I listed sci-fi concepts which both did and did not require new physics. Most of them don't. The ones that do aren't that many: warp drive, artificial gravity, "sensors", FTL communication, wormhole viewing. That's 5 out of 19, roughly 25%.
What are you talking about? Hillary isn't that far from billionaire status with all those "speaking fees" she's been raking in. Between her and Trump, that means that probably somewhere around 75% of Americans will listen to a billionaire. (You overcounted Trump's supporters; lots of Republicans don't like him and prefer Cruz, but Cruz seems to be angling to be a billionaire too so you may be correct in counting them anyway.)
So you're wrong, but not the way you may have thought: *Most* Americans prefer to listen to a billionaire.
Why would you get the crappy 1080p monitor for that when you can get it with a 1920x1200 screen instead? I can get a little 14" notebook with a 1080p monitor.
What else don't we have? Replicator/transporter/warp drive are still in the fantasy realm until someone discovers new physics.
I don't think this is correct for the replicator and transporter. ST is a little fuzzy on how these work, but basically it has something to do with disassembling things at the molecular level, transporting them on an energy beam, and reassembling them elsewhere. It's far-fetched to be sure, but it doesn't seem to rely on faster-than-light physics the way warp drive does, so it seems to be technically possible at a glance.
Warp drive is theoretically possible BTW thanks to Miguel Alcubierre, but it relies on negative mass...
I'll give you some more sci-fi that we haven't implemented yet: 1) nuclear fusion (which actually produces net power) - this is a pretty big one, and pretty near-term as we're working actively on it. I'm sure that's been in tons of sci-fi. 2) nuclear spacecraft propulsion. This was in the 2003 BSG, and probably mentioned in lots of other sci-fi too. 3) medical scanners (the "medical tricorder" in ST). They're working on something like this; basically portable devices with chips designed to detect various blood-borne particles, so a pinprick and a drop of blood will tell you in seconds stuff that you currently need to send vials of blood to a lab and wait a week for. Closely related: portable, instant gene sequencers. 4) nanites. Seen in the ST:TNG episode with all the annoying baseball references. 5) elimination of the aging process. Various groups are working on this now, and sci-fi hasn't actually touched on it that much. 5a) using nanites inside people, either for superhuman powers or to prevent/slow aging. 6) artificial gravity. A prerequisite for almost all spaceship sci-fi (it's too expensive to film zero-g scenes), but of course relies on new physics. Doing without this means you need rotating crew structures (like in 2001), but these have to be big to avoid making the people nauseated. To have any serious floor space (like in Star Trek), you'd need a really huge ship for rotation to work. 7) faster-than-light communications ("subspace radio" in ST). Needs new physics. 8) "sensors" in Star Trek: notice that in ST, they're able to detect and observe things from lightyears away, apparently not bound by light speed limitations. There's never any indication how "long range sensors" work. Tachyons maybe? New physics. 9) "sonic showers" in Star Trek. 10) the ability to view any arbitrary place and time (in the past) like watching TV. See "Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke. Needs new physics (wormholes) 11) space elevators. See "The Fountains of Paradise" by Arthur C. Clarke. Needs new materials technology, and still might be infeasible on Earth, but would probably work great on the Moon even with current materials since there's no atmosphere and the gravity's low. 12) laser cannons. They're working on this one, and have already demonstrated prototypes. 13) VR (virtual reality). A staple of 1990s sci-fi. They've been working on this for a while; see Oculus. 14) holograms. We have them, but they're kinda lame, not like the holodeck in TNG. 15) holographic storage. In the works. 16) the ability to record and replay memories. See the movie "Strange Days". 17) antimatter as an energy source. Used in ST and other places. Theoretically possible, but probably only useful for spacecraft because there's no known place to mine antimatter, so it'd have to be artificially generated and the cost would be horrendous. But the energy density would be unbeatable. 18) artificially-grown replacement organs. They're working on this with stem cells. 19) cloning. They're working on this too, and did it with a sheep.
