To be the devil's advocate, lets go back to the alegory of the den.
Let's say that in 30 years we do have a neural tap. There are going to be people whose primary experience is through the neural tap, and who only ever see the incomplete approximations that computers can produce.
They wouldn't know there is more detail. Indeed, they might consider the extra detail to be an imperfection, event to the point of being offensive.
Just look what Television has done to the art of communication. It's diced it up into information McNuggets, and packaged it in a technicolor box. People who learn primarily through TV are only content with ideas that are seemingly complete (however inaccurate), and can be expressed in less than 30 seconds.
I'm often called on cast a technical eye on a report or communication that was prepared by a layman. Inevitably that document includes an comment or extrapolation that, while in everyday experience is accurate, it only holds under a controlled set of circumstances.
Eek, I'm somewhere between recalling E.M. Forrester's The Machine Stops and finalizing a plotline for my book The Artifact.
Now you know what it's like for a computer Guru to sit through a spy movie.
"I've crossed referenced [the subject's] credit card receipts and have pinpointed his location to..."
That's a neat trick, credit card processors take days to settle payments, and queries generally require a court order, and are generally historical in nature.
"We have a live satellite image of the location..."
Really? On a satellite that is travelling at 17,000 mph. Normally we are lucky to get a blurry snapshot, at best, every 90 minutes. More likely a snapshot every few days, owing the the orbital mechanics of spy satellites. Geo-stationary satellites are too far away to get a decent close-up from.
"I've cross referenced the FBI's database..."
Until recently the FBI's database was a green-screen application that would take days to search properly. Assuming what you were looking for was in it. And your search didn't require more than one word at a time.
Incidentally, I agree with the sibling poster who says that it's better to have people play FPS to learn that they're not invulnerable.
It doesn't take a FPS to do that. Before we had computer graphics, Generals would act out upcoming battles on massive game tables, using chance to simulate complex components of battle. Both sides in WWII used this technique with pretty good success. Well, when they used it. The Nazis stopped using simulations when Hitler got it in his head that he was some sort of Napolean.
In the Art of War, Sun Tsu writes:
Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat, how much more no calculation at all!
What folks also don't appreciate is the fact that in war, you can be dead without even hearing the shot that killed you. Effective range on an assault rifle is about a hundred yards. Snipers can pick you from several hundred yards. Most bullets travel faster than sound.
Helicopter gunships, artillery, cruise missiles, and aerial bombardments that can take you out miles away. Generally, if you see the enemy, it had better be through a gun sight, because if not you are already in his.
Movies show close-in combat because it looks exciting and fills the field of view. Real combat is fought from in between cover, or at night.
Yes, they can produce photo quality bikini girls, and infinite combinations of sex partners. What they can't produce is the mess. Humans secrete, sweat, secrete, and ejaculate all sorts of fluids, generally producing a mess at the end.
Computers can't create messes on their own. Sloppiness is a labor intensive job for a CG artists to make look convincing.
People are also covered with blemishes, scars, and hair. Using a texture you might be able to fool the eye from far away, but up close computers can't produce a sufficient level of detail. And in porn the camera zooms into some pretty explicit areas.
Yes some artists can fill in the right level of detail for stills. The problem is that porn requires motion.
Salvadore Dali was once asked by a skeptic why he can't produce things that are more realistic, like photographs. He asked the man if he had a photograph, and the man produced a wallet sized picture of his wife. Dali examined the photograph, and then said, "My, your wife is so small and flat."
I've probably butchered it, but I hit my 20 minute limit on googleing for a slashdot post without finding a link to the quote. Ah academia. The art of remembering what was said, but forgetting the source.
And here is why. Animation artists are far more expensive. You don't NEED an a-list actor to make a movie. You can assemble a respectable cast for a movie from a local community theater. Scratch that. Americans aren't used to people who can actually act.
Which brings me to point 2. Actors in movies don't "act". They are charactatures bumbling through a plot while reciting lines. Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise in all of his movies. Keanu Reeves plays Keanu Reeves. Characters a made up of all the subtle gestures, inflections, and involuntary ticks they make while performing.
Yes, a computer could synthesize quirks. But keeping it consistent enough to build a "star" would take far more effort than simply hiring an actor. (Note that all animated blockbusters until now DID use real actors to generate voice and gestures.)
Give people some credit. The star system aside, we are cheap to make, and we can make stuff up on he fly that leaves a team of artists working on the world's most powerful computers in the dust.
It only looks real because they are modeling a person who is looking anything but. Biki models wax off their body hair, have no tan lines, and often employ makeup to hide minor blemishes and scars.
