Trueness. The NASA press releases are usually headed up by some fluff that former sports reporters can comprehend, with a little more depth behind that for the average "hard news" reporter... they know the true techie reporters are going to raid their web sites and get the real dirt.
Now, not all of NASA operates that way... JPL can put out some potent stuff....
I'd really like to see a well-monitored voucher program tried somewhere. Some supplemental appropriation, so the standard education lobby couldn't scream "The schools are being robbed!" (although they will anyway - "That money should go to schools!") over a meaningful period (4-6 years). Do it right, get good evidence - then sit down and figure out what to do, based on those results, and not just a bunch of people engaging in knee-jerk reactions to the latest edu-fad.
Uh, huh. Riiiight. Attention, attention - this is NOT a buyer's market! There is NOT a glut of schools out there competing for your kids and their dollars - even at the college level there's not much meaningful competition. In fact, if more private schools were to open where I live, the public schools would probably love it - they'd have to put up fewer portables, and might even be able to scale their building programs back.
IF we close the public schools, where are the students going to go? Anywhere they can. Just like child care at the preschool level, the parents who can afford better send their kids to "preschools" (like my daughter's Montessori program) and those who can't send theirs to "day care centers" that offer far less.
We'll end up about where we are today - the rich will be competing to send their kids to "the best" schools, and the not-rich will be doing everything they can to get by - which means their kids will get a worse education, doesn't it? But then, what incentive will the rich have to improve everyone's lot overall by forcing improvement on those sub-standard schools?
Hmmm... you posit an extreme. Apart from the fact that I can't ever recall hearing of a legislative body voting itself out of existence (might be nice occasionally, though)... you don't give enough details to make me feel comfortable with your result. The worst a local school board could do in most areas is to abdicate its responsibility and let the state take over the local schools. In a few exeriments around the country (don't have the references here, sorry) there have been attempts to let private contractors and companies take over the public schools, most of which have had mediocre results. Simply closing all the public schools simply won't work.
If I imply that elections should be single-issue things, then I retract that implication. However, the election process is the primary way to exert pressure on these institutions. Where's the accountability if a private corporation takes over the schools? Don't tell me it's in a contract - I know too many lawyers. Don't tell me it's in their profit/loss - all I have to do is look at industries that routinely "lose" or "barely make" money (Hollywood, old-style utilities) to see a problem with that.
Now, legislatures have their own problems - special interests and lobbyists, corruption, incompetence... but if people care enough, they can get together and make an impact, even if it's only in their own district/county/state. Don't think there's enough student accountability? Write letters for required testing before graduation (a not-so-hot idea, BTW). Don't think teachers are competent? Organize petitions for teacher testing and standard teacher accredidation. Don't think there are enough teachers? Stand outside the local Safeway with a sign and get people to agree to that local option sales tax that would go to raise their pay. Don't like the curriculum in your daughter's social studies class? Go to the school board, get on the agenda, and speak - and if that doesn't make you happy, get off your duff and run for office. That's citizenship, which is how the public schools remain accountable to the public.
Where, exactly, is the accountability in privatizing education?
It's not. There are lots of private schools out there - but they're not the only game in town.
It's when the public schools disappear that we realize exactly how few people those private schools can support... and how few people can afford to go to them.
That's such a load. There is accountability - it's called an election. In most parts of the country, you vote for your school board. Even in the parts where you don't vote for the school board, you vote for the state legislature. If you care, then this is where you make a difference - the political process.
Don't start thinking that a corporation is going to be more responsive to the public's desires... unless you want your schools to be run like HMOs.
The public school model is fundamentally and hopelessly flawed, and that won't change regardless of how much money is dumped into it. I'd rather see schools competing for students than the one size fits all, bureaucratic monopolies we have today in the U.S.
Unfortunately, noone has come up with a mechanism that allows everyone to go to school without the public school system.
Do we really have one-size-fits-all schools? Heck no. We have magnet programs, and special education, and "tracked" curriculums. What we don't have are enough resources, in terms of personnel, facilities, and supplies, to enable 5-children-per-gifted teacher learning experiences.
Personally, I think the schools we have today are a remarkable example of the free market in action. We can't find enough qualified, capable teachers because those individuals are also gifted enough that they can find better-paying, less-strenuous, more-respected jobs elsewhere.
You want to blame someone for our schools? Blame the parents who:
- Don't care enough to be involved
- Won't pay for the public schools (through taxes, etc.)
- Use their kids' scholastic performance as a competition with other parents.
