The people who paid for busses out of town after the flooding paid up front. There were stories of people who paid $100 for a ticket out of town, only to have their bus commandeered before it ever arrived. Again, before splitting hairs too much, I'm going say that I partially agree, our government sucks too, but that's no argument for privatization.
I suppose, but really, they were both (private and government) quite terrible. Before I work myself into a pigeonhole, I'm going to go ahead and make it clear that I don't think that government should be let off the hook. In fact, I hope that Bush is impeached, and that people at all levels are fired for their tragic incompetence. However, the focus is conveniently on government, and I think that people need to avoid making assumptions (i.e., that the free market would work "better").
Whereever there is a need, it is the job of a (good) economy to answer. This is a given. The free market is not a command economy. The invisible hand should have efficiently provided the optimal solution, instead, what we got was chaos. Compare this to Cuba's evacuation of 1.5 million people last year before Ivan. Cuba has quite a bit fewer resources, but managed just fine. Again, I'm not trying to say government is always efficient, clearly our current one is not. But, if we are going to be fair, then we shouldn't forget to look at the private sector. It's certainly not a given that we should get rid of government programs as the article implies.
Why wouldn't it be their job to transport people? They do own the public transporation, don't they? Are you saying we should hand over all control of public transportation to the government? If so, then you are making my point for me.
Look at it this way, if you hand over all control of transportation to private industry, then shouldn't it be their responsibility to transport people efficiently? Isn't this a valid test of the free market? If it isn't, then what is a valid test? The airline industry has been begging for government to lift regulations, and they've gotten what they want, so shouldn't they step up to the plate and take some of the blame? And why is it that these corporations become invisible when they close up shop and leave a bunch of poor people stranded? Why haven't they accepted ANY blame?
Either way, it's food for thought. The reality is that it's more complex than my original statement, and it's tough to tell where the private boardroom ends and the government office begins. However, let's not kid ourselves, handing this money and power into private hands isn't going to make things better. It will just provide an extra layer of insulation between the looters and the citizens of our country. Keeping these programs as part of the government will at least help retain some accountability. Remember, you aren't going to be a customer of the space program for a long time, so the only control you will have over what is going is through government.
They're called the transportation industry, i.e. bus, trains, and airplanes. The last two were started by gravy train government subsidies. However, when they are needed, they bail and close up early, leaving the majority of poor people, and even some well-to-do stranded. At least you see government pretending to take some blame. They're doing a terrible job of it, becuase the conservative administration doesn't take responsibility for much of anything, but the corporations, well, they're invisible. In fact, if you watched CNN's footage of looting, you would think that walmart was the biggest victim in all of this.
Leaving these problems up to industry is not the answer. The reason, it's obvious, because industry doesn't care about poor people.
Have you ever seen private industry step up and take responsibility for something? Anything? I know we have a bunch of douchebags in office, and I'd like to see them all impeached and in jail as soon as possible, but they're better than private industry, which somehow finds a way to become invisible any time we have a crisis. The answer to the problems caused by privatization is not to privatize more things. The obvious answer is to correct our mistakes and create functioning government.
Because private industry did such a great job of evacuating the city of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina. Let's turn over our space program to the free market and see how it handles it.
Does anybody ever notice how whenever the free market fails at something, the government steps in to take the blame, which provides further "evidence" that government is incompetent, which results in further reduction of government services, and more privatization. Then, when private industry screws up yet again, we blame government, and round and round we go. It's a nice circular argument. This is of course the problem with privatization, is that private industry cares about one thing, and that is profit. Markets are horribly inefficient at solving certain kinds of problems, such as the evacuation of the city of New Orleans (or space exploration, unless the only thing we're interested in is sending rich people into space). It would be nice if the free-marketeers in the White House understood this fact.
If you were reading what I wrote, you would notice that I NEVER said that people don't have a chance. It's pretty reprehensible that "a chance" is all that you think people deserve. Not a fair chance, but just a chance. Using your logic, a rigged game, a crappy education, lack of nutrition, etc., are ok, as long as people have "a chance" and a "kick in the ass".
