Even if you have no valuable skills other than a strong back, don't you still have to eat? How disposable are people? More to the point, is everyone like you or me? Must they have made the same choices, gained the same favor, suffered the same setbacks? Isn't it possible that our circumstances might be different from theirs, have forced them down a different road?
Or does everything devolve down to 'The Little Engine That Could'?
Technology has enabled me to write things that thousands of people read on the Internet.
How much are you paid to perform this service? How does it contribute to the economic welfare of your household? In broader terms, while it may be quite satisfying to you as an individual, how does it increase the welfare or economic wealth of whatever society in which you participate?
Just doing it isn't the issue; what we too often don't ask is why and what are the consequences? Ultimately, if no one adds material value to society then, regardless of the spiritual or cultural value of that society, it can not survive. There's a reason for the stereotype of the 'starving artist'. American society in particular and Western society in general is dependant upon the continual creation of new wealth. If the rewards of creating that new wealth are not seen as being reasonably fairly distributed but perhaps hoarded by an elite few, the wealth creation engine will slow or stop as unrewarded participants drop out. In the past the distibution mechanism was the periodic paycheck, along with important sundries such as affordable health care, education, markets in which to spend the wealth, and perhaps most importantly, managed expectations (a new car, a home of one's own, a chicken in every pot, college for the kids and an opportunity for one's offspring to do better for themselves.) That seems to be changing and, like all changes to fundamental societal mechanisms, the change will bring with it disruption, anger, resentment, and possibly violence. One would think that after a few thousand years of recorded history we'd have learned to manage our way through these periodic upheavals but no, here we go again.
In the old sense, meaning people who believe that elegance is important and simplicity is a factor of elegance, and give them identical problems and environments to work in. Syntactically their solutions will most likely be very different (one will comment, the other not, one prefers braces indented one way, the other another way, etc.) but for many, many problems, particularly those posed in acedemia, their solutions will often be extremely similar, the algorithms possibly identical. How many ways are there to efficiently write a bubble sort, for example, or a node walker? There are lots of sucky solutions but may be very few elegant 'hackerish' ones, in my experience.
So what happens when the cheating detector spits their names out?
After 20 years of professional programming, I've recently gone back to university to get my BS in Computer Science (yes, there is a wall, Virginia.) The first time this happens to me I'm calling my cousin, the lawyer. At the least I expect to have the rest of my tuition paid for. At best I want to see some lazy prof fired. I refuse to put up with this B.S.
While many of Sun's efforts seem laudable from traditional 'open source' perspectives, there are some curious relapses (i.e., Java as an open standard.) Does Sun see open source as something to be encouraged for its own sake, or is it seen more as a weapon to use against the competition (specifically, Microsoft)? Personally, I worry about the future of projects such as Star Office: given that Microsoft's lead in office software is so huge, it seems to me that alternatives to MS Office will have a long road in front of them before appreciable progress (market share) is seen. Does Sun's committment to open source and Star Office extend to perhaps a decade of underdog competition?
Thank you.
Rocketboy
Deeper analysis needed
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2
I'm not claiming to be the one to do it, either: my military knowledge is at least 20 years out of date. Nevertheless, even at first glance the article seems to ignore several points:
1. There are plenty of ground troops in Afganistan, supplied by the Northern Alliance. Even though they didn't begin making their move on Kabul until US airpower had extensively disrupted Taliban command and control, and yet even though their drive stalled until heavy close air support convinced the Taliban regulars that discretion was the better part of valor, my opinion is that the Taliban government would still control the country if it weren't for Northern Alliance troops and tanks chasing them down on the ground.
2. Recent news reportage from the Tora Bora region describes the cave network there as 'uneffected' by US airstrikes. The airstrikes apparently blew quite a bit of rock and debris over cave entrances, but most of the caves were easily dug out and undamaged inside. US military and political leadership knew this last autumn when they considered using nuclear penetrators to actually destroy the caves. Without ground troops, the Taliban would still be occupying those caves and doing so in relative safety.
3. National borders are quite indefensible: too much ground, too few troops. It's too easy to sneak small groups across imaginary lines in between satellite and aerial recon passes. Most of the bad guys in Afganistan are in other countries now, probably quite a few in Pakistan in my opinion, but which safe haven they chose to flee to doesn't matter. The US tried sensor-laden 'electronic fence' tactics in Vietnam and it worked better than most histories described, but the technology was immature. It's a lot better today and will begin receiving more attention as a result of this experience in Afganistan.