Human skin is transparent, blotchy, an has many layers that move independently. It folds along creases, and bunches while it moves. (No matter how fat or thin you are.) All that makes it messy for artists to model us, which is where artistic ideals come from.
The bugger with computers is that they do the ideal perfectly. The problem is that the ideal is no reflection of reality.
In the theater there is a concept known as "suspension of disbelief." You and the audience more or less agree on some level that they are not, indeed sitting on their duffs in a dark room watching actors in pancake makeup walking around painted plywood sets. They are in fact in medieval England, participating in the court of King Richard.
The most effective games for me were the ones that were not trying to be photorealistic. Early games developers really were on to something employing anime for graphical sequences and character charts.
Robotech was one of the most realistic playstation 2 games I've played. Not because the planes and robots looked like actual real-world weapons. It was because they looked and acted like the weapons from the cartoon series I remembered as a kid.
The animation sequences in Dungeon keeper 2 were absolutely believable. The same animation quality applied to Blizzard's Starcraft was not. Why? Dungeon keeper didn't try to look real, and employed a lot of tongue in cheek cartoony elements. Starcraft tried to be entirely too serious.
Have you ever run wire? Spec'ed out electrical requirements. How about crash restart a network?
1000 computers requires a fundimentally different network architecture than 100, which is different still than 10. And this is just assuming that the computer run unattended. Workstations have their own problems that require a warm body to clean up mistakes.
(Heck 1000 computers and you start to have pronounced problems supplying electrical power properly. Switching power supplies throw off the sine wave in alternating current. You need power conditioners every few workstations to keep from getting random brownouts around the building. That's part of the reason most Co-los have that massive UPS.)
Well no. Most of them couldn't tell you what ActiveX was. Nor would they be capable of following a set of simple instructions on how to disable it.
What makes Microsoft so dangerous is not just that their software is shit. Its that in the process of subverting the market they scooped up the segment of the population that is completely oblivious to the inner workings of their computer.
I hate to tell you this, but accounting is going overseas too. It's even easier to outsource than helpdesk or software development precisely because the rules are all pre-defined, the results constantly checked and re-evaluated, and the work itself very labor intensive. (Well, thought labor.)
No, I'd say electrician or plumber is a more stable job. They require a local license, there are trade unions that largely regulate wages, and people don't think twice about paying you $50/hour to do it.
If 90% of your time is spent fighting fires, there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the systems are set up or you're chronically understaffed. Now, I can scale *myself* from 100 to 1000 systems with little additional effort on my behalf once they are set up.
Scaling yourself up from 100 to 1000 systems, once they are set up? Er, you forget that our job IS to set them up.
And be careful laying blame on poor design choices or chronic understaffing. These are often problems caused by powers beyond the admin's control. I for one have quite a few albatroses on my network.
You have an awefully low ID number to be casting half baked aspersions about how simple the internet is, and those who find it hard must be flawed. There are some of us out here that work for a living.
Besides if 90% of a guy's job is fighting fires, where exactly is he supposed to find the time for self-directed study. (Considering the remaining 10% is easily swallowed in phone calls, meetings, and paperwork.)
Your analogy is flawed. A command line is NOT like a high quality paint brush.
It's more akin to being able to sketch an idea on your own versus having to work only with clip-art. For most common tasks, a skilled artist and a skilled clip-art collector are roughly equivilent. (Unskilled users of both systems are relatively useless.)
A sketcher takes a little longer to train, but after minimal training he or she can represent far more complex ideas than are possible searching through a clip-art database.
Even running a predominately linux shop hasn't saved me from windows worms. We have a few SQL databases, and each major app insists on running on it's own hardware. (Especially when one of them has to replicate over the internet.)
I firewall them, but all it takes is a misguided user, a permissive web browser, and a new RPC vulnerability to make life a living hell for a few weeks.
Back in the day, systems were extremely complex and needed an army of people to look after the basic functionality. Now that's changing...sysadmins will be around, but adaptation is required.
Back in the day? What gets MSCE's into trouble is that systems ARE that complicated, and will continue to be that complicated, and that their training was inadaquate for managing all but the simplest Windows network.
Last I checked a decent admin had to have a working knowledge of TCP/IP, routing, and the myriad support services that have sprung up around them like DNS. Even if your shop is MickeySoft, your upstream provider and domain name registry are not. I've been working under Linux for almost 10 years, and I'm still learning new things.