I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other examples here.
Don't worry, there's plenty of stuff left to implement from sci-fi, even without discovering new physics. And I'm sure sci-fi authors will come up with even more ideas. Medical technology is probably
That's why open-source software works better than trying to just roll your own internal crap. With FOSS, multiple companies who need the same thing can work together and pool their limited resources to produce something which works well for them. That's kinda the whole point to it all. Buying proprietary software is nothing more than outsourcing: instead of making your own tool, you're getting an outside vendor to do it for you. They profit because they sell the same tool to a bunch of customers. But they're greedy so they charge a lot for it when it's a niche application and you have no freedom when you use their tool. If you have enough resources in-house to make a comparable tool in a short enough time, then you should do that, but most places don't (as you found out). But when you pool resources with other like-minded firms, then you can do it.
There's likely already a FOSS EDA tool that does much of what you want from Cadence. Contribute to that and add in the functionality that it lacks that you need and fix it up.
What parts of Asia? A lot of Asian countries look like pretty lousy places to live. Japan looks really nice, but they don't seem too keen on importing workers.
Apparently, my acne and swollen, ingrown hairs are more tolerable to other people than my facial hair.
I can't help you with acne, but what do you use for shaving? I used to have problems with ingrown hairs on my neck when I was younger and used an electric foil-type shaver. Now I use an old-fashioned double-edged safety razor, and have no trouble with ingrown hairs. A razor like this constantly scrapes off the top layers of your skin, so ingrown hairs become extremely rare as the stubble doesn't have a chance to get stuck underneath.
Another benefit is that shaving makes you look younger, for two reasons: not only the lack of hair, but again because you're constantly scraping off the top layers of skin, so it keeps your skin looking younger.
But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!!:-)
Huh?
Are you saying that they do or don't want to do version control?
The old fuddy-duddy way is to NOT use version control. It's actually a somewhat new concept in software, which was mainly only used on larger machines (such as VAXen which had it built into the filesystem, sorta, and Unix's RCS). What we have now with everyone using git for software version control is a new phenomenon. Before about 15 years ago, CVS was about it as far as free version control, and for really serious firms, they used shit like ClearCase which cost an absolute fortune and requires a full-time administrator now matter how small your team. It's only been recently that we've had a plethora of extremely effective and free (and FOSS) tools for doing version control. Go back to the 80s and look at how microcomputer programmers worked; they didn't use version control at all.
There's still a lot of places where older engineers aren't using version control.
InfoWorld ran an article about 25 years ago asking "Can people over 40 work in IT?", that is, can they keep up with the technology. The article, written by someone much younger than 40 answered the question "No, people under 40 can't work in IT." They shouldn't be hired and they should be fired (buy-outs, layoffs, downsizing, firings).
Someone should track down that author. He's got to be well over 40 now. Hopefully he's living under a bridge.
(Sorry, I couldn't help it. Normally I hate this modernism but it's so appropriate here.)
Raytheon, paying to relocate? Good luck with that. From what I've seen, big defense contractors do not pay that well, and usually do not pay relocation bonuses.
Unemployment in tech is much lower than the national average (2.9% vs 5.1%), and tech job tenure is higher than average.
It'd be more helpful to see how the unemployment varies by age. Just because a bunch of 25-year-olds have no trouble finding some hipster job doesn't mean it's a great industry.
Finally, the official unemployment numbers are total bullshit anyway. They don't count people who have given up, or have left the industry due to frustration and went into a lower-paying profession, or for non-tech workers, if they're working part-time instead of full-time, among many other problems with their methodology.
My solution, if adopted more widely, might get us stuck with a solution that doesn't integrate well with our other systems or is something nobody can maintain.