Some preliminary conclusions can be drawn from the above:
A. Airpower alone still can't win a war. Coversely, you probably can't win a war without it, either.
B. One lesson the US learned from Vietnam and the Gulf War is that the American public doesn't mind casualties among allies nearly as much as it minds US casualties. Bosnia/Albania and now Afganistan demonstrates that, for all its major failings, the US government has been fairly successful at getting others to do the dirty work on the ground. When I think of the Northern Alliance my mind automatically wants to call them 'legions' because in effect that's the role they served. Of course, they have their own rules by which they play the game, which is why the US has not gotten nor probably ever will get bin Laden or any of the other high muckity-mucks. Next time something like this happens, be sure that there will be US 'advisors' with each unit of imperial ground troops, serving the same purpose as Soviet commissars served with Soviet units from WWII until the breakup of the Soviet empire.
C. The prevaling Western view of warfare, that it occurs in relatively well-delineated areas between reasonably well-defined groups, is obsolete and probably always has been. Think of it as a historical artifact arising from the enormously destructive effects of rifled, repeating-fire weapons only reinforced by the carnage of WWI and II. Informal warfare, as we learned in Vietnam and Bosnia, is played by different rules. Surprisingly, the US military and political establishments are learning to play by those rules. Don't look for detailed, on-the-spot news reporting from battlefields in the future: it is and will become more critical for the civilian populace at home to be ignorant of the true cost of war.
D. The US way of war is horrendously expensive: even as civilian and military casualties drastically reduce, the economic cost rises steeply. This is the real reason why the Soviet Union broke up: it could no longer pay the bill for a superpower-sized military and, as a military empire, once the armed forces fell apart the political establishment followed soon after. The US, being a vastly richer (economically) country than the old Soviet Union, can afford some limited military adventures from time to time but even they (or we, as I'm a US citizen, although not always a happy one!) can't afford to go to war too often or for too long. In the end there will be a lot of rhetoric about 'winning the war against terrorism' but the real end of this latest phony war will come when the bill arrives in Congress. I've seen numbers such as US$66 billion lately, for the prosecution of the war 'so far'. This is for a limited action, mostly paying for jet fuel, bombs, and maintenance (and bribes. Probably a lot of that.) The price would rise dramatically if many-million dollar jets or tanks were being trashed. Even we can't afford that kind of war for very long. On the other hand, if you can find a bunch of cheap mercenaries and outfit them with (relatively) inexpensive ex-Soviet, Russian, or Chinese weapons, the cost drops quite a bit.
Think 'legion'. As I said before, that's pretty accurate.
The "strategic creativity" in a game is less than 1% of the effort
Goes a long way toward explaining why so many games are loser copies of old shit, doesn't it? Coding is easy; coming up with a worthwhile, original idea -- that's harder.
and it has definitely had an impact on my career. Let me explain:
I'm 44 and am currently where I've been for the past 5 years, IT manager for a small manufacturing company. I took some of the first computer classes US high schools offered, way back in 1974-76 when programming projects got sent out to the local bank's mainframe for compilation and execution. My first IT job was as programmer trainee for a small service bureau too cheap to pay a living wage (thus no one with any training or experience would touch them) where I stayed for a year and a half, working on IBM S/34 minicomputers. Did my first microcomputer work on CP/M systems (Exidy Sorcerer! Woo-hoo!) and IBM Datamasters in '77 or '78. From there to another S/34 shop, then to a larger one that was both bleeding edge in PCs and networking as well as moving to the (then new) IBM S/38. Worked on S/34, S/38, Apple II & III, CP/M, and IBM PC systems there for 8 years, then moved to a larger company using IBM AS/400 and more PCs with networking, in a mixed mainframe/mini/PC environment over an international WAN. Consulted for a while, now here. I have extensive mainframe, minicomputer and PC experience, program in a bundle of languages (including C, Java, a variety of aassemblers, etc.), and my networking goes back to Banyan Vines and Lantastic days, not to mention early X.25, etc. I'm no computer god by any means, but I've been around and always got excellent or outstanding reviews.
