What a way to confuond the IRS
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I like it, pay in UltimaCash for groceries, buy a car for the value of a self-sustaining SimCity model. What we need is a standard internet currency, or maybe one for each ISP or top level domain (.gov-cash,.edu-cash) - and let InterNIC worry about exchange rates much like the IMF does now.
Not a digital-only phenomenon
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Companies have been choosing their names based on the image the name projects, for a long time. Smaller companies have been taking-on names LIKE those of big companies, to give themselves credibility they didn't earn.
This is not as much about value as about reputation, and reputation is the cornerstone of the 'old boys network' and as such, predates the internet by thousands of years.
That Hun, Attila, he's a bad MoFo, so let him have your daughter and he won't kill you. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. My nick is Jar Jar, so I must be a total loser.:)
Gravitational collapse of information
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This sounds a lot like the signal to noise ratio of the net. At some point (arguably already upon us) the amount of junk on the net will overwhelm the volume of useful information, and the net will cease to be a useful resource.
With spam, web pages containing more ad banners than content, and everyone and their grandma 'working the web', we're getting dangerously close to this info-gravitational collapse.
The metaphor holds surprisingly well to layman astronomy. We have certain singularities of unusually dense matter on the net - AOL to name one. This dense matter distorts the flow of information around it, and emits a particularly dangerous form of radiation; MeToo-on radiation. Ha! While at it, there's the M$sphere firing off FUD particles in every direction.:)
Another perspective is that of the net being a natural resource. The more junk we pump into the datastream, the more polluted and less usable it becomes. Eventually the frogs die off, the lurkers get other hobbies, and the cyber-ecosystem dies.
Add to this the ever increasing complexity of the net, which makes it harder and harder for a bot search engine to tell fact from fiction and content from bunk, and you've got a thicket of URLs that makes me long for the Dewey decimal system at times.
I don't know about heat or power, but I know that the powers that be look really closely at the bottom line.
CAT-5 is cheap (by comparison to optics) especially if it is already strung throughout the building. It can be cut to size, and you don't need to hire an optics-aware tech to handle it. The installed base of CAT-5 wiring is significant, and presents a large investment - so as you'd say, using it is a major benefit
Also there's all the supporting hardware. Even if you make the investment in fiber, and string it throughout your building, you've got to tie it all together, and that requires special (non-copper) equipment. Fiber-handling equipment of any kind - be it routers, switches, couplers, whatever - is again more expensive than the CAT-5 counterpart.
Conversely, a new installation is still likely to shy away from fiber, because this is still new tech, and nobody wants a lemon, or a token-ring, or BetaMax.
Management will always look at the market inertia, and initial and running costs when making these decisions, and the sensible choice in those terms is copper ethernet.
Sun, BSDI, OS/2... This may be good short term news, but in the long term it bodes ill.
It shows that the corporate mentality is not shifting towards open source, but rather is attempting to pacify the OSS movement by anointing it's BINARY product. Or simply benefiting the end users with more available software - but we can just compile that - so NO.
This may be a genuine attempt at drawing closer to the OSS developers, to make them feel welcome and included and appreciated. Then to flesh out the good ones, hire them for the shrink-wrap market, and let OSS fall where it may.
This probably won't be so extreme, but it smells of 'embrace and extend' from here.
Now THIS we can use around the office. The hell with Win2k, GB-ether is nice for all those big CAD drawings, DB shuffles, Quake games!
Now, about that Internet backbone bandwidth: If I have GB-ether on my desk, and so does everyone else (even if $75 is just a single chip, the card can't be that bad.. ) - we're going to choke the net to death.
Nevermind that a single PC can't pump data out that fast, a cubefarm of them can. We need significant backbone bandwidth improvements and faster routers.
It is the sign of an active mind. The sign of a mind that is not fully occupied, and settled into the status quo. A restless mind is an inquisitive one.
Remember your physics, people - a mind at rest tends to remain at rest; a mind in motion tends to remain in motion.
Why are the media types begrudging us our restless minds? Could it be that minds at rest are more placid, complacent and willing to buy into media-induced mediocrity?
Evolution stops without challenge. The human mind is an example of accelerated evolution - with major adaptive changes visible within a single generation. Static minds must be forced to adapt and evolve. Restless minds seek out their own, brave new worlds, to adapt to.
Restlessness is good, it is healthy, it is a sign that we're actually doing something. We're acting, not re-acting. Cogito, ergo sum!
As I was reading it, I thought "gee, I wouldn't be surprised to read something like this in The Onion". Imagine my contentment at having my judgement about a 'news' story shown correct.
Althought, there is something to be said for the concept. I know a little about scriptanalysis, and while the jury is still out on the completeness of the theory, there is something to it.
Certain personality types seem to correlate with particular styles of writing pretty strongly. Intense people tend to have spiky, angular writing, while easy going people tend to write in rounder letters. The nuances of crossed t's and dotted i's suggest certain personality traits - but it's far from an exact science. It's pretty interpretive, much like dreams and free association exercises.
But it makes me wonder. If there are in fact correlations, and one's writing style betrays one's personality, then why could it not work the other way? After all, it might be a bio-feedback mechanism - just like facial expression and posture.
Consider that changing one's tempo of writing, slowing it down and concentrating more on the spacing between words and other penmanship artifacts just might feed back onto one's personality. This puts all those penmanship lessons in Catholic school into a different perspective. The good nuns intended for us all to have nice handwriting, but they were also shoehorning us into a uniform personality type. Another example of religious brainwashing.
Now, a PDA, with it's typically jerky and disjointed grafitti might instill those tendencies in the user.