It's hard to know without more information from you about what exactly these tools are and what they do, but because you wrote these tools yourself (using FOSS components), this seems false: the biggest benefit to home-grown solutions is flexibility. You wrote it, you have the code, so you can much more easily integrate it with other systems than something you don't have the code for. (The exception, of course, is if interfacing it to another system requires reverse engineering because the protocol or API is secret.)
or is something nobody can maintain.
This is the main problem with home-grown tools. It's non-standard, so if they really smart guy who put it together leaves the company, they may not have anyone who's able to jump in and take it over, whereas some $$$$$ proprietary click-and-drool tool is easy for any monkey to take over, and the expense of not having flexibility as I mentioned above.
This just sounds like a classic make-vs-buy problem to me. It's something that companies have been dealing with for ages, long before computers even. Do you make something you need yourself, or do you buy it? Making it yourself may be cheaper, but usually takes longer, but is more flexible because you can make it exactly the way you need. Buying it is usually faster but costs more and is less flexible and less likely to be exactly what you need.
I just want to mention that this part of your story isn't very convincing to me. I don't know what sort of tool you're talking about, but depending on what it is and how it fits in, it may very well be fully worth taking two years to select something, and your hacked-together assemblage of components may be a really bad idea
Or, his story is absolutely correct and he works for the government, and that guy is taking 2 years to select something that can be done by a bash script written in a day.
But I've been browsing at -1 for a while and I wonder if the bad rep of ACs on/. is (still) deserved. I found many insightful commentary there,
I've been browsing at -1 for over 15 years until just recently. I finally had to set it to +1 because of APK and a bunch of other trolls. This place has really gone down the tubes. I still can't set all my thresholds to +1: Slashdot just won't accept my changes.
The trolls are easy to skip and by far not as frequent as people suggest
I completely disagree. You must not have seen a thread that got taken over by APK's drivel.
I agree to a point, and think you have an excellent point about self-censorship. However, on the flip side, the way it's done here on/. with AC-posting isn't much of an improvement, because just like you said about people not wanting to talk to you at all because of your reputation, the same thing happens with ACs, except that it's not one person, it's all of them: all ACs get grouped together and are treated lesser because of the actions of some ACs (hello APK!). Basically, because so many ACs are trolls, a lot of people simply ignore them, and for good reason: it's just a bunch of noise.
I think Reddit's system is much better: anyone can sign up for a new account in less than 30 seconds, so it's easy to maintain multiple accounts. That's exactly what I do there. Each account can in effect be like a different persona if you want, or you can use different accounts for different subreddits so people don't dig up your post history from other accounts to do ad hominem attacks. But that way, you don't get grouped in with other trolls, while still being able to voice opinions that may be controversial without affecting your reputation for your older pseudonym.
Don't do BI? So how exactly do you propose to deal with the high unemployment caused by automation? Pretty soon we'll have automated long-haul trucking, so the truckers will all be out of a job, and fast food will be automated too, so no more jobs at McDs. How exactly do you propose to deal with that situation? Just let half the population starve?
I don't agree with them either, but their anti-gay marriage stance isn't exactly "medieval". If you went back in time just 20 years and polled people about it, you wouldn't find too much support for it. It wasn't really until the last 10-15 years that it became a big issue and public opinion changed. It's actually pretty remarkable how fast society's attitude about that has flip-flopped. It makes me wonder what other social issues in our society are going to change dramatically in the next decade or two.
Slashdot Mirror
I listed sci-fi concepts which both did and did not require new physics. Most of them don't. The ones that do aren't that many: warp drive, artificial gravity, "sensors", FTL communication, wormhole viewing. That's 5 out of 19, roughly 25%.
What are you talking about? Hillary isn't that far from billionaire status with all those "speaking fees" she's been raking in. Between her and Trump, that means that probably somewhere around 75% of Americans will listen to a billionaire. (You overcounted Trump's supporters; lots of Republicans don't like him and prefer Cruz, but Cruz seems to be angling to be a billionaire too so you may be correct in counting them anyway.)