I never noticed lacking a degree until I turned 35 or so -- and why should I have? Most companies discourage the sharing of salaries. I was happy to be making a good wage and didn't know until later that my peers were getting 20% more than I was, even with half my experience. For a variety of reasons I'm not terribly thrilled where I am but I believe I'm pretty well stuck here: in two years of searching I've found very few companies interested in my skills and experience. When I go for a job in competition with someone a few years out of college, just married or no family, I lose every time, long before anyone gets to talking about salaries. At my age, lack of a degree is almost a poison pill in my career -- so much so that I'm currently attending college to get one, something I should have done long ago (if I could have afforded to.) When I was just out of high school, college aid was a lot harder to get than it is today and I couldn't afford college on my own (and stepfather was blunt: don't even ask me to cosign a tuition loan, kid. Oh, and when are you moving out? Saturday good for you?) Now, take advantage of what's out there and get a degree. Any degree: CS is obviously best if that's the career you want but any degree is better than none.
Why bother. Remember, Moore's Law is still in effect
What's Moore's Law got to do with this? This is more the area of Murphy's Law, I think. As for why bother, heck, I don't know: because I can. When I had a 286 PC, it did everything I wanted it to do at the time, why did I need a 386? My 386 was dandy, what was the benefit of having a 486? My trusty 486 was quite fast at the time: was the premium price of a Pentium worth it?
Stuff happened! People thought up new applications for newer and faster machines, and then we couldn't do without them. Remember when your average machine could push out 5 frames per second of 160x120 video, tops? I remember when encrypting a 26k text file took almost a minute, each. Back in the day I didn't think I'd be watching DVD videos on my desktop or laptop PC: who'd want to, that's what TVs were for!
Years and years ago I had a program that simulated stellar interaction in small globular clusters. A few hundred stars pushed a 086 as far as it would go and it was still an overnight crunch to simulate much interaction. I kinda gave up on it after a while: other interests, etc. I think about it occasionally, wondering when that sort of stuff will get commoditized to the point where I can take a look at it again without having to pull away from current projects for six months. Not quite there yet, I think, but gettin' close, gettin' mighty close...:)
I think you missed the point. Cringley isn't a gearhead and doesn't claim to be. If he can make this work then anyone with sufficient interest and a willingness to learn can build their own scaleable computer cluster, for whatever goofy project turns them on. Does this loss of technical priesthood priviledge bother you?:)
Look on the bright side: at some point in the future when your relatives bother you for help with computer problems, the problems might actually be interesting. Instead of wondering why Windows has eaten Uncle Bob's resume, they'll wonder why there's an anomalous 6ms latency on node 4 and want you to help them figure out whether the problem is related to cable shielding degradation or whether there's a subtle error in the routing algorithm...
Re:Forever War == Starship Troopers after Vietnam
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 2
I think of Forever War as sort of an "anti-Starship Troopers. Heinlein's novel rather glamorizes the military in general and the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) in particular; Haldeman's book does not. In a way, I also think of The Forever War as being what Starship Troopers might have been had Heinlein participated in such a morally and culturally ambiguous and contentious conflict as Vietnam; he was a product of WWII and the certainty his characters portray is a natural result of a war generally agreed to be rightous and true. I like both books quite a bit although for different reasons and feel that both books are considerably more complex -- and interesting! -- than a short review like this one can do justice to. After all, both novels have been the subject of university dissertations.
Re:Several versions of this book
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 2
Now THIS was informative: I didn't know that the latest version had much more in it than the original (which is the one I read.) At last, an excuse to buy a new copy!
Good or bad, what has his record doing non-SF have to do with whether or not he can put together an interesting SF series? Does he know how incredibly short the list is of non-SF writers who have failed miserably when they tried to write science fiction? (Almost as difficult as it is to go from SF into mainstream.)
Can he do SF? Won't know until he tries. He hasn't done it so far, but then most of the "SciFi" billed stuff on TV and movies isn't SF either. I hope he remembers that success with Buffy doesn't automatically translate into success in other genres: I think it helps the creativity when the hounds and jackels are only half a step behind... Fear is a terrific motivator, sometimes.
Prediction: lousy SF, possibly profitable typical Hollywood "SciFi" crap. Cha-ching and he'll go off to do something that takes a bit less effort.
We're running NT 4.0 and using Lotus Notes as our e-mail client. Despite regular and repeated admonishments we've had two users open these damn things. Well, this was predictable and that's one big reason we're using Notes instead of Outlook: at least we won't be spreading this crap.
