Quick priorities: - Carbon tax that feeds R&D and subsidies to clean tech; - NASA reforms including purchases of commodity products as-delivered-to-orbit with no spec on how to get them there; - Foreign aid money governed by transparency index (Transparency International at transparency.org); - Emissions taxes that self-finance the EPA (tax all emissions and fines go to further enforcement); - Net neutrality and passenger bill-of-rights acts; - Repeal of monopoly power over broadband re: cable modems, etc. - College subsidies for U.S. citizens or foreigners that intend to locate here; - Strict enforcement of current INS laws requiring workers to show proof of employability before being allowed to work here coupled with green card lottery (worldwide, not just to Mexico); - Repeal of Patriot act provisions for search without warrents; - Redeployment of almost all U.S. troops from South Korea; - Change from a Class A to a Class B drug (legalization, under inpatient Doctor's supervision), of the Heroin addiction cure Ibogaine ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine/rel=url2html-972http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine/ >; - No Child Left Behind act changes to ease regulatory burden and channel money where its needed; - Expansion of the Peace Corps.; - Possible construction of a Trans-Alaska highway / railway that can lead to a cross-Bearing straights bridge; - Possible approval of a nuclear pebble bed reactor design and reprocessing facilities; - A balanced budget.
I haven't ever been "down under", and am wondering if the companies that serve as ISPs there are multinational corporations? That is, do they service just the Australian mainland?
Of course, New Zealand is rightfully sovereign, but I'm not sure that calling an ISP that services both Australia and New Zealand a "multinational". Really, I'm speaking of any ISP that has customers in Australia, the U.S., Europe, etc. I would even accept Indonesia since they're so big population-wise and geographically...
Is there an Australia On Line (AOL)? Is Time-Warner in the business of content delivery there? Are the phone companies the same? How integrated are U.S. firms with the world telecom market?
The National Electrical Code (NEC) changes every 3 years. I read it cover to cover in 1993, and have recently reviewed the changes - all are (to my nonprofessional eye) insignificant to the layman. The big thing now is how to deal with 12V lighting, which is relatively new, but that's kind of an edge case for the kind of wiring you're going to do in a kitchen, garage, or bathroom remodel.
I think about it like Scuba diving. Yes, there are tables to keep you safe. BUT, it's a horrible idea to get anywhere near their limits. Just make sure when you dive you get NOWHERE CLOSE to the edge of dangerousness, this is a friggin FUN thing, not worth your life. Basically, my rules are, don't go below 70 feet and come up fast on a single tank; if you're planning on hitting 70 feet, do it first, don't stay at that depth long, and come up to 30 if you can and stay upwards of that for the rest of your tank.
Same rules apply to electrical work. Only use #12 or #10 awg for a normal 15 amp circuit, haul 3 wires (black, white, and green) even in conduit, for each of your circuits, oversize the conduit, only use the big "1400" junction boxes (jboxes) instead of cutting corners and trying to fit your splices into a tiny jbox behind a pair of GFCI plugs. Buy two nice pairs of electrical pliers and spend an hour twisting pairs together 'till you get good at it.
If there must be explicit causation to bring racketeering charges against the RIAA that revolve around mail fraud, wire fraud, or a set of crimes that net over 1 year in jail, the obvious choice to me is mail fraud.
They have consistently misrepresented the facts they have in hand about any actual person in their "Settlement Offer" letters. These attempt to defraud consumers by making false claims about the evidence they have in hand regarding a particular person's innocence or guilt. These false claims are done for the purpose of self-enrichment.
If I file suit in federal court alleging I think that FamousPersonA is a wife-beater and then send a letter to FamousPersonA saying, "Settle with me and I'll drop the suit", I believe this is a form of blackmail. If I know that I have a larger legal team than they do and can outlast them at trial or in any countersuit, then I have unlimited means to extort money from FamousPersonA. Or, anyone else.
The claims are False because the RIAA purports to have proof of guilt. These are overly confident, overstated positions. They constitute a fraudulent mail scheme. They are individually punishible and form a pattern of intimidation and attempted blackmail.
The original announcement was to be Tuesday at noon. Cheney went to the hospital for a knee-blood-clot "emergency" in the morning. So, Kucinich delayed it until 5 pm when it was obvious there was no emergency with Cheney's health.
The newsday got slammed with several other big stories: - EU says Wolfowitz should go; - UN says Bagdad surge not working; - House passes War-funding with timetable; - Cheney speaking at BYU (Utah) commencement w/ lots of protesters; - Very Conservative (not neocon) New Hampshire voting for Civil Unions
So, yesterday/today is news-dense. The impeachment resolution had to compete.
* mailing a part of your anatomy to a loved one (William Gates); * using Wine to run a limited set of programs in an almost functional way; * switching to a different program that does the same thing natively on the Mac; * using a multi-boot scenario to boot into another OS instead of OS/X; * using VMWare (does this run under OS/X YET???) to create a VM that runs an MS OS; * creating a VM that runs Win2K or XP and ignoring the "benefits" of Vista; * running naked through the frigid streets with a placard reading "UBUNTU ROCKS, BABY!" * Diazepam, lots and lots of Diazepam (generic of Vallium, for the uninitiated).
