Here's the article: Imaging the charge distribution within a single molecule Fabian Mohn, Leo Gross, Nikolaj Moll & Gerhard Meyer Nature Nanotechnology (2012) doi:10.1038/nnano.2012.20
It's lazy journalists who couldn't do 2 minutes of Googling who are killing journalism, not the Internet or Online Publishing!
I believe the pinnacle of the Hypertext Novel was the MUD, which was very much a digital "choose your own adventure" book with some interactivity with other 'readers' thrown in.
MUDs are still around, I believe, and have evolved into MMORPGs by some people's interpretation...
Good point. Perhaps restrict this to Civil Servants who have NEVER worked on a flying mission -- it'd still either get rid of a lot of useless people or give them incentive to be useful:)
I think NASA should get rid of its cadre of bureaucrats who do NOTHING but squabble over budgets, kill programs, and buy staplers. That way, they can let the brilliant (and I do NOT mean this sarcastically) engineers who still work there do their job.
Here's a rule of thumb:
If you're a civil servant and you have not worked on anything that has left the ground in the last 5 years, you get fired, and the engineers you manage get assigned to someone who HAS worked on something that has gone into space.
Good points. I've also seen stand-up meetings used mostly for micromanagement/time compliance/etc. instead of information. They've left a bad taste for me...
I appreciate your points here. One question - what's your take on studying alone or with friends?
Thanks.
I generally like to have some grasp of the material before I study with others, but group sessions can also be very useful.
What I find the most helpful is having to explain something to a friend (or a group) -- it forces me to learn it, since I now have an 'audience'. There have been occasions, however, when I've gotten stuff explained to me (better than the instructor could), and have benefited from studying in a group.
If you want to get the most out of your group study session, do some 'homework' by yourself first and read through the material. You'll probably get (and give) a lot more, even if you don't understand everything going into the group session.
“Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,” says Bjork.
In that case, using only 10% of it shouldn't be a problem!:)
Joking aside, most of the suggestions in the article make sense.
After years and years of classes, some years off, and going back to taking classes (and doing much better in them), this is the advice I have. It is not free -- you are required to give me $5 if you ever find me in real life:
0) Understand the material. Keep a laptop connected to the Internet open during class. Google whatever you don't understand immediately, fill the gaps in your knowledge, and get back to the lecture. Bookmark or transcribe the info down if necessary (this helps me with definitions, acronyms, etc.). This will keep you from getting bored, since boredom generally results from not understanding. If you understand the material and the instructor is truly being boring, the tangential information you discover during this process may be more useful than the class itself!
1) Understand the material! I mean really -- even if you're behind. Do reading before class if you can. Check Wikipedia. Consult the Khan Academy. Do the homework, and spread it over multiple days, making sure you get some sleep in between the days. All-nighters, while they make for great stories, are not as helpful as you think. (My record was 36 hours straight -- I got the A -- but I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance!)
2) Avoid early morning classes, if possible. Unless you're a morning person -- in which case you probably don't need the advice.
3) Take notes during class. On paper, with indelible pen, in a bound notebook, writing/drawing only the points which seem relevant to you. The point of doing this is to help you focus and summarize, not to record the lecturers words for posterity. I've found that typing, while faster and more legible, does not aid my recall as well. Recording the lecture may be helpful if it's an exam review, but is pointless if you're not paying attention while there.
4) Teach someone the material right afterward, if you can. Tutor someone, or bore your significant other to tears...
5) Find a way to extend what you learned. Right down your ideas. Implement them if practical. Post them on Halfbakery if not...
I doubt there are many people out there who bought an iPad and are complaining that they can't install Linux on it (me included), so why should it be any different for these 'Designed for Windows 8' devices?
For several reasons:
1) In case you haven't noticed, the tablet is (not so slowly) replacing the laptop and the desktop. By the time the transition is done, you may notice that all you can purchase is a subscription to use your tablet. The tablet itself may be prohibitively expensive, but easily leased from the connectivity provider, much like your cell phone. This will discourage casual hacking or jailbreaking. It'll be like the good old days of leasing your phone from the phone company. The "desktop" may turn into a developer only tool, much like the console (XBox, Playstation, etc.) developer machines you can buy for around $10K *if* you qualify.