Give a little thought to the appearance and style of your handwriting. Is it small and intense - focused on details and careless of the reader's experience? Is it permeated by short, angular upstrokes into sequencial letters in a word? How about that bursty tempo? And the afterthought crosed t and dotted i? Is it pretty and elegant, or more concerned with getting the meaning across?
Congratulations, you intuitive, cerebral, stressed egomanical hacker type.
AI is not going to come around as individual, complex, human-like minds. Not like anything we can understand, either. It will be alien.
The Matrix made an interesting point - one that I missed on the first viewing: "We gave birth to A.I. A SINGULAR intelligence that spawned a whole race of machines..." or something along that vein.
AI will be a single consciousness - much like the Internet when viewed as an entity - but a lot faster, and able to do all sorts of heuristic analyses before comitting to a single, best action - a'la Deep Blue.
Personally, IMHO, classical AI is a dead end. 'Teaching' a computer all about the world in the hope that at some point it will simply comprehend, is ludicrous. It may have adequate knowledge to make an informed decision based on a given set of algorithms - and may even tailor it's algorithms, but it will never be "intelligent".
The future of AI lays in Neural Networks. In the emergent behavior of a complex system of miniscule processing units. Not necessarily machines, but conceptual processing units - acting together.
Of course, for this to work, your glass of water molecules must be half-full rather than half-empty.:)
There's nothing I'd like to do more, first thing into the office, than read a Star Wars spoiler... But it's already choked!! I guess I'll have to pretend to be an overachiever, and get to my desk before Rob makes the first round of 8:30 posts, next time. [sigh]
Now let me think, who might be in the market for a chip fab? TransMeta comes to mind... Of course, I'm totally ignorant about chip fabrication... Would they need to retool?;)
Getting SE training in an academic setting is a contradiction in terms. Academia, by it's own definition, is dedicated to pushing the envelope of knowledge - Computer Science as you define it fits there nicely.
But, some pretty good institutions are making an effort lately to provide training in SE - and I hope this will improve the quality of production code that comes out of industry.
CMU, RPI, UCONN are the ones I know about to offer SE programs (grad level) but I'm sure the list is longer, and getting longer still.
But you are also right in saying that SE is still taught by apprenticeship. No amount of time in a lecture hall compares to hands-on production quality code pounding.
I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do - I understand.
I think that a Code of Ethics is very much at issue in this case. An individual developer, bound by a clause stating 'thou shalt not fake functionality or misrepresent the purpose of software' would not have engaged in the development of the product. A developer bound by a clause 'thou shalt make the breech of the above clause publicly known' would have kept the thing from getting to market. IP and NDA's would of course have to take a back seat to the Code of Ethical Software Development - and would that be so bad? If honest common sense outweighed the legal disclaimer, the world would be a better place.
Also, Professional Certification should not be a requirement to practice the trade. It should only be an additional value - much as it is in engineering. Most engineers are not Professional Engineers, yet they still work in their profession. Hence, everyone would still be able to program, without the Certification, without the degree even. And, as in the case of OSS, much great work would be done by people w/o the Cert.
In 1995, Syncronys Softcorp released a product called SoftRAM95. It claimed to double RAM, and sold over 600,000 copies at $79.95 per copy.
What the software did was to show some dials on the screen, which sowed how much RAM this software made available.
The point is that the dials SHOWED something, but there was no actual RAM doubling taking place. The dials just REPORTED that there was.
The average Joe consumer had been slipped a placebo.
A Professional Certification would introduce a Code Of Ethics (along with a guarantee of competence) that would keep this sort of thing from ever happening again.
The License of which you speak applies to the medical and legal fields, but not engineering. A Certification OTOH is a piece of paper that qualifies one to use a particular tool.
What we're talking about here (NYT) is a Certification of Professional Competency, not a License to practice or a Certificate of Tool Awareness, if you will.
The CN{A|E} and MSxx 'certificates' are tool awareness leaflets that mean that an employer doesn't have to worry about you not knowing how to use a particular tool. You take an MSCD and put him in a Linux environment, and you'll see what that paper is worth.
Now, the Certificate of Professional Competency is something else entirely. Any degreed engineer knows about the decomposition of forces, and can tell that a particular design simply will not stand. But a PE will have passed tests to guarantee that his/her designs will not only stand under designed load, but under a variety of additional conditions. Also, a PE's design will FAIL-SAFE, rather than in a spectaculary disastrous manner (Gallopping Girdy comes to mind).
In the context of the software industry, a Certificate of Professional Competency has nothing to do with the development tool or language. It has to do with the robustness of the conceptual design. A PSE would know implicitly what designs are suitable solutions to a particular problem. A PSE certification would give an employer the assurance that this person does good work - and is not (pardon the term) a hack.
The concept of the Professional Certification has been bastardized by companies such as Microsoft, Novel and Sun (Java Cert? PUHLEEZE!) to convince management types that the holders of these leaflets know what they're doing. All these certs mean is that someone paid, sat, and passed.
A PSE would know, through their education and certification process, why MS-Winders is rickety and why X is a monument to great design. A PSE would not ever produce code that locks the machine, leaves a gaping security hole, or shows you a blue screen of death. A PSE would do this by design, and not by a series of fixes, patches and upgrades.
A PSE would not necessarily know Java or C++ or Smalltalk, but rather OOP - inside and out. They would not necessarily know x86 or 680x0, but the crux of ASM.
PSE development, unfortunatelly, does not mesh with OSS. It requires careful review, strong-arm process and centralized development. And for some applications, this is the way to do it.