Funny, though: both computers were infected but only one had gotten around to adding itself to the registry, and neither one deleted McAfee. I wonder if these things are on a timer where they don't do their bad shit right away upon infection? Probably a bug...:)
I can't think of a single microcomputer in the early '80s that could use a punch card even if you wanted one
Wang. I no longer remember the model but in 1975-6 I took a programming course at the local vocational center as part of my senior year in high school and for part of it we wrote BASIC programs on a Wang desktop system which had a cassette tape drive and an 80-column punch card reader. You could either sit at the built-in terminal and type your program in (frowned upon since there were a dozen students and one computer,) or you could write them out and give them to the keypunch class to key onto cards. At the time the electronics class was building an Altair: we (the programming class) wanted them to hurry the fsck up and get it done before the end of the year so we could play with it, but they (the electronics class) were onto us and fully intended for it to be their toy, not ours.
As a consumer who has presumably been harmed, what exactly does this settlement do for me? How has MS been 'punished' for its actions, or alternatively how is it deterred from doing it again?
they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.
They're not doing well at that, either: the only stuff we ship UPS any more is crap that they don't like. We've had computers shipped within the US completely destroyed (the plastic case for a 14" video monitor, for example, was actually split in half,) and UPS's attitude is always, 'Oh, well: it was insured, right? So everything's ok.' No, dumbasses, it's not ok: we don't ship this stuff just for the exercise. Now your competition gets the business and the profits.
The decision made a point of mentioning that UCTA language allows the potential perpetual withholding of information, whereas the Constitutional basis for the Copyright Act specifies that protection is for a limited time. (IANAL) but this seems to me to be a fair basis for overturning at least that part of the UCTA, and similar recent Acts which appear to be based on yet contradict this part of the Constitution. It will be interesting (to me, anyway,) to see whether this gets picked up and used in current or later cases.
How many film cameras these days still work if they run out of power?
More than you think. Most of the pros I know have manual cameras as backup precisely because of the battery problem. That's also why I hang on to my old manual stuff -- nearly infallible backup.
Actually, now that I think about it, I only have one camera that dies when the battery goes flat...
the pro photographer should wear a wearable computer with laptop harddrives in it
Ye Gods, are you mad? Photographers have spent the last 150 years trying to make their load lighter, not heavier! And cameras are delicate enough: now I have to be careful not to bump the computer hard enough to damage a hard drive? And more batteries... We're going back to the Civil War days when a photographer needed a wagon just to carry all the technology around with them.
Ah, no, thanks.
Besides, you missed the point. The digital photographers (b>chose to delete their photos because they didn't think they were important. Surprise! Serendipity at work...
Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever.
Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar
Once a negative has been processed you don't need to do anything to preserve it: it just sits there like last semester's lousy English grade. But, as pointed out in your post, to preserve a digital image people have to take action, repeatedly, on a regular basis. Twenty years from now, will you look at your 200 GB archive of digital photos and copy/reformat all of them to new storage? Frankly, I seriously doubt it. You're going to have other interests, other things to do. You'll do those that are important to you but the others will die. Each generation you'll have perfect bitwise copies of some of your images, with newer ones taking precidence over older ones. Digital images will disappear because we will choose to lose them, each of us trusting to our own judgement.
So what's wrong with that? Aren't my own personal family pictures my own business? Yep. But news agencies are going to make the same decisions and come to the same conclusions. That's a shared heritage which is socially and legally unrecognized: if news agencies decided to erase all but the dozen most popular images of the World Trade Towers, or of Einstein, or Linus, or Alan Cox, who's to stop them? Should that happen? Stupid question: it will happen whether it's good or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it.
The film photographs I make will (probably) never be famous or important to anyone but me. But they're well stored and a century from now, when I've long ago emigrated to the Martian colony and am preparing for the first interstellar colonization trip, my great-grandkids will have the opportunity to see what that old fart (me!) was like in the bad old days. They may choose not to look -- that's their decision. I prefer to leave it to them, rather than making it for them now, by destroying the negatives. With digital, it will take effort to preserve the photos, with film, it takes effort to destroy them.
If I take pictures with film all of the photos, good, bad, and ugly, will be available until I run out of storage space and throw them out. Packrat that I am, this will probably never happen. Most professional photographers (I'm not, BTW, but am a passionate amateur,) end up with archives of tens of thousands of images, only a small percentage of which are ever printed and used or displayed. News agencies have enormous archives which are regularly 'mined' for new viewpoints of old events. But with digital technology the concern is that the outtakes will never be archived; they'll be edited out at the source, from the camera, and never get into the archives in the first place. What does it matter that a stored digital image may have a potentially infinite storage lifetime, (I know, I know: up for debate,) if X% of all digital photos taken are deleted and never stored at all?