2) The rise of Linux was enabled by the abundance of cheap hardware originally meant for the 'WinTel' platform. Had the devices been locked to Windows 3.1, the world would look very different right now.
3) Apple is a genuine OEM (in that they manufacture both hardware and software and sell you a complete device). There is much less of a need to replace the software (although we'd all love to have the freedom to do so). Anything you buy with Windows on it is a much less integrated solution.
4) Most importantly, we'd like to be able to run *FREE* software on commodity hardware. Economies of scale do not operate the way libertarians fantasize -- the free market will NOT spawn a sizable open source hardware industry (if you believe otherwise, please point me to the tens of truly open smart phones that I can buy right now). There *may* be one or two tablets which allow free software in a locked down world in order to satisfy the die hards -- but they will be several generations behind the state of the art.
Call me paranoid if you wish, but I believe this trend is part of a decade long *gradual* transition to trusted computing for consumer hardware. What started out with consoles (cryptographic signing of games) moved to smart phones and is now moving to tablets.
Think about it: we live in an age of pervasive connectivity, hardware manufacturers which own content creators (e.g., Sony) and rent politicians (who cared little about your rights to begin with). You should *want* the freedom to run your own software, even if you choose not to at this moment.
Most people I know who are running XP are running it because IT and MS have not been able to pry it away from them. Win7 might be good, but Vista gave people such a bad taste that they see no reason (and generally have no reason) to upgrade from XP.
It probably can't charge it for daily use on a phone-sized solar panel, though. It'd still be nice to have some solar panels on the phone so that you could get SOME talk time after 8 hours of charging if you were in the desert or something...
I'm sure if you have a backpack (or larger) charger, you'd be able to charge your phone just fine...
A much more effective option would be for Google to quietly blacklist all SOPA supporting companies, websites, & politicians from its search results. Or find the results and send them to a "access to this web page restricted due to support of SOPA" message.
Mean spirited and childish, but it would work.
On the other hand, I'm afraid such a blackout would have unintended consequences.
I did the same thing for a group of middle school students back in 2005 and after evaluating a bunch of graphics and sound libraries, we settled on Basic4GL.
Basic4GL is everything BASIC was, except without line numbers and with all the GLUT functionality built in (minus the initialization cruft). It also supports sound, loading a bunch of texture formats, and has the NEHE tutorials ported to it, and runs on VERY low end hardware. Download and run the demos -- you'll be impressed.
The kids did exceptionally well. We got a classroom full of (failing) middle school students to understand the idea of a coordinate system, and use this to design their own spaceship (using only a piece of graph paper and their own derived x,y coordinate pairs). We then guided them through animating this spaceship with key press events (and in the process they learned about coordinate transformations).
Our goal of having them design their own textures and sound effects never quite panned out, since we ran out of time -- but our ultimate goal was a classroom produced game where every student had a piece of the production workflow.
Afterwards, I found myself using Basic4GL for OpenGL prototyping since it does away with so much of the initialization, etc.
For example, the following is a whole Basic4GL program to draw a triangle
This was, of course, several years ago. You may find something better now (I'd recommend looking into Processing. I'd stay away from anything that a kid can't set up on his own (i.e., combination of multiple libraries)).
For the classes, you want to emphasize the basics while at the same time giving them something they can sink their teeth into from Day 1. I started with having them type in a very simple program in the first class and then run it themselves. I went from there to what the coordinates mean, etc. You will find that some kids are faster than others, and some of them might surprise you. You will also find that they'll do really well teaching each other.
Mod parent up. I also got into programming because all I had access to was a hand-me-down Apple II in 1993. It probably got me into the field single-handedly.
That being said, there is something to be said to provide technology for the sake of learning the technology itself. Logging onto the web and finding your own games IS a skill. The second part of my computer education was getting through the school's pathetic security (FileMenu=0 in Windows 3.1's win.ini) to run my own programs. Sometimes I think the whole thing was set up as a sneaky way to teach kids about computer networking.
(Downloading Doom on a 2400 baud connection and running it on a 25 Mhz Pentium with 4MB of RAM was also quite a learning experience)
The link to the test is at the bottom of the article.
They must have put it up after the article posted on Slashdot -- I do not believe it was there before. Or perhaps it's hidden from my version of Chrome!:)
Fast. Do not look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt!