So you're wrong, but not the way you may have thought: *Most* Americans prefer to listen to a billionaire.
Why would you get the crappy 1080p monitor for that when you can get it with a 1920x1200 screen instead? I can get a little 14" notebook with a 1080p monitor.
What else don't we have? Replicator/transporter/warp drive are still in the fantasy realm until someone discovers new physics.
I don't think this is correct for the replicator and transporter. ST is a little fuzzy on how these work, but basically it has something to do with disassembling things at the molecular level, transporting them on an energy beam, and reassembling them elsewhere. It's far-fetched to be sure, but it doesn't seem to rely on faster-than-light physics the way warp drive does, so it seems to be technically possible at a glance.
Warp drive is theoretically possible BTW thanks to Miguel Alcubierre, but it relies on negative mass...
I'll give you some more sci-fi that we haven't implemented yet:
1) nuclear fusion (which actually produces net power) - this is a pretty big one, and pretty near-term as we're working actively on it. I'm sure that's been in tons of sci-fi.
2) nuclear spacecraft propulsion. This was in the 2003 BSG, and probably mentioned in lots of other sci-fi too.
3) medical scanners (the "medical tricorder" in ST). They're working on something like this; basically portable devices with chips designed to detect various blood-borne particles, so a pinprick and a drop of blood will tell you in seconds stuff that you currently need to send vials of blood to a lab and wait a week for. Closely related: portable, instant gene sequencers.
4) nanites. Seen in the ST:TNG episode with all the annoying baseball references.
5) elimination of the aging process. Various groups are working on this now, and sci-fi hasn't actually touched on it that much.
5a) using nanites inside people, either for superhuman powers or to prevent/slow aging.
6) artificial gravity. A prerequisite for almost all spaceship sci-fi (it's too expensive to film zero-g scenes), but of course relies on new physics. Doing without this means you need rotating crew structures (like in 2001), but these have to be big to avoid making the people nauseated. To have any serious floor space (like in Star Trek), you'd need a really huge ship for rotation to work.
7) faster-than-light communications ("subspace radio" in ST). Needs new physics.
8) "sensors" in Star Trek: notice that in ST, they're able to detect and observe things from lightyears away, apparently not bound by light speed limitations. There's never any indication how "long range sensors" work. Tachyons maybe? New physics.
9) "sonic showers" in Star Trek.
10) the ability to view any arbitrary place and time (in the past) like watching TV. See "Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke. Needs new physics (wormholes)
11) space elevators. See "The Fountains of Paradise" by Arthur C. Clarke. Needs new materials technology, and still might be infeasible on Earth, but would probably work great on the Moon even with current materials since there's no atmosphere and the gravity's low.
12) laser cannons. They're working on this one, and have already demonstrated prototypes.
13) VR (virtual reality). A staple of 1990s sci-fi. They've been working on this for a while; see Oculus.
14) holograms. We have them, but they're kinda lame, not like the holodeck in TNG.
15) holographic storage. In the works.
16) the ability to record and replay memories. See the movie "Strange Days".
17) antimatter as an energy source. Used in ST and other places. Theoretically possible, but probably only useful for spacecraft because there's no known place to mine antimatter, so it'd have to be artificially generated and the cost would be horrendous. But the energy density would be unbeatable.
18) artificially-grown replacement organs. They're working on this with stem cells.
19) cloning. They're working on this too, and did it with a sheep.
I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other examples here.
Don't worry, there's plenty of stuff left to implement from sci-fi, even without discovering new physics. And I'm sure sci-fi authors will come up with even more ideas. Medical technology is probably
What kind of moron would run EDA software on a tablet?