Enjoy your happy and carefree lifestyle of free choices freely made in a consequences free environment !!
[ Oh. Sorry. I forgot. There are consequences. Never mind. ]
I'd love to replace Office with OpenOffice. Unfortunately, Microsoft has bundled this stuff so tightly it's difficult to displace.
Visio has no viable competition.
Yes, I've tried Dia, and frankly it's nowhere near as usable as Visio. I wish there was competition here, but there isn't.
Usually I just need the features found in the version of Visio from about 1996. Then, it was just coming out and not owned by MS yet. it worked fine. it allowed me to do the simple flowcharts and connectors that moved nicely. I mostly do
data flow diagrams
systems schematics, or
database schemas
. This is pretty simple functionality but Dia doesn't do it yet. Yuck. I want arrows with different size arrowheads, lines that stay attached to objects as you move them, and the ability to make them curved / bendy or straight. That's it.
Likewise, MS Office has Outlook which has an integrated calendar function that invites me to and reminds me of meetings. If Thunderbird did that, I'd switch quite quickly. I use Tbird at home and love it.
That's the functionality I need. I'm sure I'm not the first one to mention it, but I hope that Sun or IBM or Redhat or Novell is listening. This functionality can't be that hard to develop, and they'd get much more users for their products if they did that. It can't cost more than $20 million to field a product with that minimal level of functionality - that's 20 developers for 2 years plus infrastructre, management, and QA. Put it in OpenOffice at $free instead of $400/seat MS Office and their market segment would be... HUGE (the planet).
There's only 14 characters on the display, what should it say? "Put In Paper?" Where? The obvious place, of course. Stupid wording, but once you know what it means, it's obvious.
Yes, there's lots of "cool" technology that benefits someone somewhere, but how much of it will be useful? Impossible to know, since fads happen in programming just like any other industry: 4GL languages (application/code generators) (see Texas instruments ATI? ATL?), PowerBuilder, etc.
Your work will be your education. Pay attention to the failures you see and ask lots of questions. Of course, if you're an engineer in mindset, you're doing this already.
CODE READABILITY SHOULD BE YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE. One of the biggest challenges I have with working with new grads is that they want to write "optimized" code. YUCK! I end up with unreadable gibberish that executes 2.51% faster. Remember that 50% (yes!) of software cost is in maintenance phase. That means that spending just a little extra effort designing and initially building something simple to understand, diagnose, and modify will save TONS over the life of the program.
Another problem I face is new programmers using the tool they know (like VB) rather than the tool that's optimal for the job. If you don't know Perl (at http://perl.org/), learn it! it is the glue that holds servers and systems together - BUT WRITE HIGHLY READABLE CODE! If there's something easy to do in Perl, it's write obfuscated pieces of *(#&$ that no one can decypher afterwards, including you if you're not careful. A good way to get used to Perl is to browse the CPAN and find something in version 1.001 and look at their self-noted to-do list, fix it, and submit that code up. You gain great experience and the world ends up with better code.
As much as I complain about it, I've found that it really pays to know how to use VBA Excel and Word. Plumbing those apps into other apps can give you godlike status to the business users.
If you want a nice, practial OO language that lets you do lots of stuff, I'm really falling in love with Python. It's fast, it's got a viable OO strategy (as beautiful OO as Perl's OO is ugly), and it's growing fast. If you don't know Python, spend a while and write a quick 1000 lines in it that does something marginally useful.
I used to work for BankOne (now JPMorganChase) in Chicago doing Perl work for their Capital Markets trading systems. This meant writing about 40,000 lines of Perl code to decode the bank's internal reports and load 'em to a data warehouse. In the process, I had to decode some report formats that were not proprietary, as well code up some helper modules, like ones that retrieved files (recursively) from FTP sites, verified they were complete, etc., based on configuration files.
Much of this code could have been released to http://cpan.org/ nicely.
However, I signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) when I joined the bank saying, more or less, I won't release any of the bank's intellectual property to any third party without prior (probably written) approval from umpteen layers of management.
This kind of NDA has been more-or-less standard when joining a new firm as a developer. People don't like it when you release code to the world that gives your company a competitive edge, or might present a security risk if people knew how you were doing things (I know all those rules about security through obscurity being useless, but that's different than posting to a cracking website the protocols you use to get data from servers around the bank).
The problems of being able to contribute back this worthwhile code are legion. Many organizations are not set up to deal with this kind of problem yet. Over time, when managers come to understand that there are definite gains to be made by releasing a module to the wild, and actually find that other people like it and contribute-to/improve it, then word will get around.
I would counsel slow, persistent, quite isolated pushes for very clearly non-business-critical components to be put under the GPL into CPAN or the like. No excited "let's do this" will get the idea through. Calm, rational arguments about a component being broadly useful elsewhere and this would may mean someone else (that you don't have to pay) will fix the small bugs we don't have time for.
