Studiously refraining from teaching somebody any of that boosts their confidence in a way that only years, or even decades, of advanced study can hope to equal!
Incidentally, why doing you programmers just prove that your algorithms will never hang before shipping code? Are you lazy or something?
The 'ten-year-old' bracket unfortunately includes the tail end of the 'capacitor plague' era hardware. There would certainly be plenty of survivors; but motherboards and/or PSUs with substantial ripple on important rails, possibly just to the point of glitchiness, possibly to outright failure and rivulets of crusted capacitor pus all over the place next to what was once voltage smoothing for the CPU are definite possibilities.
As long as you have some spares on the shelf, and a tolerance for the occasional death, it isn't a big deal; but I'd expect to see some mortality.
Not that NASA is the primary customer, by any means; but they farm out enough work that it would be very difficult to increase NASA's budget without also increasing the revenues of major defense contractors. Culturally NASA has a noble mission of doing some good science, often of the flavor with limited immediate payoff; but financially they help keep defense contractors humming when demand for their more lethal products is softer than they would hope.
The web browser will actually be OK(I have a classic EEE PC 2G with an authentic whatever-ultra-crappy-celeron-occupied-the-bottom-of-Intel's-SKU-chart-before-Atom-existed that runs Chromium(from a root directory located on an SDHC card of undistinguished quality, no less) quite adequately.)
Now, websites on the other hand... have a nasty habit of bringing that little combo to its knees as soon as the javascript heats up and the flash-object swarm comes in on the attack.
(one common flavor: There will be two separate processes for asset disposal: If an institutional asset is judged to have no internal use and no value, it can be disposed of, subject only to any hazmat/environmental restrictions(in practice, any outfit slinging a lot of IT gear has some recycler who will at least lie credibly enough about responsible disposal, so this isn't hard). If, however, the asset has no internal use; but is judged to have value, it is kicked to an entirely different 'Surplus property auction" process, usually designed decades ago to keep malfeasance about quite pricey bits of state, federal, and local gear from being quietly flogged out the back door, and magnificently ill-suited to selling off individual model M's on ebay.)
The trivial rebuttal is the frequency with which these oh-so-private-sector entities end up glomming onto state contracts and becoming, de-facto, an arm of the state, just with juicier returns to shareholders. There is a veritable ecosystem of beltway obligate parasites that present all the outward indications of being 'private'; but are deeply embedded in state operations.
There are also the subtler considerations of what sorts of coercion and malfeasance one can achieve without the benefit of state power; but arguing about that seems to be a surprisingly lost cause in a world where large numbers of employees are pissing into a cup on command because they can't afford to lose their job and the argument is still ongoing...
This makes me feel damn old; but today's "10 year old PC" is a 2GHz-and-change Northwood P4 with a GMA900 or GMA950. Probably a half-gig of RAM.
That will run XP just fine(I'm currently showing some systems of roughly that spec, a bit more RAM, the door in fact); but its also pretty damn modern for everything except gaming and 64-bit memory spaces.
At a computer-lab level, reliability among 10-year old PCs can be a bit troublesome; but the sheer power of what is considered no longer worth bothering with is not to be despised.
In my (thankfully limited) encounters with formal disposal rules, public and private, 'just flog the stuff on ebay' is frequently far more trouble than it ends up being worth.
One major factor is that a successful institution needs to be set up so as not to be easy meat for dishonest functionaries(at least before they've worked their way to the top). Common result? Low level cogs selling things, especially things with unclear value, is not encouraged. This goes double if the said low-level cog has some degree of purchasing authority. It's just too easy to use official funds to pay at the front door, then flog gear out the back door for direct personal profit and/or kickbacks of some flavor. This does cramp a lot of perfectly legitimate plans by honest people; but tends to remain in force because nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.
It is a great pity that schools(on the instructional side, obviously certain people on the management side are essentially corporate excel jockies whose paychecks just happen to be signed by a public entity) don't take more advantage of the fact that it is largely impossible for students to give a damn about full compatibility with business-critical workflows laid down before they were born by companies that they don't work for, or interface consistency with the version of MS Office 2024 that they might encounter when they get puked out into the cold world of cube-drone hell...
If there weren't so many people who manage to say things like that with a straight face and nigh-religious levels of conviction there would be a lot more humor in the situation...
Well, well. Isn't it so nice that after 'Total Information Awareness' was canned for being slightly too creepy even for congress, it has resurfaced as a free-swimming and not-at-all-sinister corporation heavily larded with CIA alumni. I assume that this is the American analog of our pal Putin's pithy "There is no such thing as a former KGB man"
So called Clonally transmissible cancers are particularly growth-oriented cells from some progenitor organism that managed to beat the odds and, instead of just killing their luckless host as cancers tend to, spread to other members of the species.