The ones who don't get involved - well, there's not a lot you can do. The ones who are TOO involved - in the wrong ways("How dare you give my little Johnny detention! You're not challenging him enough to make him pay attention in your class - it's your fault he talks out of turn!") need to be "sentenced" to teach for a month - that'd educate them on those "cushy teaching jobs."
Wow - that sounds bitter - and I'm not even a teacher.
I'll agree with this analogy. Software engineering is "engineering" in the most primitive sense, now... we have some fundamental concepts, worked out over the last fifty years, and some others that we've adapted from other disciplines (architecture, library science, ergonomics). We still lack an internal classification system - everything's software, be it Web, embedded, accounting... we keep trying to apply the same tools and principles to these disparate problem domains, and in the end it too often seems to come down to who can hack fastest to get to market first.
Earlier, there was discussion of the relative maturity of electrical and computer hardware engineering. EE is only about 100 years old, as a discipline, and computer hardware engineering (a sub-discipline of EE) is only 50 or so. What have they learned in that time?
How to construct primitives (memory cells, NAND gates, FPGAs). How to put them together to address individual issues. The constraints surrounding their use. They have a body of reference works, which they can use to look up the fundamental principles to apply to their calculations.
Computer Science, and software engineering, are still at a more primitive level. True, we have Knuth's compendium of primitives. The concepts of object- and component-oriented software development are emerging from the morass, but how much software out there is really OO? (A hint - just because you used a C++ compiler, it ain't necessarily OO.)
In colonial America, almost anyone could build a one-room house - few were architects and engineers who could build assembly halls, docks, bridges, and the rest of the infrastructure required for a growing colony. I get the feeling most of us are "programmers," skilled at cutting down trees, making boards, and nailing them together, but not so good with the drafting blueprints part.
There's a lot less tolerance of crap in digital design. We all b!tch and moan when Intel has an internal floating-point error, and scream for recalls, but we accept blue screens and core dumps on a daily basis. The evolutionary pressures on hardware have been much more quality-driven than software, where features seem to be the main driver (IMHO).
The thing that ticks me off about this, is that it's already being done. The Digitized Sky Survey is a survey of all parts of the sky from a couple of authoritative sources. The Medium Deep Survey is Hubble data, gathered in a sort of parasitic mode (roughly analogous to how Seti@Home gets their data - but IANAAstronomer - that's an orders-of-magnitude oversimplification). BOTH are available for access over the Web.
Apart from having more observatories publish their data (most already do), having a central point to index it (not really here today, but if you want it you can generally find it - if it's not in the sky survey, it's not in the sky), and having M$ run things (please, no!), what does he hope to accomplish?
When I "inherited" responsibility for an entire site (first guy quit, second admin was put on bed rest for her pregnancy), I ran out and bought BOTH these books. I thought they complemented one another well.
You need government to have people smart enough to not get snowed by the contractors. The US Government has spent the last 10 years or so moving "real work" to contractors, reducing their own headcount and turning their people into overseers of contractors. As Contractor Scum myself, I feel for my guvvie friends when they're stuck reviewing the pounds of paper their contractors generate to make sure the contractors are:
1) Doing only what they were contracted to do
2) Actually doing what they were contracted to do
3) Not robbing the guvvies blind while doing (1) and/or (2).
Then there are the jobs that we might not want contractors in... little things like law enforcement, the IRS, etc. But wait - too late! They're there already!
It gives them incentive to stay in the government and not take one of those cushy contractor jobs. You said it yourself, your company's been "raiding" gov't organizations - the government, slow-moving beast that it is, has decided that all those pinpricks are bleeding it of some of the folks it (surprise, surprise) really needs.
I have a buddy who's a GS12, and he'll be lucky to see 10% off this... that 33% is apparently for the lucky entry-levels, who're going to get suckered into government jobs and be locked there for life.
What features do you feel are missing from Bastille as it stands today, and aren't in the roadmap you have for the immediate future?
What elements of system security do you feel should be part of the "core" (if not the kernel) of the operating system, and why (in your opinions) aren't they there already?
Methodology, process, toolset... they're all tied together. Where to start, where to start....
In the Days of Yore when I was an undergrad, they worried about teaching us Structured Design, or maybe Functional Decomposition. Painful stuff, but still useful for developing algorithms.
The current technology supports Object-Oriented software development, although much of what's called O-O these days is C compiled with a C++ compiler, where the structs are named "class." The Unified Modeling Language seems to have finally put an end to the Notation Wars of the 80s and 90s, and allows you to document your design in sundry ways. The Three Amigos at Rational (Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobsen, in the order Rat. bought 'em) wrote it, and the OMG has accepted it.
