Does this sort of thing cover both the aging of the body and the brain? What's the gain in living to be 150 if your brain stops functioning at any sort of useful level at age 70? Yeah, "lots of people" are still firing on all mental cylinders at age 70, but most are not. If everyone is alive up to age 150 but is a non-productive consumer of stuff starting at age 70 this whole "live long and prosper" thing will be a total nightmare. Even if brain aging is held in check, do we have the resources to support that many human beings on this planet?
My working Macs (at the office) are still on Snow Leopard, but my home systems are newly bought and are stuck on (now) Mountain Lion. The two Lions are broken in many ways. The two that I dislike most are the "looks just like your paper calendar" craziness that was overflowing the whole UI and whatever it is that they've done with memory management that causes 4GB to be too little to really work on. This last one gripes me because I bought a 4GB MacBook Air because (silly me) 4GB had been more than plenty for my Snow Leopard systems. I had to bump the wife's MacBook Pro up to 16GB so she wouldn't keep running into the spinning beachball after a day's work, something I never run into with 4GB Snow Leopard systems after weeks of heavy lifting. I will be switching to Mavericks at the.1 release point hoping that both of these will be improved if not fixed.
My company is located very near Microsoft's Redmond campus, and the situation is the same here. MS runs a large fleet of various people-carrying vehicles that pick up Microsofties all around the area. All the while the mass transit that serves the rest of us is going downhill fast. Every time I turn around MS is working hard to avoid paying more taxes. Gotta love those guys.
I see a few mentions of FORTRAN, but they're all modded low. I've been working as a researchers/roll-your-own-code programmers for 40 years now. I've written so much FORTRAN code over that period that I pretty much dream in FORTRAN. Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. Anyway, if you want to do serious research support work you should learn FORTRAN in general and HPF (High-Performance FORTRAN) in particular. If you're any kind of a decent programmer you should be able to pick this up fairly easily, but for street cred in the scientific research computer-support business you'd better get some FORTRAN chops.
A year in prison for the crime of fixing a vote while not being a professional political operative. At least the kid knows he's got a shot at a good job when he gets out. Better prospects than if he had finished his program at Cal State San Marcos.
I've seen HAM radio at it's best, and how it can be taken out by any idiot with enough broadcast power. I was in Puerto Rico when a bad hurricane hit the island and wiped out all communications over most of the island. A good friend was a HAM operator, and he linked up with a semi-formal network of HAM operators along the east coast that activates whenever there's a hurricane disaster. These people provided the only communications for large numbers of people for several days, and were instrumental in saving lives. At one point, however, one pin-headed yokel got on the frequency the net was using and rebroadcast AM radio music with a lot of watts behind it. They finally got this guy off the air (with some FCC help), but he hindered the net for almost a day.
The HAM community does a lot for many others who are not HAMs, and to open their bands up to individuals who only see dollar signs everywhere and only think of their own "rights" to do whatever they damn well please would be both a travesty and a serious mistake.
Simply put, they stick around because it's a good-paying job in an economy where there aren't that many available. Your friend bailed 10 years ago, back when jobs for people in these fields were a lot more plentiful. NASA became a giant jobs-and-pork operation years ago, and was one of the original "welfare for whitecoats" agencies (whitecoats as in lab coats). Any engineer or scientist with a NASA job these days hangs on as long as they can. Mortgages gotta be paid, and kids gotta be fed.
I am a long-time bleeding-heart liberal type, and while I am aghast at what we’ve given up in the name of The War on Terrorism I can see the usefulness, and perhaps even the imperative, for the US to collect and analyze data of this sort. If, and a very important if, the use of the data is carefully monitored by third parties and there are clear guidelines for collection, protection, and use of the data. Back in the Good Old Days of the 20th Century enemies were spatially located (for the most part). Spy satellites and spy boots-on-the-ground could be and were used to keep track of what people who wanted to do us harm were up to (in theory, anyway). These could also be used on US citizens, and there were pretty clear rules about not doing so (rules that were, admittedly, overlooked or circumvented at times). These days, the people who need to be watched are all over the world and are best tracked via lines of communication, most importantly cell phone and internet technologies. That’s what this is all about, keeping track of what’s going on so there are few surprises like the 9/11 fiasco.
Now, can this be misused? You betcha it can. Faster than you can say Nixon (or your favorite Bad Guy’s name). However, to NOT collect and analyze these data is a bad idea as well. As always, there’s no perfect solution. I think those data need to be collected and analyzed to keep an eye on what’s happening, but we also need more transparency on the checks-and-balances put in place to make sure the data are used only for very clear purposes. Can this be done in today’s highly politicized, the-other-side-is-stupid, political environment? I don’t know, but I do think we need to try.
