parts either.
My wife was a Coop at Aberdeen Proving Grounds back in 1998. She was on a team that was analyzing tie-rod failures in the Navy's helicopters. They had switched to a low-cost vendor who apparently had not been heat-treating the parts right.
The Navy's answer: keep the vendor and re-treat the parts.
To this day she is still frightened of helicopters, which kind of sucks since I want a pilot's license.
Can I propose a new abbreviation: AAA (Amen and Amen). Context: Replying to a comment you agree on, but you feel like you are being ever so slightly redundant and may in fact be the choir preached to.
In a lot of cases I'm using linksys products because they have a lot of semi-supported hacks that allow me to do wireless bridging and a few other rocket science type things for WiFi.
Once Cisco gets their grubby hands on it, I don't see that sort of black-art stuff continuing. Besides, Linksys stuff is all built on a standard chipset. What would a name like Cisco need Linksys for? It's pretty straightforward to engineer a cable router or a Wifi access point.
Whatever becomes of the LinkSys/Cisco merger I doubt customers will like it very much.
I'm am frankly impressed that someone managed to use machine vision to control a delivery system in real time.
Think about it guys, in his spare time this guy managed to use a single camera, some color filters, and an SDK to navigate a childs toy anywhere in a room up to 40m wide. Is it reliable, no. But I would'nt call the Wright flyer A reliable either.
I'm personally working on an entry for the Darpa Grand Challenge, and I really have to respect anyone who can get machine vision to work.
Either that or I need to stop reinventing the wheel, and somebody needs to direct me to a robust set of tools that I've been overlooking.
That said, wherever people sit and congregate with laptops they will want internet access. Wifi can provide it. The trick is to be able to make it worth someone's while to put in the wireless.
I thought rant was a -1 not a +1. Moderators, strike that boy down as a whiner.
If you want all that and a bag of chips, just buy yourself one of those wiresless web phones and plug it into your laptop. Sprint sells them, Verizon sells them. The service isn't all that expensive. It is a bit slow, but not all that expensive.
Hmm. Considering the range for Wifi is measured in miles even with te fancy boosters, you are going to need at least one neighbor with a Broadband connection.
Just make sure that's a neighbor on the top of a hill.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, but University's don't care because they get their money either way.
Those are some really goo pointers for conversation BTW. I'll be digging up those papers.
For every person like this gentleman, I knew at least 2 that copied each others homework, calluded on labs, and piggybacked on other students for projects. Most of the cheaters made it to graduation.
Now, whose bridge would YOU choose to drive over.
A degree is no measure of skill or fortitude, at least not in large cattle campuses.
The economy rebounds!
As an clasically trained Electrical Engineering Dropout, I second that notion. I didn't finish the program, but I did walk away with a profoundly different approach to solving problems.
The other thing to remember is that we do not live in a Democracy. We live in a Republic. Actually a collection of 50 little Republics that band together for a common defense.
You have absolutely no say in how the government is operated. You DO however get to pick the folks who do run the joint. Anyone who tells you different is a despot, crackpot, or selling you something.
I also had another throught: imagine the world once we really get serious about robotics. Robot cars, domestic droids, etc. Software engineering could very well become a safety issue.
Our "designs" could very well take immediate shape in the blue room. Of course, we also start getting into matters like at which point responsibility for the actions of the programmer end, and the actions of the operator (or even the robot itself) start.
We really opened a can of worms with computers, let me tell you.
Just think, people were fleeing to Canada to avoid the front lines with a gun in their hand, and we have 600 morons who decided to tag along with a camera?
Not only are these folks civilians, not only are they not armed, they picked the crankiest, self-rightious, blabbermouthiest population of poeple in the western world.
No wait... there may be a plan in all this.
And we all know that hospitals are ideal places for parking tanks and stockpiling munitions too.
Say what you will about the local 571, but it's rather nice to have someone to call who knows what the hell they are doing, and is making a comfortable enough living that he doesn't have to either screw you or cut corners.
By now I would consider myself a Master Network Engineer. Largely because I finally understand the areas I have no clue on, have no time for, or otherwise have the budget to call in the hired help.
Homeland secretary has raised the terror alert to code orange in response to overheating toaster coils...
The Bush administration points to a recent survey that nine out of ten americans thing their pests are psychic as proof of the resolve of the public on the Middle East invasion (oops) Iraq War....
Software engineers DESIGN programs. The don't usually code them, or at least the whole thing. Or at least not for any project of sufficient size and complexity to warrent a software engineer as opposed to a caffiene intoxicated teenager.
(As I sip in my caffiene... The spice must flow...)