Now - how do you use it? Rational has their Unified Process, which is a big-momma full-up kill-rain-forests-for-documentation Formal Process, and then there are the other folks like Kent Beck with eXtreme Programming and Peter Coad with Feature-Driven Development and Alistair Cockburn with his Crystal processes....
So - advice for the young - learn UML, learn Java, go to a bookstore and pick a basic OO book and read it, then pick another and read it, then do the stuff that's common between them. Out in the Real World, they'll want to retrain you anyway:-).
I hate reading half a dozen files and having to figure out half a dozen different sets of personal coding quirks. I've gotten so I can almost identify contributors to some projects by their coding style - which is not, to me, a desirable characteristic.
When I'm leading a development team (on crass commercial software development) I try to get some standards for comments, indenting, and naming conventions in place early on, and point out discrepancies during code reviews. Yeah, there's more typing when you have to name a class for the piece of the system it's in - but it's a heck of a lot better than having the C++ preprocessor "pick" a class with a colliding name (or even worse, having some static data element collide).
Folks may complain about the coding standards you hold them to, but it's obvious from the quality of the product that it's working. Bravo!
This toy's been in development a while - the web site's Solotrek.com. Hope they can make it fly - and navigable by mere mortals, not just Special Forces folk.
Now - I want one of THESE, integrated with one of these from the Ultimate Chair article the other day - I think the Aura model, with the air curculation and rotation and customizable overhead lighting... yeah... this is getting closer.
I used Nedit once, years ago and I'm glad to see it's still around. I see from your pages it's still X-focused, Motif-based, although it's been ported to Windoze and the Mac.
My question: has there been consideration of rebaselining it into a truly "portable" language or library set, such as Java with Swing or one of the other "lightweight" open-source multiOS frameworks, or will it stay X-focused for the forseeable future?
In what way does "open source" ensure safety/reliability/security? The algorithm's the thing being published - since it's published, publicly, the world can try to attack it.
It's closed, proprietary implementations that I worry about. If the algorithm has a back door, there's a good chance someone will find it... if the source code has a back door, only serious hackers will have a shot at finding it... if you can't see the source, who do you trust?
Somebody at S3 has been reading/. and decided to see if all those loud, opinionated geeks were willing to pay $1500 for what they said they wanted?
Now, if only I had something to DO with that kind of toy (that wouldn't get me killed by my Wif for spending $1500 on that instead of an anniversary present for her)....
The GE writeup says that power plants are running in the 35-45% range, and you "typically" lose about 8% in transmission, giving 27-37% efficiency at the end of the circuit (your home).
Their unit, they claim, is approx. 38% efficient - so you're breaking even or coming out a little ahead on the generation efficiency front. They don't mention that utilities are buying their fuels in bulk (at rates which average less than we home folk - although it's more subject to fluctuation). And their cost calculator is mysteriously "removed" (hmmmmm).
Wonder if I can plug a few solar panels into this system, too? Keep my gas bill down during daytime and hot weather, use their power converter and batteries... maybe I need to replan my Dream House again.
BTW - as of noon, their site is/.'ed again. Happened last night when this story first came on (I was trying until about 11:30 EDT), worked fine until around lunchtime on the Eastern Seaboard, and now their servers are Mostly Dead again. The/. Effect Strikes Again!
Some of the newer homes are being built with combo water heater/furnace systems where the hot water serves to heat air quickly, and the heat of the furnace heats the water as it heats the house. Now, let's see one of these tied into that kind of system... generate home heat, water heat, and power in one nice unit...
One of the main pains in DII COE is called "segmentation" - it's not fun at all. Naturally, being good members of the military-industrial complex, companies involved in the spec figured out how to make cash off it.
The Segmentation Center, operated by SAIC, will do the vast majority of the DII COE (and JTA - don't forget about that Joint Technical Architecture that DII COE came from) compliance and segmentation work for you.
Now, in the DoD Make vs. Buy world, shelling out your program cash may not look good - but it's cheaper to have these guys do the work and have it pass certification the first time than training your own folk up, doing the work, and running a good chance of blowing it when it goes up for review and certification.
And yeah, I work for SAIC - but not for these guys. I've just used 'em - made this decision myself a LOONG time ago.
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Now, not all of NASA operates that way... JPL can put out some potent stuff....
I'd really like to see a well-monitored voucher program tried somewhere. Some supplemental appropriation, so the standard education lobby couldn't scream "The schools are being robbed!" (although they will anyway - "That money should go to schools!") over a meaningful period (4-6 years). Do it right, get good evidence - then sit down and figure out what to do, based on those results, and not just a bunch of people engaging in knee-jerk reactions to the latest edu-fad.