There is also Henrietta Lacks; but she lives more or less exclusively in laboratory environments and might not be said to count...
Some marmosets are naturally chimeric some substantial portion of the time. This leads to wacky fun for researchers because it is perfectly possible(depending on how the different cell populations ended up distributed in the mature monkey) for an individual to show one genotype on blood tests; but produce offspring that appear to be genetic descendants of their brother or sister....
We have some (too expensive to justify replacing) facilities control modules at work whose 'web interface' consists of a java applet that won't run on anything more recent than J2SE 1.4(early 2002, for those keeping score).
Given the relative costs of replacing the module(the closest thing to a firmware update that the vendor offers) and just maintaining a VM snapshot of a decade-old java setup, we obviously went with the latter.
I have no particular reason to believe that java itself is to blame, rather than merely being the instrument of somebody's apathy and/or incompetence; but there are definitely some special applications floating around.
if so many of your students are apparently such bad programmers, I'm guessing it's due to a mutual problem they share (you), even though you clearly seem enthusiastic about your job.
You'd really have to know more about the selection criteria for his class to make any useful statements about what properties they share...
You guys are really being taken to the cleaners (not that that seems to be unusual, with electronics pricing). Is the Vita substantially less overpriced, or is the magnitude of the price delta between the two classes of handhelds still about the same as in the US?
Not to sound against it, but a) Would he understand what the data meant? b) Maybe the software and what not is proprietary?
Just some thoughts that come to mind
a) He certainly isn't going to have a better chance of understanding the data if he isn't allowed to see them... Would I be polishing my 'I told you so' reflexes if he decides to do a bit of amateur reprogramming? Sure. Does denying somebody access to even view data because they might not understand it make sense? About as much sense as keeping books away from children because they aren't yet literate...
b) Given that the manufacturer won't disclose it, it apparently is proprietary. That's sort of the entire issue. We have now(and, barring exciting economic apocalypse of some flavor) and will have in greater numbers and in more significant capacities, a population for which 'binary blobs' are inside their bodies, not their laptops. Some of them don't like this.
Executive in entrenched industry doesn't like new disruptive technology driving industry shift!
Unfortunately for him, it isn't even just the disruptive technology that he has to worry about... A Vita will run you ~$250, plus the essentially-obligatory proprietary memory card. PSPs are down around 120-130 new, less used or refurbed, and Nintendo handhelds are less than that. Even in its relation to the classic console market, the Vita targets only the (relatively narrow) niche of comparatively serious gamers who are on the go enough that having a portable as a primary or secondary console makes sense. Now that a great many cellphones are moderately competent as well, that niche isn't getting any wider.
What I'd like to see, just for giggles, would be a rewrite of the rules for various games commonly gambled on(eg. poker) into the forms and terms of 'legitimate' financial transactions, followed by some test cases in jurisdictions where gambling is tightly regulated; but derivatives trading(that, um, just so happens to be based on the future outcomes of certain playing card distributions...) is not. You might even be able to treat your winnings as capital gains, rather than income, and write off your 'capital losses'(which I'm pretty sure you don't get to do on normal gambling losses)...
The really troubling thing (to my mind) is not so much the 'what does Wall St. produce?' question(which, as you note, is ostensibly 'capital allocation'; but the 'how efficiently do they actually produce it?' question.
In a non-pathological market situation, you would hope to see Wall St.'s share of the economy as a whole be static or declining(as newer technology makes allocating capital easier and less expensive) and the demand for 'capital allocation' exist only so far as other business sectors find that more efficient capital allocation makes them more efficient and productive(in the same way that you would want to see any other support function of a business kept in line with the business overall. You wouldn't want your IT group consuming a greater percentage of your total economic output every year). Trouble is, that isn't what the numbers reflect.
Instead of acting as other suppliers do, and having their health and size depend on the success of the customers, the financial services sector has managed to capture a steadily increasing share of the value relative to other sectors. Absolute growth would be one thing, if the economy as a whole is growing; but relative growth, in terms of percentage of total output captured, suggests a substantial increase in the market(and regulatory) power of financial services without necessarily any increase in the value of their product to their customers. That is bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Studiously refraining from teaching somebody any of that boosts their confidence in a way that only years, or even decades, of advanced study can hope to equal!
Incidentally, why doing you programmers just prove that your algorithms will never hang before shipping code? Are you lazy or something?