Slashdot Mirror
It's their own damn fault for taking the job
Even if you have no valuable skills other than a strong back, don't you still have to eat? How disposable are people? More to the point, is everyone like you or me? Must they have made the same choices, gained the same favor, suffered the same setbacks? Isn't it possible that our circumstances might be different from theirs, have forced them down a different road?
Or does everything devolve down to 'The Little Engine That Could'?
Technology has enabled me to write things that thousands of people read on the Internet.
How much are you paid to perform this service? How does it contribute to the economic welfare of your household? In broader terms, while it may be quite satisfying to you as an individual, how does it increase the welfare or economic wealth of whatever society in which you participate?
Just doing it isn't the issue; what we too often don't ask is why and what are the consequences? Ultimately, if no one adds material value to society then, regardless of the spiritual or cultural value of that society, it can not survive. There's a reason for the stereotype of the 'starving artist'. American society in particular and Western society in general is dependant upon the continual creation of new wealth. If the rewards of creating that new wealth are not seen as being reasonably fairly distributed but perhaps hoarded by an elite few, the wealth creation engine will slow or stop as unrewarded participants drop out. In the past the distibution mechanism was the periodic paycheck, along with important sundries such as affordable health care, education, markets in which to spend the wealth, and perhaps most importantly, managed expectations (a new car, a home of one's own, a chicken in every pot, college for the kids and an opportunity for one's offspring to do better for themselves.) That seems to be changing and, like all changes to fundamental societal mechanisms, the change will bring with it disruption, anger, resentment, and possibly violence. One would think that after a few thousand years of recorded history we'd have learned to manage our way through these periodic upheavals but no, here we go again.
In the old sense, meaning people who believe that elegance is important and simplicity is a factor of elegance, and give them identical problems and environments to work in. Syntactically their solutions will most likely be very different (one will comment, the other not, one prefers braces indented one way, the other another way, etc.) but for many, many problems, particularly those posed in acedemia, their solutions will often be extremely similar, the algorithms possibly identical. How many ways are there to efficiently write a bubble sort, for example, or a node walker? There are lots of sucky solutions but may be very few elegant 'hackerish' ones, in my experience.
So what happens when the cheating detector spits their names out?
After 20 years of professional programming, I've recently gone back to university to get my BS in Computer Science (yes, there is a wall, Virginia.) The first time this happens to me I'm calling my cousin, the lawyer. At the least I expect to have the rest of my tuition paid for. At best I want to see some lazy prof fired. I refuse to put up with this B.S.
While many of Sun's efforts seem laudable from traditional 'open source' perspectives, there are some curious relapses (i.e., Java as an open standard.) Does Sun see open source as something to be encouraged for its own sake, or is it seen more as a weapon to use against the competition (specifically, Microsoft)? Personally, I worry about the future of projects such as Star Office: given that Microsoft's lead in office software is so huge, it seems to me that alternatives to MS Office will have a long road in front of them before appreciable progress (market share) is seen. Does Sun's committment to open source and Star Office extend to perhaps a decade of underdog competition?
Thank you.
Rocketboy
I'm not claiming to be the one to do it, either: my military knowledge is at least 20 years out of date. Nevertheless, even at first glance the article seems to ignore several points:
1. There are plenty of ground troops in Afganistan, supplied by the Northern Alliance. Even though they didn't begin making their move on Kabul until US airpower had extensively disrupted Taliban command and control, and yet even though their drive stalled until heavy close air support convinced the Taliban regulars that discretion was the better part of valor, my opinion is that the Taliban government would still control the country if it weren't for Northern Alliance troops and tanks chasing them down on the ground.
2. Recent news reportage from the Tora Bora region describes the cave network there as 'uneffected' by US airstrikes. The airstrikes apparently blew quite a bit of rock and debris over cave entrances, but most of the caves were easily dug out and undamaged inside. US military and political leadership knew this last autumn when they considered using nuclear penetrators to actually destroy the caves. Without ground troops, the Taliban would still be occupying those caves and doing so in relative safety.
3. National borders are quite indefensible: too much ground, too few troops. It's too easy to sneak small groups across imaginary lines in between satellite and aerial recon passes. Most of the bad guys in Afganistan are in other countries now, probably quite a few in Pakistan in my opinion, but which safe haven they chose to flee to doesn't matter. The US tried sensor-laden 'electronic fence' tactics in Vietnam and it worked better than most histories described, but the technology was immature. It's a lot better today and will begin receiving more attention as a result of this experience in Afganistan.