The outsourcing thing is going to hurt for the forseeable future
No, it's not. System Administrators are valuable because they know the system. Every network installation is unique. Big networks tend to have a lot of history and non-obvious solutions. Small networks tend to have a lot of customizations and quirks. Hired guns are good at doing one thing: ripping out the existing network and installing a new one. Their contract generally ends at that point, and you are stuck with whatever they came up with. (Been there, done that.)
Outsourcing a sysadmin overseas makes about as much sense as outsourcing your plumbing overseas. Networks have localized problems, with localized equipment, and localized users. Remote management will not allow you to reboot a server, nor diagnose why your upstream connection is down.
It's not that you have a big M on your forehead, Mate. It's the massive gaps in your understanding of how it all fits together that give you away.
Yeah, but not every application requires a dual-Opteron server. Filservers need to be disk- and ram-heavy, but require little CPU, for example; the X-serves don't have a good cost-to-benefits ratio for the $1K rackmount range, and if you've got a small company with limited resoures, a $600 Dell will do just as well as a fileserver.
There isn't a cost/benefit in the $1000 range, but there sure as hell is in the $6000 range. At least if you want the server to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Having been a longtime (and soon to be former) Dell customer, I'm tired of having to escalate every stinking spare part request. We were back and forth with their call center for WEEKS trying to get a simple replacement power supply for our RAID. They suggested we play swappy with the various components, without regard to the fact that we had 100GB of data on there that takes 48 hours to restore from backup. (And the fact that the power problem caused disks to wink out if we swapped components, cascading to container loss.)
When they finally offered to send a support technician out, he was only available 9-5. Yeah, real helpful to tell the building "Sorry folks we have to drop the fileserver today at 2:00. Oh, and if this clown screws it up, we might be back up on Thursday. Assuming he finds the problem, and we don't end up having to drop ship another unit because the local field office doesn't have any spares."
Voice recognition will never take off. Think of how frustrating it is to order a cheeseburger through the intercom at your local fast food joint. It's a hell of a lot easier now thay they give you visual feedback, isn't it?
Computers are even dumber about processing words than your average (or even WAY below average) kid at the Mcdodos. Computers have no capacity to learn on the fly. (Well at least in any timescale appreciable to the operator.) A simple command would require a ton of confirmations to ensure it was entered correctly. And most instructions given to a computer don't work if it's a number off or guesses "to" instead of "too" or "two."
Keyboards, for all their warts, are fantastic input devices. I'm quicker at typing than speaking.
Have them install a spare hard drive in your machine, and use partimage to clone the disk after your next "reinstall". Next time it goes kablooey, you can re-clone the disk in a matter of minutes.
Yeah sure, you can use Ghost for that. But I like to keep it opensource.
Just because your are paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you.
But really, people are far too trusting of the anonymity of the net. It's about as anonymous as any public place. Well, any public place in which you wear a name tag that is cross referenced to the phone book, your school records, and your past 7 years of credit card purchases.
And no, putting in phony information into web surveys doesn't help. Your IP is logged, which is traced back to your ISP, who knows what account you logged into, and usually where you were calling from. I've dimed out a fair number of wannabee crackers out there.
Yes. But at some point to get your mail delivered in the conventional way it would have to chat to a server across port 25 (or port 465, smtp with ssl.)
You can yat with your (rather they hypothetical you's) zombies across any channel you like, but most mail servers only want to hear from you on port 25.
Slashdot Mirror
Drexel by any chance?
Let's say that in 30 years we do have a neural tap. There are going to be people whose primary experience is through the neural tap, and who only ever see the incomplete approximations that computers can produce.
They wouldn't know there is more detail. Indeed, they might consider the extra detail to be an imperfection, event to the point of being offensive.
Just look what Television has done to the art of communication. It's diced it up into information McNuggets, and packaged it in a technicolor box. People who learn primarily through TV are only content with ideas that are seemingly complete (however inaccurate), and can be expressed in less than 30 seconds.
I'm often called on cast a technical eye on a report or communication that was prepared by a layman. Inevitably that document includes an comment or extrapolation that, while in everyday experience is accurate, it only holds under a controlled set of circumstances.
Eek, I'm somewhere between recalling E.M. Forrester's The Machine Stops and finalizing a plotline for my book The Artifact.
"I've crossed referenced [the subject's] credit card receipts and have pinpointed his location to..."
That's a neat trick, credit card processors take days to settle payments, and queries generally require a court order, and are generally historical in nature.
"We have a live satellite image of the location..."
Really? On a satellite that is travelling at 17,000 mph. Normally we are lucky to get a blurry snapshot, at best, every 90 minutes. More likely a snapshot every few days, owing the the orbital mechanics of spy satellites. Geo-stationary satellites are too far away to get a decent close-up from.