I think this is going to take hold at smaller companies MUCH more quickly. I work at a startup now, and we regularly contribute patches to several of the open source (mostly Python) projects we use. Why? Because we want our changes incorporated into the tree so we don't diverge too much from the standard release (which would require much more work to update when they release a new branch).
After a while, larger companies will get the message, too, and understand this business model. Compare this to flying airplanes - pilots all talk, and contribute info, so everyone is safer. Your competitive advantage is the systems you build, and how you run them, not the fact that everyone else crashes more than you do, because whenever anyone crashes, everyone suffers.
>> Nuclear power is an inefficient method to create a buffer.
Beg to differ. Nuclear is perhaps the best option now for "clean" energy it produces spent fuel rods, which we can (the French do) recycle/reprocess (since only 4% of the U-235 fizzles, separating byproducts lets you use the same fuel over and over).
>> even at low power levels, your fuel will keep fissioning merrily along
Not quite true. Lifetime on fuel rods is dependent on the number of fissions, not the time spent in the reactor. Control rods mediate the reaction or can shut it down nearly entirely. I have looked with "no joy" (unsuccessfully) for info on minimum power levels at nuke plants, my guess would be 5%-ish of maximum power just to keep the turbine spinning. There would also be some interconnect time if they're off-grid.
This is a Farnsworth Fusor. See Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor/ for info on this type of device, which is VERY OLD, reasonably well-characterized, and most definitely NOT an energy-generation device.
Fusors use far more power than they generate. The idea is a pair of spherical grids charged to 50K volts differential. Deuterium gas is a welding supply item. Gas hits the outer grid, ionizes, and is propelled at ultra-high speed to the exact center of the grid.
The drawback is the inefficiencies: There is no known design (and some theoretical work saying it is impossible to a achieve such a design) which does not have significant heat losses to impacts of the gas on the inner grid. This generates random gas, which impedes the movement of the ions, etc.
If nothing obvious is running as a process, this might be popping up from a scheduled task.
Occassionally we ran these at my old job and it would pop up a window in front of whatever you were doing, very briefly. The task was a batch file that kicked off something else.
Unless they're vaccinated, don't give them MUMPS; if you do find a nice Doctor (Like Dr. Pascal), 'cuz Pascal was fun for me in College.
If they like noises, Squeak is good, but the cogently verbiaged might prefer SmallTalk in a group. For those speech impaired, knowing there's other people who Lisp would be good.
Glen Seaborg, who at one time had the longest entry in Who's Who, was an accomplished scientist AND engineering manager. His team at Lawrence Berkeley Labs 'discovered' (created, really) elements 96 to 102. Born April 18th, 1912 in Ishpeming, Michigan, died several years ago in 1999. He was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission under Kennedy and helped negotiate the (mostly Atmospheric) Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1960 (?).
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for their discoveries about transuranic elements.
He is a fascinating character.
Why do I know this? I've known it since High School. Several friends of mine in from Highland Park High School (Illinois) and I started a fan club in honor of Glen Seaborg. We called him at his office in Berkeley on his Birthdays for several years. One year, we sent him a t-shirt with the name of our fan club (the 'Hansians' for reasons too obscure to discuss here). My summer before my senior year, he contacted us and mentioned he was flying through O'Hare soon. So, in August 1984 I met him at the airport and I had the great honor of sharing dinner and conversation with him for about 2 hours with him in an airport restaurant. It was a profound experience in my life.
The lesson: Have the kids pick any famous scientist. There are many. Create a list to help them, or just say 'any Nobel or Fields medal (for math geeks) prize winner'. Have them give a short speech on the person from memory, telling some anecdotes (they must cite the sources).
Just Watch - the mid term elections this cycle will again be driven by raising the alert and fear level to drive voters into a panic, "Trust Our Imperious Leaders!" mode, no matter how corrupt, no matter how self-serving these alert levels are.
The Fearmongering must stop ! This is Stupid, Insulting, and Damaging to our Democracy!
JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, DiscoverCard, Sears (CreditCard division), etc.
I used to work in the Risk Management department of Bank One in Chicago (merged last year with JPMChase). Our department employed about 15 of which were either math or physics majors. One day, one of them was really happy because he'd gotten a paper accepted for publication in a mathematics (scholarly) journal (on graph theory? don't remember..).
The 15 mostly were a sub-department of Risk Management called Quantitative Evaluation(?) Dept., known around the bank as the QED group or 'The Quants'. They evaluated the riskiness of a position (financial holding) against as many real-world variables as possible, in as rigorous way as possible, applying statistics and other analysis methods with computer simulations that they would write. This kind of job is roughly equivalent to actuarial work, only in the financial industry, but it has lots of very interesting and diverse subtopics.
The Quants had quite a bit of autonomy when it came to the programming. Bank One had (regretable) "language standards" that said that all systems had to be written in Java. They wrote in whatever they wanted, which was usually Perl, or sometimes in 'R' or 'S' (whichever one is the open source one), sometimes using SPSS or another tool as well, and they had a server farm to run stuff on if they wanted to.