Some preliminary conclusions can be drawn from the above:
A. Airpower alone still can't win a war. Coversely, you probably can't win a war without it, either.
B. One lesson the US learned from Vietnam and the Gulf War is that the American public doesn't mind casualties among allies nearly as much as it minds US casualties. Bosnia/Albania and now Afganistan demonstrates that, for all its major failings, the US government has been fairly successful at getting others to do the dirty work on the ground. When I think of the Northern Alliance my mind automatically wants to call them 'legions' because in effect that's the role they served. Of course, they have their own rules by which they play the game, which is why the US has not gotten nor probably ever will get bin Laden or any of the other high muckity-mucks. Next time something like this happens, be sure that there will be US 'advisors' with each unit of imperial ground troops, serving the same purpose as Soviet commissars served with Soviet units from WWII until the breakup of the Soviet empire.
C. The prevaling Western view of warfare, that it occurs in relatively well-delineated areas between reasonably well-defined groups, is obsolete and probably always has been. Think of it as a historical artifact arising from the enormously destructive effects of rifled, repeating-fire weapons only reinforced by the carnage of WWI and II. Informal warfare, as we learned in Vietnam and Bosnia, is played by different rules. Surprisingly, the US military and political establishments are learning to play by those rules. Don't look for detailed, on-the-spot news reporting from battlefields in the future: it is and will become more critical for the civilian populace at home to be ignorant of the true cost of war.
D. The US way of war is horrendously expensive: even as civilian and military casualties drastically reduce, the economic cost rises steeply. This is the real reason why the Soviet Union broke up: it could no longer pay the bill for a superpower-sized military and, as a military empire, once the armed forces fell apart the political establishment followed soon after. The US, being a vastly richer (economically) country than the old Soviet Union, can afford some limited military adventures from time to time but even they (or we, as I'm a US citizen, although not always a happy one!) can't afford to go to war too often or for too long. In the end there will be a lot of rhetoric about 'winning the war against terrorism' but the real end of this latest phony war will come when the bill arrives in Congress. I've seen numbers such as US$66 billion lately, for the prosecution of the war 'so far'. This is for a limited action, mostly paying for jet fuel, bombs, and maintenance (and bribes. Probably a lot of that.) The price would rise dramatically if many-million dollar jets or tanks were being trashed. Even we can't afford that kind of war for very long. On the other hand, if you can find a bunch of cheap mercenaries and outfit them with (relatively) inexpensive ex-Soviet, Russian, or Chinese weapons, the cost drops quite a bit.
Think 'legion'. As I said before, that's pretty accurate.
The "strategic creativity" in a game is less than 1% of the effort
Goes a long way toward explaining why so many games are loser copies of old shit, doesn't it? Coding is easy; coming up with a worthwhile, original idea -- that's harder.
and it has definitely had an impact on my career. Let me explain:
I'm 44 and am currently where I've been for the past 5 years, IT manager for a small manufacturing company. I took some of the first computer classes US high schools offered, way back in 1974-76 when programming projects got sent out to the local bank's mainframe for compilation and execution. My first IT job was as programmer trainee for a small service bureau too cheap to pay a living wage (thus no one with any training or experience would touch them) where I stayed for a year and a half, working on IBM S/34 minicomputers. Did my first microcomputer work on CP/M systems (Exidy Sorcerer! Woo-hoo!) and IBM Datamasters in '77 or '78. From there to another S/34 shop, then to a larger one that was both bleeding edge in PCs and networking as well as moving to the (then new) IBM S/38. Worked on S/34, S/38, Apple II & III, CP/M, and IBM PC systems there for 8 years, then moved to a larger company using IBM AS/400 and more PCs with networking, in a mixed mainframe/mini/PC environment over an international WAN. Consulted for a while, now here. I have extensive mainframe, minicomputer and PC experience, program in a bundle of languages (including C, Java, a variety of aassemblers, etc.), and my networking goes back to Banyan Vines and Lantastic days, not to mention early X.25, etc. I'm no computer god by any means, but I've been around and always got excellent or outstanding reviews.
