Yeah and you also have situations where you order the same product for example the english version of Windows in England. It's not that it is localized (at least very very little work would have been done), its not that it isn't the version that people commonly get (they speak english) yet you'll still pay more. Or say hardware: and Iomega 1TB external harddrive 169.99, or 168E in Germany from Amazon. So about a 50% increase. Distance from where a lot of things are manufactured is about the same, there is a bigger population and it is more dense than north america, but europe will still pay more.
Yep, but you must admit there will be a lot less of the low level techs running around grabbing workstations to drag back to the batcave then before. If you don't have as much moving parts (which can be even more the case with flash drives) you'll have less broken stuff to fix. This probably will only matter for larger companies that have several staff. For smaller companies since you can't get a fractional support staff they still will have one guy like they did before.
I think bandwidth and security will be the big issues with thin-client ideas that will eventually swing things back to workstations again. But in the mean time I think there will be more demand for backend support and less for front end. Hopefully front end techs will get a chance to work in the backend.
By definition you can't get more energy from a photovoltaic than the total energy that is being deposited on the surface. You can only go so high. While there are fundamental limits to what a CPU can do, also by definition you can theoretically shrink it many orders of magnitude more, you can make bigger chips, you can play games with the driving current, the transmission medium (photonics anyone?) etc. In short one you have control of the input the other you don't.
I think a lot of help desk jobs will go away. I know of a bunch of companies going back to the terminal model of computing with blade servers running virtualized OS's on the backend. There is hardly any moving parts on the client side and you have access to all the systems just by taking a snapshot. That moves all the work into the datacentre and unfortunately for most helpdesk types they aren't trusted there. Most companies will take a tech savy highschool grad as a helpdesk person but will want a degree for the server side guys.
However, don't kid yourself, there are still lots of crappy products out there. There will still be some work moving the terminals around, replacing monitors, and even more work in coding systems to make use of multicore technology. To do a good parallel program can easily take several times the effort as to do the single threaded algorithm. So either people will get paid to grunt through it (probably what will happen in the short term) or a lot of tooling will need to be built (probably what will happen in the long term). Either way code monkeys should have their hands full for another 10 years.
Not a janitor an IT guy. We have a separate bioinformatics group which would have a much deeper understanding of BLAST than I, but from what I've seen of it it seems like a really crappy system that has become a standard that everyone is comfortable with and reluctant to give up. For example (may be it is the type of problem I don't know) but I know of groups that run blast queries and it pretty much touches every element in the database. It it was in a properly indexed database a lot of the data presumably would be able to be pruned out before it was actually touched.
It is a much larger arm movement to go from keyboard to screen than from keyboard to mouse. Add to that that the mouse sensitivity can be adjusted to magnify the effects of movements, it would be really awkward to do that with a "touch what you want" type screen GUI.Plus there is a whole class of applications where you wouldn't want to have your hand in the way of what you are manipulating, for example drawing in Photoshop or what not.
Also try accurately selecting text with a finger, I don't know about you but my finger takes up several characters in width, how would I tell which one the GUI has decided that my gesture has selected?
Seems like a long enough time to be recieving royalties. If musicians can't save for their retirement like the rest of us that is their problem. After all, they should have known when their royalties are due to stop and if that didn't equal when they thought they'd be dead then they should have been saving.
The funny thing is there is a Cambridge Ontario which just happens to border on Kitchener-Waterloo which is where Perimeter is. Wouldn't it be funny if he ends up moving from Cambridge to Cambridge?:)
A good classical mechanics textbook: Classical Mechanics, Herbert Goldstein. It it IMHO the defacto standard for graduate classical mechanics, and very very well written. It requires advanced math to understand (but that shouldn't be a problem for you:)).
A good statistical mechanics book, I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I've used serveral, there doesn't seem to be much of a shortage of good stat-mech books.