My feeling is that in the future, perhaps decades from now, that the US will be regarded as a tragically failed experiment, and that the lesson learned will be that huge riches, combined with technology that makes it easy to monitor and track people, is a horrible and dangerous combination. I believe that eventually huge concentrations of wealth and power will be outlawed, as it's just too dangerous. That's if we're being optimistic, which I am. The pessmimistic view is that things will just get worse and no one will put up a fight. The naive view, is that there is no harm in allowing for immense wealth, and that people like Gates will just spend their money on toys.
As far as people being responsible for their actions, I agree, but you are underestimating the effects that poverty and deprivation of resources have on one's ability to make decisions. Without a level playing field, it is impossible to hold people completely responsible for their outcome.
This just isn't true. These positions are not unlimited. In fact, that was point. Our society is a giant pyramid, it would not function if everyone was wealthy. If they all went to community college, the cost of school would go up even higher, and wages for college grads would drop. The market would beat them over the head would with a stick until they relented and settled for less. I work in bioinformatics. We have a bunch of Chinese immigrants flooding my field. They aren't becoming rich like you suggest, despite working hard and being very good at what they do. Instead, they are flooding the market, and making a formerly lucrative field, research science, less and less attractive. For the most part, immigrant labor is very submissive, and willing to jump through an untold number of hoops to get their Phd's or hang onto their jobs. Not only do they have the market beating them into submission, but they have another stick, the threat of deportation if they flunk out or get fired, making them even more motivated. The result isn't a bunch of rich Chinese immigrants. The result has been Phd's making 35K a year.
Our life circumstances determine in large part who we are and what we become. Choices are constrained by these circumstances. It is overlooking a major fact of life to suggest that people who grow up poor and uneducated have the same choices, and ability to make choices that people who are educated and given the best of everything have.
The effects of malnutrition, abuse, neglect, and lack of educational opportunities are huge. It is dishonest and vile to blame someone who grows up in these circumstances for the outcome of their lives.
I know, I'm supposed to remember that they can all go to college in this great land of opportunity of ours. All 40 million of the poor in our country can sign up to go to Harvard tomorrow. I'm sure that there is room. All of those manual laborers can just stop being farmers, and landscapers, and burger flippers, etc., and we can all be rich, if we just keep our chin up and try harder. When we're all rich, we can all hire servants. And our servants, they'll be rich too, and all of our problems will be solved. Yep, all 250 million Americans can just do what they want, if we only try harder.
Since when have markets EVER worked the way you describe? Your proposition reminds me of my vegetarian friends who don't eat meat because they think that if we consume less meat, it will help solve world hunger problems. That's NOT why people are hungry, we throw food away every day in this country. We have more than enough surplus to feed the entire world. It's because markets are inefficient. If all Americans decided to quit eating meat tomorrow, that still wouldn't change the fact that the reason people go hungry is because they don't have money, and without money, you don't get to eat in a market based economy.
The same goes for your example of labor outsourcing. Corporations are not doing this to provide running water, etc. to third world countries. Only a small minority in India are benefitting from any of this outsourcing, the rest are just as poor as they ever were. It would be nice if corporations were actually installing infrastructure, but that's not reality. The reality is that they are doing the bare minimum, like making sure that the warehouses that the employees work in have electricity, and running water, but when those employees go home, they still live in the same 3rd world standards that they had before. Again, this is a small minority, the rest are living in poverty. The net effect of outsourcing has been to lower the standard of living, not to raise it. As soon as the standard of living gets to high, the corporations will move. The goal is to drive wages down to the lowest level. Small miniorities of rich people will benefit, both in the US and in the 3rd world, but everyone else will suffer.
You keep describing this as a process of wealth redistribution to the 3rd world, when the reality is that the wealth is being distributed to the rich. The way markets have worked, and the way that they have always worked, is that the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. The net effect of free trade is not redistribution of wealth to 3rd world countries, but is in fact to redistribute wealth out of the hands of the middle class and in to the hands of the upper class. I would quit thinking about this in terms of nationality, that only confuses the issue. Free trade's goal is not the redistribution of wealth between nations, but is in fact a policy that redistributes wealth between class. Making "India" or "China" richer means absolutely nothing. Nationalism no longer has meaning in this world of globalization. The proper way to view this and to gain understanding into why free trade proponents love it so much, is to view it in terms of class. When one does a class based analysis, and looks at what this policy is doing to each class (middle vs upper vs lower), it becomes obvious that around the world, free trade has taken money away from the middle and lower classes, and put it in the hands of the upper classes. The rich in India, China, US, etc. have gotten quite a bit richer treating and trading middle class labor as if they were commodities, and the poor have gotten quite a bit poorer as a result.