IF we close the public schools, where are the students going to go? Anywhere they can. Just like child care at the preschool level, the parents who can afford better send their kids to "preschools" (like my daughter's Montessori program) and those who can't send theirs to "day care centers" that offer far less.
We'll end up about where we are today - the rich will be competing to send their kids to "the best" schools, and the not-rich will be doing everything they can to get by - which means their kids will get a worse education, doesn't it? But then, what incentive will the rich have to improve everyone's lot overall by forcing improvement on those sub-standard schools?
This is an improvement how?
If I imply that elections should be single-issue things, then I retract that implication. However, the election process is the primary way to exert pressure on these institutions. Where's the accountability if a private corporation takes over the schools? Don't tell me it's in a contract - I know too many lawyers. Don't tell me it's in their profit/loss - all I have to do is look at industries that routinely "lose" or "barely make" money (Hollywood, old-style utilities) to see a problem with that.
Now, legislatures have their own problems - special interests and lobbyists, corruption, incompetence... but if people care enough, they can get together and make an impact, even if it's only in their own district/county/state. Don't think there's enough student accountability? Write letters for required testing before graduation (a not-so-hot idea, BTW). Don't think teachers are competent? Organize petitions for teacher testing and standard teacher accredidation. Don't think there are enough teachers? Stand outside the local Safeway with a sign and get people to agree to that local option sales tax that would go to raise their pay. Don't like the curriculum in your daughter's social studies class? Go to the school board, get on the agenda, and speak - and if that doesn't make you happy, get off your duff and run for office. That's citizenship, which is how the public schools remain accountable to the public.
Where, exactly, is the accountability in privatizing education?
It's when the public schools disappear that we realize exactly how few people those private schools can support... and how few people can afford to go to them.
Don't start thinking that a corporation is going to be more responsive to the public's desires... unless you want your schools to be run like HMOs.
Unfortunately, noone has come up with a mechanism that allows everyone to go to school without the public school system.
Do we really have one-size-fits-all schools? Heck no. We have magnet programs, and special education, and "tracked" curriculums. What we don't have are enough resources, in terms of personnel, facilities, and supplies, to enable 5-children-per-gifted teacher learning experiences.
Personally, I think the schools we have today are a remarkable example of the free market in action. We can't find enough qualified, capable teachers because those individuals are also gifted enough that they can find better-paying, less-strenuous, more-respected jobs elsewhere.
You want to blame someone for our schools? Blame the parents who:
- Don't care enough to be involved
- Won't pay for the public schools (through taxes, etc.)
- Use their kids' scholastic performance as a competition with other parents.
The ones who don't get involved - well, there's not a lot you can do. The ones who are TOO involved - in the wrong ways("How dare you give my little Johnny detention! You're not challenging him enough to make him pay attention in your class - it's your fault he talks out of turn!") need to be "sentenced" to teach for a month - that'd educate them on those "cushy teaching jobs."
Wow - that sounds bitter - and I'm not even a teacher.
Nothing wrong with x86 hardware - if it's in a Beowulf cluster....
(*flees*)
Earlier, there was discussion of the relative maturity of electrical and computer hardware engineering. EE is only about 100 years old, as a discipline, and computer hardware engineering (a sub-discipline of EE) is only 50 or so. What have they learned in that time?
How to construct primitives (memory cells, NAND gates, FPGAs). How to put them together to address individual issues. The constraints surrounding their use. They have a body of reference works, which they can use to look up the fundamental principles to apply to their calculations.
Computer Science, and software engineering, are still at a more primitive level. True, we have Knuth's compendium of primitives. The concepts of object- and component-oriented software development are emerging from the morass, but how much software out there is really OO? (A hint - just because you used a C++ compiler, it ain't necessarily OO.)
In colonial America, almost anyone could build a one-room house - few were architects and engineers who could build assembly halls, docks, bridges, and the rest of the infrastructure required for a growing colony. I get the feeling most of us are "programmers," skilled at cutting down trees, making boards, and nailing them together, but not so good with the drafting blueprints part.
There's a lot less tolerance of crap in digital design. We all b!tch and moan when Intel has an internal floating-point error, and scream for recalls, but we accept blue screens and core dumps on a daily basis. The evolutionary pressures on hardware have been much more quality-driven than software, where features seem to be the main driver (IMHO).
Apart from having more observatories publish their data (most already do), having a central point to index it (not really here today, but if you want it you can generally find it - if it's not in the sky survey, it's not in the sky), and having M$ run things (please, no!), what does he hope to accomplish?
When I "inherited" responsibility for an entire site (first guy quit, second admin was put on bed rest for her pregnancy), I ran out and bought BOTH these books. I thought they complemented one another well.