That's why open-source software works better than trying to just roll your own internal crap. With FOSS, multiple companies who need the same thing can work together and pool their limited resources to produce something which works well for them. That's kinda the whole point to it all. Buying proprietary software is nothing more than outsourcing: instead of making your own tool, you're getting an outside vendor to do it for you. They profit because they sell the same tool to a bunch of customers. But they're greedy so they charge a lot for it when it's a niche application and you have no freedom when you use their tool. If you have enough resources in-house to make a comparable tool in a short enough time, then you should do that, but most places don't (as you found out). But when you pool resources with other like-minded firms, then you can do it.
There's likely already a FOSS EDA tool that does much of what you want from Cadence. Contribute to that and add in the functionality that it lacks that you need and fix it up.
What parts of Asia? A lot of Asian countries look like pretty lousy places to live. Japan looks really nice, but they don't seem too keen on importing workers.
Well your neighbors in Finland are looking at implementing the Universal Basic Income, which would help solve this problem.
Apparently, my acne and swollen, ingrown hairs are more tolerable to other people than my facial hair.
I can't help you with acne, but what do you use for shaving? I used to have problems with ingrown hairs on my neck when I was younger and used an electric foil-type shaver. Now I use an old-fashioned double-edged safety razor, and have no trouble with ingrown hairs. A razor like this constantly scrapes off the top layers of your skin, so ingrown hairs become extremely rare as the stubble doesn't have a chance to get stuck underneath.
Another benefit is that shaving makes you look younger, for two reasons: not only the lack of hair, but again because you're constantly scraping off the top layers of skin, so it keeps your skin looking younger.
Depending on which sector of industry you're looking at, the 30s-40s people aren't having any kids these days.
(This is much more true of Silicon Valley industries than, say, the defense industry.)
And how many of those HR workers ever work 80-hour weeks anyway?
So far, my experience in life is that anyone who seeks out a career in HR is scum.
But the more annoying ageism is a general assumption by some of the kids that if there is a difference of opinion on an engineering question, it's because the old guy is clinging to his anachronistic ways. Version control? Testing? Even a one-page design doc? Don't be such an old fuddy duddy!! :-)
Huh?
Are you saying that they do or don't want to do version control?
The old fuddy-duddy way is to NOT use version control. It's actually a somewhat new concept in software, which was mainly only used on larger machines (such as VAXen which had it built into the filesystem, sorta, and Unix's RCS). What we have now with everyone using git for software version control is a new phenomenon. Before about 15 years ago, CVS was about it as far as free version control, and for really serious firms, they used shit like ClearCase which cost an absolute fortune and requires a full-time administrator now matter how small your team. It's only been recently that we've had a plethora of extremely effective and free (and FOSS) tools for doing version control. Go back to the 80s and look at how microcomputer programmers worked; they didn't use version control at all.
There's still a lot of places where older engineers aren't using version control.
InfoWorld ran an article about 25 years ago asking "Can people over 40 work in IT?", that is, can they keep up with the technology. The article, written by someone much younger than 40 answered the question "No, people under 40 can't work in IT." They shouldn't be hired and they should be fired (buy-outs, layoffs, downsizing, firings).
Someone should track down that author. He's got to be well over 40 now. Hopefully he's living under a bridge.
Why can't you understand the horror that the rest of us feel when confronted with your millennia of slavery, homophobism, and misogyny?
How do you know he isn't gay? That'd really make your head explode, wouldn't it?
(I know, you're being sarcastic, I'm just running with it.)
THIS!!
(Sorry, I couldn't help it. Normally I hate this modernism but it's so appropriate here.)
Raytheon, paying to relocate? Good luck with that. From what I've seen, big defense contractors do not pay that well, and usually do not pay relocation bonuses.
Unemployment in tech is much lower than the national average (2.9% vs 5.1%), and tech job tenure is higher than average.
It'd be more helpful to see how the unemployment varies by age. Just because a bunch of 25-year-olds have no trouble finding some hipster job doesn't mean it's a great industry.
Finally, the official unemployment numbers are total bullshit anyway. They don't count people who have given up, or have left the industry due to frustration and went into a lower-paying profession, or for non-tech workers, if they're working part-time instead of full-time, among many other problems with their methodology.
