I can understand why users get confused about computers. I still talk and think about a "directory" rather than a "folder." This makes explaining things to my mom hell whenever I forget that someone decided to change the name. Minor changes like this are extremely confusing for users who never completely understood the concept of a "directory" and now suddenly have a "folder" thrust on them.
I worked as a lecturer for 2 years and ended up hating it with a passion for a number of reasons. This is a bit of a rant, but most of the posters above are very positive, and I think it is important that the other side of university employment is raised.
One of the posters above hit the nail on the head: Universities sell degrees. What this means is that the pressure is on to pass students no matter what. This means that students that know nothing get degrees. I heard of a case where a student went to one of the senior staff members and asked to give his degree back because he had realised that he had learnt nothing! I eventually got sick of being told to adjust the marks to pass more students. We were given "guidelines" about the average number of students that had passed in previous years. These guidelines then became the minimum required pass rate. Even the senior staff who had been presenting the same course at the same level for decades were forced to adjust marks to lower their standards. My conscience could not let me be part of a system where second year electronics students still do not know the difference between series and parallel circuits.
Publication pressure was a major issue. Teaching chewed up most of our time, so there was very little time for anything else. Yet we still had to publish 1 publication credit per year. But there was a catch! A journal paper is only 0.75 credits. And the credit for a paper is split equally between the authors. This meant that a person studying towards a degree (anyone without a PhD) had to produce 3 journal papers per year because half of the credit went to their advisor. The senior staff loved this idea because they got lots of journal publications for an hour meeting a week. The young staff had no opportunity to progress because they always had too much work to ever produce enough publications to be promoted.
Universities are mad about patents and intellectual property at the moment. The upshot of this was that my contract with the university said that anything I thought of in my field of specialisation belonged to the university. Sounds fair? Except that being a lecturer in the department of electrical, electronic and computer engineering meant that that was considered my SPECIALIST field. But that was still not broad enough! The dean of the faculty told me that I was also a specialist in mathematics! The upshot of this is that ANYTHING I did belonged to the university.
And this included consulting - compulsory to establish university credibility and the main way to supplement one's salary. The university forced us to work through their company for anything we did, and that company took 20% of the turnover (not profit) of the project. The problem was that this included nothing. We still had to pay for lab time, equipment usage, lawyers to set up contracts, accountants to sort finances out, etc.. The best bit was that they collected payment from the client, and only way to get our money out of them was through the university's bureaucracy. Basically to do the compulsory consulting we ended up having to jack our prices up by 20% making us uncompetitive, and having to fork out the money to fund the project until the university decided it was time to pay us the money we had earned. It was basically a way for the university to make money for doing nothing while passing the risk to its staff.
In the end I was glad to leave. I do more interesting work, work less hours, get credit and pay for the extra effort I put in, and do not have to deal with the bureaucracy and politics any more.
Actually, this happened many years ago - long before GPS and modern technology. In South Africa the speed limit was lowered because there was a fuel shortage (around the time OPEC first imposed production restrictions). The problem was that most people just ignored the change and carried on like they always did. The traffic police started enforcing the speed limit by noting license plates as people started a trip between two towns (there was only one road between the towns) and then worked out how long the trip should take if the people were not speeding. In the second town the police then just pulled people who arrived too soon over and gave them fines!
That is really awesome! The idea of a model railroad being a computer is not new though. I read a book by Desmond Bagley (or was is Alistair Maclean) many years ago where a scientist who wanted his work to remain secret built a model railroad/computer. His dying act is to give his model railroad timetables to the main character. The main character later realises that the timetables are actually code for this unique computer.
When I left a job, a friend of mine found a pack of Post-Its in my office and started labelling things. In the end there was one on the door, the chair, the telephone, the roof - even one of the Post-Its was labelled "Post-It!" When we had done my office we went to the secretary's office and started there. We even labelled the contents of her drawers! When I heard from her a while later she thanked us for helping her find her things! The best bit was that there was still a Post-It on the wall that she hadn't found yet! Aaaah, the joys of a piece of paper with glue on one side!
I once had to compare two genetic algorithm implementations, and genetic algorithms use LOTS of random numbers. The algorithms were supposed to produce the same results, but the one was faster than the other. To ensure they really gave identical results I used the same sequence of "random" numbers in both algorithms by using a fixed seed to the random number generator.
Or they stay as an indie group thereby retaining full rights to their work and earning decent pay from CD sales. Then they hear that their music has been placed on the web where anyone can download it and their sales skyrocket because of the increased coverage! Sounds good to me!
I had a friend who decided that while he was studying he would go ahead and do a PhD. He is a highly skilled person who didn't really need the extra qualification because of his experience. The problem now is that nobody wants to hire him because they think he is going to want a larger salary! He doesn't, he just wants a job, but he can't seem to convince anybody of this! Just something to consider...