"I've cross referenced the FBI's database..."
Until recently the FBI's database was a green-screen application that would take days to search properly. Assuming what you were looking for was in it. And your search didn't require more than one word at a time.
It doesn't take a FPS to do that. Before we had computer graphics, Generals would act out upcoming battles on massive game tables, using chance to simulate complex components of battle. Both sides in WWII used this technique with pretty good success. Well, when they used it. The Nazis stopped using simulations when Hitler got it in his head that he was some sort of Napolean.
In the Art of War, Sun Tsu writes: Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat, how much more no calculation at all!
Not exactly on topic...
Regardless of how "realistic" the graphics look, combat simulators can't simulate:
Helicopter gunships, artillery, cruise missiles, and aerial bombardments that can take you out miles away. Generally, if you see the enemy, it had better be through a gun sight, because if not you are already in his.
Movies show close-in combat because it looks exciting and fills the field of view. Real combat is fought from in between cover, or at night.
Yes, they can produce photo quality bikini girls, and infinite combinations of sex partners. What they can't produce is the mess. Humans secrete, sweat, secrete, and ejaculate all sorts of fluids, generally producing a mess at the end.
Computers can't create messes on their own. Sloppiness is a labor intensive job for a CG artists to make look convincing.
People are also covered with blemishes, scars, and hair. Using a texture you might be able to fool the eye from far away, but up close computers can't produce a sufficient level of detail. And in porn the camera zooms into some pretty explicit areas.
Yes some artists can fill in the right level of detail for stills. The problem is that porn requires motion.
I've probably butchered it, but I hit my 20 minute limit on googleing for a slashdot post without finding a link to the quote. Ah academia. The art of remembering what was said, but forgetting the source.
And here is why. Animation artists are far more expensive. You don't NEED an a-list actor to make a movie. You can assemble a respectable cast for a movie from a local community theater. Scratch that. Americans aren't used to people who can actually act.
Which brings me to point 2. Actors in movies don't "act". They are charactatures bumbling through a plot while reciting lines. Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise in all of his movies. Keanu Reeves plays Keanu Reeves. Characters a made up of all the subtle gestures, inflections, and involuntary ticks they make while performing.
Yes, a computer could synthesize quirks. But keeping it consistent enough to build a "star" would take far more effort than simply hiring an actor. (Note that all animated blockbusters until now DID use real actors to generate voice and gestures.)
Give people some credit. The star system aside, we are cheap to make, and we can make stuff up on he fly that leaves a team of artists working on the world's most powerful computers in the dust.
Human skin is transparent, blotchy, an has many layers that move independently. It folds along creases, and bunches while it moves. (No matter how fat or thin you are.) All that makes it messy for artists to model us, which is where artistic ideals come from.
The bugger with computers is that they do the ideal perfectly. The problem is that the ideal is no reflection of reality.
The most effective games for me were the ones that were not trying to be photorealistic. Early games developers really were on to something employing anime for graphical sequences and character charts.
Robotech was one of the most realistic playstation 2 games I've played. Not because the planes and robots looked like actual real-world weapons. It was because they looked and acted like the weapons from the cartoon series I remembered as a kid.
The animation sequences in Dungeon keeper 2 were absolutely believable. The same animation quality applied to Blizzard's Starcraft was not. Why? Dungeon keeper didn't try to look real, and employed a lot of tongue in cheek cartoony elements. Starcraft tried to be entirely too serious.
And don't get me started on Squaresoft...
Command lines and script files are still faster and more reliable for what I do.
1000 computers requires a fundimentally different network architecture than 100, which is different still than 10. And this is just assuming that the computer run unattended. Workstations have their own problems that require a warm body to clean up mistakes.
(Heck 1000 computers and you start to have pronounced problems supplying electrical power properly. Switching power supplies throw off the sine wave in alternating current. You need power conditioners every few workstations to keep from getting random brownouts around the building. That's part of the reason most Co-los have that massive UPS.)
Their answer was to knit it as tightly into the operating system as possible. The Jargon's dictionary would file the move under Evil and Rude.
What makes Microsoft so dangerous is not just that their software is shit. Its that in the process of subverting the market they scooped up the segment of the population that is completely oblivious to the inner workings of their computer.
I hate to tell you this, but accounting is going overseas too. It's even easier to outsource than helpdesk or software development precisely because the rules are all pre-defined, the results constantly checked and re-evaluated, and the work itself very labor intensive. (Well, thought labor.)