Seriously, if you're over 30, quit now. Otherwise, if you are young and inexperienced, stay if this is a WELL-PAYING opportunity or you REALLY enjoy and trust yourself or the company.
If you stay, start MIGRATING the pieces into something you understand and can document. I recommend migrating to a mainstream, well-supported, open source projects UNLESS the proprietary alternative is vastly easier to deploy (this is generally not the case). Test each step and have a backout plan ready. Backup whatever you can.
Realize that you might succeed and prove yourself to the company. Also realize that it might all come crashing down on you, with all the blame being assigned to you for any and all things that go wrong. The pitfalls are many. Use the source. Good luck!
Very good point with the trading servers. As someone who actually uses FB, I can't imagine anything worse than my employer gaining access to my friend list at everything I (and they) post in terms of work/life separation.
BTW, the value of Facebook is NOT in how well it does what it does, but in the fact that everyone you know is there, should you have any desire to talk to them as a group. For better or worse, it has replaced e-mail as a means of getting/keeping in touch with friends who live far away. I find myself almost NEVER e-mailing friends now (especially not with pictures, etc. that they might be interested in).
I do NOT like the fact that Internet communication, for all practical purposes, is controlled by one company with a horrible privacy record. But unless ALL your friends are techno-geeks (or Luddites who live in the same town), not having a Facebook account is a bit like not having a phone...
I am hoping that a viable open source alternative will emerge that does the same thing (and is easy to integrate with existing FB users)
If the machines are Linux (or booted temporarily into Linux), use ssh (or rsh) to script most of what you're doing. Be sure to configure them to not require passwords for ssh. Then use rsync to back up, and remote ssh scripting to do the wipe on all machines. You can get smart with transferring scripts to the machine & running them with ssh scripting without doing anything manual.
If the machines are Windows boxes, you might want to look at some remote access/backdoor solutions (of the "gray" hat variety, perhaps -- since you presumably do not want to go to each machine and log in manually to do ANYTHING). Do what the biologists do and turn attack vectors into something useful!
"So basically you're saying "we know so little therefore let's keep knowledge secret". Makes sense."
Yes. When we may know enough to cause Extinction Level Event, but don't know enough to stop said event fast enough, keeping knowledge secret is a very very very very very very very good idea.
Agreed! I'm for releasing every software bug out there, but the worst case scenario is FAR better with software than with Biology. I'm not sure why we're even debating this -- and Slashdot contains the _smart_ people of the Internet. I'd hate to see where the stupid people hang out...
Mod parent up. I was going to say the exact same thing. Biology is NOT Computer Science, despite the superficial similarities. It's a lot easier to destroy than fix in biological systems. Open-source virologists ain't gonna fix this one!
Destroy the article, virus, etc. Bar the scientist who did this from all future funding and keep him under surveillance lest he get tempted by others (i.e., give him a desk job).
It won't be budget cuts, but the lack of political will.
Don't those amount to the same thing? "Political will" == a large and sustained budget.
No they don't. NASA actually has a decent budget (more would help, I'm sure), but keeps spending a lot of it on various and sundry projects which go nowhere (certain exceptions such as the Mars Rover notwithstanding).
There doesn't seem to be enough courage even within the organization to say "Let's go to Mars!" or "Let's build a moon base!" unless it comes from the top. [The organization is not structured that way -- it is part of the Executive Branch -- their missions ultimately come from above, as it was intended]
I believe there are enough brilliant brilliant engineers amongst the bureaucrats (for the time being) to pull it off if a sustained directive was given. And some of the things they _need_ to pull off (IMHO) are beyond what can be accomplished by $20M prizes... (Not to dis the X-Prize)
It won't be budget cuts, but the lack of political will. If SOME politician in charge would just give NASA a well-defined mission such as "10 years for a working moon base" or "15 years to land humans on Mars" they would find a way to pull it off, even without budget increases -- provided that the next guy doesn't just change or the mission. But this takes guts, and the willingness to stand up to the inevitable chorus of of naysayers and space-hating dullards who will keep yammering about budget deficits, etc.
So instead, they end up spending a considerable amount of money on ENDLESS reorganizations and PowerPoint presentations while they lose engineers who are tired of the Sisyphean nature of working on projects that are prone to the whims of yearly budget cycles.