Now for the olive branch. Many developers have what it takes to be PSE (as I define it), but all PSE's would be - by definition - great developers. Employers whose projects carry enormous responsibility, would seek out staffs of PSE's, or would put PSE's in crucial locations within the organization, as sanity-checks on the work done. As for who is in control of the licensing board.. Well, the industry as a whole, as in all others.
In the engineering field - whence the argument'idea arises, the ASME (I think) is the controlling authority. It is a professional society, not a corp or gov affiliate.
Sort of like the IEEE or ACM in our field. So, a body of these, and other CS entities, would be a good choice to develop the certification criteria. Also, the Software Engineering Institure as CMU would be a worthy representative, as would the CSAB which accredits most CS curricula out there and so could enforce that correct practices are taught from the onset.
Not every engineer needs to be a professionally licensed one. Only those whose work affects the safety of people, or is Federally funded, or has HUGE money riding on it; or those who are the final authority on the product, need to bear ultimate responsibility for their work - and these are the ones who need to be certified.
The engineers who design nuclear power plants, for example, need not be certified - because the process they are bound to follow already is - and the number of redundant checks on their work is exhaustive.
So it should be with software engineers. People whose scope has a public safety effect, great financial liability, or is tax-payer funded/government contracted, but whose work does not undergo exhaustive and redundant SQA and V&V processes; should certainly be certified.
Note: Professional engineering certification is not the same as a VBA cert, or even a CNE - though the CNE comes close. Professional certification involves sound design principles, conservative estimation methods... Much more abstract concepts than knowing the version of the tool you use. Certification is public assurance that you are competent to bear the responsibility of the task. If the worst outcome of the failure of the task, is not "that bad" (ie no public safety compromise, no property damage, no POed taxpayers not re-electing the people that gave you the contract) than simple insurance or a disclaimer will do.
This is very hard to achieve in the software context, but I suppose that a simple analogy would be: design methodologies that include - GUARANTEED BOUNDS CHECKING, NO SIDEFFECTS, NO MEMORY LEAKS, FAILSAFE OPERATION, REDUNDANT BUT DIVERSE IMPLEMENTATION OF CRITICAL ALGORITHMS AND SYSTEMS - would qualify one for professional certification (provided these are not language specific and on the core level of the developer's understanding of his/her field).
>Anyone have their familiy not get it or actually >turn on you for telling them the truth?
Hmmm... I work in a small development group in a HUGE engineering firm. I have to say that the majority of my co-workers are really good looking people, and I can see they were always this way. They're all old enough to have kids in grade school thru college, but they're still active, healthy and sharp people.
They see this thing the MEDIA way. I tried talking to my manager and others here about this; and they just do not connect. In fact, as soon as I mentioned that the killers were likely driven out of their peer group so hard that they were forced into fighting back, the conversation was pretty much over.
It's sad, since these people are parents of kids dealing with the same stresses as the ones in Colorado. Their kids are too aware of their parents lack of understanding, that they refuse to talk about it. The parents assume the kids have no problems, the kids assume the parents don't get it. The kids are right.
I, myself, am the kid of someone very much like my co-workers. My own parents don't get it either. To them, my past teenage angst was just a part of the psychology of growing up - not a willful reaction to the rejection I felt in High School.
I fear that with time, income and status, I too will cease to understand, or begin to dismiss teenage experiences - just in time to be useless to my own kids. I pray I remember.
Ooof! I misrepresented myself there. Nothing wrong at all with blue-collar at all. Where I have a problem is the jocks and princesses who ride the popularity wave so long that they neglect to feed their head the four basic food-for-thought groups. They then have no choice but to work as bank tellers, delivery people, line workers...
I can't do cars. I have no mechanical inclinations. I have complete respect for my mechanic - he's briliant.
A friend of mine smoked his Pell grant. He was really popular in HS and got into a state school based on raw talent and good SATs - not his mediocre grades. He sells cars for a living at 26, and will never live his life further than two paychecks in advance. This is the type I don't care for.
People who choose to work for a living amaze me - I, being inherently lazy.:) People who simply do not have it upstairs to excell - sorry, got dealt a bum hand in life. But people who can contribute, but try to swindle the system instead, deserve what they ultimately get.
The software market, as it is, can not sustain itself. Those dime-a-dozen certifications won't be worth the paper they're printed on, and that 'worthless' degree will be golden, after managers consider the value of robust design as contrasted with the hurried Y2K patchwork they pay millions for now. It may not be Y2K, but rather the new phone number system that will be required in the near future; but a major change is on the horizon.
I suspect that, shortly after Y2K, employers will realize that skilled/educated labor and self-taught labor are not the same. The demand for 'just anyone' will drop and software engineers and professional developers will be in higher demand than a self-taught hacker. Also, product knowledge will be replaced by concept knowledge - so all the Java hackers, MS-VC++ hackers, VB hackers and everyone who is dependent on a language, top heavy API or a version number, will be hurting.
I expect that a professional license will be as important for a job as it is for engineers, and maybe lawyers and doctors. Cheap less-skilled labor will always be available overseas, and in our industry that's as close as the next cubicle.
I believe that we will see software development houses structured and prestigious as architectural firms, where software systems will be designed, defined and documented in therms of interface, algorithm and data structure, and then the work will be farmed out to cheap labor - assembly line style. "Here's your data structures, algorithm and functionality document, Gunga Din - I want the program, in this new language, in three months. Oh, here's the BNF for the language. Have fun!"