The 'ten-year-old' bracket unfortunately includes the tail end of the 'capacitor plague' era hardware. There would certainly be plenty of survivors; but motherboards and/or PSUs with substantial ripple on important rails, possibly just to the point of glitchiness, possibly to outright failure and rivulets of crusted capacitor pus all over the place next to what was once voltage smoothing for the CPU are definite possibilities.
As long as you have some spares on the shelf, and a tolerance for the occasional death, it isn't a big deal; but I'd expect to see some mortality.
I'm pretty sure that getting invaded and sacked by demons is bad for shareholder value, so nothing at all, clearly.
Not that NASA is the primary customer, by any means; but they farm out enough work that it would be very difficult to increase NASA's budget without also increasing the revenues of major defense contractors. Culturally NASA has a noble mission of doing some good science, often of the flavor with limited immediate payoff; but financially they help keep defense contractors humming when demand for their more lethal products is softer than they would hope.
NASA has proposed reorganizing themselves as the "United Earth Directorate" and absorbing all legacy governments.
The web browser will actually be OK(I have a classic EEE PC 2G with an authentic whatever-ultra-crappy-celeron-occupied-the-bottom-of-Intel's-SKU-chart-before-Atom-existed that runs Chromium(from a root directory located on an SDHC card of undistinguished quality, no less) quite adequately.)
Now, websites on the other hand... have a nasty habit of bringing that little combo to its knees as soon as the javascript heats up and the flash-object swarm comes in on the attack.
(one common flavor: There will be two separate processes for asset disposal: If an institutional asset is judged to have no internal use and no value, it can be disposed of, subject only to any hazmat/environmental restrictions(in practice, any outfit slinging a lot of IT gear has some recycler who will at least lie credibly enough about responsible disposal, so this isn't hard). If, however, the asset has no internal use; but is judged to have value, it is kicked to an entirely different 'Surplus property auction" process, usually designed decades ago to keep malfeasance about quite pricey bits of state, federal, and local gear from being quietly flogged out the back door, and magnificently ill-suited to selling off individual model M's on ebay.)
The trivial rebuttal is the frequency with which these oh-so-private-sector entities end up glomming onto state contracts and becoming, de-facto, an arm of the state, just with juicier returns to shareholders. There is a veritable ecosystem of beltway obligate parasites that present all the outward indications of being 'private'; but are deeply embedded in state operations.
There are also the subtler considerations of what sorts of coercion and malfeasance one can achieve without the benefit of state power; but arguing about that seems to be a surprisingly lost cause in a world where large numbers of employees are pissing into a cup on command because they can't afford to lose their job and the argument is still ongoing...
This makes me feel damn old; but today's "10 year old PC" is a 2GHz-and-change Northwood P4 with a GMA900 or GMA950. Probably a half-gig of RAM.
That will run XP just fine(I'm currently showing some systems of roughly that spec, a bit more RAM, the door in fact); but its also pretty damn modern for everything except gaming and 64-bit memory spaces.
At a computer-lab level, reliability among 10-year old PCs can be a bit troublesome; but the sheer power of what is considered no longer worth bothering with is not to be despised.
In my (thankfully limited) encounters with formal disposal rules, public and private, 'just flog the stuff on ebay' is frequently far more trouble than it ends up being worth.
One major factor is that a successful institution needs to be set up so as not to be easy meat for dishonest functionaries(at least before they've worked their way to the top). Common result? Low level cogs selling things, especially things with unclear value, is not encouraged. This goes double if the said low-level cog has some degree of purchasing authority. It's just too easy to use official funds to pay at the front door, then flog gear out the back door for direct personal profit and/or kickbacks of some flavor. This does cramp a lot of perfectly legitimate plans by honest people; but tends to remain in force because nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.
It is a great pity that schools(on the instructional side, obviously certain people on the management side are essentially corporate excel jockies whose paychecks just happen to be signed by a public entity) don't take more advantage of the fact that it is largely impossible for students to give a damn about full compatibility with business-critical workflows laid down before they were born by companies that they don't work for, or interface consistency with the version of MS Office 2024 that they might encounter when they get puked out into the cold world of cube-drone hell...
If there weren't so many people who manage to say things like that with a straight face and nigh-religious levels of conviction there would be a lot more humor in the situation...
Well, well. Isn't it so nice that after 'Total Information Awareness' was canned for being slightly too creepy even for congress, it has resurfaced as a free-swimming and not-at-all-sinister corporation heavily larded with CIA alumni. I assume that this is the American analog of our pal Putin's pithy "There is no such thing as a former KGB man"
But not quite impossible, interestingly.