Since you are going into astro I'd suspect it would be good to either/or/both read a GR or fluid mechanics book. I'd go with the fluid mechanics because it shares a lot of the math with both GR and EM, (Poisson and Laplace equations, Fourier methods, conservation laws etc). It is also nice to see classical physics in a non-block sliding down a ramp frame of reference:)
They can now easy show prior art for patent claims. Thus getting more money, thus paying for more labrats/equipment to get more patents. Ad nausium.
P.S. I work for a genetic facility:)
P.P.S. the biggest need IMHO in the industry is a means to get a list of genes that are "similar" to the one that you are working for. It requires a bunch of complex manipulation of the data, I can't see how putting stuff in a simple text based search system will help.
Exactly, natural selection by itself doesn't prove anything. A rough statement of the theory of evolution: slight mutations happen, if the mutation is beneficial than the resulting mutant will be more likely to survive than the "normal" members of the species. An odd organism surviving isn't in itself proof that the organism will eventually or even potentially evolve into an entirely different species.
Trends in fossil remains are another matter though, and definitely make it likely that it is evidence for large scale evolutionary processes. Does that mean that a designer couldn't have started things off or gave things a little nudge periodically/continuously no. Both are possible, but IMHO only one is testable. After all most ID statements boil down to creationist claims (God made the world the way he wanted it, evolution doesn't happen period), or God made the world and then lets evolution happen or guides it. The last two options claim that evolution happens, the first one is the one that most agnostics have problems with I think. It is kind of hard to observe something not happening:) and prove that it never/can't happen. Where as one could see a species change from one variety to another over a bunch of generations.
Yeah I think you have a good point here as far as a lot of management roles being open to both. In a development heavy company though (say MS) you are going to have a hard time getting a PM role for a development project. You can be sure that they'll be looking for someone with development experience with preference for someone within the product group. Also, an IT department manager makes about the same as a senior developer from what I've saw.
True, though at one point I paid for a copy of Mandrake in a store. At the time CD burners were just starting to be available (I think I paid 400 for a 4X) so it was a pain to find someone with the means to copy it for you. Kind of hard to download an OS from a computer without an OS:)
I seem to recall it came with Open Office and a decent hardcopy manual to help you install. Roughly $30 not bad (though turned out not to be my favorite distro).
You already no the universal language of science. For example I work in a German research centre and our official work language is english.
That said, knowing another language can't hurt, but you did luck out you already know the dominant language in science (I'd guess 90+% of all science articles and books are published in english). What will happen in a generation is anyone's guess.
As was jokingly pointed out it might be Chinese or Hindi that is the common language. But I doubt it. Hindi and Chinese speaking people are learning english at a much greater rate than english speaking kids are learning chinese (culture driven not business driven, so it shouldn't change even as the west losses its economic dominance IMHO).
Yeah, and also there are a lot of programmers that don't have a clue how a computer works. Admittedly I might have a weird prospective because I got a degree in physics with a specialization in condensed matter along with digital electronics and programming courses. However, I run into a lot of top notch (and I mean at the independent well respected consultant, guy that gets flown to conferences to speak because he is the world expert in the field level guys) that can't figure out if their computer isn't working because of the PSU or HDD failure.
There is more to computers than being able to program them, and I've met a bunch of programmers that don't have a deep understanding how logic gates and such work, can't get around concepts such as cashe locality etc. They are great Phython, Java etc programmers and just trust the language/API's to do things well for them. Anyways that is my rant, I hope that some day the free market will learn that an IT guy can be of equal worth to a company as development staff. Currently where I live a starting IT guy makes about 50k and a starting developer 90k or so, and that is no where near being fair. For the most part a developer can start being productive in a couple weeks where as in a complicated environment an IT guy can take 6 months before they can do things by themselves. However, the salary's don't even out over time even though the IT guy needs more "training" (and thus is of greater value added:)) than the developer.
Perhaps. Here is hoping that they support ODF and if they need a feature added to it they go through the normal process for a revision of the standard not just break compatibility to add new features.