I wondered how they could have so much freedom and resources. They said they made money, not just prevented its loss. If the standard model of a transaction said that there was a 5% chance of a complete loss, the bank would have to put aside 5% of the transaction in cash to offset losses. Note also that there's a lot of work to be done to determine the risk/loss curves, not just the chance of a complete loss. Regardless, that's sometimes a LOT of money, invested in very short term liquid and low-risk (low reward) instruments (investment vehicle). BUT, if the Quants could prove it was really only a 4% chance of loss, the bank could (by law AND good sense) put that money in another higher-paying instrument.
Also, they evaluated the existing models and revised them for better accuracy. One of the problems in financials (all of Wall Street has this problem) is accurately determining The Greeks. That is (as Marcia Stigum's "The Money Book" says) there are a variety of measurements of risk in financial transactions like the Delta, Gamma, Beta curve, etc. These are fairly simple to calculate for liquid instruments like bonds maturing tomorrow, but for a swaption on Estonian municipal debt, it's not necessarily as easy.
We (I worked on a data warehouse of the results of this stuff) also ran Monte Carlo simulations (remember your sadistics/I mean statistics class?) that evaluate riskiness. We had weekend-long runs (with FAST sets of boxes) using these to determine how much our reserves should be, if a position needed to be hedged, or even if the financial institution (not always a bank) was likely to go bankrupt ("operational risk") and what we should do to offset reserves for that case.
Financial Risk management is a HUGE opportunity for MATH and PHYSICS majors. The physics because you're used to deriving and applying formulae to real-life situations and accounting for the discrepancies with statistics and other tools. Consider Wall Street or Saville Row (?Britain), or another major company. They ALL need math majors. Computer science is a perfect minor - you know how to implement your ideas, too, it proves you're capable of handling their problems.
-- Oh --- I should also mention that a friend of mine from College had an internsip at Boeing in Wichita KS one summer. He said they ahd a mathematician working in an office near his. People from all over the engineering department would come in with complex problems they couldn't solve easily, and he'd either solve the problems or tell them how to do it. Pure math, solving problems all day, real world. It can't just be Boeing; I'm thinking 3M and other engineering-driven companies need that sort of thing too.
As much as we might like to use some special purpose tool for this purpose, most of the time that I'm looking at code I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to be editing it or just peeking. Thus, it's silly to be in one program when I need another. And, the added "system weight" of running a "heavy" editor vs./bin/less or vi or emacs is silly, when I don't want to remember all their key combinations for moving around the file - top, bottom, page up pagedown, etc.
Syntax highlighting is THERE in an editor, and I don't have to restart if I change my mind about changing the file.
http://ultraedit/com/ is a GREAT editor for Windows, or Jedit or Eclipse for Win or unix.
Have Firefox automatically update from a set of known sites at a configurable interval. An indicator, like the update-now exclamation point of up2date, which if clicked upon would get and install the latest CRLs from all the available authorities;
A Firefox Extension should be created (anyone? anyone? Buhler?) that does this automatically at a configurable interval.
This would seem to solve this security hole nicely with minimal fuss. Normal users don't worry, they have a clear thing to do when the indicator changes, be it an extension or built into Firefox.
I had the hardest time in OpenOffice Calc printing the gridlines. (Found out: it's on Format -> page, but that's not possible with a read-only file, since Format->Page is greyed out!)
Also, setting the print area, and it was hard to figure out how to get a randomly sized spreadsheet to print in a scale of (1 page tall by x wide) or (1 page wide by x tall) (found out: it's also in Format-> Page, likewise with the read-only).
In the U.S., the two educational systems of memorization (concrete) vs. conceptualization (theoretical) tend to favor the latter, theoretical methodology that encourages questioning and independent thought from the students.
In many other countries, I have heard that the memorization or rote-learning methodology is strongly emphasized. I understand that this results in a large deference to the scholarship of others and less interest in, or tolerance of, a student's rejection of conventional thinking.
Do you personally see these differences in educational emphasis, or is this a western myth? If you do see them, how do they affect engineering in arab countries? Does this relate to Islam in some way, with its emphasis on deference to several preeminent religious schools/seminaries that imams must attend to be allowed to interpret the Koran? Is this conceptualization of Islam also a flawed or distorted view in some way? How does this affect the engineers you meet? Is Linux / OpenSource, Wikipedia, SMS, email, and the power these give to the average user, affecting this worldview / educational / cultural system?
Slashdot Mirror
Next thing you know, more parts will be up for naming. Suggestions:
Others?
The irony is, on his show recently someone referred to his dad, "Big Russ", as being deceased. Tim had to correct him.
Quick priorities:
- Carbon tax that feeds R&D and subsidies to clean tech;
- NASA reforms including purchases of commodity products as-delivered-to-orbit with no spec on how to get them there;
- Foreign aid money governed by transparency index (Transparency International at transparency.org);
- Emissions taxes that self-finance the EPA (tax all emissions and fines go to further enforcement);
- Net neutrality and passenger bill-of-rights acts;
- Repeal of monopoly power over broadband re: cable modems, etc.
