Most non-trivial programs can be drawn as diagrams at a conceptual level, which is probably the level you're talking about when you say you "think about algorithms but don't program" (I'm paraphrasing). Sounds like you're looking for an excuse not to learn programming. As soon as you do the answer to your question will be obvious: there's so much detail and complexity in a real program that a picture can't capture the information in a succinct way.
Sure, you can actually describe every variable and data structure and nuance of any program as a diagram, but it's going to be very complex and unmaintainable (ie very messy to debug) and have a lot of text in it to describe exactly what you want.
Some programming languages can be very good at simply defining certain types of programs - APL can do some awesome matrix and vector calculations in a few lines, or Perl can describe some very complex data manipulation in a few lines. In both cases you'd spend much, much longer describing it in a diagram that includes every nuance of the program, or trying to describe them in sentences.
All these things are self evident to programmers. They know there's fiddly detailed things you have to do in C or Assembler sometimes, or graphics that easier/faster done in Python/Tk or text manipulation best done in Awk or Perl or symbolic manipulation best done in Lisp or whatever. And to those programmers those programs ARE the most efficient way to encode ("draw") the problem. Furthermore other programmers look at well written code and quickly build an understanding of what code is doing. Comments help her a lot, depending on the familiarity of the programmer with the kind of code. (eg a programmer specialising in interrupt driven driver writing for a living is going to have trouble understanding a program with simulates sonar echoes in water).
Again, bite the bullet, learn how to program in a few languages and all this is obvious.
Then there's complex systems that can be described AT A HIGH LEVEL in diagrams, but the caveats and exceptions and nuances to describe it fully might cover 1000s of pages, or much more, of design documents. In many cases the final programs of hundreds of megabytes of definition documents (like an autopilot system I worked on for an air force jet) ends up much bigger than the final source code (and then the final programs are way smaller again).
Stop pussy footing around though, teach yourself to code and write some substantial programs (at least a few 1000 lines, but probably a fews 10k lines) and do that a few times, then in a few languages and you'll understand coding these days is pretty efficient. I'm sure it'll be improved upon but for now you'll get insight into why your question so obviously shows you just need to learn how to program.
Hmmm, from what I've heard from and read about Susan Greenfield over the last 15 years or so, I would say she thinks a couple of notches deeper on neuroscience matters than most people. She is also very aware of the popular press and the reasons why the public respond the way they do. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a carry on argument from the unproven idea that vaccinations cause autism. There certainly is a huge increase in autism in the last 20 years. Something is causing it.
For what it's worth my opinion is that autism is usually diagnosed before the age of 5 years, sometimes by the age of 3. These kids won't have seen much video games by then - maybe a lot of TV though. I recall reading that autism is pretty much unheard of in developing countries, it's a western phenomena, so something that changed in the last few decades in developed countries is causing this.
I think this all highlights the need for proper research, not knee jerk responses, which may be the exact response the Baroness was after.
To say nothing of the Japanese, Indian and Chinese space efforts that have gone from nothing to orbital capability in the last 30 years. China now has put people into space too on their own. Japan and India are sure to follow (though Japan has used Russian flights for this so far I think).
The above poster is correct though in reprimanding US-centric thinking. I'm sure there are also still a few British people who think the UK is actually a dominant world power in space - which it was in the 50s.
I presented public lectures on a system I developed called Cyberterm, back in the early 90s. I presented lectures at UK VR_SIG Meeting at deMontfort University in Leicester in 1995 and at the HITL (Human Interface Technology Lab) at the University of Washington in that same year. I can name names or people in attendance if required.
Each talk was advertised and attended by the general public and outlined Cyberterm's use of pretty much exactly the system described in the patent (which I had up and running at the time). The system had also been demonstrated to numerous other people around the world at the time and since then and was written about in WAVE and Virtual magazines in the late 90s and described in written detail in many online papers as well as a series of ariticles in the PCVR-Magazine (also in the late 90s). Some of these articles are still available online archived by the HITL Librarian.
As the author of this system and the underlying technology, I would say I have some copyright ownership of the technology I developed. I still have archives of the earlier code and it runs with a copyright message.
I'll be happy to claim a big chunk of any money worlds.com make. Patent attorneys and lawyers of other companies (NC-Soft for instance) wishing to defend themselves can contact me via linkedin.com (amongst other places).
There was a great sci-fi movie back in the 60s, "Crack in the World" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/ that had a similar story line to this, only it ended up with a rift forming in the earth's crust that spread across Africa and they used nukes to end it all, causing a huge chunk of crust to be hurled into space. Life imitates art again.
I always thought Lamarckian Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamark/ was poo poo. Maybe we need to look at it again given recent discoveries like this one and finding that disease can change DNA and get passed on.
I think Richard has a sentimental position of favour in many people's minds. I have money fond memories of playing Ultima 1-4 on the AppleII back in the early 80s and then Ultima Online was the largest and most populated (and profitable) MMORPG for many year in the late 90s. There were other online games but none as enduring or with as many userds as UO. I used to love sifting through te source code that came with those early Ultima games to see how they were done (in AppleBasic and 6502 Assembler).