No, I'd say electrician or plumber is a more stable job. They require a local license, there are trade unions that largely regulate wages, and people don't think twice about paying you $50/hour to do it.
(Never did get my BS.)
Scaling yourself up from 100 to 1000 systems, once they are set up? Er, you forget that our job IS to set them up.
And be careful laying blame on poor design choices or chronic understaffing. These are often problems caused by powers beyond the admin's control. I for one have quite a few albatroses on my network.
You have an awefully low ID number to be casting half baked aspersions about how simple the internet is, and those who find it hard must be flawed. There are some of us out here that work for a living.
Besides if 90% of a guy's job is fighting fires, where exactly is he supposed to find the time for self-directed study. (Considering the remaining 10% is easily swallowed in phone calls, meetings, and paperwork.)
Your analogy is flawed. A command line is NOT like a high quality paint brush.
It's more akin to being able to sketch an idea on your own versus having to work only with clip-art. For most common tasks, a skilled artist and a skilled clip-art collector are roughly equivilent. (Unskilled users of both systems are relatively useless.)
A sketcher takes a little longer to train, but after minimal training he or she can represent far more complex ideas than are possible searching through a clip-art database.
I firewall them, but all it takes is a misguided user, a permissive web browser, and a new RPC vulnerability to make life a living hell for a few weeks.
Back in the day? What gets MSCE's into trouble is that systems ARE that complicated, and will continue to be that complicated, and that their training was inadaquate for managing all but the simplest Windows network.
Last I checked a decent admin had to have a working knowledge of TCP/IP, routing, and the myriad support services that have sprung up around them like DNS. Even if your shop is MickeySoft, your upstream provider and domain name registry are not. I've been working under Linux for almost 10 years, and I'm still learning new things.
The outsourcing thing is going to hurt for the forseeable future
No, it's not. System Administrators are valuable because they know the system. Every network installation is unique. Big networks tend to have a lot of history and non-obvious solutions. Small networks tend to have a lot of customizations and quirks. Hired guns are good at doing one thing: ripping out the existing network and installing a new one. Their contract generally ends at that point, and you are stuck with whatever they came up with. (Been there, done that.)
Outsourcing a sysadmin overseas makes about as much sense as outsourcing your plumbing overseas. Networks have localized problems, with localized equipment, and localized users. Remote management will not allow you to reboot a server, nor diagnose why your upstream connection is down.
It's not that you have a big M on your forehead, Mate. It's the massive gaps in your understanding of how it all fits together that give you away.
There isn't a cost/benefit in the $1000 range, but there sure as hell is in the $6000 range. At least if you want the server to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Having been a longtime (and soon to be former) Dell customer, I'm tired of having to escalate every stinking spare part request. We were back and forth with their call center for WEEKS trying to get a simple replacement power supply for our RAID. They suggested we play swappy with the various components, without regard to the fact that we had 100GB of data on there that takes 48 hours to restore from backup. (And the fact that the power problem caused disks to wink out if we swapped components, cascading to container loss.)
When they finally offered to send a support technician out, he was only available 9-5. Yeah, real helpful to tell the building "Sorry folks we have to drop the fileserver today at 2:00. Oh, and if this clown screws it up, we might be back up on Thursday. Assuming he finds the problem, and we don't end up having to drop ship another unit because the local field office doesn't have any spares."
Computers are even dumber about processing words than your average (or even WAY below average) kid at the Mcdodos. Computers have no capacity to learn on the fly. (Well at least in any timescale appreciable to the operator.) A simple command would require a ton of confirmations to ensure it was entered correctly. And most instructions given to a computer don't work if it's a number off or guesses "to" instead of "too" or "two."
Keyboards, for all their warts, are fantastic input devices. I'm quicker at typing than speaking.
Have them install a spare hard drive in your machine, and use partimage to clone the disk after your next "reinstall". Next time it goes kablooey, you can re-clone the disk in a matter of minutes.
Yeah sure, you can use Ghost for that. But I like to keep it opensource.
But really, people are far too trusting of the anonymity of the net. It's about as anonymous as any public place. Well, any public place in which you wear a name tag that is cross referenced to the phone book, your school records, and your past 7 years of credit card purchases.
And no, putting in phony information into web surveys doesn't help. Your IP is logged, which is traced back to your ISP, who knows what account you logged into, and usually where you were calling from. I've dimed out a fair number of wannabee crackers out there.
You can yat with your (rather they hypothetical you's) zombies across any channel you like, but most mail servers only want to hear from you on port 25.