I agree J++ was a really bad idea. I've seen podcasts where internal MS VS team people admit that J++ sucked. In a way you can kind of understand what caused the fiasco though. Java was the next big thing, the.com bubble was in full swing and java was marketed as THE web programming language. So MS needed a clone to make VS look good. That they did a piss poor job is unfortunate, but that they tried made sense at the time.
True the kid could have been doing something else. Arguments that it would be more work so sort of a punishment for the smart kids I'm not sure I agree with. The smart kid was able to do the work with less effort (that is kind of what being smart means no?), so it isn't punishment, it is just asking the kid to work for just as long as everyone else. Same thing at work, if you get your work done quickly the boss finds something else for you to do.
The difference is the boss has an incentive to give you more work, either he directly earns more money if you get more done, or it makes him look better. The teacher has a problem though, s/he has to keep the rest of the class going, answer their questions etc., while at the same time trying to think up more work for the smart ones. Don't underestimate the power of laziness, just because your a teacher doesn't mean you like to run around like crazy trying to come up with lesson plans on the fly.
On that note, I think it would be great to get rid of the concept of individual class lesson plans and grades completely. Instead have levels in each topic. Hell I don't care call it level 1 through 12 if you want. But don't constrain the kids to take exactly 1 year to go through each level. The teacher should be prepared to assign any piece of work to the students at their level. The student completes them at the pace that they can. Once they have finished they go to the next level, whether it takes them half a school year or two school years.
If you finish all the levels when your 10, oh well your ready for college.
I was a teaching assistant at my university. I can vouch for the fact that it can be a pain in the butt when someone works ahead of the course plan and then starts asking you questions about the following week's work. I may have just learnt that material the year prior (and immediately forgot it after the exam:)). Now I have to read over next weeks chapter on the fly because I only prepared for this weeks. I was embarrassed that I couldn't remember how to handle problems from material I had just learnt myself; I'm hoping that a university educated teacher (especially those that have done it for several years) would know elementary school material though.
Antarctica (having about 70% of the worlds ice) is actually growing in terms of volume and area of ice (Though very slowly, nearly steady state).
There is also arguments that a world without ice would have more useful land. For example Iceland and Greenland would have vastly more habitable land and Antartica would be livable too.
Average sea levels are raising but at a much much slower raise than several thousand years. The challenge is to prove that the rate of change is different than would be expected at this point in the freeze/thaw cycle and that it is caused by man and not just slight variations "this time around".
You hear a lot about the big datacentres that are being planned by the likes of Google, Yahoo etc. I realize this is probably an over simpification but it seems like they know ahead of time what the systems will be for the datacentre. They seem to know the apps they will run, the servers they like etc.
While I admit that these datacentres are huge and get a lot of publicity, thus a lot of pressure to design right and "green" I don't think that level of advanced knowledge is typical for SMBs and even most non-IT centric businesses regardless of size.
In practice a company has a few servers and one or two system admins, then they grow, staff leaves, they start thinking about different technologies, required software changes etc. What they end up with is a few vendors servers, a few vendors disk arrays probably a few flavors of networking etc.
In short the "real world" problem for the majority of companies/sys-admins isn't the very academic concept of building a single purpose datacentre, but handling growth and change. I'm yet to see a good reference for how to handle this. At best I see vendors showing how great there new server/rack combination is in isolation, Another popular thing is the ever popular look how low our power needs per FLOP are for a data centre based on our products. Yeah like we are likely to use identical systems for databases as we do for LDAP, and the same one for a fileserver as we use for a MPI cluster.
Anyways, does anyone know a good reference to deal with these "real world" problems?
That damn greenhouse effect growing my crops again. Man I'm pissed off.
I'm convinced that humans can't ruin the world by using CO2 admitting sources of power (perhaps if we burned it all at once not for energy). My reasoning:
1) Humans are not very the best at surviving extremes in weather. Thus:
2) If CO2/other green house gases screw up the air humans will die off before most other life forms.
3) The ones that survive will tend to be CO2 digesting lifeforms which will bring things back to normal and in the meantime probably have a hayday with all the extra food.