I think that's called sneakernet. When the ethernet goes down, just write a protocol that has employees write the data to floppy/cd/whatever and then transport the data on foot.:) That should work for a small company.
I'm not sure how useful any of the analogies have been. Most of them have served to make the issue more confusing. The one that was quoted in the earlier article describing logging on to a neighbors network as being equivalent to copying a window's CD was an extremely dishonest analogy. If one is the average window's (or mac) user, they may not even be aware of what network they are logged into. The reasonable conclusion that should be reached is that if it is possible for the majority of people to log in to a network due to no fault of their own, that the responsibility should be up to the owner to provide proper security.
I think the reality is that we are unsure of how we should deal with this because it's a new situation and most analogies don't apply to this. Wireless networks provide open access without even intruding on someone's property. Also, since the signals travel unencrypted over public airwaves, it's a legal gray area. If I broadcast unencrypted information over public airwaves outside of my property, should I be guaranteed security? Is it reasonable to assume that someone who provides no encryption wants a network to be kept private?
is if you find yourself going in the wrong direction, you double your speed. The war in Iraq has gotten us these results so far, and instead of pulling back, we double our speed, just brilliant. The obvious solution is to pull our troops out, but I doubt fanatics like you would ever figure that one out.
It reminds me of the drug war, which has made very little real progress, other than locking some people up, but if you ever ask a DEA agent, they'll tell you the lack of progress is a sign that we need to dedicate even MORE resources to the effort, not that it's a failed policy.
The fact is, if we gave everyone a wonderful education, that produced bright, motivated, eager go-getters, then our society would collapse. It might take a decade or two, but at some point, the social order would be ruined. So, instead, we have a system that allows for monsters to be in charge, and to ruin a certain amount of students, so that they go on to be janitors, or criminals, etc., and the system survives. Every once in a while, something goes horribly wrong and the media needs to pretend that our educational institutions are honorable, wonderful institutions. Instead, they put the blame on something else, like video games, or tv, etc. Don't get me wrong, for some, especially those who grow up in more affluent areas, education can be wonderful. It's just that if a monster does get in charge of a school or a class, we need to understand why they can stay there. The reason they can stay there is because society needs a certain amount of people to be at the bottom of the heap, and so it's really not a problem if a school, especially one in a poor area or a small town produces a bunch of beaten down, broken people. After all, someone has to work at walmart.
Think about it this way, if we had a system with well-paid teachers, where 90% of the students got out with high expectations, who would want to do the grunt work? Who would sweep floors, or work the cash register at walmart? Eventually the absurdity would be revealed and those whose expectations were dashed would want to change things.
Still, I just got the 4800+, and I must say that I'll never go back to single core. I really can't see how you could tell the difference between a 2.4 Ghz and 2.8 ghz athlon in games, they are both very fast, and having the extra core is worth it. I was able to rip two CD's at once, and play ut2004 without a single hitch. I couldn't even tell that the CD's were being ripped. The only annoying part was when cdex interrupted my game to tell me it was finished, but other than that, it was very fast. Kernel compiles are also faster, and I can now run compute intensive tasks like compiling, ripping, encoding, etc. and play games and surf the net while I'm waiting.
I was ripping cd's and playing ut2004 at the same time yesterday. Apparently that's one of the things that my Athlon 4800+ is good at. Back when I ran single core, it would hitch quite a bit while ripping CD's, but now I can rip two CD's, or do a kernel compile (using colinux), and run my window's games without noticing anything. So, yes, it's safe to say that if I can rip two CD's at once and play ut2004 that running 12 text editing apps, or email, and a few browser windows along with a game isn't a stretch.
First, you should have stopped at a Bachelor's in CS. You got sold a level education that you clearly do not need. Don't feel bad, that's their (the University's) job, to sell you education, but you probably should have done more research on whether or not you needed the degree. An MS in Comp Sci teaches you about algorithms and focuses more on the scientific aspect of computing, which is fine if that's what you want your career to be, but if what you want to do is write software, then a BS is more practical. So, go out, take an entry level position somwhere where they will allow you to advance quickly and then set to learn how to write software. Eventually you will get enough experience in software design that you will be able to advance and that extra piece of paper will probably help.
