As much as the open source community loves to hate Bill and Microsoft, they have transformed the world. Contrast the office of today with that of 20 years ago. Today, almost every office worker is using his/her computer most of the day. Before, there were legions of secretaries, typists and assistants to help in the production of documents and letters.
Of course there are disadvantages but the modern ways make white collar workers much more productive.
Like it or not, Bill Gates contributed more to the good economy of the 1990s than Bill Clinton did. Yet we love Bill C and love to hate Bill G.
I used to advise people, "If you want to do anything illegal, immoral, embarrassing, or secret, don't even think of doing it on or with a computer, or even in the same room as a computer. Even the most competent computer experts screw up their security frequently."
So, how far would I go? If I cared enough about security I'd abstain.
North America or not, an engineering education is heavy on science and math. It positions you well for engineering (duh) but also CompSci, Sales, Management, Project, and even legal work.
Lots of people say that your generation will have to change careers several times in your lifetime. They may be right. If you know how to analyze how things really work, and you're not too specialized, and you're not too overpriced, then you ought to be well positioned to survive both change and foreign competition.
I work in power engineering. Technology is not likely to make that specialty moot. For security reasons it can never be outsourced overseas. If I do a good job, and make energy cheaper and/or safer I get the satisfaction of performing a public service.
Not to reveal my age, but when I was an engineering student in the early 60s the big science news was that flat screen TV was only 2 years away, and that CRTs would be rendered obsolete. Flat screen TV was perpetually 2 years away in the future for most of my life, but it finally did arrive.
Our goal should be to have commercially useful fusion energy in operation by the end of the 21st century. It's vital, but not easy, for the public to support such long-term goals. That's particularly true when we can't visualize the links in the chain that will connect now with then.
The actual breakthroughs that make energy power cheap and safe are likely to come closer to the end of the century, and we can't imagine what they might be. Still, we must support constant inquiry and scientific research to create the fertile conditions for breakthrough discoveries.
The only reservation I have about supporting big science is a serious one. Money should go for science, not to feed the egos of the pricipals. The bigger the project, the harder it is to assure that.
Your logic seems to presume that free software has better acces to local talent than commercial software does. That doesn't follow, unless you think it's easier to get people to work for no pay than for pay.
Please don't say yes. I don't want my employer to get the idea that I'll work harder if he stops my paychecks.
There must be hundreds of millions of users who don't have the expertise to be serious about Internet security. Most of those people only care about web browsing and simple email.
Why can't we have ISPs that provide them with those services without providing "real" internet access with and IP address and all? In the bad old days companies like Prodigy and Compuserve had proprietary sofware. Most of those have either converted to "real" ISPs supporting "real" internet access, or they're gone.
The other hundreds of millions of users who do have the expertise to be serious about security need some motivation to do so.
Myself? At work and at home my laptop is well secured by my employer, but I have little motivation to put much effort into my home PC. I seldom use my home PC any more so why should I secure it?
Wait! If we don't search for every private bit of information on public computers, then we could be accused of missing potential advanced warning of the next 911 terrorist plot.
The Google engine should be required under The Patriot Act to forward everything that it finds on every public computer to Homeland Security at connectthedots.gov
Defensive measures such as logout and flushing the cache are acts of terrorism.:)
Wind, pumped hydro storage and other forms of power generation are heavily capital intensive. As much as 20% of the USA's total capital investment in tangible assets is in the electric infrastructure.
In the past couple of years, investors have been scared away from the energy sector. The 2000 fiasco in California and the Enron scandal get much of the blame. Lack of investment capital hinders all technologies and hinders regulated as well as deregulated states. Even regulated monopolies must raise capital on open financial markets. Technologies, research, public sympathy, and government policies are all irrelevant if investors are unwilling to take the risks.
If you personally want to contribute to green power, change your 401Ks and IRAs to invest directly in the projects you favor. If you don't think those projects are safe enough for your money, why would you expect others to do so? The public debate goes awry when some people want to dictate how other people should invest their savings.
I hate mindless regulation SEC style. I also hate it that accounts and auditors have an inherent conflict of interest as long as they are hired and paid by the companies they audit. What a preposterous system!
