Probably a good half or more of "good" high schools just plain ignore programming and CS, and the people who pass the Google interviews learned most of what they know in college, whether from lectures or from working through it while doing homework and projects.
Microsoft is still dealing with the fact that their flagship products throughout the 1990's are almost universally associated with crashes, poor performance, and overhyped marketing. It bit them with the Zune, and now it's biting them with the phones. You know why XBox is so big? It doesn't have the word 'Windows' or 'Microsoft' in its name, and it had (still has?) its own business unit with its own management structure not tied to Windows.
Because those 33m were stolen from the people on the street. Childish tribal mentality: I have something and you don't, therefore I owe you a cut, just because.
As I recall, the staunchest bushies bought W's pitch that invading Iraq would nip a potential future 9/11 in the bud. In 2002-2003, it wasn't that hard to believe, even for rational people.
Right backatcha. Too many CS types I've worked with just don't get hardware because they've only taken freshman physics and have never had to stay up all night trying to debug a faulty bit just to get a project done. And they can't quite grasp that even an occasional segfault in a program that controls moving machinery is not acceptable.
The inspection isn't inspecting the quality of the machining. It's inspecting the quality of the machinist who wrote and ran the CNC program. Mostly catches mistakes caused by improper fixturing and the like.
I trust my car because I know it's got nearly a hundred years engineering heritage behind it that keeps it from doing things like going left when I steer right, accelerating when I hit the brakes, and exploding in a fireball when I turn it over.
I trust the autopilot in the commercial jet I'm flying in because it's got nearly 80 years of engineering heritage in control theory that keeps it from doing things like flipping the plane upside down for no reason or going into a nose dive after some turbulence, and nearly 70 years of heritage in avionics and realtime computers that keeps it from freezing when a cosmic ray flips a bit in memory or from thinking it's going at the speed of light when it crosses the dateline or flies over the north pole.
I will trust a household robot to go about its business in my home and with my children when there is a similar level of engineering discipline in the field of autonomous robotics. Right now, all but a very select few outfits that make robots are operating like academic environments where the metaphorical duct tape and bailing wire are not just acceptable, but required, components in the software stack.
Bigger problem: I am engineer, and even if I'm not at my desk more than 40 hours a week, I'm thinking about my work on my drive home, in the shower, on the toilet, when I'm otherwise bored...and I count that as honest work. For hourly manual labor, you can have these rules. For intellectual work, you can't enforce something like that. Which is why people in my line of work aren't paid by the hour.
I'm only on my phone about an hour a day. Does everyone else get dibs on the other 23? How about tapping off of my power line? Free water from my garden hose? Sit on my porch and read my newspaper before I go and grab it? Raid my fridge whenever they're hungry? Shit in my toilets when I'm not using them? You pinkos want mobile internet? You pay for it like everyone else does.
Problem 4: today's scientists don't have the street cred of the WW2 generation. Those guys went from zero to (many) operational weapons systems in six years or less, and by many objective measures Knew What They Were Doing, and millions of people in uniform and out saw it with their own eyes. Today's average global warming scientist, pure mathematician, or theoretical physicist can only point to publications and slide shows for his accomplishments. Not the same gravitas with the average Joe, and not even the same gravitas with technical types like myself who get their flu shots and don't subscribe to young earth creationism.
Explain how. How often do you find yourself having to convert units at all in techinical work at all? A programming example: If you're using double precision floating point, you have 17 significant decimal digits. Once you pick a distance unit (inch, foot, meter, kilometer), you shouldn't [have to] do any conversions, that just invites programming errors, whether you try to jump from inches to miles or meters to kilometers. So sorry, you introduce exactly zero improvement by deciding to use meters over inches or feet in your program. Same thing for software that interacts with hardware. A rocketry example: If everyone uses lbf-seconds rather than N-m for impulse commands, it doesn't matter. It all gets converted into milliseconds and volts when it goes to the control valves and servos. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by choosing metric over American units (or vice versa).
Trouble is, you tend to have to use realtime friendly CPU's when you do this stuff. So things like pipeline optimization, predictive branching, cache management, etc, tend to not always be present on CPUs that are designed for determinism. So realistically, I would not be surprised if the heaviest computing in that thing is done on a single core 500MHz-1GHz CPU, and the rockets aren't probably running anything fancier than a 100 MHz single core machine either. They may or may not have memory management in hardware (I know some higher end 1GHz SBCs I've worked with don't, they just have a single flat address space).
It's still way overkill for what it needs to do, but in order to get the cycle times down under the 10 msec mark (order of magnitude), you have to pick and chose what language you work in (anything with non determinism like Java or something with a heap like the C++ run time may well be a no-no), and you have to pick and choose which algorithms you implement.
The latest-and-greatest randomized algorithm you see in IEEE may not be suitable for realtime implementation because while the average time is 1msec, there exist execution paths which take 15 msec to run. So you're safer going with the sub-optimal thing that executes in 5 msec every time.
"In our school, when a kid gets punched, he gains the right to retaliate."
I wish I had gone to that kind of school. Not only would I have not gotten in trouble for punching back, I might have gotten punched back myself a few times and learned faster to stop picking on people.
The PLO/PA under Arafat made the choices that lead to that situation. Go back and read through the mid-late 90's history of the conflict, and especially what went on in 2000. It's almost entirely a one-sided history of violent Palestinian provocation followed by increasingly violent Israeli response, not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers!
Probably a good half or more of "good" high schools just plain ignore programming and CS, and the people who pass the Google interviews learned most of what they know in college, whether from lectures or from working through it while doing homework and projects.
The JPL-built Mars rovers run VxWorks, as do some other NASA probes. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.
I take pride in being mean to freeloaders.