I would not try interviewing for a senior level position. You'll simply display your lack of understanding by attempting it. I highly doubt that you have the experience necessary for such a position. Computer science and software engineering are as far apart as theoretical physics and civil engineering. Sure, they both have the same foundations, but one is theoretical and research oriented, and the other is practical and design oriented. Just because you can handle advanced physics doesnt mean you can build bridges. Just because you have a detailed knowledge of algorithms doesn't mean that you can handle large software projects. Don't assume that you can take your Masters and go out and take the place of someone who has written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, it just doesn't work that way.
I suppose that this is true, but does it really matter? I program for a living, and guess how much difference it makes to me on a day to day basis? absolutely none. I have an ibook and an x86 PC, and the only difference I notice is that the ibook is really slow, but other than that, as a programmer, I don't notice the kludges that you are talking about. As an end user, I like backward compatibility. And, for 99.9999% of those of us out there who never see a line of assembly code except when we are running something through a debugger, what difference does it make? You can get worked up about any number of issues if you really want to, but why choose to worry about RISC vs CISC? It's pretty clear that it was a failed marketing gimmic that overpromised and underdelivered.
Also, the primary bottleneck in computing today is memory access. That's something that risc does not solve, and in fact makes a lot worse. RISC code is by it's very nature is bloated, often times taking two to three instructions to do what CISC can do in a single instruction, and as a result is more likely to overflow your L1 cache. CISC on the other hand can be very succint since you have many instructions to choose from. CISC also tends to compile quite a bit quicker than RISC code, which is a nice feature if you are writing applications.
I think the thing is, that Moore's law has made this discussion moot. Intel could include 10 8088's as bagagge and it wouldn't matter. Transistor counts have gone through the roof, so much so that they are now putting multiple core's on the same die, so who cares if we have a little bit of extra baggage, Moore's law is guaranteeing that the baggage is getting more and more negligable as time goes on. I imagine that in 5 years, this whole discussion will be moot, since they can just sell CPU's with different cores on the same die. Think of it, you could have your itanium on one core, and your Pentium IV on another, and everybody is happy.
In summary, RISC vs CISC is a moot issue. It was a marketing campaign that Apple lost. Hopefully some of the zealouts (and yes, that term is accurate, I had a coworker that would get red in the face when debating this topic) that have gotten into this discussion will realize this and quite wasting their time on it as I have just done...:)
I just thought that I would add, what makes learning new concepts even worse in the field of bioinformatics is that there aren't any books, or more accurately, very few. Most of the knowledge is contained in journal articles, or even worse, you just have to try to pick it up when people talk, because the research hasn't been published yet. Dejargonizing things and getting to the basic underlying concepts can take quite a while. It's very frustrating.
I've worked three jobs so far since I've been out of school (I tend not to hop jobs and like to stay for at least a few years). My experience working as a programmer in scientific programming (4 years in GIS data visualization software and nearly a year in bioinformatics) is that scientists and engineers are notoriously bad teachers. The biggest hurdle I have with new employment in a field where I have to acquire new concepts is the fact that no one will take the time to explain anything. You are on your own. Yes, I am given books, source code (which may or may not be documenteed), etc., but after that, it's up to me to figure it out. This can take an incredible amount of time.
This is probably why it takes longer to be productive as a scientist. We are getting much more precise with what we say. The introduction of computers, statistical methods, and mathematics into even traditionally soft sciences such as biology means that it takes that much longer to get a grasp of what is going on. I'm not sure if there is a way around this. However, one solution is that we soften up science and try to make it accessible. Another solution is to try to get rid of some of the pathological competitiveness that encourages scientist to keep their work inaccessible.
It's not necessarily that the concepts are difficult, it's also a problem of translating the jargon, and analytical methods of expressing these ideas into plain english.
BTW, I looked up DFT on google, ugghhh, I feel your pain.