I think that stock market investors should be able to buy anti-fraud insurance for their shares. To have company stock eligible for such insurance, the company would have to satisfy auditors hired by the insurance company. Insured stocks would presumably sell at a premium price compared to uninsured stocks. If the premium margin was enough, both investors and company managements would be motivated to participate in the fraud insurance program.
Is this idea in keeping with Libertarian principles? If yes, how would a Libertarian administration go about bringing it to be?
Sigh. No wonder we can't agree on simple issues. You don't trust private industry. I don't trust government.
You should study the record on nuclear power in the USA. Zero people have been killed by private nuclear power, (except in non-nuclear related ordinary accidents like falling off a ladder at a nuke plant) but many have been killed and many endangered by government programs.
The number may be different today, but some years back they said that 98% of the high level nuclear waste in the USA is from weapons, not power plants. Yet nearly 100% of the national debate and are directed at the 2% civilian waste, because most facts about weapons waste are classified and because civilians are not asked to give their opinion about weapons programs.
Still because industry's #1 priority is profit, they are ineligible for trust in your eyes. Politicians, motivated solely by re-election are more credible to you.
In the USA and many other countries, nuclear power plants are owned and operated by non-profit government utilities. If those plants are demonstratively safer than profit-motivated plants, the evidence should be plain from the records. Can anyone cite such evidence?
As long as we need a majority to change anything, and as long as we can't find a majority to decide whom to trust, we're stuck with perpetual gridlock. The status quo, no matter how good or bad, reigns supreme.
Not true that the sail would have to be massive. Some years back I read a proposal for a aluminum sail as big as the earth but weighing only 100 grams. It would only be 2 atoms thick.
When I started in this business in 1966, RAM cost $1 per bit. That's more than 25 million to 1 times more expensive than today's RAM.
More to the point, in those days a man-day of programmer's time was worth 2 or 3 bits of memory. Therefore one could justify several days of work to save a single byte. That economic was the cause of much of the often criticised spaghetti code from those days. Even when it was not true, the programmers believed that sharing a single line of code between more than one if-then-else clause was worth a month's pay.
Even today, writing for clarity as opposed to writing for performance is far from being universally accepted.
I don't mean to excuse our government for mistreating our men, nor do I mean to diminish the suffering from the victims. However, there is a tendency for the magnitude of the health problems to be grossly exaggerated.
The Radiation Reassessed page, a NSF sponsored project, discusses the cancer statistics for Hiroshima survivors. Here's the relevant quote: However, it's worth noting that among about 52,000 survivors who received at least.005 sieverts (0.5 rem) of radiation, 420 excess cancer deaths have been blamed on radiation, while about 7,600 other cancer deaths were due to other causes. That's hardly the kind of cancer epidemic that many people associate with the word "radiation."
Less than 1% died of radiation included cancers. A much larger fraction must be assumed to have suffered from non-fatal cancers or other ill effects. Still, the radiation exposure was far from the dominant health effect in the lives of those people.
The point is that the perception most or all radiation victims suffered health effects is wrong. The primary effects of the atomic bomb were immediate, not lingering.
If suffering among the GI victims is as widespread as stories make it sound, then at least some of it must be attributed to the nocebo effect. [Nocebo is the opposite of placebo effect. If someone tells you that you ought to feel bad, you do feel bad.]
The NYT article itself suggests the solution to this problem -- competition. It also mentions the dynamics of net monocultures that suppress competitors.
If and when a viable ebay competitor arises (big if), then it can compete by offering more generous warantee and guarantee terms. Ebay will respond if they feel the pressure.
Until then, ebay will have to measure the soundness of their policies by their success. They must indeed be doing something right.
I'm an old FORTRAN guy who swtiched to objects, so I can relate as to the initial conceptual difficulty of choosing which objects and why. My best advice is to leave your engineering problem X code intact and think about how to encapsulate it to do more than you imagined in the past.
I worked with power grid problems (load flow). Think of it as glorified E=I*R. In the beginning, we could accomplish 0.04 cases per hour. Today's computers run more like 4,000,000 comparable cases per hour. That's more than ample reason to think differently about how to handle a case.