So called Clonally transmissible cancers are particularly growth-oriented cells from some progenitor organism that managed to beat the odds and, instead of just killing their luckless host as cancers tend to, spread to other members of the species.
There is also Henrietta Lacks; but she lives more or less exclusively in laboratory environments and might not be said to count...
Some marmosets are naturally chimeric some substantial portion of the time. This leads to wacky fun for researchers because it is perfectly possible(depending on how the different cell populations ended up distributed in the mature monkey) for an individual to show one genotype on blood tests; but produce offspring that appear to be genetic descendants of their brother or sister....
Just to be sure, we'll probably have to homogenize any animals and/or small children we wish to study in the future.
and probably your tapes too (because of wear&tear)
the hideous, desperate seeking of a tape in this condition is informally described as 'shoe-shining'...
Or positions of power and authority, if they aren't idiots about it...
We have some (too expensive to justify replacing) facilities control modules at work whose 'web interface' consists of a java applet that won't run on anything more recent than J2SE 1.4(early 2002, for those keeping score).
Given the relative costs of replacing the module(the closest thing to a firmware update that the vendor offers) and just maintaining a VM snapshot of a decade-old java setup, we obviously went with the latter.
I have no particular reason to believe that java itself is to blame, rather than merely being the instrument of somebody's apathy and/or incompetence; but there are definitely some special applications floating around.
if so many of your students are apparently such bad programmers, I'm guessing it's due to a mutual problem they share (you), even though you clearly seem enthusiastic about your job.
You'd really have to know more about the selection criteria for his class to make any useful statements about what properties they share...
You guys are really being taken to the cleaners (not that that seems to be unusual, with electronics pricing). Is the Vita substantially less overpriced, or is the magnitude of the price delta between the two classes of handhelds still about the same as in the US?
Not to sound against it, but
a) Would he understand what the data meant?
b) Maybe the software and what not is proprietary?
Just some thoughts that come to mind
a) He certainly isn't going to have a better chance of understanding the data if he isn't allowed to see them... Would I be polishing my 'I told you so' reflexes if he decides to do a bit of amateur reprogramming? Sure. Does denying somebody access to even view data because they might not understand it make sense? About as much sense as keeping books away from children because they aren't yet literate...
b) Given that the manufacturer won't disclose it, it apparently is proprietary. That's sort of the entire issue. We have now(and, barring exciting economic apocalypse of some flavor) and will have in greater numbers and in more significant capacities, a population for which 'binary blobs' are inside their bodies, not their laptops. Some of them don't like this.
Executive in entrenched industry doesn't like new disruptive technology driving industry shift!
Unfortunately for him, it isn't even just the disruptive technology that he has to worry about... A Vita will run you ~$250, plus the essentially-obligatory proprietary memory card. PSPs are down around 120-130 new, less used or refurbed, and Nintendo handhelds are less than that. Even in its relation to the classic console market, the Vita targets only the (relatively narrow) niche of comparatively serious gamers who are on the go enough that having a portable as a primary or secondary console makes sense. Now that a great many cellphones are moderately competent as well, that niche isn't getting any wider.
What I'd like to see, just for giggles, would be a rewrite of the rules for various games commonly gambled on(eg. poker) into the forms and terms of 'legitimate' financial transactions, followed by some test cases in jurisdictions where gambling is tightly regulated; but derivatives trading(that, um, just so happens to be based on the future outcomes of certain playing card distributions...) is not. You might even be able to treat your winnings as capital gains, rather than income, and write off your 'capital losses'(which I'm pretty sure you don't get to do on normal gambling losses)...
The really troubling thing (to my mind) is not so much the 'what does Wall St. produce?' question(which, as you note, is ostensibly 'capital allocation'; but the 'how efficiently do they actually produce it?' question.
In a non-pathological market situation, you would hope to see Wall St.'s share of the economy as a whole be static or declining(as newer technology makes allocating capital easier and less expensive) and the demand for 'capital allocation' exist only so far as other business sectors find that more efficient capital allocation makes them more efficient and productive(in the same way that you would want to see any other support function of a business kept in line with the business overall. You wouldn't want your IT group consuming a greater percentage of your total economic output every year). Trouble is, that isn't what the numbers reflect.
Instead of acting as other suppliers do, and having their health and size depend on the success of the customers, the financial services sector has managed to capture a steadily increasing share of the value relative to other sectors. Absolute growth would be one thing, if the economy as a whole is growing; but relative growth, in terms of percentage of total output captured, suggests a substantial increase in the market(and regulatory) power of financial services without necessarily any increase in the value of their product to their customers. That is bad.
Running a test system in a production environment sounds like a "buggy system"(albeit a system one level higher in the chain) to me...