- College subsidies for U.S. citizens or foreigners that intend to locate here;
- Strict enforcement of current INS laws requiring workers to show proof of employability before being allowed to work here coupled with green card lottery (worldwide, not just to Mexico);
- Repeal of Patriot act provisions for search without warrents;
- Redeployment of almost all U.S. troops from South Korea;
- Change from a Class A to a Class B drug (legalization, under inpatient Doctor's supervision), of the Heroin addiction cure Ibogaine ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine/rel=url2html-972http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine/ >;
- No Child Left Behind act changes to ease regulatory burden and channel money where its needed;
- Expansion of the Peace Corps.;
- Possible construction of a Trans-Alaska highway / railway that can lead to a cross-Bearing straights bridge;
- Possible approval of a nuclear pebble bed reactor design and reprocessing facilities;
- A balanced budget.
Just some ideas.
I haven't ever been "down under", and am wondering if the companies that serve as ISPs there are multinational corporations? That is, do they service just the Australian mainland?
Of course, New Zealand is rightfully sovereign, but I'm not sure that calling an ISP that services both Australia and New Zealand a "multinational". Really, I'm speaking of any ISP that has customers in Australia, the U.S., Europe, etc. I would even accept Indonesia since they're so big population-wise and geographically...
Is there an Australia On Line (AOL)? Is Time-Warner in the business of content delivery there? Are the phone companies the same? How integrated are U.S. firms with the world telecom market?
The National Electrical Code (NEC) changes every 3 years. I read it cover to cover in 1993, and have recently reviewed the changes - all are (to my nonprofessional eye) insignificant to the layman. The big thing now is how to deal with 12V lighting, which is relatively new, but that's kind of an edge case for the kind of wiring you're going to do in a kitchen, garage, or bathroom remodel.
I think about it like Scuba diving. Yes, there are tables to keep you safe. BUT, it's a horrible idea to get anywhere near their limits. Just make sure when you dive you get NOWHERE CLOSE to the edge of dangerousness, this is a friggin FUN thing, not worth your life. Basically, my rules are, don't go below 70 feet and come up fast on a single tank; if you're planning on hitting 70 feet, do it first, don't stay at that depth long, and come up to 30 if you can and stay upwards of that for the rest of your tank.
Same rules apply to electrical work. Only use #12 or #10 awg for a normal 15 amp circuit, haul 3 wires (black, white, and green) even in conduit, for each of your circuits, oversize the conduit, only use the big "1400" junction boxes (jboxes) instead of cutting corners and trying to fit your splices into a tiny jbox behind a pair of GFCI plugs. Buy two nice pairs of electrical pliers and spend an hour twisting pairs together 'till you get good at it.
Basic engineering applied to Life.
IANAL!
If there must be explicit causation to bring racketeering charges against the RIAA that revolve around mail fraud, wire fraud, or a set of crimes that net over 1 year in jail, the obvious choice to me is mail fraud.
They have consistently misrepresented the facts they have in hand about any actual person in their "Settlement Offer" letters. These attempt to defraud consumers by making false claims about the evidence they have in hand regarding a particular person's innocence or guilt. These false claims are done for the purpose of self-enrichment.
If I file suit in federal court alleging I think that FamousPersonA is a wife-beater and then send a letter to FamousPersonA saying, "Settle with me and I'll drop the suit", I believe this is a form of blackmail. If I know that I have a larger legal team than they do and can outlast them at trial or in any countersuit, then I have unlimited means to extort money from FamousPersonA. Or, anyone else.
The claims are False because the RIAA purports to have proof of guilt. These are overly confident, overstated positions. They constitute a fraudulent mail scheme. They are individually punishible and form a pattern of intimidation and attempted blackmail.
The original announcement was to be Tuesday at noon.
Cheney went to the hospital for a knee-blood-clot "emergency" in the morning.
So, Kucinich delayed it until 5 pm when it was obvious there was no emergency with Cheney's health.
The newsday got slammed with several other big stories:
- EU says Wolfowitz should go;
- UN says Bagdad surge not working;
- House passes War-funding with timetable;
- Cheney speaking at BYU (Utah) commencement w/ lots of protesters;
- Very Conservative (not neocon) New Hampshire voting for Civil Unions
So, yesterday/today is news-dense. The impeachment resolution had to compete.
Alternatives to doing this include:
* mailing a part of your anatomy to a loved one (William Gates);
* using Wine to run a limited set of programs in an almost functional way;
* switching to a different program that does the same thing natively on the Mac;
* using a multi-boot scenario to boot into another OS instead of OS/X;
* using VMWare (does this run under OS/X YET???) to create a VM that runs an MS OS;
* creating a VM that runs Win2K or XP and ignoring the "benefits" of Vista;
* running naked through the frigid streets with a placard reading "UBUNTU ROCKS, BABY!"
* Diazepam, lots and lots of Diazepam (generic of Vallium, for the uninitiated).
Enjoy your happy and carefree lifestyle of free choices freely made in a consequences free environment !!
[ Oh. Sorry. I forgot. There are consequences. Never mind. ]
I'd love to replace Office with OpenOffice. Unfortunately, Microsoft has bundled this stuff so tightly it's difficult to displace.