Remember that many of the arguments against this technology are the same as the orginal arguments against electric guitars (pioneered by Les Paul if memory serves), electronic keyboards, and most other tech-based revolutions in the music industry. Yes, guitarists are traditionally very conservative, but they adopted the electric guitar, so why not the electronic guitar?
Even if Linux and the rest of Open Source disappear tomorrow, they will have left their mark on the world. Even the mighty Microsoft, one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, is feeling the pressure. This can only lead to good things.
Yes, this arrangement does not go as far as most of use would like, but it is a step in the right direction. And more importantly, it is a step that would never have happened without Open Source.
Hats off to Stallman for starting the dream and everyone who has supported it.
Where does this leave the RIAA legally? The bill mentioned in the article that would allow the RIAA and other copyright holders to crack computers to prevent piracy is not law yet. Does that mean that this would be regarded as just another worm with the authors being thrown in jail (like the authors of Love Bug and others)?
...now all that stuff the US government keeps telling us about the danger of crackers and how they can cause millions of dollars worth of damage is TRUE!
During the '60s and '70s, when the space race was in full flight, many young people in the USA decided to study science and technolgy to be part of space - the final frontier (sorry, I just had to). Now the space race is over. Man is not going to the stars any time soon. The upshot of this is that fewer young people in the USA are going into science and technology. The large number of TV programmes about lawyers and doctors and other non-science/technology fields are compounding the problem. At the moment the USA gets around this problem by importing scientists and technologists, but this can't continue forever. Unless the USA can find a way to motivate another generation to study science and technology, it will lose its leadership.
I see their point, and I agree that Linux has a place in any computer-related university curriculum as an introduction to UNIX (even ignoring the other advantagess it has), and I am a major Linux fan (to the point that I actually find Windows difficult to use).
(You all know what comes next:) BUT, I don't think that Windows should be completely eliminated. Windows is still the de-facto standard in industry and universities owe it to their students to give them skills they can use. It is also essential that universities maintain neutrality in the sense that they do not give the impression that they are promoting one system over another - a university's role is to eductate and do research, not dictate what the world will do or follow current fads.
Before everyone gets the wrong idea; I use the same argument to motivate the use of Linux at the university where I work (it is a very good way to teach students UNIX rather than only teaching them Windows). So what is needed is a balance.
I learnt Linux about two years ago by reading HOWTOs. I even went out and bought one of those enormous "Learn Linux" books and I have almost never opened it. The HOWTOs are nice because they tell you how to do a common task, or give an introduction to a topic. Start with the "DOS/Win to Linux HOWTO" and then just read the ones for the stuff you need to do (like "Printing HOWTO").
Oh yes, and find a Linux user you can ask for help when you get stuck!
A good case study would be South Africa. We have very strong gun control laws which have recently been made even stricter, but we have possibly the highest violent crime rate in the world.
"Then you can model how it behaves more cheaply than seeing whether the bridge falls down." Powerful CAD packages are very useful if used correctly. I have students who design circuits by simulating them and tweaking parameters until they work. The problem with this approach is that the design will not work in practice unless the simulation is perfect (not always the case), and this approach discourages thought about why things happen the way they do. There is no substitute for good design. In one specific case, many hours of simulation could have been saved by a few minutes of calculations and a "wierd simulation artifact" was actually a well-known effect.
"Try finding an analogy to that for software, er lets model the software on a computer..." That's my point: The simulation model is the final product. I am not suggesting that implementing things to test whether they work is a bad idea - in fact I do it all the time. The problem comes when people forget what was just a test and start using it in the final code. Tests are often poorly written and documented, and are not intended to work in a completed system - causing more problems later. Another problem is that as soon as something works, it is left alone and alternatives are never tried because the alternatives have never been considered as they would have been in a normal engineering design process.
"We've only been building software for 50 years, and almost every time we're creating something new."
And we've only been building transistors for 50 years and chips for 30? years, but most chips seem to turn out alright. And this with radical process changes every few years.
I don't think that software is any more difficult to design than anything else - it's just that we don't try to design it! Software is written, not designed/engineered. Stuff is so easy to change later that we neglect the design phase and skip directly to implementation. Things like bridges and chips and most other engineering projects have to be right first time because they are almost impossible to modify later. Imagine what a bridge would look like if it were built like software!
The only way to get round this is to apply sound engineering design principles to software. This means that one has to complete the design before one starts coding/building in the same way as other engineering projects.
If we designed software the way we design bridges we would have much better software (or worse bridges;).