Sometimes I feel like the politicians are AFRAID of letting NASA accomplish something grand, lest they attract the (unwarranted) attention of the aforementioned naysayers.
I hope someone out there realizes that contact lens display will require an entirely new rendering paradigm for virtual reality (or 3D graphics in general -- but if you have a contact lens display with essentially 360 field of view, why NOT do Virtual Reality?).
The eye only sees about 2-3 degrees at once, and scans the scene so that your brain can create a 3D reconstruction. Instead of just pushing a high number of pixels at a high FPS, it will make a LOT more sense to track the eye and render what the viewer is looking at in very high resolution, and the rest of the scene in lower resolution. This needs to be done with both eyes while taking into account vergence and accommodation (which object each eye is pointing at, and where the eye is focusing).
If 3D graphics researchers are smart, I see a LOT of good research coming up in rendering paradigms made possible by this type of display which give an effective 100+ megapixel display while using only several megapixels of rendering capability...
If they are NOT smart, we'll see some heads-up display type of applications with annoying text which moves with your eye movement...
There is some preliminary work being done which may aid this in Foveated Rendering.
If you really want to stay in programming, create a product that you've always wanted to build in your own time. I suggest you find a local Makerspace (or Hackerspace) and meet with like-minded geeks who may want to work on projects with you and can plug you into the more interesting side of technology.
The point is, build whatever you're building with the idea that you will be sharing it with an audience who will appreciate it. This may help you get some of your passion back, and at the very least, it will be something to show your prospective employers (who is hopefully working on something more interesting). Having been on both sides of the interview table, I can tell you that a portfolio of projects trumps pretty much every other interview skill (except for bad personality).
One more suggestion: go back to school. Being a professional programmer (or having been one for some years) will give you a great edge in most technical fields, since they are full of amateur programmers. [Very few technical areas can now avoid programming]
Slashdot Mirror
You would think that any journalist who is writing an article about something being imaged would also include the picture:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17156036
Here's the link to the actual article with more pictures:
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.20.html
Here's the article:
Imaging the charge distribution within a single molecule
Fabian Mohn, Leo Gross, Nikolaj Moll & Gerhard Meyer
Nature Nanotechnology (2012) doi:10.1038/nnano.2012.20
It's lazy journalists who couldn't do 2 minutes of Googling who are killing journalism, not the Internet or Online Publishing!
I believe the pinnacle of the Hypertext Novel was the MUD, which was very much a digital "choose your own adventure" book with some interactivity with other 'readers' thrown in.
MUDs are still around, I believe, and have evolved into MMORPGs by some people's interpretation...
Good point. Perhaps restrict this to Civil Servants who have NEVER worked on a flying mission -- it'd still either get rid of a lot of useless people or give them incentive to be useful :)
I think NASA should get rid of its cadre of bureaucrats who do NOTHING but squabble over budgets, kill programs, and buy staplers. That way, they can let the brilliant (and I do NOT mean this sarcastically) engineers who still work there do their job.
Here's a rule of thumb:
If you're a civil servant and you have not worked on anything that has left the ground in the last 5 years, you get fired, and the engineers you manage get assigned to someone who HAS worked on something that has gone into space.
Good points. I've also seen stand-up meetings used mostly for micromanagement/time compliance/etc. instead of information. They've left a bad taste for me...
I appreciate your points here. One question - what's your take on studying alone or with friends?
Thanks.
I generally like to have some grasp of the material before I study with others, but group sessions can also be very useful.
What I find the most helpful is having to explain something to a friend (or a group) -- it forces me to learn it, since I now have an 'audience'. There have been occasions, however, when I've gotten stuff explained to me (better than the instructor could), and have benefited from studying in a group.
If you want to get the most out of your group study session, do some 'homework' by yourself first and read through the material. You'll probably get (and give) a lot more, even if you don't understand everything going into the group session.
In that case, using only 10% of it shouldn't be a problem! :)
Joking aside, most of the suggestions in the article make sense.