Things that caught my eye were (1) iCloud keychain to allow better mobile-system tracking of passwords within the iOS and OS X framework, (2) iBooks on Mac (FINALLY!), (3) some expanded multitasking in iOS 7 (although it's not clear if it's really extended capabilities over iOS 6 or just a spiffier UI), and (4) Airdrop from within iOS 7 to nearby devices. The new Mac Pro line looks sharp, and I definitely lust for one even if I don't need one.
I agree completely about science running mostly on *nix for heavy lifting, but what about desktop? I have given up on the Linux desktop for reasons stated by others in this thread, and use OS X for my desktop. Unfortunately, OS X has been trending towards becoming iOS on the desktop, which I hate, so I've looking at (shudder) Windows 7. If MS hadn't biffed so badly on Windows 8 (making the same mistake Apple appears to be making, trying to make the desktop look and act like a big cellphone) I'd be seriously looking at a Windows desktop (still with *nix doing the heavy lifting).
Is "safe online (PUT YOUR SERVICE HERE)" as much an oxymoron as the much-malinged "military intellegence" back in the '60s? I see lots of stories about both sides of online voting, but I've not seen an answer to the basic question of "is it possible to have a safe hack-proof online voting system." I don't mean an assessment of whether Siebold or any of the other idiots in this market have fool-proof systems, but whether or not voting can be done safely online even if Brother Stallman designed it. My own feeling is that it's like putting something critical such as access to power grids online - not a good idea unless there's no other way to get what you need. I don't really see what's so hard about schlepping down to your local school and voting once a year or so. If that's too hard for you, don't bother voting because the hard work of making an informed choice is likely beyond your capabilities as well. (Does not apply to people who can't get to a voting booth for several of many good reasons, and mail-in ballots has worked for these people for decades.)
Started with punch-card (not IBM format) programming a Wang desktop beast, hand-inserting one card at a time. Rebooting (which was needed more often than I care to admit) required walking down the hall to the closet where the "brains" of the thing lived. I then graduated to a PDP-8 that was sitting in a corner waiting to be installed for a remote-access telescope, programming by entering Basic commands via a TTY. Finally they let me at the observatory's new CDC 6600, reading data from paper tapes (down from the mountain) and programs from punch-card decks. That's when I learned Fortran (II), which is still my main language. I also had to walk 12 miles to work in the snow every day (in Tucson). The alternative was to wait for the stage coach.
This really makes me feel like retiring! I worked at the USAF Global Weather Center (AFGWC) near Omaha in the 1970s where there was this mysterious computer referred to as a TIP which plugged into an even more mysterious ARPANET thing. We'd hang 9-track tapes and ship data back to research and archive centers on the east coast once a day. As a 2nd LT my time was deemed cheap enough to spend babysitting the transfer process (which often broke down). Time flies when you're on the 'net.
Keuffel and Esser (K+E) have just announced their new electronic, cloud-accessible slide rule. Made of recycled circuit boards and faced with titanium recycled from old Soviet submarines, these babies can do just about anything with at least three-digit accuracy. Give-or-take a power of 10.
This is how Government funding works. I was at a workshop on the then-new field of space weather forecasting in the mid 1990s where the keynote address was given by Dr. Joe Friday, at the time the head of the NWS. He pointed out that we would see no serious funding from Congress until there was the space-weather equivalent of a train wreck that kills many voters, or costs the monied interests lots of dinero. (Joe later lost his job when a non-forecastable flood in the mid-west that exceeded the 100-year flood levels wasn't correctly forecast. In this case, the solution was of the Shoot the Messenger variety since the real cause of the bad flooding was lousy planning by the Corps of Engineers.) The local government version of this is not putting a stoplight at a bad intersection until someone, preferably a cute child or pregnant mother, is killed there.
So, if everyone hates him why is he still the AG? I've heard nothing from the executive branch that event hints that he's in trouble with The Boss, and with the opportunity to switch horses at the start of the new (and final) term, why did Obama keep him on? That's the question.