Visio has no viable competition.
Yes, I've tried Dia, and frankly it's nowhere near as usable as Visio. I wish there was competition here, but there isn't.
Usually I just need the features found in the version of Visio from about 1996. Then, it was just coming out and not owned by MS yet. it worked fine. it allowed me to do the simple flowcharts and connectors that moved nicely. I mostly do
- data flow diagrams
- systems schematics, or
- database schemas
. This is pretty simple functionality but Dia doesn't do it yet. Yuck. I want arrows with different size arrowheads, lines that stay attached to objects as you move them, and the ability to make them curved / bendy or straight. That's it.Likewise, MS Office has Outlook which has an integrated calendar function that invites me to and reminds me of meetings. If Thunderbird did that, I'd switch quite quickly. I use Tbird at home and love it.
That's the functionality I need. I'm sure I'm not the first one to mention it, but I hope that Sun or IBM or Redhat or Novell is listening. This functionality can't be that hard to develop, and they'd get much more users for their products if they did that. It can't cost more than $20 million to field a product with that minimal level of functionality - that's 20 developers for 2 years plus infrastructre, management, and QA. Put it in OpenOffice at $free instead of $400/seat MS Office and their market segment would be... HUGE (the planet).
No one has actually answered this legitimate question.
"PC LOAD LETTER" ==> (P)rint (C)artridge, (Load Letter) Sized Paper now!"
"PC LOAD LETTER" ==> (P)rint (C)artridge, (Load Letter) Sized Paper now!"
"PC LOAD LETTER" ==> (P)rint (C)artridge, (Load Letter) Sized Paper now!"
"PC LOAD LETTER" ==> (P)rint (C)artridge, (Load Letter) Sized Paper now!"
"PC LOAD LETTER" ==> (P)rint (C)artridge, (Load Letter) Sized Paper now!"
There's only 14 characters on the display, what should it say? "Put In Paper?" Where? The obvious place, of course. Stupid wording, but once you know what it means, it's obvious.
I RTFM.
Yes, there's lots of "cool" technology that benefits someone somewhere, but how much of it will be useful? Impossible to know, since fads happen in programming just like any other industry: 4GL languages (application/code generators) (see Texas instruments ATI? ATL?), PowerBuilder, etc.
Your work will be your education. Pay attention to the failures you see and ask lots of questions. Of course, if you're an engineer in mindset, you're doing this already.
CODE READABILITY SHOULD BE YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE. One of the biggest challenges I have with working with new grads is that they want to write "optimized" code. YUCK! I end up with unreadable gibberish that executes 2.51% faster. Remember that 50% (yes!) of software cost is in maintenance phase. That means that spending just a little extra effort designing and initially building something simple to understand, diagnose, and modify will save TONS over the life of the program.
Another problem I face is new programmers using the tool they know (like VB) rather than the tool that's optimal for the job. If you don't know Perl (at http://perl.org/), learn it! it is the glue that holds servers and systems together - BUT WRITE HIGHLY READABLE CODE! If there's something easy to do in Perl, it's write obfuscated pieces of *(#&$ that no one can decypher afterwards, including you if you're not careful. A good way to get used to Perl is to browse the CPAN and find something in version 1.001 and look at their self-noted to-do list, fix it, and submit that code up. You gain great experience and the world ends up with better code.
As much as I complain about it, I've found that it really pays to know how to use VBA Excel and Word. Plumbing those apps into other apps can give you godlike status to the business users.
If you want a nice, practial OO language that lets you do lots of stuff, I'm really falling in love with Python. It's fast, it's got a viable OO strategy (as beautiful OO as Perl's OO is ugly), and it's growing fast. If you don't know Python, spend a while and write a quick 1000 lines in it that does something marginally useful.
Just my 5 cents.
I used to work for BankOne (now JPMorganChase) in Chicago doing Perl work for their Capital Markets trading systems. This meant writing about 40,000 lines of Perl code to decode the bank's internal reports and load 'em to a data warehouse. In the process, I had to decode some report formats that were not proprietary, as well code up some helper modules, like ones that retrieved files (recursively) from FTP sites, verified they were complete, etc., based on configuration files.
Much of this code could have been released to http://cpan.org/ nicely.
However, I signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) when I joined the bank saying, more or less, I won't release any of the bank's intellectual property to any third party without prior (probably written) approval from umpteen layers of management.
This kind of NDA has been more-or-less standard when joining a new firm as a developer. People don't like it when you release code to the world that gives your company a competitive edge, or might present a security risk if people knew how you were doing things (I know all those rules about security through obscurity being useless, but that's different than posting to a cracking website the protocols you use to get data from servers around the bank).
The problems of being able to contribute back this worthwhile code are legion. Many organizations are not set up to deal with this kind of problem yet. Over time, when managers come to understand that there are definite gains to be made by releasing a module to the wild, and actually find that other people like it and contribute-to/improve it, then word will get around.