After years and years of classes, some years off, and going back to taking classes (and doing much better in them), this is the advice I have. It is not free -- you are required to give me $5 if you ever find me in real life:
0) Understand the material. Keep a laptop connected to the Internet open during class. Google whatever you don't understand immediately, fill the gaps in your knowledge, and get back to the lecture. Bookmark or transcribe the info down if necessary (this helps me with definitions, acronyms, etc.). This will keep you from getting bored, since boredom generally results from not understanding. If you understand the material and the instructor is truly being boring, the tangential information you discover during this process may be more useful than the class itself!
1) Understand the material! I mean really -- even if you're behind. Do reading before class if you can. Check Wikipedia. Consult the Khan Academy. Do the homework, and spread it over multiple days, making sure you get some sleep in between the days. All-nighters, while they make for great stories, are not as helpful as you think. (My record was 36 hours straight -- I got the A -- but I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance!)
2) Avoid early morning classes, if possible. Unless you're a morning person -- in which case you probably don't need the advice.
3) Take notes during class. On paper, with indelible pen, in a bound notebook, writing/drawing only the points which seem relevant to you. The point of doing this is to help you focus and summarize, not to record the lecturers words for posterity. I've found that typing, while faster and more legible, does not aid my recall as well. Recording the lecture may be helpful if it's an exam review, but is pointless if you're not paying attention while there.
4) Teach someone the material right afterward, if you can. Tutor someone, or bore your significant other to tears...
5) Find a way to extend what you learned. Right down your ideas. Implement them if practical. Post them on Halfbakery if not...
For several reasons:
1) In case you haven't noticed, the tablet is (not so slowly) replacing the laptop and the desktop. By the time the transition is done, you may notice that all you can purchase is a subscription to use your tablet. The tablet itself may be prohibitively expensive, but easily leased from the connectivity provider, much like your cell phone. This will discourage casual hacking or jailbreaking. It'll be like the good old days of leasing your phone from the phone company. The "desktop" may turn into a developer only tool, much like the console (XBox, Playstation, etc.) developer machines you can buy for around $10K *if* you qualify.
2) The rise of Linux was enabled by the abundance of cheap hardware originally meant for the 'WinTel' platform. Had the devices been locked to Windows 3.1, the world would look very different right now.
3) Apple is a genuine OEM (in that they manufacture both hardware and software and sell you a complete device). There is much less of a need to replace the software (although we'd all love to have the freedom to do so). Anything you buy with Windows on it is a much less integrated solution.
4) Most importantly, we'd like to be able to run *FREE* software on commodity hardware. Economies of scale do not operate the way libertarians fantasize -- the free market will NOT spawn a sizable open source hardware industry (if you believe otherwise, please point me to the tens of truly open smart phones that I can buy right now). There *may* be one or two tablets which allow free software in a locked down world in order to satisfy the die hards -- but they will be several generations behind the state of the art.
Call me paranoid if you wish, but I believe this trend is part of a decade long *gradual* transition to trusted computing for consumer hardware. What started out with consoles (cryptographic signing of games) moved to smart phones and is now moving to tablets.
Think about it: we live in an age of pervasive connectivity, hardware manufacturers which own content creators (e.g., Sony) and rent politicians (who cared little about your rights to begin with). You should *want* the freedom to run your own software, even if you choose not to at this moment.
Most people I know who are running XP are running it because IT and MS have not been able to pry it away from them. Win7 might be good, but Vista gave people such a bad taste that they see no reason (and generally have no reason) to upgrade from XP.
It probably can't charge it for daily use on a phone-sized solar panel, though. It'd still be nice to have some solar panels on the phone so that you could get SOME talk time after 8 hours of charging if you were in the desert or something...
I'm sure if you have a backpack (or larger) charger, you'd be able to charge your phone just fine...
A much more effective option would be for Google to quietly blacklist all SOPA supporting companies, websites, & politicians from its search results. Or find the results and send them to a "access to this web page restricted due to support of SOPA" message.
Mean spirited and childish, but it would work.
On the other hand, I'm afraid such a blackout would have unintended consequences.
I did the same thing for a group of middle school students back in 2005 and after evaluating a bunch of graphics and sound libraries, we settled on Basic4GL.
Basic4GL is everything BASIC was, except without line numbers and with all the GLUT functionality built in (minus the initialization cruft). It also supports sound, loading a bunch of texture formats, and has the NEHE tutorials ported to it, and runs on VERY low end hardware. Download and run the demos -- you'll be impressed.