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The people who paid for busses out of town after the flooding paid up front. There were stories of people who paid $100 for a ticket out of town, only to have their bus commandeered before it ever arrived. Again, before splitting hairs too much, I'm going say that I partially agree, our government sucks too, but that's no argument for privatization.
I suppose, but really, they were both (private and government) quite terrible. Before I work myself into a pigeonhole, I'm going to go ahead and make it clear that I don't think that government should be let off the hook. In fact, I hope that Bush is impeached, and that people at all levels are fired for their tragic incompetence. However, the focus is conveniently on government, and I think that people need to avoid making assumptions (i.e., that the free market would work "better").
Actually, I blame both. The system, as a whole, failed. Not just our economy, or our government, but both, and they failed miserably.
I guess I'll go ahead and point out that NO wasn't build below sea level to keep someone else from having to take the time to correct you...
Whereever there is a need, it is the job of a (good) economy to answer. This is a given. The free market is not a command economy. The invisible hand should have efficiently provided the optimal solution, instead, what we got was chaos. Compare this to Cuba's evacuation of 1.5 million people last year before Ivan. Cuba has quite a bit fewer resources, but managed just fine. Again, I'm not trying to say government is always efficient, clearly our current one is not. But, if we are going to be fair, then we shouldn't forget to look at the private sector. It's certainly not a given that we should get rid of government programs as the article implies.
Why wouldn't it be their job to transport people? They do own the public transporation, don't they? Are you saying we should hand over all control of public transportation to the government? If so, then you are making my point for me.
Look at it this way, if you hand over all control of transportation to private industry, then shouldn't it be their responsibility to transport people efficiently? Isn't this a valid test of the free market? If it isn't, then what is a valid test? The airline industry has been begging for government to lift regulations, and they've gotten what they want, so shouldn't they step up to the plate and take some of the blame? And why is it that these corporations become invisible when they close up shop and leave a bunch of poor people stranded? Why haven't they accepted ANY blame?
Either way, it's food for thought. The reality is that it's more complex than my original statement, and it's tough to tell where the private boardroom ends and the government office begins. However, let's not kid ourselves, handing this money and power into private hands isn't going to make things better. It will just provide an extra layer of insulation between the looters and the citizens of our country. Keeping these programs as part of the government will at least help retain some accountability. Remember, you aren't going to be a customer of the space program for a long time, so the only control you will have over what is going is through government.
They're called the transportation industry, i.e. bus, trains, and airplanes. The last two were started by gravy train government subsidies. However, when they are needed, they bail and close up early, leaving the majority of poor people, and even some well-to-do stranded. At least you see government pretending to take some blame. They're doing a terrible job of it, becuase the conservative administration doesn't take responsibility for much of anything, but the corporations, well, they're invisible. In fact, if you watched CNN's footage of looting, you would think that walmart was the biggest victim in all of this.
Leaving these problems up to industry is not the answer. The reason, it's obvious, because industry doesn't care about poor people.
Have you ever seen private industry step up and take responsibility for something? Anything? I know we have a bunch of douchebags in office, and I'd like to see them all impeached and in jail as soon as possible, but they're better than private industry, which somehow finds a way to become invisible any time we have a crisis. The answer to the problems caused by privatization is not to privatize more things. The obvious answer is to correct our mistakes and create functioning government.
Because private industry did such a great job of evacuating the city of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina. Let's turn over our space program to the free market and see how it handles it.
Does anybody ever notice how whenever the free market fails at something, the government steps in to take the blame, which provides further "evidence" that government is incompetent, which results in further reduction of government services, and more privatization. Then, when private industry screws up yet again, we blame government, and round and round we go. It's a nice circular argument. This is of course the problem with privatization, is that private industry cares about one thing, and that is profit. Markets are horribly inefficient at solving certain kinds of problems, such as the evacuation of the city of New Orleans (or space exploration, unless the only thing we're interested in is sending rich people into space). It would be nice if the free-marketeers in the White House understood this fact.
If you were reading what I wrote, you would notice that I NEVER said that people don't have a chance. It's pretty reprehensible that "a chance" is all that you think people deserve. Not a fair chance, but just a chance. Using your logic, a rigged game, a crappy education, lack of nutrition, etc., are ok, as long as people have "a chance" and a "kick in the ass".