Now, I don't know if this is good, bad or indifferent, but it will be a change. That highschool dropout making $60k/yr for web designs will awaken up to his eyeballs in a lifestyle he can't afford, and lots of skilled and brilliant - but un-pedigreed - developers will have to scramble to make ends meet. But, just like the clothing and electronics industries, the job of building the bulk of the product will get shipped to the Orient, Mexico and elsewhere, where people are still willing to work hard for relatively low pay.
We've argued the college angle ad nauseum already; but everyone has to admit, in college it is easier to be left alone to do your thing.
In college, unless you choose to pledge a frat (and willfully subject yourself to much more humiliation by the Greeks than by the jocks), you can easily stay out of the way of THAT element. Simply be involved in intellectual and 'social conscience' activities, and you're unlikely to even see the greek alphabet - except in math and physics classes.
High School, on the other hand, holds geeks as a captive audience. Even if you're lucky enough to have your choice of classes, you pass the 'shinny, happy people' in the hallways, and you're likely to be abused.
A redefined school system, specialized at the HS level - not in college, is what is necessary. Specialized public schools are needed. Ones for geeks - that offer the sciences and the fine arts; and ones for the 'beautiful people' with their sports programs and shop.
Let's take the Academia vs trade-school divide down to the highschool level; where the future leaders of society can learn in peace, and the future blue collar plumber/mechanic types can score touchdowns as their bimbette girlfriends cheer on the sidelines.
All the scum floats to the top, while everyone at the bottom gets burned.
And what better place to learn the finer points of conformity, monolithic society and the stigma of individuality than High School?
The media markets to the teen demographic, pushing them hard to be an individual, to stand out, to 'express themselves'; provided they do it by wearing Tommy Hilfeger T-shirts, drinking the un-cola and listening to American Top 40.
Those brave souls who actually dare to scratch away the patina of mass marketting are ostracised as being boat-rockers, as being anti-social, and as being contrary just to be difficult. Too bad.
These brave souls are missing the point. If you do not hang out with the jocks, flirt with the cheerleaders and schmooze with the teachers, you'll never join the Country Club, play bridge with the other Stepford wives, or otherwise keep up with the Joneses. Get with the program kids! Get a haircut, a new pair of 501's and a Swatch. (sorry, I'm dating myself here)
I, for one, went to a private school. I got to wear a uniform (well, they called it a dress code, since the colors could vary a bit, and I could choose the tie).
By virtue of the school and dress, I was branded a prep by my neighborhood friends - who were more like the trenchcoats then I realized - until now.
I played some sports, but I wasn't all that good. That, and my decent grades got me branded a geek by the jocks - the worst insult to bear in highschool.
I was a pretty cerebral kid, and I was pretty shy, so the popular girls thought I was 'strange'; but since I wanted to fit in, I hardly even noticed that the smart girls actually liked me. In retrospect - I wish I had paid them more attention.
The point I'm trying to make is that I didn't fit in anywhere. I wasn't really a jock, I shunned the brainy girls out of shyness - so the smart kids thought I was just rude, I was a prep to my friends... I got used to being a loner. I didn't act out or make a point of looking different - and that's probably why I was allowed to survive highschool. I sort of went unnoticed.
I kept up the habit in college, until I made friends with people who shared my interests. The friends I made in the computer science department are some of the best I've even met.
We're all professionals now - me and my CS geek buddies. We have well paying jobs, nice cars, real lives. Hell, we're in our mid 20's, and a few of us own our own homes. We're all over the country at this point, but we keep in touch. We trust each other and we buttress eachother against the diminishing ranks of the jock/prep jerks.
I ran into the quarterback of my old HS football team the other day in the supermarket. We talked for a while, had a few laughs over what was. After he was done RINGING UP MY ORDER, I left him there and went back to my REAL LIFE.
A message to the misfits: Be a chameleon. Look the part, fit in, get transparent and bide your time. Wait for your niche.
We all know that kids can be really cruel sometimes. I suspect that it is, unfortunately, human nature.
It seems that, in order to set up a 'pecking order' or a social hierarchy of sorts, children resort to both physical and emotional bullying of their peers. It's a Darwinian thing of sorts, in the context of social interaction in the playground.
Our job is to teach them out of it. But, when we deal with similar situations in our daily adult lives, acceptance is a hard virtue to instill. Our children learn from our words, but mostly they learn from our actions.
When they hear us talk of acceptance, but see us keeping up with the Joneses, they come to believe that we are hipocrites and that status and conformity are what they should strive for.
When they hear us talk about generosity, and are later forbidden to play with the 'welfare case kid', they realize that generosity is a lie we tell ourselves to feel good about our station in life.
When they hear us talk about kindness, and then see their own grandparents left to die in nursing homes, and as they watch us explain how we have no time to visit them, they learn that kindness is something we extend to people who can contribute to our standard of living and our conveniences, and how those that are no longer 'of use' can simply be discarded.
I wish I had a solution to present, but there is this at least: The realization of human nature, and our own dis-illusionment with our shortcomings, will serve to make us better parents and better people. We must craft the next generation to take the effort further when it is their time. We can't do that by lying to ourselves, denying ourselves our own faults, being happy about how good we have it, compared to [fill in the blank] and how it's all [fill in the blank]'s fault.
Slashdot Mirror
I like it, pay in UltimaCash for groceries, buy a car for the value of a self-sustaining SimCity model. What we need is a standard internet currency, or maybe one for each ISP or top level domain (.gov-cash, .edu-cash) - and let InterNIC worry about exchange rates much like the IMF does now.