One way to take advantage of the extra computing power is to embed the engineering solver prodedures in optimizing programs. A linear programming engine object can be linked to my load flow encapsulated object. Together they might solve a million what-if cases to produce one optimum result.
A 2nd example. The solver can be encapsulated in objects that make stochastic pertubations of key parameters. Thus your deterministic engineering problem solver could become part of a higher-level solver that gives probability distributions as results.
A 3rd example: Modern load flow solvers are encapsulated in objects so that they can be called by higher level programs. GIS users can sketch out a new housing development and the housing object can create and place the needed poles, tunnels and wires and then turn to the 1960s-vintage procedure to calculate voltages and short-circuit currents then check the anwers against the building code objects. That could not have been achieved wihtout object encapsulation of the solvers.
A lot of the other replies to your post focused on the use of objects at the micro level, linked-lists, wires, resistors, etc as the objects. My advice is to look in the other direction, macro rather than micro. Use them to stretch your thinking about what's possible to do with your engineering algorithms.
Even brand new programs sometimes benefit from cutting off the OO at the lowest levels. Ask yourself why C++ keeps ints, chars and so on as non-object atoms while Smalltalk lets you make objects of everyting down to ints and chars and even bits if I remember correctly. It's lots of fun to play with but the overhead of too many micro level objects is great. All in all, I've gained much more benefit from objects that focus on the macro management of algorithmic solvers rather than the micro details. That's one of the problems I have with MathCAD use; as soon as the CAD programs solve the problem, they become a hindrance to encapsulating the result as an object to be used by higher level programs.
The idea of self-modifying software was proposed long before most of you were born. The swift hard judgment of programmers at the time was that this was perhaps the biggest turkey of a software idea ever conceived.
On the other hand, adaptation, self-tuning, adaptive algorithms, neural nets, and genetic algorithms are all moderately cool. They may not be silver bullets, but neither are they hopeless turkeys.
My point is, avoid the use of self-modifying or alter themselves as adjectives. They're poison.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as the open source community loves to hate Bill and Microsoft, they have transformed the world. Contrast the office of today with that of 20 years ago. Today, almost every office worker is using his/her computer most of the day. Before, there were legions of secretaries, typists and assistants to help in the production of documents and letters.
Of course there are disadvantages but the modern ways make white collar workers much more productive.
Like it or not, Bill Gates contributed more to the good economy of the 1990s than Bill Clinton did. Yet we love Bill C and love to hate Bill G.
I used to advise people, "If you want to do anything illegal, immoral, embarrassing, or secret, don't even think of doing it on or with a computer, or even in the same room as a computer. Even the most competent computer experts screw up their security frequently."
So, how far would I go? If I cared enough about security I'd abstain.
North America or not, an engineering education is heavy on science and math. It positions you well for engineering (duh) but also CompSci, Sales, Management, Project, and even legal work.
Lots of people say that your generation will have to change careers several times in your lifetime. They may be right. If you know how to analyze how things really work, and you're not too specialized, and you're not too overpriced, then you ought to be well positioned to survive both change and foreign competition.
I work in power engineering. Technology is not likely to make that specialty moot. For security reasons it can never be outsourced overseas. If I do a good job, and make energy cheaper and/or safer I get the satisfaction of performing a public service.
Not to reveal my age, but when I was an engineering student in the early 60s the big science news was that flat screen TV was only 2 years away, and that CRTs would be rendered obsolete. Flat screen TV was perpetually 2 years away in the future for most of my life, but it finally did arrive.
Our goal should be to have commercially useful fusion energy in operation by the end of the 21st century. It's vital, but not easy, for the public to support such long-term goals. That's particularly true when we can't visualize the links in the chain that will connect now with then.
The actual breakthroughs that make energy power cheap and safe are likely to come closer to the end of the century, and we can't imagine what they might be. Still, we must support constant inquiry and scientific research to create the fertile conditions for breakthrough discoveries.
The only reservation I have about supporting big science is a serious one. Money should go for science, not to feed the egos of the pricipals. The bigger the project, the harder it is to assure that.