My feeling is that in the future, perhaps decades from now, that the US will be regarded as a tragically failed experiment, and that the lesson learned will be that huge riches, combined with technology that makes it easy to monitor and track people, is a horrible and dangerous combination. I believe that eventually huge concentrations of wealth and power will be outlawed, as it's just too dangerous. That's if we're being optimistic, which I am. The pessmimistic view is that things will just get worse and no one will put up a fight. The naive view, is that there is no harm in allowing for immense wealth, and that people like Gates will just spend their money on toys.
As far as people being responsible for their actions, I agree, but you are underestimating the effects that poverty and deprivation of resources have on one's ability to make decisions. Without a level playing field, it is impossible to hold people completely responsible for their outcome.
This just isn't true. These positions are not unlimited. In fact, that was point. Our society is a giant pyramid, it would not function if everyone was wealthy. If they all went to community college, the cost of school would go up even higher, and wages for college grads would drop. The market would beat them over the head would with a stick until they relented and settled for less. I work in bioinformatics. We have a bunch of Chinese immigrants flooding my field. They aren't becoming rich like you suggest, despite working hard and being very good at what they do. Instead, they are flooding the market, and making a formerly lucrative field, research science, less and less attractive. For the most part, immigrant labor is very submissive, and willing to jump through an untold number of hoops to get their Phd's or hang onto their jobs. Not only do they have the market beating them into submission, but they have another stick, the threat of deportation if they flunk out or get fired, making them even more motivated. The result isn't a bunch of rich Chinese immigrants. The result has been Phd's making 35K a year.
Our life circumstances determine in large part who we are and what we become. Choices are constrained by these circumstances. It is overlooking a major fact of life to suggest that people who grow up poor and uneducated have the same choices, and ability to make choices that people who are educated and given the best of everything have.
The effects of malnutrition, abuse, neglect, and lack of educational opportunities are huge. It is dishonest and vile to blame someone who grows up in these circumstances for the outcome of their lives.
I know, I'm supposed to remember that they can all go to college in this great land of opportunity of ours. All 40 million of the poor in our country can sign up to go to Harvard tomorrow. I'm sure that there is room. All of those manual laborers can just stop being farmers, and landscapers, and burger flippers, etc., and we can all be rich, if we just keep our chin up and try harder. When we're all rich, we can all hire servants. And our servants, they'll be rich too, and all of our problems will be solved. Yep, all 250 million Americans can just do what they want, if we only try harder.
Since when have markets EVER worked the way you describe? Your proposition reminds me of my vegetarian friends who don't eat meat because they think that if we consume less meat, it will help solve world hunger problems. That's NOT why people are hungry, we throw food away every day in this country. We have more than enough surplus to feed the entire world. It's because markets are inefficient. If all Americans decided to quit eating meat tomorrow, that still wouldn't change the fact that the reason people go hungry is because they don't have money, and without money, you don't get to eat in a market based economy.
The same goes for your example of labor outsourcing. Corporations are not doing this to provide running water, etc. to third world countries. Only a small minority in India are benefitting from any of this outsourcing, the rest are just as poor as they ever were. It would be nice if corporations were actually installing infrastructure, but that's not reality. The reality is that they are doing the bare minimum, like making sure that the warehouses that the employees work in have electricity, and running water, but when those employees go home, they still live in the same 3rd world standards that they had before. Again, this is a small minority, the rest are living in poverty. The net effect of outsourcing has been to lower the standard of living, not to raise it. As soon as the standard of living gets to high, the corporations will move. The goal is to drive wages down to the lowest level. Small miniorities of rich people will benefit, both in the US and in the 3rd world, but everyone else will suffer.
You keep describing this as a process of wealth redistribution to the 3rd world, when the reality is that the wealth is being distributed to the rich. The way markets have worked, and the way that they have always worked, is that the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. The net effect of free trade is not redistribution of wealth to 3rd world countries, but is in fact to redistribute wealth out of the hands of the middle class and in to the hands of the upper class. I would quit thinking about this in terms of nationality, that only confuses the issue. Free trade's goal is not the redistribution of wealth between nations, but is in fact a policy that redistributes wealth between class. Making "India" or "China" richer means absolutely nothing. Nationalism no longer has meaning in this world of globalization. The proper way to view this and to gain understanding into why free trade proponents love it so much, is to view it in terms of class. When one does a class based analysis, and looks at what this policy is doing to each class (middle vs upper vs lower), it becomes obvious that around the world, free trade has taken money away from the middle and lower classes, and put it in the hands of the upper classes. The rich in India, China, US, etc. have gotten quite a bit richer treating and trading middle class labor as if they were commodities, and the poor have gotten quite a bit poorer as a result.