Companies have been choosing their names based on the image the name projects, for a long time. Smaller companies have been taking-on names LIKE those of big companies, to give themselves credibility they didn't earn.
:)
This is not as much about value as about reputation, and reputation is the cornerstone of the 'old boys network' and as such, predates the internet by thousands of years.
That Hun, Attila, he's a bad MoFo, so let him have your daughter and he won't kill you. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. My nick is Jar Jar, so I must be a total loser.
This sounds a lot like the signal to noise ratio of the net. At some point (arguably already upon us) the amount of junk on the net will overwhelm the volume of useful information, and the net will cease to be a useful resource.
:)
With spam, web pages containing more ad banners than content, and everyone and their grandma 'working the web', we're getting dangerously close to this info-gravitational collapse.
The metaphor holds surprisingly well to layman astronomy. We have certain singularities of unusually dense matter on the net - AOL to name one. This dense matter distorts the flow of information around it, and emits a particularly dangerous form of radiation; MeToo-on radiation.
Ha! While at it, there's the M$sphere firing off FUD particles in every direction.
Another perspective is that of the net being a natural resource. The more junk we pump into the datastream, the more polluted and less usable it becomes. Eventually the frogs die off, the lurkers get other hobbies, and the cyber-ecosystem dies.
Add to this the ever increasing complexity of the net, which makes it harder and harder for a bot search engine to tell fact from fiction and content from bunk, and you've got a thicket of URLs that makes me long for the Dewey decimal system at times.
I don't know about heat or power, but I know that the powers that be look really closely at the bottom line.
CAT-5 is cheap (by comparison to optics) especially if it is already strung throughout the building. It can be cut to size, and you don't need to hire an optics-aware tech to handle it.
The installed base of CAT-5 wiring is significant, and presents a large investment - so as you'd say, using it is a major benefit
Also there's all the supporting hardware. Even if you make the investment in fiber, and string it throughout your building, you've got to tie it all together, and that requires special (non-copper) equipment. Fiber-handling equipment of any kind - be it routers, switches, couplers, whatever - is again more expensive than the CAT-5 counterpart.
Conversely, a new installation is still likely to shy away from fiber, because this is still new tech, and nobody wants a lemon, or a token-ring, or BetaMax.
Management will always look at the market inertia, and initial and running costs when making these decisions, and the sensible choice in those terms is copper ethernet.
Sun, BSDI, OS/2... This may be good short term news, but in the long term it bodes ill.
It shows that the corporate mentality is not shifting towards open source, but rather is attempting to pacify the OSS movement by anointing it's BINARY product. Or simply benefiting the end users with more available software - but we can just compile that - so NO.
This may be a genuine attempt at drawing closer to the OSS developers, to make them feel welcome and included and appreciated. Then to flesh out the good ones, hire them for the shrink-wrap market, and let OSS fall where it may.
This probably won't be so extreme, but it smells of 'embrace and extend' from here.
Until the big houses open their source, beware.
Now THIS we can use around the office.
The hell with Win2k, GB-ether is nice for all those big CAD drawings, DB shuffles, Quake games!
Now, about that Internet backbone bandwidth:
If I have GB-ether on my desk, and so does everyone else (even if $75 is just a single chip, the card can't be that bad.. ) - we're going to choke the net to death.
Nevermind that a single PC can't pump data out that fast, a cubefarm of them can. We need significant backbone bandwidth improvements and faster routers.
Where's those danged pure-optical chips?
Just what my sick sense of humor needed.
Last thing I need is a dog that leaks battery acid on my rugs.
And the metal splinters from having it hump your guests leg... Sheesh! A lawsuit waiting to happen.
I wonder if it will come with all the standard phaser settings - 'stun' for the mailman, 'kill' for the Jehova's Witnesses.
And here you thought having the real dog FIXED was traumatic. Imagine having to go through that $$$ experience every time in rains!
Can one of these be R/C driven by a Pilot? How about the seeing-eye-dog possibilities?
I can see it now, robotic dogs chasing Furbys up binary trees!! Aaaargh!
Imagine what a Beowulf cluster of those woud be like. ;)
It is the sign of an active mind. The sign of a mind that is not fully occupied, and settled into the status quo. A restless mind is an inquisitive one.
Remember your physics, people - a mind at rest tends to remain at rest; a mind in motion tends to remain in motion.
Why are the media types begrudging us our restless minds? Could it be that minds at rest are more placid, complacent and willing to buy into media-induced mediocrity?
Evolution stops without challenge. The human mind is an example of accelerated evolution - with major adaptive changes visible within a single generation. Static minds must be forced to adapt and evolve. Restless minds seek out their own, brave new worlds, to adapt to.
Restlessness is good, it is healthy, it is a sign that we're actually doing something. We're acting, not re-acting. Cogito, ergo sum!
As I was reading it, I thought "gee, I wouldn't be surprised to read something like this in The Onion". Imagine my contentment at having my judgement about a 'news' story shown correct.
Althought, there is something to be said for the concept. I know a little about scriptanalysis, and while the jury is still out on the completeness of the theory, there is something to it.
Certain personality types seem to correlate with particular styles of writing pretty strongly.
Intense people tend to have spiky, angular writing, while easy going people tend to write in rounder letters. The nuances of crossed t's and dotted i's suggest certain personality traits - but it's far from an exact science. It's pretty interpretive, much like dreams and free association exercises.
But it makes me wonder. If there are in fact correlations, and one's writing style betrays one's personality, then why could it not work the other way? After all, it might be a bio-feedback mechanism - just like facial expression and posture.