I never noticed lacking a degree until I turned 35 or so -- and why should I have? Most companies discourage the sharing of salaries. I was happy to be making a good wage and didn't know until later that my peers were getting 20% more than I was, even with half my experience. For a variety of reasons I'm not terribly thrilled where I am but I believe I'm pretty well stuck here: in two years of searching I've found very few companies interested in my skills and experience. When I go for a job in competition with someone a few years out of college, just married or no family, I lose every time, long before anyone gets to talking about salaries. At my age, lack of a degree is almost a poison pill in my career -- so much so that I'm currently attending college to get one, something I should have done long ago (if I could have afforded to.) When I was just out of high school, college aid was a lot harder to get than it is today and I couldn't afford college on my own (and stepfather was blunt: don't even ask me to cosign a tuition loan, kid. Oh, and when are you moving out? Saturday good for you?) Now, take advantage of what's out there and get a degree. Any degree: CS is obviously best if that's the career you want but any degree is better than none.
What's Moore's Law got to do with this? This is more the area of Murphy's Law, I think. As for why bother, heck, I don't know: because I can. When I had a 286 PC, it did everything I wanted it to do at the time, why did I need a 386? My 386 was dandy, what was the benefit of having a 486? My trusty 486 was quite fast at the time: was the premium price of a Pentium worth it?
Stuff happened! People thought up new applications for newer and faster machines, and then we couldn't do without them. Remember when your average machine could push out 5 frames per second of 160x120 video, tops? I remember when encrypting a 26k text file took almost a minute, each. Back in the day I didn't think I'd be watching DVD videos on my desktop or laptop PC: who'd want to, that's what TVs were for!
Years and years ago I had a program that simulated stellar interaction in small globular clusters. A few hundred stars pushed a 086 as far as it would go and it was still an overnight crunch to simulate much interaction. I kinda gave up on it after a while: other interests, etc. I think about it occasionally, wondering when that sort of stuff will get commoditized to the point where I can take a look at it again without having to pull away from current projects for six months. Not quite there yet, I think, but gettin' close, gettin' mighty close... :)
Look on the bright side: at some point in the future when your relatives bother you for help with computer problems, the problems might actually be interesting. Instead of wondering why Windows has eaten Uncle Bob's resume, they'll wonder why there's an anomalous 6ms latency on node 4 and want you to help them figure out whether the problem is related to cable shielding degradation or whether there's a subtle error in the routing algorithm...
I think of Forever War as sort of an "anti-Starship Troopers. Heinlein's novel rather glamorizes the military in general and the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) in particular; Haldeman's book does not. In a way, I also think of The Forever War as being what Starship Troopers might have been had Heinlein participated in such a morally and culturally ambiguous and contentious conflict as Vietnam; he was a product of WWII and the certainty his characters portray is a natural result of a war generally agreed to be rightous and true. I like both books quite a bit although for different reasons and feel that both books are considerably more complex -- and interesting! -- than a short review like this one can do justice to. After all, both novels have been the subject of university dissertations.
Now THIS was informative: I didn't know that the latest version had much more in it than the original (which is the one I read.) At last, an excuse to buy a new copy!
:)
He came up with a concept that's part Western, part space drama.
It might be worth remembering that Roddenbery originally pitched the first Star Trek to the studio as "Wagon Train to the Stars".
Good or bad, what has his record doing non-SF have to do with whether or not he can put together an interesting SF series? Does he know how incredibly short the list is of non-SF writers who have failed miserably when they tried to write science fiction? (Almost as difficult as it is to go from SF into mainstream.)
Can he do SF? Won't know until he tries. He hasn't done it so far, but then most of the "SciFi" billed stuff on TV and movies isn't SF either. I hope he remembers that success with Buffy doesn't automatically translate into success in other genres: I think it helps the creativity when the hounds and jackels are only half a step behind... Fear is a terrific motivator, sometimes.
Prediction: lousy SF, possibly profitable typical Hollywood "SciFi" crap. Cha-ching and he'll go off to do something that takes a bit less effort.
The code effectively shows my implementation, but may not show my intention.
Possibly the most intelligent comment I've ever seen on Slashdot.
We're running NT 4.0 and using Lotus Notes as our e-mail client. Despite regular and repeated admonishments we've had two users open these damn things. Well, this was predictable and that's one big reason we're using Notes instead of Outlook: at least we won't be spreading this crap.
:)
Funny, though: both computers were infected but only one had gotten around to adding itself to the registry, and neither one deleted McAfee. I wonder if these things are on a timer where they don't do their bad shit right away upon infection? Probably a bug...
Wow -- two sensible court opinions in one day! Is the moon full or something?