Environmentalists bitch about the selfishness of man to burn plant harming fuels etc. But then most of their arguements revolve around how it affects people. Oh look at this poor tribe that had to move from the coast presumably because of the ocean level rising (it has in fact declined on average). Oh there is draughts in Africa (but they don't mention that it was a record crop year in the Americas when we had all that warming for the El Nino, also better fishing conditions etc).
At my university at least as far back as 97 for a physics degree. They called it intro to numerical analysis. You learned the very basics of procedural programming in the first couple weeks then moved on to numerical integration(simpsons verlet and newtons), algebra(dynamically allocated arrays, matrix multiply, transpose etc), curve fitting(least squares and a little polynomial fit).
You then had optional courses afterwards, one digital electronics (actually building circuits to do things like basic osscilliscope, calculator etc), and a advanced numerical analysis course (actually touched models eg protein folding, condensed matter lattice models, and various "advanced methods", simulated annealing, monte carlo, runge-kutta, etc) You had to do a project that took about a month of work to do as well, for example I did a simulated annealing optimized model of Lennard-Jones atoms with periodic boundary conditions.
Then again my school was consistently in the top three in the world on the ACM contests, and in general a geek friendly school (U of Waterloo in Canada). Definitely a big bias towards computers there.
Maybe I agree. I think as a business success 95 was the best. They finally had a strangle hold on the market (I liked OS/2 better than 3.1). 95 Also did huge things for GUI design. Painting in broad stokes MS GUI's pretty much stayed the same since. Sure they look prettier now, but the shapes of windows, interactions etc have pretty much stayed the same.
For a usability/stablity prospective I think I have to agree with most that 2000 Pro was the high point. I think in some ways VS.Net/.Net Framework should be on the list too. It gave them a competitor to Java, a multi language virtual machines, and after several revisions still remains a solid competitor.
Or even better a time bomb for half way through your notice period. If they treat you fairly delete it. If they are pricks you won't be able to login to disable it.
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Yeah and you also have situations where you order the same product for example the english version of Windows in England. It's not that it is localized (at least very very little work would have been done), its not that it isn't the version that people commonly get (they speak english) yet you'll still pay more. Or say hardware: and Iomega 1TB external harddrive 169.99, or 168E in Germany from Amazon. So about a 50% increase. Distance from where a lot of things are manufactured is about the same, there is a bigger population and it is more dense than north america, but europe will still pay more.
I think bandwidth and security will be the big issues with thin-client ideas that will eventually swing things back to workstations again. But in the mean time I think there will be more demand for backend support and less for front end. Hopefully front end techs will get a chance to work in the backend.
By definition you can't get more energy from a photovoltaic than the total energy that is being deposited on the surface. You can only go so high. While there are fundamental limits to what a CPU can do, also by definition you can theoretically shrink it many orders of magnitude more, you can make bigger chips, you can play games with the driving current, the transmission medium (photonics anyone?) etc. In short one you have control of the input the other you don't.
However, don't kid yourself, there are still lots of crappy products out there. There will still be some work moving the terminals around, replacing monitors, and even more work in coding systems to make use of multicore technology. To do a good parallel program can easily take several times the effort as to do the single threaded algorithm. So either people will get paid to grunt through it (probably what will happen in the short term) or a lot of tooling will need to be built (probably what will happen in the long term). Either way code monkeys should have their hands full for another 10 years.
Not a janitor an IT guy. We have a separate bioinformatics group which would have a much deeper understanding of BLAST than I, but from what I've seen of it it seems like a really crappy system that has become a standard that everyone is comfortable with and reluctant to give up. For example (may be it is the type of problem I don't know) but I know of groups that run blast queries and it pretty much touches every element in the database. It it was in a properly indexed database a lot of the data presumably would be able to be pruned out before it was actually touched.
Also try accurately selecting text with a finger, I don't know about you but my finger takes up several characters in width, how would I tell which one the GUI has decided that my gesture has selected?
Seems like a long enough time to be recieving royalties. If musicians can't save for their retirement like the rest of us that is their problem. After all, they should have known when their royalties are due to stop and if that didn't equal when they thought they'd be dead then they should have been saving.