Consider that changing one's tempo of writing, slowing it down and concentrating more on the spacing between words and other penmanship artifacts just might feed back onto one's personality. This puts all those penmanship lessons in Catholic school into a different perspective. The good nuns intended for us all to have nice handwriting, but they were also shoehorning us into a uniform personality type. Another example of religious brainwashing.
Now, a PDA, with it's typically jerky and disjointed grafitti might instill those tendencies in the user.
Give a little thought to the appearance and style of your handwriting. Is it small and intense - focused on details and careless of the reader's experience? Is it permeated by short, angular upstrokes into sequencial letters in a word? How about that bursty tempo? And the afterthought crosed t and dotted i? Is it pretty and elegant, or more concerned with getting the meaning across?
Congratulations, you intuitive, cerebral, stressed egomanical hacker type.
AI is not going to come around as individual, complex, human-like minds. Not like anything we can understand, either. It will be alien.
:)
The Matrix made an interesting point - one that I missed on the first viewing:
"We gave birth to A.I. A SINGULAR intelligence that spawned a whole race of machines..." or something along that vein.
AI will be a single consciousness - much like the Internet when viewed as an entity - but a lot faster, and able to do all sorts of heuristic analyses before comitting to a single, best action - a'la Deep Blue.
Personally, IMHO, classical AI is a dead end. 'Teaching' a computer all about the world in the hope that at some point it will simply comprehend, is ludicrous. It may have adequate knowledge to make an informed decision based on a given set of algorithms - and may even tailor it's algorithms, but it will never be "intelligent".
The future of AI lays in Neural Networks. In the emergent behavior of a complex system of miniscule processing units. Not necessarily machines, but conceptual processing units - acting together.
Of course, for this to work, your glass of water molecules must be half-full rather than half-empty.
Aargh!
There's nothing I'd like to do more, first thing into the office, than read a Star Wars spoiler... But it's already choked!! I guess I'll have to pretend to be an overachiever, and get to my desk before Rob makes the first round of 8:30 posts, next time. [sigh]
Now let me think, who might be in the market for a chip fab? TransMeta comes to mind... ;)
Of course, I'm totally ignorant about chip fabrication... Would they need to retool?
Getting SE training in an academic setting is a contradiction in terms. Academia, by it's own definition, is dedicated to pushing the envelope of knowledge - Computer Science as you define it fits there nicely.
But, some pretty good institutions are making an effort lately to provide training in SE - and I hope this will improve the quality of production code that comes out of industry.
CMU, RPI, UCONN are the ones I know about to offer SE programs (grad level) but I'm sure the list is longer, and getting longer still.
But you are also right in saying that SE is still taught by apprenticeship. No amount of time in a lecture hall compares to hands-on production quality code pounding.
I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do - I understand.
I think that a Code of Ethics is very much at issue in this case. An individual developer, bound by a clause stating 'thou shalt not fake functionality or misrepresent the purpose of software' would not have engaged in the development of the product. A developer bound by a clause 'thou shalt make the breech of the above clause publicly known' would have kept the thing from getting to market. IP and NDA's would of course have to take a back seat to the Code of Ethical Software Development - and would that be so bad? If honest common sense outweighed the legal disclaimer, the world would be a better place.
Also, Professional Certification should not be a requirement to practice the trade. It should only be an additional value - much as it is in engineering. Most engineers are not Professional Engineers, yet they still work in their profession. Hence, everyone would still be able to program, without the Certification, without the degree even. And, as in the case of OSS, much great work would be done by people w/o the Cert.
In 1995, Syncronys Softcorp released a product called SoftRAM95. It claimed to double RAM, and sold over 600,000 copies at $79.95 per copy.
What the software did was to show some dials on the screen, which sowed how much RAM this software made available.
The point is that the dials SHOWED something, but there was no actual RAM doubling taking place. The dials just REPORTED that there was.
The average Joe consumer had been slipped a placebo.
A Professional Certification would introduce a Code Of Ethics (along with a guarantee of competence) that would keep this sort of thing from ever happening again.
The License of which you speak applies to the medical and legal fields, but not engineering.
A Certification OTOH is a piece of paper that qualifies one to use a particular tool.
What we're talking about here (NYT) is a Certification of Professional Competency, not a License to practice or a Certificate of Tool Awareness, if you will.
The CN{A|E} and MSxx 'certificates' are tool awareness leaflets that mean that an employer doesn't have to worry about you not knowing how to use a particular tool. You take an MSCD and put him in a Linux environment, and you'll see what that paper is worth.
Now, the Certificate of Professional Competency is something else entirely. Any degreed engineer knows about the decomposition of forces, and can tell that a particular design simply will not stand. But a PE will have passed tests to guarantee that his/her designs will not only stand under designed load, but under a variety of additional conditions. Also, a PE's design will FAIL-SAFE, rather than in a spectaculary disastrous manner (Gallopping Girdy comes to mind).
In the context of the software industry, a Certificate of Professional Competency has nothing to do with the development tool or language. It has to do with the robustness of the conceptual design. A PSE would know implicitly what designs are suitable solutions to a particular problem. A PSE certification would give an employer the assurance that this person does good work - and is not (pardon the term) a hack.
The concept of the Professional Certification has been bastardized by companies such as Microsoft, Novel and Sun (Java Cert? PUHLEEZE!) to convince management types that the holders of these leaflets know what they're doing. All these certs mean is that someone paid, sat, and passed.
A PSE would know, through their education and certification process, why MS-Winders is rickety and why X is a monument to great design. A PSE would not ever produce code that locks the machine, leaves a gaping security hole, or shows you a blue screen of death. A PSE would do this by design, and not by a series of fixes, patches and upgrades.