Windows is not intended for servers and UNIX is. That's essentially all that is said. Windows is built for the lowest common denominator (hence all the GUIs) and UNIX is built for people that know what they are doing to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away. But this kind of modification would be difficult because of the way Windows is structured. UNIX, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to build a decent GUI on top of a fundamentally sound architecture than it is to build a fundamentally sound architecture under a good GUI.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for UNIX. The UNIX world must develop GUIs to rival Windows' and make sure that the performance is equal to that of Windows. Then one can have the best of both worlds. And then nobody can argue that Windows is better.
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I can understand why users get confused about computers. I still talk and think about a "directory" rather than a "folder." This makes explaining things to my mom hell whenever I forget that someone decided to change the name. Minor changes like this are extremely confusing for users who never completely understood the concept of a "directory" and now suddenly have a "folder" thrust on them.
I worked as a lecturer for 2 years and ended up hating it with a passion for a number of reasons. This is a bit of a rant, but most of the posters above are very positive, and I think it is important that the other side of university employment is raised.
One of the posters above hit the nail on the head: Universities sell degrees. What this means is that the pressure is on to pass students no matter what. This means that students that know nothing get degrees. I heard of a case where a student went to one of the senior staff members and asked to give his degree back because he had realised that he had learnt nothing! I eventually got sick of being told to adjust the marks to pass more students. We were given "guidelines" about the average number of students that had passed in previous years. These guidelines then became the minimum required pass rate. Even the senior staff who had been presenting the same course at the same level for decades were forced to adjust marks to lower their standards. My conscience could not let me be part of a system where second year electronics students still do not know the difference between series and parallel circuits.
Publication pressure was a major issue. Teaching chewed up most of our time, so there was very little time for anything else. Yet we still had to publish 1 publication credit per year. But there was a catch! A journal paper is only 0.75 credits. And the credit for a paper is split equally between the authors. This meant that a person studying towards a degree (anyone without a PhD) had to produce 3 journal papers per year because half of the credit went to their advisor. The senior staff loved this idea because they got lots of journal publications for an hour meeting a week. The young staff had no opportunity to progress because they always had too much work to ever produce enough publications to be promoted.
Universities are mad about patents and intellectual property at the moment. The upshot of this was that my contract with the university said that anything I thought of in my field of specialisation belonged to the university. Sounds fair? Except that being a lecturer in the department of electrical, electronic and computer engineering meant that that was considered my SPECIALIST field. But that was still not broad enough! The dean of the faculty told me that I was also a specialist in mathematics! The upshot of this is that ANYTHING I did belonged to the university.
And this included consulting - compulsory to establish university credibility and the main way to supplement one's salary. The university forced us to work through their company for anything we did, and that company took 20% of the turnover (not profit) of the project. The problem was that this included nothing. We still had to pay for lab time, equipment usage, lawyers to set up contracts, accountants to sort finances out, etc.. The best bit was that they collected payment from the client, and only way to get our money out of them was through the university's bureaucracy. Basically to do the compulsory consulting we ended up having to jack our prices up by 20% making us uncompetitive, and having to fork out the money to fund the project until the university decided it was time to pay us the money we had earned. It was basically a way for the university to make money for doing nothing while passing the risk to its staff.
In the end I was glad to leave. I do more interesting work, work less hours, get credit and pay for the extra effort I put in, and do not have to deal with the bureaucracy and politics any more.
Actually, this happened many years ago - long before GPS and modern technology. In South Africa the speed limit was lowered because there was a fuel shortage (around the time OPEC first imposed production restrictions). The problem was that most people just ignored the change and carried on like they always did. The traffic police started enforcing the speed limit by noting license plates as people started a trip between two towns (there was only one road between the towns) and then worked out how long the trip should take if the people were not speeding. In the second town the police then just pulled people who arrived too soon over and gave them fines!
That is really awesome! The idea of a model railroad being a computer is not new though. I read a book by Desmond Bagley (or was is Alistair Maclean) many years ago where a scientist who wanted his work to remain secret built a model railroad/computer. His dying act is to give his model railroad timetables to the main character. The main character later realises that the timetables are actually code for this unique computer.
I have always maintained that English is a very user friendly language - it's only friendly to its users!
When I left a job, a friend of mine found a pack of Post-Its in my office and started labelling things. In the end there was one on the door, the chair, the telephone, the roof - even one of the Post-Its was labelled "Post-It!" When we had done my office we went to the secretary's office and started there. We even labelled the contents of her drawers! When I heard from her a while later she thanked us for helping her find her things! The best bit was that there was still a Post-It on the wall that she hadn't found yet! Aaaah, the joys of a piece of paper with glue on one side!
I once had to compare two genetic algorithm implementations, and genetic algorithms use LOTS of random numbers. The algorithms were supposed to produce the same results, but the one was faster than the other. To ensure they really gave identical results I used the same sequence of "random" numbers in both algorithms by using a fixed seed to the random number generator.