Microsoft is still dealing with the fact that their flagship products throughout the 1990's are almost universally associated with crashes, poor performance, and overhyped marketing. It bit them with the Zune, and now it's biting them with the phones. You know why XBox is so big? It doesn't have the word 'Windows' or 'Microsoft' in its name, and it had (still has?) its own business unit with its own management structure not tied to Windows.
Because those 33m were stolen from the people on the street. Childish tribal mentality: I have something and you don't, therefore I owe you a cut, just because.
As I recall, the staunchest bushies bought W's pitch that invading Iraq would nip a potential future 9/11 in the bud. In 2002-2003, it wasn't that hard to believe, even for rational people.
To paraphrase a prophet, the determined real programmer can write fortran programs for any application.
Right backatcha. Too many CS types I've worked with just don't get hardware because they've only taken freshman physics and have never had to stay up all night trying to debug a faulty bit just to get a project done. And they can't quite grasp that even an occasional segfault in a program that controls moving machinery is not acceptable.
The inspection isn't inspecting the quality of the machining. It's inspecting the quality of the machinist who wrote and ran the CNC program. Mostly catches mistakes caused by improper fixturing and the like.
I trust my car because I know it's got nearly a hundred years engineering heritage behind it that keeps it from doing things like going left when I steer right, accelerating when I hit the brakes, and exploding in a fireball when I turn it over.
I trust the autopilot in the commercial jet I'm flying in because it's got nearly 80 years of engineering heritage in control theory that keeps it from doing things like flipping the plane upside down for no reason or going into a nose dive after some turbulence, and nearly 70 years of heritage in avionics and realtime computers that keeps it from freezing when a cosmic ray flips a bit in memory or from thinking it's going at the speed of light when it crosses the dateline or flies over the north pole.
I will trust a household robot to go about its business in my home and with my children when there is a similar level of engineering discipline in the field of autonomous robotics. Right now, all but a very select few outfits that make robots are operating like academic environments where the metaphorical duct tape and bailing wire are not just acceptable, but required, components in the software stack.
Regulate out any incentive toward innovation and you can be assured that the advertised 14400 bps is all you're ever going to get.
Bigger problem: I am engineer, and even if I'm not at my desk more than 40 hours a week, I'm thinking about my work on my drive home, in the shower, on the toilet, when I'm otherwise bored...and I count that as honest work. For hourly manual labor, you can have these rules. For intellectual work, you can't enforce something like that. Which is why people in my line of work aren't paid by the hour.
Or go start your own IT company. You can do that here, you know. You're not in North Korea.
Hey, the CDC doesn't run zombie apocalypse drills for no reason
I'm only on my phone about an hour a day. Does everyone else get dibs on the other 23? How about tapping off of my power line? Free water from my garden hose? Sit on my porch and read my newspaper before I go and grab it? Raid my fridge whenever they're hungry? Shit in my toilets when I'm not using them? You pinkos want mobile internet? You pay for it like everyone else does.
Problem 4: today's scientists don't have the street cred of the WW2 generation. Those guys went from zero to (many) operational weapons systems in six years or less, and by many objective measures Knew What They Were Doing, and millions of people in uniform and out saw it with their own eyes. Today's average global warming scientist, pure mathematician, or theoretical physicist can only point to publications and slide shows for his accomplishments. Not the same gravitas with the average Joe, and not even the same gravitas with technical types like myself who get their flu shots and don't subscribe to young earth creationism.
Explain how. How often do you find yourself having to convert units at all in techinical work at all? A programming example: If you're using double precision floating point, you have 17 significant decimal digits. Once you pick a distance unit (inch, foot, meter, kilometer), you shouldn't [have to] do any conversions, that just invites programming errors, whether you try to jump from inches to miles or meters to kilometers. So sorry, you introduce exactly zero improvement by deciding to use meters over inches or feet in your program. Same thing for software that interacts with hardware. A rocketry example: If everyone uses lbf-seconds rather than N-m for impulse commands, it doesn't matter. It all gets converted into milliseconds and volts when it goes to the control valves and servos. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by choosing metric over American units (or vice versa).
Then by the time it's vibrating...
Either that or they're in cahoots with Quetzlcoatl.
Sneaky bastard. Snakes his way into everything.
No, those eggs were clearly fake. You can tell from the picture they're made of plastic.
It's like re-living history.
Do we get to relive the declining battery life as well?
Trouble is, you tend to have to use realtime friendly CPU's when you do this stuff. So things like pipeline optimization, predictive branching, cache management, etc, tend to not always be present on CPUs that are designed for determinism. So realistically, I would not be surprised if the heaviest computing in that thing is done on a single core 500MHz-1GHz CPU, and the rockets aren't probably running anything fancier than a 100 MHz single core machine either. They may or may not have memory management in hardware (I know some higher end 1GHz SBCs I've worked with don't, they just have a single flat address space).
It's still way overkill for what it needs to do, but in order to get the cycle times down under the 10 msec mark (order of magnitude), you have to pick and chose what language you work in (anything with non determinism like Java or something with a heap like the C++ run time may well be a no-no), and you have to pick and choose which algorithms you implement.
The latest-and-greatest randomized algorithm you see in IEEE may not be suitable for realtime implementation because while the average time is 1msec, there exist execution paths which take 15 msec to run. So you're safer going with the sub-optimal thing that executes in 5 msec every time.
"In our school, when a kid gets punched, he gains the right to retaliate."
I wish I had gone to that kind of school. Not only would I have not gotten in trouble for punching back, I might have gotten punched back myself a few times and learned faster to stop picking on people.
The PLO/PA under Arafat made the choices that lead to that situation. Go back and read through the mid-late 90's history of the conflict, and especially what went on in 2000. It's almost entirely a one-sided history of violent Palestinian provocation followed by increasingly violent Israeli response, not the other way around.