A PSE would not necessarily know Java or C++ or Smalltalk, but rather OOP - inside and out. They would not necessarily know x86 or 680x0, but the crux of ASM.
PSE development, unfortunatelly, does not mesh with OSS. It requires careful review, strong-arm process and centralized development. And for some applications, this is the way to do it.
Now for the olive branch. Many developers have what it takes to be PSE (as I define it), but all PSE's would be - by definition - great developers.
Employers whose projects carry enormous responsibility, would seek out staffs of PSE's, or would put PSE's in crucial locations within the organization, as sanity-checks on the work done.
As for who is in control of the licensing board.. Well, the industry as a whole, as in all others.
In the engineering field - whence the argument'idea arises, the ASME (I think) is the controlling authority. It is a professional society, not a corp or gov affiliate.
Sort of like the IEEE or ACM in our field. So, a body of these, and other CS entities, would be a good choice to develop the certification criteria.
Also, the Software Engineering Institure as CMU would be a worthy representative, as would the CSAB which accredits most CS curricula out there and so could enforce that correct practices are taught from the onset.
Not every engineer needs to be a professionally licensed one. Only those whose work affects the safety of people, or is Federally funded, or has HUGE money riding on it; or those who are the final authority on the product, need to bear ultimate responsibility for their work - and these are the ones who need to be certified.
The engineers who design nuclear power plants, for example, need not be certified - because the process they are bound to follow already is - and the number of redundant checks on their work is exhaustive.
So it should be with software engineers. People whose scope has a public safety effect, great financial liability, or is tax-payer funded/government contracted, but whose work does not undergo exhaustive and redundant SQA and V&V processes; should certainly be certified.
Note: Professional engineering certification is not the same as a VBA cert, or even a CNE - though the CNE comes close. Professional certification involves sound design principles, conservative estimation methods... Much more abstract concepts than knowing the version of the tool you use.
Certification is public assurance that you are competent to bear the responsibility of the task. If the worst outcome of the failure of the task, is not "that bad" (ie no public safety compromise, no property damage, no POed taxpayers not re-electing the people that gave you the contract) than simple insurance or a disclaimer will do.
This is very hard to achieve in the software context, but I suppose that a simple analogy would be: design methodologies that include - GUARANTEED BOUNDS CHECKING, NO SIDEFFECTS, NO MEMORY LEAKS, FAILSAFE OPERATION, REDUNDANT BUT DIVERSE IMPLEMENTATION OF CRITICAL ALGORITHMS AND SYSTEMS - would qualify one for professional certification (provided these are not language specific and on the core level of the developer's understanding of his/her field).
>Anyone have their familiy not get it or actually
>turn on you for telling them the truth?
Hmmm... I work in a small development group in a HUGE engineering firm.
I have to say that the majority of my co-workers are really good looking people, and I can see they were always this way. They're all old enough to have kids in grade school thru college, but they're still active, healthy and sharp people.
They see this thing the MEDIA way. I tried talking to my manager and others here about this; and they just do not connect. In fact, as soon as I mentioned that the killers were likely driven out of their peer group so hard that they were forced into fighting back, the conversation was pretty much over.
It's sad, since these people are parents of kids dealing with the same stresses as the ones in Colorado. Their kids are too aware of their parents lack of understanding, that they refuse to talk about it. The parents assume the kids have no problems, the kids assume the parents don't get it. The kids are right.
I, myself, am the kid of someone very much like my co-workers. My own parents don't get it either. To them, my past teenage angst was just a part of the psychology of growing up - not a willful reaction to the rejection I felt in High School.
I fear that with time, income and status, I too will cease to understand, or begin to dismiss teenage experiences - just in time to be useless to my own kids. I pray I remember.
Ooof! I misrepresented myself there.
:) People who simply do not have it upstairs to excell - sorry, got dealt a bum hand in life. But people who can contribute, but try to swindle the system instead, deserve what they ultimately get.
Nothing wrong at all with blue-collar at all.
Where I have a problem is the jocks and princesses who ride the popularity wave so long that they neglect to feed their head the four basic food-for-thought groups.
They then have no choice but to work as bank tellers, delivery people, line workers...
I can't do cars. I have no mechanical inclinations. I have complete respect for my mechanic - he's briliant.
A friend of mine smoked his Pell grant. He was really popular in HS and got into a state school based on raw talent and good SATs - not his mediocre grades. He sells cars for a living at 26, and will never live his life further than two paychecks in advance. This is the type I don't care for.
People who choose to work for a living amaze me - I, being inherently lazy.
The software market, as it is, can not sustain itself. Those dime-a-dozen certifications won't be worth the paper they're printed on, and that 'worthless' degree will be golden, after managers consider the value of robust design as contrasted with the hurried Y2K patchwork they pay millions for now. It may not be Y2K, but rather the new phone number system that will be required in the near future; but a major change is on the horizon.
I suspect that, shortly after Y2K, employers will realize that skilled/educated labor and self-taught labor are not the same. The demand for 'just anyone' will drop and software engineers and professional developers will be in higher demand than a self-taught hacker. Also, product knowledge will be replaced by concept knowledge - so all the Java hackers, MS-VC++ hackers, VB hackers and everyone who is dependent on a language, top heavy API or a version number, will be hurting.
I expect that a professional license will be as important for a job as it is for engineers, and maybe lawyers and doctors. Cheap less-skilled labor will always be available overseas, and in our industry that's as close as the next cubicle.