I would counsel slow, persistent, quite isolated pushes for very clearly non-business-critical components to be put under the GPL into CPAN or the like. No excited "let's do this" will get the idea through. Calm, rational arguments about a component being broadly useful elsewhere and this would may mean someone else (that you don't have to pay) will fix the small bugs we don't have time for.
I think this is going to take hold at smaller companies MUCH more quickly. I work at a startup now, and we regularly contribute patches to several of the open source (mostly Python) projects we use. Why? Because we want our changes incorporated into the tree so we don't diverge too much from the standard release (which would require much more work to update when they release a new branch).
After a while, larger companies will get the message, too, and understand this business model. Compare this to flying airplanes - pilots all talk, and contribute info, so everyone is safer. Your competitive advantage is the systems you build, and how you run them, not the fact that everyone else crashes more than you do, because whenever anyone crashes, everyone suffers.
>> Nuclear power is an inefficient method to create a buffer.
s /pollutioncontrols/overview_mercurycontrols.html/
Beg to differ. Nuclear is perhaps the best option now for "clean" energy it produces spent fuel rods, which we can (the French do) recycle/reprocess (since only 4% of the U-235 fizzles, separating byproducts lets you use the same fuel over and over).
OTOH, 1993 worldwide emissions of mercury totalled 5500 tons. This is being controlled (142 tons from the U.S. by 1999), but in the rest of the world it's obviously a big polluter. Cite: http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystem
>> even at low power levels, your fuel will keep fissioning merrily along
Not quite true. Lifetime on fuel rods is dependent on the number of fissions, not the time spent in the reactor. Control rods mediate the reaction or can shut it down nearly entirely. I have looked with "no joy" (unsuccessfully) for info on minimum power levels at nuke plants, my guess would be 5%-ish of maximum power just to keep the turbine spinning. There would also be some interconnect time if they're off-grid.
This is a Farnsworth Fusor. See Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor/ for info on this type of device, which is VERY OLD, reasonably well-characterized, and most definitely NOT an energy-generation device.
Fusors use far more power than they generate. The idea is a pair of spherical grids charged to 50K volts differential. Deuterium gas is a welding supply item. Gas hits the outer grid, ionizes, and is propelled at ultra-high speed to the exact center of the grid.
The drawback is the inefficiencies: There is no known design (and some theoretical work saying it is impossible to a achieve such a design) which does not have significant heat losses to impacts of the gas on the inner grid. This generates random gas, which impedes the movement of the ions, etc.
It is also known as Electrostatic fusion.
If nothing obvious is running as a process, this might be popping up from a scheduled task.
Occassionally we ran these at my old job and it would pop up a window in front of whatever you were doing, very briefly. The task was a batch file that kicked off something else.
Unless they're vaccinated, don't give them MUMPS; if you do find a nice Doctor (Like Dr. Pascal), 'cuz Pascal was fun for me in College.
If they like noises, Squeak is good, but the cogently verbiaged might prefer SmallTalk in a group. For those speech impaired, knowing there's other people who Lisp would be good.
The mean ones will abuse Snobol in Winter
The A.D.D. kids will probably like the feeling of Euphoria they get from their first
Of course, you could teach them a very nice language with a horrible name, Brainfuck.
Or, you could just look Here for a comparison of popular programming languages.
Glen Seaborg, who at one time had the longest entry in Who's Who, was an accomplished scientist AND engineering manager. His team at Lawrence Berkeley Labs 'discovered' (created, really) elements 96 to 102. Born April 18th, 1912 in Ishpeming, Michigan, died several years ago in 1999. He was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission under Kennedy and helped negotiate the (mostly Atmospheric) Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1960 (?).
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for their discoveries about transuranic elements.
He is a fascinating character.
Why do I know this? I've known it since High School. Several friends of mine in from Highland Park High School (Illinois) and I started a fan club in honor of Glen Seaborg. We called him at his office in Berkeley on his Birthdays for several years. One year, we sent him a t-shirt with the name of our fan club (the 'Hansians' for reasons too obscure to discuss here). My summer before my senior year, he contacted us and mentioned he was flying through O'Hare soon. So, in August 1984 I met him at the airport and I had the great honor of sharing dinner and conversation with him for about 2 hours with him in an airport restaurant. It was a profound experience in my life.
Element Seaborgium is named in his honor.
The lesson: Have the kids pick any famous scientist. There are many. Create a list to help them, or just say 'any Nobel or Fields medal (for math geeks) prize winner'. Have them give a short speech on the person from memory, telling some anecdotes (they must cite the sources).
Just Watch - the mid term elections this cycle will again be driven by raising the alert and fear level to drive voters into a panic, "Trust Our Imperious Leaders!" mode, no matter how corrupt, no matter how self-serving these alert levels are.
The Fearmongering must stop ! This is Stupid, Insulting, and Damaging to our Democracy!
JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, DiscoverCard, Sears (CreditCard division), etc.
I used to work in the Risk Management department of Bank One in Chicago (merged last year with JPMChase). Our department employed about 15 of which were either math or physics majors. One day, one of them was really happy because he'd gotten a paper accepted for publication in a mathematics (scholarly) journal (on graph theory? don't remember..).