The kids did exceptionally well. We got a classroom full of (failing) middle school students to understand the idea of a coordinate system, and use this to design their own spaceship (using only a piece of graph paper and their own derived x,y coordinate pairs). We then guided them through animating this spaceship with key press events (and in the process they learned about coordinate transformations).
Our goal of having them design their own textures and sound effects never quite panned out, since we ran out of time -- but our ultimate goal was a classroom produced game where every student had a piece of the production workflow.
Afterwards, I found myself using Basic4GL for OpenGL prototyping since it does away with so much of the initialization, etc.
For example, the following is a whole Basic4GL program to draw a triangle
This was, of course, several years ago. You may find something better now (I'd recommend looking into Processing. I'd stay away from anything that a kid can't set up on his own (i.e., combination of multiple libraries)).
For the classes, you want to emphasize the basics while at the same time giving them something they can sink their teeth into from Day 1. I started with having them type in a very simple program in the first class and then run it themselves. I went from there to what the coordinates mean, etc. You will find that some kids are faster than others, and some of them might surprise you. You will also find that they'll do really well teaching each other.
Good luck!
Mod parent up. I also got into programming because all I had access to was a hand-me-down Apple II in 1993. It probably got me into the field single-handedly.
That being said, there is something to be said to provide technology for the sake of learning the technology itself. Logging onto the web and finding your own games IS a skill. The second part of my computer education was getting through the school's pathetic security (FileMenu=0 in Windows 3.1's win.ini) to run my own programs. Sometimes I think the whole thing was set up as a sneaky way to teach kids about computer networking.
(Downloading Doom on a 2400 baud connection and running it on a 25 Mhz Pentium with 4MB of RAM was also quite a learning experience)
Not surprised. All I knew about the company was the apparent character of their CEO, as indicated by the Elephant Shooting Incident:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/01/bob-parsons-go-daddy-elephant-video_n_843623.html
Now that I've posted this, Slashdot will soon be only known as 216.34.181.45 :)
The link to the test is at the bottom of the article.
They must have put it up after the article posted on Slashdot -- I do not believe it was there before. Or perhaps it's hidden from my version of Chrome! :)
This study would be a lot more believable if they didn't use phrases like " users of monopoly software" and actually linked to the test they gave.
(For the record, I'm not an IE user either. But the article isn't too far from spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign)
Fast. Do not look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt!
Seriously, if you're over 30, quit now. Otherwise, if you are young and inexperienced, stay if this is a WELL-PAYING opportunity or you REALLY enjoy and trust yourself or the company.
If you stay, start MIGRATING the pieces into something you understand and can document. I recommend migrating to a mainstream, well-supported, open source projects UNLESS the proprietary alternative is vastly easier to deploy (this is generally not the case). Test each step and have a backout plan ready. Backup whatever you can.
Realize that you might succeed and prove yourself to the company. Also realize that it might all come crashing down on you, with all the blame being assigned to you for any and all things that go wrong. The pitfalls are many. Use the source. Good luck!
Very good point with the trading servers. As someone who actually uses FB, I can't imagine anything worse than my employer gaining access to my friend list at everything I (and they) post in terms of work/life separation.
BTW, the value of Facebook is NOT in how well it does what it does, but in the fact that everyone you know is there, should you have any desire to talk to them as a group. For better or worse, it has replaced e-mail as a means of getting/keeping in touch with friends who live far away. I find myself almost NEVER e-mailing friends now (especially not with pictures, etc. that they might be interested in).
I do NOT like the fact that Internet communication, for all practical purposes, is controlled by one company with a horrible privacy record. But unless ALL your friends are techno-geeks (or Luddites who live in the same town), not having a Facebook account is a bit like not having a phone...
I am hoping that a viable open source alternative will emerge that does the same thing (and is easy to integrate with existing FB users)
If the machines are Linux (or booted temporarily into Linux), use ssh (or rsh) to script most of what you're doing. Be sure to configure them to not require passwords for ssh. Then use rsync to back up, and remote ssh scripting to do the wipe on all machines. You can get smart with transferring scripts to the machine & running them with ssh scripting without doing anything manual.