Since Day 1 of the Obama presidency I've wondered about our Attorney General and the whole attitude and actions of the DOJ. At least once a month they do something that seems counter to what I think Obama and the Democratic Party stand for, and there's no outcry from either. Is Holder like an earlier DOJ Bad Boy (J. Edgar Hoover) in that he has a closetful of incriminating evidence on every politician in DC? The entire bureaucratic structure that is the DOJ needs to be cleaned out and re-staffed, pretty much from the ground up. I don't know if this is carry-forward from people buried deep in the DOJ during the Bush the Lesser years, or if this really is a reflection of what Holder, and perhaps his nominal bosses, want to see happen? I don't want to sound all paranoid about this, but I am.
The one time I wish I had mod points I don't. There are many of us "tired" folks out here, but I don't think we're in for any relief any time soon because it's the ADHD teenage Valley Girl market that seems to be driving where OS development goes these days. As I sit before my Mountain Lion OS X box at home I'm constantly reminded how much better my older/slower (hardware wise) Snow Leopard box at work is. I give Apple one more try at turning things around with their next major OS upgrade, and if it's another big step towards iOS I'm putting Snow Leopard on all my Apple boxes and planning for life as a techno hermit.
A lot of "professional" users of computers (doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc) seem to think that they gotta have really special software to handle everything they do, because everything they do is so special. Much of this is due to people who think they're smart being duped by people who are smarter into thinking they need special software. Is the solution here that these professionals need to do a better job of buying their IT support in the first place? Admittedly, there is certainly some software that has to be written for very narrow and specialized needs, but a lot of these needs can be met by pretty much off-the-shelf solutions implemented by people who know what they're doing. I think these professionals start off by trying to do it themselves (because they are smart, you know?), find that it's not as easy as they thought, and then buy into the pitch that they need REALLY smart IT people doing specialized stuff for them. I'd laugh at all this, but it's part of why our health care costs so damn much.
Anyone who thinks that DOD and NASA can work together on anything without it costing far more than it should before imploding due to inter-agency bickering and turf wars should check on the history of the NPOESS weather satellite program (although they did have lots of "help" from NOAA on that debacle). This will be particularly true if all involved see this as a cash cow in these days of waning budgets. Just assign it to one agency, make them responsible if they muck it up, and set up a truly independent oversight group to keep an eye on where the money really goes.
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Does this sort of thing cover both the aging of the body and the brain? What's the gain in living to be 150 if your brain stops functioning at any sort of useful level at age 70? Yeah, "lots of people" are still firing on all mental cylinders at age 70, but most are not. If everyone is alive up to age 150 but is a non-productive consumer of stuff starting at age 70 this whole "live long and prosper" thing will be a total nightmare. Even if brain aging is held in check, do we have the resources to support that many human beings on this planet?
My working Macs (at the office) are still on Snow Leopard, but my home systems are newly bought and are stuck on (now) Mountain Lion. The two Lions are broken in many ways. The two that I dislike most are the "looks just like your paper calendar" craziness that was overflowing the whole UI and whatever it is that they've done with memory management that causes 4GB to be too little to really work on. This last one gripes me because I bought a 4GB MacBook Air because (silly me) 4GB had been more than plenty for my Snow Leopard systems. I had to bump the wife's MacBook Pro up to 16GB so she wouldn't keep running into the spinning beachball after a day's work, something I never run into with 4GB Snow Leopard systems after weeks of heavy lifting. I will be switching to Mavericks at the .1 release point hoping that both of these will be improved if not fixed.
My company is located very near Microsoft's Redmond campus, and the situation is the same here. MS runs a large fleet of various people-carrying vehicles that pick up Microsofties all around the area. All the while the mass transit that serves the rest of us is going downhill fast. Every time I turn around MS is working hard to avoid paying more taxes. Gotta love those guys.
See this take on the problem from Aviation Week:
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_07_22_2013_p25-597816.xml
Pilots are like anyone else, if they lean on a crutch long enough they forget how to walk. Then if the crutch turns out to have a fault, boom!
I see a few mentions of FORTRAN, but they're all modded low. I've been working as a researchers/roll-your-own-code programmers for 40 years now. I've written so much FORTRAN code over that period that I pretty much dream in FORTRAN. Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. Anyway, if you want to do serious research support work you should learn FORTRAN in general and HPF (High-Performance FORTRAN) in particular. If you're any kind of a decent programmer you should be able to pick this up fairly easily, but for street cred in the scientific research computer-support business you'd better get some FORTRAN chops.
A year in prison for the crime of fixing a vote while not being a professional political operative. At least the kid knows he's got a shot at a good job when he gets out. Better prospects than if he had finished his program at Cal State San Marcos.
More like 2048 times. Get with the program!
This really BYTEs.