I think that's called sneakernet. When the ethernet goes down, just write a protocol that has employees write the data to floppy/cd/whatever and then transport the data on foot. :) That should work for a small company.
I'm not sure how useful any of the analogies have been. Most of them have served to make the issue more confusing. The one that was quoted in the earlier article describing logging on to a neighbors network as being equivalent to copying a window's CD was an extremely dishonest analogy. If one is the average window's (or mac) user, they may not even be aware of what network they are logged into. The reasonable conclusion that should be reached is that if it is possible for the majority of people to log in to a network due to no fault of their own, that the responsibility should be up to the owner to provide proper security.
I think the reality is that we are unsure of how we should deal with this because it's a new situation and most analogies don't apply to this. Wireless networks provide open access without even intruding on someone's property. Also, since the signals travel unencrypted over public airwaves, it's a legal gray area. If I broadcast unencrypted information over public airwaves outside of my property, should I be guaranteed security? Is it reasonable to assume that someone who provides no encryption wants a network to be kept private?
is if you find yourself going in the wrong direction, you double your speed. The war in Iraq has gotten us these results so far, and instead of pulling back, we double our speed, just brilliant. The obvious solution is to pull our troops out, but I doubt fanatics like you would ever figure that one out.
It reminds me of the drug war, which has made very little real progress, other than locking some people up, but if you ever ask a DEA agent, they'll tell you the lack of progress is a sign that we need to dedicate even MORE resources to the effort, not that it's a failed policy.
The fact is, if we gave everyone a wonderful education, that produced bright, motivated, eager go-getters, then our society would collapse. It might take a decade or two, but at some point, the social order would be ruined. So, instead, we have a system that allows for monsters to be in charge, and to ruin a certain amount of students, so that they go on to be janitors, or criminals, etc., and the system survives. Every once in a while, something goes horribly wrong and the media needs to pretend that our educational institutions are honorable, wonderful institutions. Instead, they put the blame on something else, like video games, or tv, etc. Don't get me wrong, for some, especially those who grow up in more affluent areas, education can be wonderful. It's just that if a monster does get in charge of a school or a class, we need to understand why they can stay there. The reason they can stay there is because society needs a certain amount of people to be at the bottom of the heap, and so it's really not a problem if a school, especially one in a poor area or a small town produces a bunch of beaten down, broken people. After all, someone has to work at walmart.
Think about it this way, if we had a system with well-paid teachers, where 90% of the students got out with high expectations, who would want to do the grunt work? Who would sweep floors, or work the cash register at walmart? Eventually the absurdity would be revealed and those whose expectations were dashed would want to change things.
Still, I just got the 4800+, and I must say that I'll never go back to single core. I really can't see how you could tell the difference between a 2.4 Ghz and 2.8 ghz athlon in games, they are both very fast, and having the extra core is worth it. I was able to rip two CD's at once, and play ut2004 without a single hitch. I couldn't even tell that the CD's were being ripped. The only annoying part was when cdex interrupted my game to tell me it was finished, but other than that, it was very fast. Kernel compiles are also faster, and I can now run compute intensive tasks like compiling, ripping, encoding, etc. and play games and surf the net while I'm waiting.
I was ripping cd's and playing ut2004 at the same time yesterday. Apparently that's one of the things that my Athlon 4800+ is good at. Back when I ran single core, it would hitch quite a bit while ripping CD's, but now I can rip two CD's, or do a kernel compile (using colinux), and run my window's games without noticing anything. So, yes, it's safe to say that if I can rip two CD's at once and play ut2004 that running 12 text editing apps, or email, and a few browser windows along with a game isn't a stretch.