The funny thing is there is a Cambridge Ontario which just happens to border on Kitchener-Waterloo which is where Perimeter is. Wouldn't it be funny if he ends up moving from Cambridge to Cambridge? :)
A good statistical mechanics book, I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I've used serveral, there doesn't seem to be much of a shortage of good stat-mech books.
Since you are going into astro I'd suspect it would be good to either/or/both read a GR or fluid mechanics book. I'd go with the fluid mechanics because it shares a lot of the math with both GR and EM, (Poisson and Laplace equations, Fourier methods, conservation laws etc). It is also nice to see classical physics in a non-block sliding down a ramp frame of reference :)
P.S. I work for a genetic facility :)
P.P.S. the biggest need IMHO in the industry is a means to get a list of genes that are "similar" to the one that you are working for. It requires a bunch of complex manipulation of the data, I can't see how putting stuff in a simple text based search system will help.
Trends in fossil remains are another matter though, and definitely make it likely that it is evidence for large scale evolutionary processes. Does that mean that a designer couldn't have started things off or gave things a little nudge periodically/continuously no. Both are possible, but IMHO only one is testable. After all most ID statements boil down to creationist claims (God made the world the way he wanted it, evolution doesn't happen period), or God made the world and then lets evolution happen or guides it. The last two options claim that evolution happens, the first one is the one that most agnostics have problems with I think. It is kind of hard to observe something not happening :) and prove that it never/can't happen. Where as one could see a species change from one variety to another over a bunch of generations.
Yeah I think you have a good point here as far as a lot of management roles being open to both. In a development heavy company though (say MS) you are going to have a hard time getting a PM role for a development project. You can be sure that they'll be looking for someone with development experience with preference for someone within the product group. Also, an IT department manager makes about the same as a senior developer from what I've saw.
I seem to recall it came with Open Office and a decent hardcopy manual to help you install. Roughly $30 not bad (though turned out not to be my favorite distro).
That said, knowing another language can't hurt, but you did luck out you already know the dominant language in science (I'd guess 90+% of all science articles and books are published in english). What will happen in a generation is anyone's guess.
As was jokingly pointed out it might be Chinese or Hindi that is the common language. But I doubt it. Hindi and Chinese speaking people are learning english at a much greater rate than english speaking kids are learning chinese (culture driven not business driven, so it shouldn't change even as the west losses its economic dominance IMHO).
There is more to computers than being able to program them, and I've met a bunch of programmers that don't have a deep understanding how logic gates and such work, can't get around concepts such as cashe locality etc. They are great Phython, Java etc programmers and just trust the language/API's to do things well for them. Anyways that is my rant, I hope that some day the free market will learn that an IT guy can be of equal worth to a company as development staff. Currently where I live a starting IT guy makes about 50k and a starting developer 90k or so, and that is no where near being fair. For the most part a developer can start being productive in a couple weeks where as in a complicated environment an IT guy can take 6 months before they can do things by themselves. However, the salary's don't even out over time even though the IT guy needs more "training" (and thus is of greater value added :)) than the developer.
I agree J++ was a really bad idea. I've seen podcasts where internal MS VS team people admit that J++ sucked. In a way you can kind of understand what caused the fiasco though. Java was the next big thing, the .com bubble was in full swing and java was marketed as THE web programming language. So MS needed a clone to make VS look good. That they did a piss poor job is unfortunate, but that they tried made sense at the time.
The difference is the boss has an incentive to give you more work, either he directly earns more money if you get more done, or it makes him look better. The teacher has a problem though, s/he has to keep the rest of the class going, answer their questions etc., while at the same time trying to think up more work for the smart ones. Don't underestimate the power of laziness, just because your a teacher doesn't mean you like to run around like crazy trying to come up with lesson plans on the fly.