I believe that we will see software development houses structured and prestigious as architectural firms, where software systems will be designed, defined and documented in therms of interface, algorithm and data structure, and then the work will be farmed out to cheap labor - assembly line style. "Here's your data structures, algorithm and functionality document, Gunga Din - I want the program, in this new language, in three months. Oh, here's the BNF for the language. Have fun!"
Now, I don't know if this is good, bad or indifferent, but it will be a change. That highschool dropout making $60k/yr for web designs will awaken up to his eyeballs in a lifestyle he can't afford, and lots of skilled and brilliant - but un-pedigreed - developers will have to scramble to make ends meet. But, just like the clothing and electronics industries, the job of building the bulk of the product will get shipped to the Orient, Mexico and elsewhere, where people are still willing to work hard for relatively low pay.
We've argued the college angle ad nauseum already; but everyone has to admit, in college it is easier to be left alone to do your thing.
In college, unless you choose to pledge a frat (and willfully subject yourself to much more humiliation by the Greeks than by the jocks), you can easily stay out of the way of THAT element. Simply be involved in intellectual and 'social conscience' activities, and you're unlikely to even see the greek alphabet - except in math and physics classes.
High School, on the other hand, holds geeks as a captive audience. Even if you're lucky enough to have your choice of classes, you pass the 'shinny, happy people' in the hallways, and you're likely to be abused.
A redefined school system, specialized at the HS level - not in college, is what is necessary. Specialized public schools are needed. Ones for geeks - that offer the sciences and the fine arts; and ones for the 'beautiful people' with their sports programs and shop.
Let's take the Academia vs trade-school divide down to the highschool level; where the future leaders of society can learn in peace, and the future blue collar plumber/mechanic types can score touchdowns as their bimbette girlfriends cheer on the sidelines.
All the scum floats to the top, while everyone at the bottom gets burned.
And what better place to learn the finer points of conformity, monolithic society and the stigma of individuality than High School?
The media markets to the teen demographic, pushing them hard to be an individual, to stand out, to 'express themselves'; provided they do it by wearing Tommy Hilfeger T-shirts, drinking the un-cola and listening to American Top 40.
Those brave souls who actually dare to scratch away the patina of mass marketting are ostracised as being boat-rockers, as being anti-social, and as being contrary just to be difficult. Too bad.
These brave souls are missing the point. If you do not hang out with the jocks, flirt with the cheerleaders and schmooze with the teachers, you'll never join the Country Club, play bridge with the other Stepford wives, or otherwise keep up with the Joneses. Get with the program kids! Get a haircut, a new pair of 501's and a Swatch. (sorry, I'm dating myself here)
I, for one, went to a private school. I got to wear a uniform (well, they called it a dress code, since the colors could vary a bit, and I could choose the tie).
By virtue of the school and dress, I was branded a prep by my neighborhood friends - who were more like the trenchcoats then I realized - until now.
I played some sports, but I wasn't all that good. That, and my decent grades got me branded a geek by the jocks - the worst insult to bear in highschool.
I was a pretty cerebral kid, and I was pretty shy, so the popular girls thought I was 'strange'; but since I wanted to fit in, I hardly even noticed that the smart girls actually liked me. In retrospect - I wish I had paid them more attention.
The point I'm trying to make is that I didn't fit in anywhere. I wasn't really a jock, I shunned the brainy girls out of shyness - so the smart kids thought I was just rude, I was a prep to my friends... I got used to being a loner. I didn't act out or make a point of looking different - and that's probably why I was allowed to survive highschool. I sort of went unnoticed.
I kept up the habit in college, until I made friends with people who shared my interests. The friends I made in the computer science department are some of the best I've even met.
We're all professionals now - me and my CS geek buddies. We have well paying jobs, nice cars, real lives. Hell, we're in our mid 20's, and a few of us own our own homes. We're all over the country at this point, but we keep in touch. We trust each other and we buttress eachother against the diminishing ranks of the jock/prep jerks.
I ran into the quarterback of my old HS football team the other day in the supermarket. We talked for a while, had a few laughs over what was. After he was done RINGING UP MY ORDER, I left him there and went back to my REAL LIFE.
A message to the misfits: Be a chameleon. Look the part, fit in, get transparent and bide your time. Wait for your niche.
We all know that kids can be really cruel sometimes. I suspect that it is, unfortunately, human nature.
It seems that, in order to set up a 'pecking order' or a social hierarchy of sorts, children resort to both physical and emotional bullying of their peers. It's a Darwinian thing of sorts, in the context of social interaction in the playground.
Our job is to teach them out of it. But, when we deal with similar situations in our daily adult lives, acceptance is a hard virtue to instill. Our children learn from our words, but mostly they learn from our actions.
When they hear us talk of acceptance, but see us keeping up with the Joneses, they come to believe that we are hipocrites and that status and conformity are what they should strive for.
When they hear us talk about generosity, and are later forbidden to play with the 'welfare case kid', they realize that generosity is a lie we tell ourselves to feel good about our station in life.
When they hear us talk about kindness, and then see their own grandparents left to die in nursing homes, and as they watch us explain how we have no time to visit them, they learn that kindness is something we extend to people who can contribute to our standard of living and our conveniences, and how those that are no longer 'of use' can simply be discarded.
I wish I had a solution to present, but there is this at least: The realization of human nature, and our own dis-illusionment with our shortcomings, will serve to make us better parents and better people. We must craft the next generation to take the effort further when it is their time. We can't do that by lying to ourselves, denying ourselves our own faults, being happy about how good we have it, compared to [fill in the blank] and how it's all [fill in the blank]'s fault.