The 15 mostly were a sub-department of Risk Management called Quantitative Evaluation(?) Dept., known around the bank as the QED group or 'The Quants'. They evaluated the riskiness of a position (financial holding) against as many real-world variables as possible, in as rigorous way as possible, applying statistics and other analysis methods with computer simulations that they would write. This kind of job is roughly equivalent to actuarial work, only in the financial industry, but it has lots of very interesting and diverse subtopics.
The Quants had quite a bit of autonomy when it came to the programming. Bank One had (regretable) "language standards" that said that all systems had to be written in Java. They wrote in whatever they wanted, which was usually Perl, or sometimes in 'R' or 'S' (whichever one is the open source one), sometimes using SPSS or another tool as well, and they had a server farm to run stuff on if they wanted to.
I wondered how they could have so much freedom and resources. They said they made money, not just prevented its loss. If the standard model of a transaction said that there was a 5% chance of a complete loss, the bank would have to put aside 5% of the transaction in cash to offset losses. Note also that there's a lot of work to be done to determine the risk/loss curves, not just the chance of a complete loss. Regardless, that's sometimes a LOT of money, invested in very short term liquid and low-risk (low reward) instruments (investment vehicle). BUT, if the Quants could prove it was really only a 4% chance of loss, the bank could (by law AND good sense) put that money in another higher-paying instrument.
Also, they evaluated the existing models and revised them for better accuracy. One of the problems in financials (all of Wall Street has this problem) is accurately determining The Greeks. That is (as Marcia Stigum's "The Money Book" says) there are a variety of measurements of risk in financial transactions like the Delta, Gamma, Beta curve, etc. These are fairly simple to calculate for liquid instruments like bonds maturing tomorrow, but for a swaption on Estonian municipal debt, it's not necessarily as easy.
We (I worked on a data warehouse of the results of this stuff) also ran Monte Carlo simulations (remember your sadistics/I mean statistics class?) that evaluate riskiness. We had weekend-long runs (with FAST sets of boxes) using these to determine how much our reserves should be, if a position needed to be hedged, or even if the financial institution (not always a bank) was likely to go bankrupt ("operational risk") and what we should do to offset reserves for that case.
Financial Risk management is a HUGE opportunity for MATH and PHYSICS majors. The physics because you're used to deriving and applying formulae to real-life situations and accounting for the discrepancies with statistics and other tools. Consider Wall Street or Saville Row (?Britain), or another major company. They ALL need math majors. Computer science is a perfect minor - you know how to implement your ideas, too, it proves you're capable of handling their problems.
-- Oh --- I should also mention that a friend of mine from College had an internsip at Boeing in Wichita KS one summer. He said they ahd a mathematician working in an office near his. People from all over the engineering department would come in with complex problems they couldn't solve easily, and he'd either solve the problems or tell them how to do it. Pure math, solving problems all day, real world. It can't just be Boeing; I'm thinking 3M and other engineering-driven companies need that sort of thing too.
Nothing Can Beat a Good Editor
As much as we might like to use some special purpose tool for this purpose, most of the time that I'm looking at code I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to be editing it or just peeking. Thus, it's silly to be in one program when I need another. And, the added "system weight" of running a "heavy" editor vs.
Syntax highlighting is THERE in an editor, and I don't have to restart if I change my mind about changing the file.
http://ultraedit/com/ is a GREAT editor for Windows, or Jedit or Eclipse for Win or unix.
Two ideas:
This would seem to solve this security hole nicely with minimal fuss. Normal users don't worry, they have a clear thing to do when the indicator changes, be it an extension or built into Firefox.
I had the hardest time in OpenOffice Calc printing the gridlines.
(Found out: it's on Format -> page, but that's not possible with a read-only file, since Format->Page is greyed out!)
Also, setting the print area, and it was hard to figure out how to get a randomly sized spreadsheet to print in a scale of (1 page tall by x wide) or (1 page wide by x tall) (found out: it's also in Format-> Page, likewise with the read-only).
Let's introduce this little guy to the TRS-80, a '59 Chevy, and the reincarnated ghost of Archie Bunker!
I, for one, welcome our new Alien Overclouds!!
In the U.S., the two educational systems of memorization (concrete) vs. conceptualization (theoretical) tend to favor the latter, theoretical methodology that encourages questioning and independent thought from the students.
In many other countries, I have heard that the memorization or rote-learning methodology is strongly emphasized. I understand that this results in a large deference to the scholarship of others and less interest in, or tolerance of, a student's rejection of conventional thinking.
Do you personally see these differences in educational emphasis, or is this a western myth? If you do see them, how do they affect engineering in arab countries? Does this relate to Islam in some way, with its emphasis on deference to several preeminent religious schools/seminaries that imams must attend to be allowed to interpret the Koran? Is this conceptualization of Islam also a flawed or distorted view in some way? How does this affect the engineers you meet? Is Linux / OpenSource, Wikipedia, SMS, email, and the power these give to the average user, affecting this worldview / educational / cultural system?