Or they stay as an indie group thereby retaining full rights to their work and earning decent pay from CD sales. Then they hear that their music has been placed on the web where anyone can download it and their sales skyrocket because of the increased coverage! Sounds good to me!
I had a friend who decided that while he was studying he would go ahead and do a PhD. He is a highly skilled person who didn't really need the extra qualification because of his experience. The problem now is that nobody wants to hire him because they think he is going to want a larger salary! He doesn't, he just wants a job, but he can't seem to convince anybody of this! Just something to consider...
Mars' polar cap covering a pocket of hydrogen gas. This is a potentially explosive situation! :-/
Remember that many of the arguments against this technology are the same as the orginal arguments against electric guitars (pioneered by Les Paul if memory serves), electronic keyboards, and most other tech-based revolutions in the music industry. Yes, guitarists are traditionally very conservative, but they adopted the electric guitar, so why not the electronic guitar?
Yes, this arrangement does not go as far as most of use would like, but it is a step in the right direction. And more importantly, it is a step that would never have happened without Open Source.
Hats off to Stallman for starting the dream and everyone who has supported it.
Where does this leave the RIAA legally? The bill mentioned in the article that would allow the RIAA and other copyright holders to crack computers to prevent piracy is not law yet. Does that mean that this would be regarded as just another worm with the authors being thrown in jail (like the authors of Love Bug and others)?
...MP3s are harmful to business!
...now all that stuff the US government keeps telling us about the danger of crackers and how they can cause millions of dollars worth of damage is TRUE!
During the '60s and '70s, when the space race was in full flight, many young people in the USA decided to study science and technolgy to be part of space - the final frontier (sorry, I just had to). Now the space race is over. Man is not going to the stars any time soon. The upshot of this is that fewer young people in the USA are going into science and technology. The large number of TV programmes about lawyers and doctors and other non-science/technology fields are compounding the problem. At the moment the USA gets around this problem by importing scientists and technologists, but this can't continue forever. Unless the USA can find a way to motivate another generation to study science and technology, it will lose its leadership.
(You all know what comes next:) BUT, I don't think that Windows should be completely eliminated. Windows is still the de-facto standard in industry and universities owe it to their students to give them skills they can use. It is also essential that universities maintain neutrality in the sense that they do not give the impression that they are promoting one system over another - a university's role is to eductate and do research, not dictate what the world will do or follow current fads.
Before everyone gets the wrong idea; I use the same argument to motivate the use of Linux at the university where I work (it is a very good way to teach students UNIX rather than only teaching them Windows). So what is needed is a balance.
Oh yes, and find a Linux user you can ask for help when you get stuck!
A good case study would be South Africa. We have very strong gun control laws which have recently been made even stricter, but we have possibly the highest violent crime rate in the world.
"Try finding an analogy to that for software, er lets model the software on a computer..." That's my point: The simulation model is the final product. I am not suggesting that implementing things to test whether they work is a bad idea - in fact I do it all the time. The problem comes when people forget what was just a test and start using it in the final code. Tests are often poorly written and documented, and are not intended to work in a completed system - causing more problems later. Another problem is that as soon as something works, it is left alone and alternatives are never tried because the alternatives have never been considered as they would have been in a normal engineering design process.
Anyway thanks for the interesting response!
And we've only been building transistors for 50 years and chips for 30? years, but most chips seem to turn out alright. And this with radical process changes every few years.
I don't think that software is any more difficult to design than anything else - it's just that we don't try to design it! Software is written, not designed/engineered. Stuff is so easy to change later that we neglect the design phase and skip directly to implementation. Things like bridges and chips and most other engineering projects have to be right first time because they are almost impossible to modify later. Imagine what a bridge would look like if it were built like software!
The only way to get round this is to apply sound engineering design principles to software. This means that one has to complete the design before one starts coding/building in the same way as other engineering projects.
If we designed software the way we design bridges we would have much better software (or worse bridges
Soapbox mode off...
That reminds me... A couple of years ago our government sent an SMS to everybody in the country! It was an AIDS message if memory serves...
I finally realised just how big the spam problem has become when Tupperware spammed me the other day!
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away. But this kind of modification would be difficult because of the way Windows is structured. UNIX, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to build a decent GUI on top of a fundamentally sound architecture than it is to build a fundamentally sound architecture under a good GUI.
This represents a tremendous opportunity for UNIX. The UNIX world must develop GUIs to rival Windows' and make sure that the performance is equal to that of Windows. Then one can have the best of both worlds. And then nobody can argue that Windows is better.
The solution is to upgrade to Windows XP because it doesn't have this problem. This is the best news Microsoft has had in years!