Your logic seems to presume that free software has better acces to local talent than commercial software does. That doesn't follow, unless you think it's easier to get people to work for no pay than for pay.
Please don't say yes. I don't want my employer to get the idea that I'll work harder if he stops my paychecks.
There must be hundreds of millions of users who don't have the expertise to be serious about Internet security. Most of those people only care about web browsing and simple email.
Why can't we have ISPs that provide them with those services without providing "real" internet access with and IP address and all? In the bad old days companies like Prodigy and Compuserve had proprietary sofware. Most of those have either converted to "real" ISPs supporting "real" internet access, or they're gone.
The other hundreds of millions of users who do have the expertise to be serious about security need some motivation to do so.
Myself? At work and at home my laptop is well secured by my employer, but I have little motivation to put much effort into my home PC. I seldom use my home PC any more so why should I secure it?
Let the flames begin.
Obviously you guys never heard of the totally original but controversial COME FROM statement proposed in Datamation magazine a long time ago.
To that I would like do add my own invention, the DO CAREFULLY statement.
Wait! If we don't search for every private bit of information on public computers, then we could be accused of missing potential advanced warning of the next 911 terrorist plot.
:)
The Google engine should be required under The Patriot Act to forward everything that it finds on every public computer to Homeland Security at connectthedots.gov
Defensive measures such as logout and flushing the cache are acts of terrorism.
Wind, pumped hydro storage and other forms of power generation are heavily capital intensive. As much as 20% of the USA's total capital investment in tangible assets is in the electric infrastructure.
In the past couple of years, investors have been scared away from the energy sector. The 2000 fiasco in California and the Enron scandal get much of the blame. Lack of investment capital hinders all technologies and hinders regulated as well as deregulated states. Even regulated monopolies must raise capital on open financial markets. Technologies, research, public sympathy, and government policies are all irrelevant if investors are unwilling to take the risks.
If you personally want to contribute to green power, change your 401Ks and IRAs to invest directly in the projects you favor. If you don't think those projects are safe enough for your money, why would you expect others to do so? The public debate goes awry when some people want to dictate how other people should invest their savings.
I hate mindless regulation SEC style. I also hate it that accounts and auditors have an inherent conflict of interest as long as they are hired and paid by the companies they audit. What a preposterous system!
I think that stock market investors should be able to buy anti-fraud insurance for their shares. To have company stock eligible for such insurance, the company would have to satisfy auditors hired by the insurance company. Insured stocks would presumably sell at a premium price compared to uninsured stocks. If the premium margin was enough, both investors and company managements would be motivated to participate in the fraud insurance program.
Is this idea in keeping with Libertarian principles? If yes, how would a Libertarian administration go about bringing it to be?
Sigh. No wonder we can't agree on simple issues. You don't trust private industry. I don't trust government.
You should study the record on nuclear power in the USA. Zero people have been killed by private nuclear power, (except in non-nuclear related ordinary accidents like falling off a ladder at a nuke plant) but many have been killed and many endangered by government programs.
The number may be different today, but some years back they said that 98% of the high level nuclear waste in the USA is from weapons, not power plants. Yet nearly 100% of the national debate and are directed at the 2% civilian waste, because most facts about weapons waste are classified and because civilians are not asked to give their opinion about weapons programs.
Still because industry's #1 priority is profit, they are ineligible for trust in your eyes. Politicians, motivated solely by re-election are more credible to you.
In the USA and many other countries, nuclear power plants are owned and operated by non-profit government utilities. If those plants are demonstratively safer than profit-motivated plants, the evidence should be plain from the records. Can anyone cite such evidence?
As long as we need a majority to change anything, and as long as we can't find a majority to decide whom to trust, we're stuck with perpetual gridlock. The status quo, no matter how good or bad, reigns supreme.
Not true that the sail would have to be massive. Some years back I read a proposal for a aluminum sail as big as the earth but weighing only 100 grams. It would only be 2 atoms thick.
When I started in this business in 1966, RAM cost $1 per bit. That's more than 25 million to 1 times more expensive than today's RAM.