On that note, I think it would be great to get rid of the concept of individual class lesson plans and grades completely. Instead have levels in each topic. Hell I don't care call it level 1 through 12 if you want. But don't constrain the kids to take exactly 1 year to go through each level. The teacher should be prepared to assign any piece of work to the students at their level. The student completes them at the pace that they can. Once they have finished they go to the next level, whether it takes them half a school year or two school years.
If you finish all the levels when your 10, oh well your ready for college.
I was a teaching assistant at my university. I can vouch for the fact that it can be a pain in the butt when someone works ahead of the course plan and then starts asking you questions about the following week's work. I may have just learnt that material the year prior (and immediately forgot it after the exam :)). Now I have to read over next weeks chapter on the fly because I only prepared for this weeks. I was embarrassed that I couldn't remember how to handle problems from material I had just learnt myself; I'm hoping that a university educated teacher (especially those that have done it for several years) would know elementary school material though.
lol :)
Antarctica (having about 70% of the worlds ice) is actually growing in terms of volume and area of ice (Though very slowly, nearly steady state).
There is also arguments that a world without ice would have more useful land. For example Iceland and Greenland would have vastly more habitable land and Antartica would be livable too.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
Average sea levels are raising but at a much much slower raise than several thousand years. The challenge is to prove that the rate of change is different than would be expected at this point in the freeze/thaw cycle and that it is caused by man and not just slight variations "this time around".
I'll no longer have to spray paint "I was here" for people to know where I was.
While I admit that these datacentres are huge and get a lot of publicity, thus a lot of pressure to design right and "green" I don't think that level of advanced knowledge is typical for SMBs and even most non-IT centric businesses regardless of size.
In practice a company has a few servers and one or two system admins, then they grow, staff leaves, they start thinking about different technologies, required software changes etc. What they end up with is a few vendors servers, a few vendors disk arrays probably a few flavors of networking etc.
In short the "real world" problem for the majority of companies/sys-admins isn't the very academic concept of building a single purpose datacentre, but handling growth and change. I'm yet to see a good reference for how to handle this. At best I see vendors showing how great there new server/rack combination is in isolation, Another popular thing is the ever popular look how low our power needs per FLOP are for a data centre based on our products. Yeah like we are likely to use identical systems for databases as we do for LDAP, and the same one for a fileserver as we use for a MPI cluster.
Anyways, does anyone know a good reference to deal with these "real world" problems?
I'm convinced that humans can't ruin the world by using CO2 admitting sources of power (perhaps if we burned it all at once not for energy). My reasoning:
1) Humans are not very the best at surviving extremes in weather. Thus:
2) If CO2/other green house gases screw up the air humans will die off before most other life forms.
3) The ones that survive will tend to be CO2 digesting lifeforms which will bring things back to normal and in the meantime probably have a hayday with all the extra food.
Environmentalists bitch about the selfishness of man to burn plant harming fuels etc. But then most of their arguements revolve around how it affects people. Oh look at this poor tribe that had to move from the coast presumably because of the ocean level rising (it has in fact declined on average). Oh there is draughts in Africa (but they don't mention that it was a record crop year in the Americas when we had all that warming for the El Nino, also better fishing conditions etc).
You then had optional courses afterwards, one digital electronics (actually building circuits to do things like basic osscilliscope, calculator etc), and a advanced numerical analysis course (actually touched models eg protein folding, condensed matter lattice models, and various "advanced methods", simulated annealing, monte carlo, runge-kutta, etc) You had to do a project that took about a month of work to do as well, for example I did a simulated annealing optimized model of Lennard-Jones atoms with periodic boundary conditions.
Then again my school was consistently in the top three in the world on the ACM contests, and in general a geek friendly school (U of Waterloo in Canada). Definitely a big bias towards computers there.
For a usability/stablity prospective I think I have to agree with most that 2000 Pro was the high point. I think in some ways VS .Net/.Net Framework should be on the list too. It gave them a competitor to Java, a multi language virtual machines, and after several revisions still remains a solid competitor.
Or even better a time bomb for half way through your notice period. If they treat you fairly delete it. If they are pricks you won't be able to login to disable it.