Now scientists and mathemeticians work with very complex systems all the time. However, most if not all of it is theoretical.
Engineers take that theory and his own experience to build a useful system. This system has to withstand the rigors of the real world. It also has to be done on time, on budget, and actually do its job without killing someone.
A lot of "scientific" achievments in the past century are actually engineering achievments.
Now the point I am trying to make is that programmers are always defining new things. Engineers can't responsibly design systems around parts with unknown properties.
Engineering and most programming endeavors are mutually exclusive. A good engineer can't afford to have an unknown in the process.
Look at the space shuttle. That was real software engineering. They designed the whole system, to do a specific task, within a specific set of parameters. Yes there was programming involved, but in this case the software was only a highly flexible control system in an aerodynamics problem.
Could some 14 year old given enough time and caffiene do the same thing? Probably. Would I trust that software with my life and a 4 billion dollar spacecraft? No. Odds are the kid would not have a grasp of the differential equations, Laplace transforms... ah... engineering school equations leave me now...
Frankly, I'm a network engineer because I seem to the only person in the building who greps how ethernet switches operate, low-level network services operate, and can build, configure, and maintain all of the mission critical IT functions in the building.
And yes, I do it all from scratch using linux where appropriate.
And no, I have no intentions of going back to school at this point, I'm earning a comfortable living with a wife and kid on the way.
I think I rightly deserve my title as Senior Network Engineer. I've put in a lot of work to costantly keep learning new technologies and perfect my techniques.
Do I have a lot of formal pieces of paper? No. Can I drag you bodily into my datacenter and show you what I've been up to? Yes.
Having interviewed countless IT folks to be my assistant, I can tell you there are a lot of folks that look great on paper, but they really don't know their stuff.
Perhaps we should really work on a way of judging people based on what they have actually done.
I've been developing an automated cluster managment too for my 9 linux rackmounts, and about 200 windows workstations. The code is written in TCL, so there is a lot of cases where some scripts were actually written by other scripts. The software patrolls the servers, and makes sure each on has the right settings for the state of the network, and it tries to adapt when a server is down.
Every once in a while, I find the system exhibiting a new behavior, in a matter I wasn't expecting. In those cases I generally have the phones ringing off the hook, so I end up writing a quick and dirty patch.
The programs is now so complicated, and klugdy I have a hard time telling what is doing what. Ever so often I will find a chunk of code that I really can't figure out why it's there.
Did I do it?
Did the machine do it?
Did the machine get me to do it for it?
In any case, since they are pulling ammonia from the water, that would lead me to believe that even if they pull beer from the water, someone drank it first.
Can't buy it, only rent it.
Now I do know that beer is cheaper than water in the Carribean. At least in St. Maarten. They have some really interesting drinking and driving laws too. Basically as long as holding the bottle doesn't interfere with driving.
Now they only tested software like that...
My wife was a Coop at Aberdeen Proving Grounds back in 1998. She was on a team that was analyzing tie-rod failures in the Navy's helicopters. They had switched to a low-cost vendor who apparently had not been heat-treating the parts right.
The Navy's answer: keep the vendor and re-treat the parts.
To this day she is still frightened of helicopters, which kind of sucks since I want a pilot's license.
Can I propose a new abbreviation: AAA (Amen and Amen). Context: Replying to a comment you agree on, but you feel like you are being ever so slightly redundant and may in fact be the choir preached to.
That's the kind of evil thinking I like to hear.
Once Cisco gets their grubby hands on it, I don't see that sort of black-art stuff continuing. Besides, Linksys stuff is all built on a standard chipset. What would a name like Cisco need Linksys for? It's pretty straightforward to engineer a cable router or a Wifi access point.
Whatever becomes of the LinkSys/Cisco merger I doubt customers will like it very much.
Think about it guys, in his spare time this guy managed to use a single camera, some color filters, and an SDK to navigate a childs toy anywhere in a room up to 40m wide. Is it reliable, no. But I would'nt call the Wright flyer A reliable either.
I'm personally working on an entry for the Darpa Grand Challenge, and I really have to respect anyone who can get machine vision to work.
Either that or I need to stop reinventing the wheel, and somebody needs to direct me to a robust set of tools that I've been overlooking.
That said, wherever people sit and congregate with laptops they will want internet access. Wifi can provide it. The trick is to be able to make it worth someone's while to put in the wireless.
Oh wait, that's me (shameless plug)[etoyoc.com]
If you want all that and a bag of chips, just buy yourself one of those wiresless web phones and plug it into your laptop. Sprint sells them, Verizon sells them. The service isn't all that expensive. It is a bit slow, but not all that expensive.
Just make sure that's a neighbor on the top of a hill.