My solution, if adopted more widely, might get us stuck with a solution that doesn't integrate well with our other systems or is something nobody can maintain.
It's hard to know without more information from you about what exactly these tools are and what they do, but because you wrote these tools yourself (using FOSS components), this seems false: the biggest benefit to home-grown solutions is flexibility. You wrote it, you have the code, so you can much more easily integrate it with other systems than something you don't have the code for. (The exception, of course, is if interfacing it to another system requires reverse engineering because the protocol or API is secret.)
or is something nobody can maintain.
This is the main problem with home-grown tools. It's non-standard, so if they really smart guy who put it together leaves the company, they may not have anyone who's able to jump in and take it over, whereas some $$$$$ proprietary click-and-drool tool is easy for any monkey to take over, and the expense of not having flexibility as I mentioned above.
This just sounds like a classic make-vs-buy problem to me. It's something that companies have been dealing with for ages, long before computers even. Do you make something you need yourself, or do you buy it? Making it yourself may be cheaper, but usually takes longer, but is more flexible because you can make it exactly the way you need. Buying it is usually faster but costs more and is less flexible and less likely to be exactly what you need.
I just want to mention that this part of your story isn't very convincing to me. I don't know what sort of tool you're talking about, but depending on what it is and how it fits in, it may very well be fully worth taking two years to select something, and your hacked-together assemblage of components may be a really bad idea
Or, his story is absolutely correct and he works for the government, and that guy is taking 2 years to select something that can be done by a bash script written in a day.
Do you and these unproductive people happen to work for the federal government?
But I've been browsing at -1 for a while and I wonder if the bad rep of ACs on /. is (still) deserved. I found many insightful commentary there,
I've been browsing at -1 for over 15 years until just recently. I finally had to set it to +1 because of APK and a bunch of other trolls. This place has really gone down the tubes. I still can't set all my thresholds to +1: Slashdot just won't accept my changes.
The trolls are easy to skip and by far not as frequent as people suggest
I completely disagree. You must not have seen a thread that got taken over by APK's drivel.
I agree to a point, and think you have an excellent point about self-censorship. However, on the flip side, the way it's done here on /. with AC-posting isn't much of an improvement, because just like you said about people not wanting to talk to you at all because of your reputation, the same thing happens with ACs, except that it's not one person, it's all of them: all ACs get grouped together and are treated lesser because of the actions of some ACs (hello APK!). Basically, because so many ACs are trolls, a lot of people simply ignore them, and for good reason: it's just a bunch of noise.
I think Reddit's system is much better: anyone can sign up for a new account in less than 30 seconds, so it's easy to maintain multiple accounts. That's exactly what I do there. Each account can in effect be like a different persona if you want, or you can use different accounts for different subreddits so people don't dig up your post history from other accounts to do ad hominem attacks. But that way, you don't get grouped in with other trolls, while still being able to voice opinions that may be controversial without affecting your reputation for your older pseudonym.
Don't do BI? So how exactly do you propose to deal with the high unemployment caused by automation? Pretty soon we'll have automated long-haul trucking, so the truckers will all be out of a job, and fast food will be automated too, so no more jobs at McDs. How exactly do you propose to deal with that situation? Just let half the population starve?
He *is* a Republican now. Proof: Republican voters are voting for him in greater numbers than all the other Republican candidates.
You need to go read about the No True Scotsman fallacy.
I don't agree with them either, but their anti-gay marriage stance isn't exactly "medieval". If you went back in time just 20 years and polled people about it, you wouldn't find too much support for it. It wasn't really until the last 10-15 years that it became a big issue and public opinion changed. It's actually pretty remarkable how fast society's attitude about that has flip-flopped. It makes me wonder what other social issues in our society are going to change dramatically in the next decade or two.
The system will probably not mathematically work if BI is indexed to cost-of-living. So what's your proposal?