:)
I can't think of a single microcomputer in the early '80s that could use a punch card even if you wanted one
Wang. I no longer remember the model but in 1975-6 I took a programming course at the local vocational center as part of my senior year in high school and for part of it we wrote BASIC programs on a Wang desktop system which had a cassette tape drive and an 80-column punch card reader. You could either sit at the built-in terminal and type your program in (frowned upon since there were a dozen students and one computer,) or you could write them out and give them to the keypunch class to key onto cards. At the time the electronics class was building an Altair: we (the programming class) wanted them to hurry the fsck up and get it done before the end of the year so we could play with it, but they (the electronics class) were onto us and fully intended for it to be their toy, not ours.
Consumers benefit by getting something
As a consumer who has presumably been harmed, what exactly does this settlement do for me? How has MS been 'punished' for its actions, or alternatively how is it deterred from doing it again?
they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.
They're not doing well at that, either: the only stuff we ship UPS any more is crap that they don't like. We've had computers shipped within the US completely destroyed (the plastic case for a 14" video monitor, for example, was actually split in half,) and UPS's attitude is always, 'Oh, well: it was insured, right? So everything's ok.' No, dumbasses, it's not ok: we don't ship this stuff just for the exercise. Now your competition gets the business and the profits.
The decision made a point of mentioning that UCTA language allows the potential perpetual withholding of information, whereas the Constitutional basis for the Copyright Act specifies that protection is for a limited time. (IANAL) but this seems to me to be a fair basis for overturning at least that part of the UCTA, and similar recent Acts which appear to be based on yet contradict this part of the Constitution. It will be interesting (to me, anyway,) to see whether this gets picked up and used in current or later cases.
How many film cameras these days still work if they run out of power?
More than you think. Most of the pros I know have manual cameras as backup precisely because of the battery problem. That's also why I hang on to my old manual stuff -- nearly infallible backup.
Actually, now that I think about it, I only have one camera that dies when the battery goes flat...
mjs
If a news photographer tells you that he's got 3 rolls left, he's not bragging. He's probably worrying.
:)
More likely begging.
mjs
the pro photographer should wear a wearable computer with laptop harddrives in it
Ye Gods, are you mad? Photographers have spent the last 150 years trying to make their load lighter, not heavier! And cameras are delicate enough: now I have to be careful not to bump the computer hard enough to damage a hard drive? And more batteries... We're going back to the Civil War days when a photographer needed a wagon just to carry all the technology around with them.
Ah, no, thanks.
Besides, you missed the point. The digital photographers (b>chose to delete their photos because they didn't think they were important. Surprise! Serendipity at work...
:) mjs
Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever.
Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar
Once a negative has been processed you don't need to do anything to preserve it: it just sits there like last semester's lousy English grade. But, as pointed out in your post, to preserve a digital image people have to take action, repeatedly, on a regular basis. Twenty years from now, will you look at your 200 GB archive of digital photos and copy/reformat all of them to new storage? Frankly, I seriously doubt it. You're going to have other interests, other things to do. You'll do those that are important to you but the others will die. Each generation you'll have perfect bitwise copies of some of your images, with newer ones taking precidence over older ones. Digital images will disappear because we will choose to lose them, each of us trusting to our own judgement.
So what's wrong with that? Aren't my own personal family pictures my own business? Yep. But news agencies are going to make the same decisions and come to the same conclusions. That's a shared heritage which is socially and legally unrecognized: if news agencies decided to erase all but the dozen most popular images of the World Trade Towers, or of Einstein, or Linus, or Alan Cox, who's to stop them? Should that happen? Stupid question: it will happen whether it's good or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it.
The film photographs I make will (probably) never be famous or important to anyone but me. But they're well stored and a century from now, when I've long ago emigrated to the Martian colony and am preparing for the first interstellar colonization trip, my great-grandkids will have the opportunity to see what that old fart (me!) was like in the bad old days. They may choose not to look -- that's their decision. I prefer to leave it to them, rather than making it for them now, by destroying the negatives. With digital, it will take effort to preserve the photos, with film, it takes effort to destroy them.
mjs
If I take pictures with film all of the photos, good, bad, and ugly, will be available until I run out of storage space and throw them out. Packrat that I am, this will probably never happen. Most professional photographers (I'm not, BTW, but am a passionate amateur,) end up with archives of tens of thousands of images, only a small percentage of which are ever printed and used or displayed. News agencies have enormous archives which are regularly 'mined' for new viewpoints of old events. But with digital technology the concern is that the outtakes will never be archived; they'll be edited out at the source, from the camera, and never get into the archives in the first place. What does it matter that a stored digital image may have a potentially infinite storage lifetime, (I know, I know: up for debate,) if X% of all digital photos taken are deleted and never stored at all?