1) Doing only what they were contracted to do
2) Actually doing what they were contracted to do
3) Not robbing the guvvies blind while doing (1) and/or (2).
Then there are the jobs that we might not want contractors in... little things like law enforcement, the IRS, etc. But wait - too late! They're there already!
I have a buddy who's a GS12, and he'll be lucky to see 10% off this... that 33% is apparently for the lucky entry-levels, who're going to get suckered into government jobs and be locked there for life.
What features do you feel are missing from Bastille as it stands today, and aren't in the roadmap you have for the immediate future?
What elements of system security do you feel should be part of the "core" (if not the kernel) of the operating system, and why (in your opinions) aren't they there already?
In the Days of Yore when I was an undergrad, they worried about teaching us Structured Design, or maybe Functional Decomposition. Painful stuff, but still useful for developing algorithms.
The current technology supports Object-Oriented software development, although much of what's called O-O these days is C compiled with a C++ compiler, where the structs are named "class." The Unified Modeling Language seems to have finally put an end to the Notation Wars of the 80s and 90s, and allows you to document your design in sundry ways. The Three Amigos at Rational (Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobsen, in the order Rat. bought 'em) wrote it, and the OMG has accepted it.
Now - how do you use it? Rational has their Unified Process, which is a big-momma full-up kill-rain-forests-for-documentation Formal Process, and then there are the other folks like Kent Beck with eXtreme Programming and Peter Coad with Feature-Driven Development and Alistair Cockburn with his Crystal processes....
So - advice for the young - learn UML, learn Java, go to a bookstore and pick a basic OO book and read it, then pick another and read it, then do the stuff that's common between them. Out in the Real World, they'll want to retrain you anyway :-).
I hate reading half a dozen files and having to figure out half a dozen different sets of personal coding quirks. I've gotten so I can almost identify contributors to some projects by their coding style - which is not, to me, a desirable characteristic.
When I'm leading a development team (on crass commercial software development) I try to get some standards for comments, indenting, and naming conventions in place early on, and point out discrepancies during code reviews. Yeah, there's more typing when you have to name a class for the piece of the system it's in - but it's a heck of a lot better than having the C++ preprocessor "pick" a class with a colliding name (or even worse, having some static data element collide).
Folks may complain about the coding standards you hold them to, but it's obvious from the quality of the product that it's working. Bravo!
This toy's been in development a while - the web site's Solotrek.com. Hope they can make it fly - and navigable by mere mortals, not just Special Forces folk.
Now - I want one of THESE, integrated with one of these from the Ultimate Chair article the other day - I think the Aura model, with the air curculation and rotation and customizable overhead lighting... yeah... this is getting closer.
My question: has there been consideration of rebaselining it into a truly "portable" language or library set, such as Java with Swing or one of the other "lightweight" open-source multiOS frameworks, or will it stay X-focused for the forseeable future?
It's closed, proprietary implementations that I worry about. If the algorithm has a back door, there's a good chance someone will find it... if the source code has a back door, only serious hackers will have a shot at finding it... if you can't see the source, who do you trust?
Now, if only I had something to DO with that kind of toy (that wouldn't get me killed by my Wif for spending $1500 on that instead of an anniversary present for her)....
Their unit, they claim, is approx. 38% efficient - so you're breaking even or coming out a little ahead on the generation efficiency front. They don't mention that utilities are buying their fuels in bulk (at rates which average less than we home folk - although it's more subject to fluctuation). And their cost calculator is mysteriously "removed" (hmmmmm).
Wonder if I can plug a few solar panels into this system, too? Keep my gas bill down during daytime and hot weather, use their power converter and batteries... maybe I need to replan my Dream House again.
BTW - as of noon, their site is /.'ed again. Happened last night when this story first came on (I was trying until about 11:30 EDT), worked fine until around lunchtime on the Eastern Seaboard, and now their servers are Mostly Dead again. The /. Effect Strikes Again!
Some of the newer homes are being built with combo water heater/furnace systems where the hot water serves to heat air quickly, and the heat of the furnace heats the water as it heats the house. Now, let's see one of these tied into that kind of system... generate home heat, water heat, and power in one nice unit...
The Segmentation Center, operated by SAIC, will do the vast majority of the DII COE (and JTA - don't forget about that Joint Technical Architecture that DII COE came from) compliance and segmentation work for you.
Now, in the DoD Make vs. Buy world, shelling out your program cash may not look good - but it's cheaper to have these guys do the work and have it pass certification the first time than training your own folk up, doing the work, and running a good chance of blowing it when it goes up for review and certification.
And yeah, I work for SAIC - but not for these guys. I've just used 'em - made this decision myself a LOONG time ago.