First, you should have stopped at a Bachelor's in CS. You got sold a level education that you clearly do not need. Don't feel bad, that's their (the University's) job, to sell you education, but you probably should have done more research on whether or not you needed the degree. An MS in Comp Sci teaches you about algorithms and focuses more on the scientific aspect of computing, which is fine if that's what you want your career to be, but if what you want to do is write software, then a BS is more practical. So, go out, take an entry level position somwhere where they will allow you to advance quickly and then set to learn how to write software. Eventually you will get enough experience in software design that you will be able to advance and that extra piece of paper will probably help.
I would not try interviewing for a senior level position. You'll simply display your lack of understanding by attempting it. I highly doubt that you have the experience necessary for such a position. Computer science and software engineering are as far apart as theoretical physics and civil engineering. Sure, they both have the same foundations, but one is theoretical and research oriented, and the other is practical and design oriented. Just because you can handle advanced physics doesnt mean you can build bridges. Just because you have a detailed knowledge of algorithms doesn't mean that you can handle large software projects. Don't assume that you can take your Masters and go out and take the place of someone who has written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, it just doesn't work that way.
I suppose that this is true, but does it really matter? I program for a living, and guess how much difference it makes to me on a day to day basis? absolutely none. I have an ibook and an x86 PC, and the only difference I notice is that the ibook is really slow, but other than that, as a programmer, I don't notice the kludges that you are talking about. As an end user, I like backward compatibility. And, for 99.9999% of those of us out there who never see a line of assembly code except when we are running something through a debugger, what difference does it make? You can get worked up about any number of issues if you really want to, but why choose to worry about RISC vs CISC? It's pretty clear that it was a failed marketing gimmic that overpromised and underdelivered.
:)
Also, the primary bottleneck in computing today is memory access. That's something that risc does not solve, and in fact makes a lot worse. RISC code is by it's very nature is bloated, often times taking two to three instructions to do what CISC can do in a single instruction, and as a result is more likely to overflow your L1 cache. CISC on the other hand can be very succint since you have many instructions to choose from. CISC also tends to compile quite a bit quicker than RISC code, which is a nice feature if you are writing applications.
I think the thing is, that Moore's law has made this discussion moot. Intel could include 10 8088's as bagagge and it wouldn't matter. Transistor counts have gone through the roof, so much so that they are now putting multiple core's on the same die, so who cares if we have a little bit of extra baggage, Moore's law is guaranteeing that the baggage is getting more and more negligable as time goes on. I imagine that in 5 years, this whole discussion will be moot, since they can just sell CPU's with different cores on the same die. Think of it, you could have your itanium on one core, and your Pentium IV on another, and everybody is happy.
In summary, RISC vs CISC is a moot issue. It was a marketing campaign that Apple lost. Hopefully some of the zealouts (and yes, that term is accurate, I had a coworker that would get red in the face when debating this topic) that have gotten into this discussion will realize this and quite wasting their time on it as I have just done...
I just thought that I would add, what makes learning new concepts even worse in the field of bioinformatics is that there aren't any books, or more accurately, very few. Most of the knowledge is contained in journal articles, or even worse, you just have to try to pick it up when people talk, because the research hasn't been published yet. Dejargonizing things and getting to the basic underlying concepts can take quite a while. It's very frustrating.
I've worked three jobs so far since I've been out of school (I tend not to hop jobs and like to stay for at least a few years). My experience working as a programmer in scientific programming (4 years in GIS data visualization software and nearly a year in bioinformatics) is that scientists and engineers are notoriously bad teachers. The biggest hurdle I have with new employment in a field where I have to acquire new concepts is the fact that no one will take the time to explain anything. You are on your own. Yes, I am given books, source code (which may or may not be documenteed), etc., but after that, it's up to me to figure it out. This can take an incredible amount of time.
This is probably why it takes longer to be productive as a scientist. We are getting much more precise with what we say. The introduction of computers, statistical methods, and mathematics into even traditionally soft sciences such as biology means that it takes that much longer to get a grasp of what is going on. I'm not sure if there is a way around this. However, one solution is that we soften up science and try to make it accessible. Another solution is to try to get rid of some of the pathological competitiveness that encourages scientist to keep their work inaccessible.
It's not necessarily that the concepts are difficult, it's also a problem of translating the jargon, and analytical methods of expressing these ideas into plain english.
BTW, I looked up DFT on google, ugghhh, I feel your pain.