I've seen HAM radio at it's best, and how it can be taken out by any idiot with enough broadcast power. I was in Puerto Rico when a bad hurricane hit the island and wiped out all communications over most of the island. A good friend was a HAM operator, and he linked up with a semi-formal network of HAM operators along the east coast that activates whenever there's a hurricane disaster. These people provided the only communications for large numbers of people for several days, and were instrumental in saving lives. At one point, however, one pin-headed yokel got on the frequency the net was using and rebroadcast AM radio music with a lot of watts behind it. They finally got this guy off the air (with some FCC help), but he hindered the net for almost a day.
The HAM community does a lot for many others who are not HAMs, and to open their bands up to individuals who only see dollar signs everywhere and only think of their own "rights" to do whatever they damn well please would be both a travesty and a serious mistake.
Simply put, they stick around because it's a good-paying job in an economy where there aren't that many available. Your friend bailed 10 years ago, back when jobs for people in these fields were a lot more plentiful. NASA became a giant jobs-and-pork operation years ago, and was one of the original "welfare for whitecoats" agencies (whitecoats as in lab coats). Any engineer or scientist with a NASA job these days hangs on as long as they can. Mortgages gotta be paid, and kids gotta be fed.
I am a long-time bleeding-heart liberal type, and while I am aghast at what we’ve given up in the name of The War on Terrorism I can see the usefulness, and perhaps even the imperative, for the US to collect and analyze data of this sort. If, and a very important if, the use of the data is carefully monitored by third parties and there are clear guidelines for collection, protection, and use of the data. Back in the Good Old Days of the 20th Century enemies were spatially located (for the most part). Spy satellites and spy boots-on-the-ground could be and were used to keep track of what people who wanted to do us harm were up to (in theory, anyway). These could also be used on US citizens, and there were pretty clear rules about not doing so (rules that were, admittedly, overlooked or circumvented at times). These days, the people who need to be watched are all over the world and are best tracked via lines of communication, most importantly cell phone and internet technologies. That’s what this is all about, keeping track of what’s going on so there are few surprises like the 9/11 fiasco.
Now, can this be misused? You betcha it can. Faster than you can say Nixon (or your favorite Bad Guy’s name). However, to NOT collect and analyze these data is a bad idea as well. As always, there’s no perfect solution. I think those data need to be collected and analyzed to keep an eye on what’s happening, but we also need more transparency on the checks-and-balances put in place to make sure the data are used only for very clear purposes. Can this be done in today’s highly politicized, the-other-side-is-stupid, political environment? I don’t know, but I do think we need to try.
Things that caught my eye were (1) iCloud keychain to allow better mobile-system tracking of passwords within the iOS and OS X framework, (2) iBooks on Mac (FINALLY!), (3) some expanded multitasking in iOS 7 (although it's not clear if it's really extended capabilities over iOS 6 or just a spiffier UI), and (4) Airdrop from within iOS 7 to nearby devices. The new Mac Pro line looks sharp, and I definitely lust for one even if I don't need one.
I agree completely about science running mostly on *nix for heavy lifting, but what about desktop? I have given up on the Linux desktop for reasons stated by others in this thread, and use OS X for my desktop. Unfortunately, OS X has been trending towards becoming iOS on the desktop, which I hate, so I've looking at (shudder) Windows 7. If MS hadn't biffed so badly on Windows 8 (making the same mistake Apple appears to be making, trying to make the desktop look and act like a big cellphone) I'd be seriously looking at a Windows desktop (still with *nix doing the heavy lifting).
Is "safe online (PUT YOUR SERVICE HERE)" as much an oxymoron as the much-malinged "military intellegence" back in the '60s? I see lots of stories about both sides of online voting, but I've not seen an answer to the basic question of "is it possible to have a safe hack-proof online voting system." I don't mean an assessment of whether Siebold or any of the other idiots in this market have fool-proof systems, but whether or not voting can be done safely online even if Brother Stallman designed it. My own feeling is that it's like putting something critical such as access to power grids online - not a good idea unless there's no other way to get what you need. I don't really see what's so hard about schlepping down to your local school and voting once a year or so. If that's too hard for you, don't bother voting because the hard work of making an informed choice is likely beyond your capabilities as well. (Does not apply to people who can't get to a voting booth for several of many good reasons, and mail-in ballots has worked for these people for decades.)