If the machines are Windows boxes, you might want to look at some remote access/backdoor solutions (of the "gray" hat variety, perhaps -- since you presumably do not want to go to each machine and log in manually to do ANYTHING). Do what the biologists do and turn attack vectors into something useful!
"So basically you're saying "we know so little therefore let's keep knowledge secret". Makes sense."
Yes. When we may know enough to cause Extinction Level Event, but don't know enough to stop said event fast enough, keeping knowledge secret is a very very very very very very very good idea.
Agreed! I'm for releasing every software bug out there, but the worst case scenario is FAR better with software than with Biology. I'm not sure why we're even debating this -- and Slashdot contains the _smart_ people of the Internet. I'd hate to see where the stupid people hang out...
Mod parent up. I was going to say the exact same thing. Biology is NOT Computer Science, despite the superficial similarities. It's a lot easier to destroy than fix in biological systems. Open-source virologists ain't gonna fix this one!
Destroy the article, virus, etc. Bar the scientist who did this from all future funding and keep him under surveillance lest he get tempted by others (i.e., give him a desk job).
It won't be budget cuts, but the lack of political will.
Don't those amount to the same thing? "Political will" == a large and sustained budget.
No they don't. NASA actually has a decent budget (more would help, I'm sure), but keeps spending a lot of it on various and sundry projects which go nowhere (certain exceptions such as the Mars Rover notwithstanding).
There doesn't seem to be enough courage even within the organization to say "Let's go to Mars!" or "Let's build a moon base!" unless it comes from the top. [The organization is not structured that way -- it is part of the Executive Branch -- their missions ultimately come from above, as it was intended]
I believe there are enough brilliant brilliant engineers amongst the bureaucrats (for the time being) to pull it off if a sustained directive was given. And some of the things they _need_ to pull off (IMHO) are beyond what can be accomplished by $20M prizes... (Not to dis the X-Prize)
It won't be budget cuts, but the lack of political will. If SOME politician in charge would just give NASA a well-defined mission such as "10 years for a working moon base" or "15 years to land humans on Mars" they would find a way to pull it off, even without budget increases -- provided that the next guy doesn't just change or the mission. But this takes guts, and the willingness to stand up to the inevitable chorus of of naysayers and space-hating dullards who will keep yammering about budget deficits, etc.
So instead, they end up spending a considerable amount of money on ENDLESS reorganizations and PowerPoint presentations while they lose engineers who are tired of the Sisyphean nature of working on projects that are prone to the whims of yearly budget cycles.
Sometimes I feel like the politicians are AFRAID of letting NASA accomplish something grand, lest they attract the (unwarranted) attention of the aforementioned naysayers.
I hope someone out there realizes that contact lens display will require an entirely new rendering paradigm for virtual reality (or 3D graphics in general -- but if you have a contact lens display with essentially 360 field of view, why NOT do Virtual Reality?).
The eye only sees about 2-3 degrees at once, and scans the scene so that your brain can create a 3D reconstruction. Instead of just pushing a high number of pixels at a high FPS, it will make a LOT more sense to track the eye and render what the viewer is looking at in very high resolution, and the rest of the scene in lower resolution. This needs to be done with both eyes while taking into account vergence and accommodation (which object each eye is pointing at, and where the eye is focusing).
If 3D graphics researchers are smart, I see a LOT of good research coming up in rendering paradigms made possible by this type of display which give an effective 100+ megapixel display while using only several megapixels of rendering capability...
If they are NOT smart, we'll see some heads-up display type of applications with annoying text which moves with your eye movement ...
There is some preliminary work being done which may aid this in Foveated Rendering.
If you really want to stay in programming, create a product that you've always wanted to build in your own time. I suggest you find a local Makerspace (or Hackerspace) and meet with like-minded geeks who may want to work on projects with you and can plug you into the more interesting side of technology.
The point is, build whatever you're building with the idea that you will be sharing it with an audience who will appreciate it. This may help you get some of your passion back, and at the very least, it will be something to show your prospective employers (who is hopefully working on something more interesting). Having been on both sides of the interview table, I can tell you that a portfolio of projects trumps pretty much every other interview skill (except for bad personality).
One more suggestion: go back to school. Being a professional programmer (or having been one for some years) will give you a great edge in most technical fields, since they are full of amateur programmers. [Very few technical areas can now avoid programming]