More to the point, in those days a man-day of programmer's time was worth 2 or 3 bits of memory. Therefore one could justify several days of work to save a single byte. That economic was the cause of much of the often criticised spaghetti code from those days. Even when it was not true, the programmers believed that sharing a single line of code between more than one if-then-else clause was worth a month's pay.
Even today, writing for clarity as opposed to writing for performance is far from being universally accepted.
The Radiation Reassessed page, a NSF sponsored project, discusses the cancer statistics for Hiroshima survivors. Here's the relevant quote: However, it's worth noting that among about 52,000 survivors who received at least .005 sieverts (0.5 rem) of radiation, 420 excess cancer deaths have been blamed on radiation, while about 7,600 other cancer deaths were due to other causes. That's hardly the kind of cancer epidemic that many people associate with the word "radiation."
Less than 1% died of radiation included cancers. A much larger fraction must be assumed to have suffered from non-fatal cancers or other ill effects. Still, the radiation exposure was far from the dominant health effect in the lives of those people.
The point is that the perception most or all radiation victims suffered health effects is wrong. The primary effects of the atomic bomb were immediate, not lingering.
If suffering among the GI victims is as widespread as stories make it sound, then at least some of it must be attributed to the nocebo effect. [Nocebo is the opposite of placebo effect. If someone tells you that you ought to feel bad, you do feel bad.]
The NYT article itself suggests the solution to this problem -- competition. It also mentions the dynamics of net monocultures that suppress competitors.
If and when a viable ebay competitor arises (big if), then it can compete by offering more generous warantee and guarantee terms. Ebay will respond if they feel the pressure.
Until then, ebay will have to measure the soundness of their policies by their success. They must indeed be doing something right.
All those comments and none of them mention the danger of monocultures. I guess unless the monoculture is Microsoft, it doesn't count.
EVIL DO LOOP
is my favorite.
ERROR 0, POWER NOT ON
is my 2nd favorite.
I'm an old FORTRAN guy who swtiched to objects, so I can relate as to the initial conceptual difficulty of choosing which objects and why. My best advice is to leave your engineering problem X code intact and think about how to encapsulate it to do more than you imagined in the past.
I worked with power grid problems (load flow). Think of it as glorified E=I*R. In the beginning, we could accomplish 0.04 cases per hour. Today's computers run more like 4,000,000 comparable cases per hour. That's more than ample reason to think differently about how to handle a case.
One way to take advantage of the extra computing power is to embed the engineering solver prodedures in optimizing programs. A linear programming engine object can be linked to my load flow encapsulated object. Together they might solve a million what-if cases to produce one optimum result.
A 2nd example. The solver can be encapsulated in objects that make stochastic pertubations of key parameters. Thus your deterministic engineering problem solver could become part of a higher-level solver that gives probability distributions as results.
A 3rd example: Modern load flow solvers are encapsulated in objects so that they can be called by higher level programs. GIS users can sketch out a new housing development and the housing object can create and place the needed poles, tunnels and wires and then turn to the 1960s-vintage procedure to calculate voltages and short-circuit currents then check the anwers against the building code objects. That could not have been achieved wihtout object encapsulation of the solvers.
A lot of the other replies to your post focused on the use of objects at the micro level, linked-lists, wires, resistors, etc as the objects. My advice is to look in the other direction, macro rather than micro. Use them to stretch your thinking about what's possible to do with your engineering algorithms.
Even brand new programs sometimes benefit from cutting off the OO at the lowest levels. Ask yourself why C++ keeps ints, chars and so on as non-object atoms while Smalltalk lets you make objects of everyting down to ints and chars and even bits if I remember correctly. It's lots of fun to play with but the overhead of too many micro level objects is great. All in all, I've gained much more benefit from objects that focus on the macro management of algorithmic solvers rather than the micro details. That's one of the problems I have with MathCAD use; as soon as the CAD programs solve the problem, they become a hindrance to encapsulating the result as an object to be used by higher level programs.
On the other hand, adaptation, self-tuning, adaptive algorithms, neural nets, and genetic algorithms are all moderately cool. They may not be silver bullets, but neither are they hopeless turkeys.
My point is, avoid the use of self-modifying or alter themselves as adjectives. They're poison.