Started with punch-card (not IBM format) programming a Wang desktop beast, hand-inserting one card at a time. Rebooting (which was needed more often than I care to admit) required walking down the hall to the closet where the "brains" of the thing lived. I then graduated to a PDP-8 that was sitting in a corner waiting to be installed for a remote-access telescope, programming by entering Basic commands via a TTY. Finally they let me at the observatory's new CDC 6600, reading data from paper tapes (down from the mountain) and programs from punch-card decks. That's when I learned Fortran (II), which is still my main language. I also had to walk 12 miles to work in the snow every day (in Tucson). The alternative was to wait for the stage coach.
This really makes me feel like retiring! I worked at the USAF Global Weather Center (AFGWC) near Omaha in the 1970s where there was this mysterious computer referred to as a TIP which plugged into an even more mysterious ARPANET thing. We'd hang 9-track tapes and ship data back to research and archive centers on the east coast once a day. As a 2nd LT my time was deemed cheap enough to spend babysitting the transfer process (which often broke down). Time flies when you're on the 'net.
Keuffel and Esser (K+E) have just announced their new electronic, cloud-accessible slide rule. Made of recycled circuit boards and faced with titanium recycled from old Soviet submarines, these babies can do just about anything with at least three-digit accuracy. Give-or-take a power of 10.
This is how Government funding works. I was at a workshop on the then-new field of space weather forecasting in the mid 1990s where the keynote address was given by Dr. Joe Friday, at the time the head of the NWS. He pointed out that we would see no serious funding from Congress until there was the space-weather equivalent of a train wreck that kills many voters, or costs the monied interests lots of dinero. (Joe later lost his job when a non-forecastable flood in the mid-west that exceeded the 100-year flood levels wasn't correctly forecast. In this case, the solution was of the Shoot the Messenger variety since the real cause of the bad flooding was lousy planning by the Corps of Engineers.) The local government version of this is not putting a stoplight at a bad intersection until someone, preferably a cute child or pregnant mother, is killed there.
So, if everyone hates him why is he still the AG? I've heard nothing from the executive branch that event hints that he's in trouble with The Boss, and with the opportunity to switch horses at the start of the new (and final) term, why did Obama keep him on? That's the question.
A take on a oldie-but-goodie : What do you call 500 lawyers sent on a one-way missions to Mars? A good start.
Since Day 1 of the Obama presidency I've wondered about our Attorney General and the whole attitude and actions of the DOJ. At least once a month they do something that seems counter to what I think Obama and the Democratic Party stand for, and there's no outcry from either. Is Holder like an earlier DOJ Bad Boy (J. Edgar Hoover) in that he has a closetful of incriminating evidence on every politician in DC? The entire bureaucratic structure that is the DOJ needs to be cleaned out and re-staffed, pretty much from the ground up. I don't know if this is carry-forward from people buried deep in the DOJ during the Bush the Lesser years, or if this really is a reflection of what Holder, and perhaps his nominal bosses, want to see happen? I don't want to sound all paranoid about this, but I am.
The one time I wish I had mod points I don't. There are many of us "tired" folks out here, but I don't think we're in for any relief any time soon because it's the ADHD teenage Valley Girl market that seems to be driving where OS development goes these days. As I sit before my Mountain Lion OS X box at home I'm constantly reminded how much better my older/slower (hardware wise) Snow Leopard box at work is. I give Apple one more try at turning things around with their next major OS upgrade, and if it's another big step towards iOS I'm putting Snow Leopard on all my Apple boxes and planning for life as a techno hermit.
They stopped counting methane released by all that fracking flatulance from the industry's employees.
A lot of "professional" users of computers (doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc) seem to think that they gotta have really special software to handle everything they do, because everything they do is so special. Much of this is due to people who think they're smart being duped by people who are smarter into thinking they need special software. Is the solution here that these professionals need to do a better job of buying their IT support in the first place? Admittedly, there is certainly some software that has to be written for very narrow and specialized needs, but a lot of these needs can be met by pretty much off-the-shelf solutions implemented by people who know what they're doing. I think these professionals start off by trying to do it themselves (because they are smart, you know?), find that it's not as easy as they thought, and then buy into the pitch that they need REALLY smart IT people doing specialized stuff for them. I'd laugh at all this, but it's part of why our health care costs so damn much.
Anyone who thinks that DOD and NASA can work together on anything without it costing far more than it should before imploding due to inter-agency bickering and turf wars should check on the history of the NPOESS weather satellite program (although they did have lots of "help" from NOAA on that debacle). This will be particularly true if all involved see this as a cash cow in these days of waning budgets. Just assign it to one agency, make them responsible if they muck it up, and set up a truly independent oversight group to keep an eye on where the money really goes.