You can buy sheets of roughened film to still to the hull of your boat to provide the same effect. Not sure what it's called, but no doubt someone like 3M sell it.
I'd love to see a benchmark showing the incease in application performance (say on a TPC benchmark) going from even 128 to 256 cores on Windows 7 compared to say, Solaris, RedHat Linux and IRIX. Unless there's some awesome new magic going on in Win7, Microsoft is well known to be below the curve in actually making use of those extra cores/cpus compared to the aforementioned OSes.
To my mind "95%+ percentile of techsavvyness" and "linux...in the beginning it was insanely difficult to do anything" don't go together.
If you're techsavvy I'd have thought you would be using vi under linux and would know that you don't use a swiss army knife to shave, despite the swiss army knife being increadibly versatile and capable of all sorts of things that a disposable razor can't even dream of. But if I want a good shave I'll use a razor (even just a disposable one) every time.
It depends on the job. Sometimes I've used Linux (RedHat) or Solaris or HPUX or BSD or pSOS or QNX or Windows2k or XP or Vista or whatever depending on best fit (which factors in time, money, performance, enduser and functionality).
Having compiled linux since the 0.99r16 kernel (early 90s) and used distros from Yggrasil to Ubuntu both at home and for work and written my own micro kernel once for an embedded project I'd say I'm maybe 75 percentile techsavvy.
There are far smarter/more expert ppl out there who run linux just fine for all their daily needs and many "Joe Averages" who wouldn't know as OS if it hit them who use Linux just fine because they can surf the Net, send emails and edit some letters now and then. Yeah, Ubuntu falls short in a number or areas where XP doesn't, is that news?
Actually many substances dissolve by themselves (depending on your definition of dissolving).
I recall working in a biochemistry lab trying to weigh out pure carnitine back in the early 80s (this was before it was used bvy body builders, this was the first human trial of pure carnitine). Trying to weigh out 10mg of the pure crystals was very frustrating because if you took too long, it absorbed moisture from the air to such an extent that it would then dissolve.
It was weird to watch the white crystals slowly turn to water and get larger over a minute or so. Hence, they effectively were dissolving by themselves.
I was in Queensland a few weeks ago and it was wonderful except for the lack of daylight saving.
The sun was shining in my hotel window at 5am in the morning and by 6pm it was dark!! So after work there was no time at all to sight see or enjoy the place and by 9pm (despite being the school holidays and the Gold Coast) the streets were pretty much empty.
I prefer daylight savings so after work we can sit around in the evening sun and enjoy drinks and late dinners and walks on the beach. If I don't wake up in the morning till 7 or 7:30am then I don't want that sunshine wasted on thick, dark curtains when I could enjoy it at the end of the day.
Please excuse me for cross posting, but I just posted this on the "30 yr anniversary of MUDs" story, plus I made some relevant changes:
Modern day MMORPGs owe an awful lot to MUDs and MOOs. Often because you don't need as much imagination, a MMORPG like WoW is pretty disappointing (to my minds and similar freinds in my age group - 40-50yo).
In fact I'm yet to find a game that has the immersion level of those early MUDs, but maybe that's because I was younger then. There's a lot more competition for my time with a house/wife/kids/job etc than when I started playing computer games seriously in the early 80s (Ultima comes to mind and Defender on the Apple II).
These days something has to be very impressive to get me interested and pretty much all modern games fail in that. I've have enjoyed Assassin's Creed recently but aside from Counterstrike after work around christmas times, to my mind, none are sufficiently open ended and diverse to replace those older games. Remember we're the old fogies who played AD&D with pencil and paper and you had the imagien the entire scene/game in your head except for a few stats written down.
It seems modern games have gone down a particular direction and left a massive field of gaming/socialising open which has been filled only partially and from time to time by things like CuSeeMe, or IRC or SMS txting, ICQ etc but then each of these specialises and as the world's communities unite more and more vistas (opportunities) open up that are not being addressed.
I think there's a lot of scope for imagination based gaming with high social networking and dynamic (or on the fly) content creation that just doesn't exist at all today. Combine this with almost permanent availability (phones), GPS and the HUDs (heads up displays) that we don't have yet and I suspect there's significant new genres of games to come that will redress some of the things we've missed since those very early days of gaming.
There's considerable scope for new genres of games, such as audio only or on-the-fly player generated content. That's how the old AD&D was and no games get close to that - I'm yet to find a game where the stories/adventure is created by the players and the world is created just a step in front of you. Those old games and their stories outlast every level of every game I've ever played and hence had the biggest impact. Do you remember with relish a level of a game you've played and retell the story with laughter and the warm camerarderie of your old friends?? Well maybe there was a scene from LeisureSuit Larry or SpaceQuest III, or Ootopos but wait...they're all very old games. I do see young kids excited about relating stuff that happened in Halo with their friends and sharing it on YouTube, so maybe I just don't get it. I don't hear my kids (who play a lot of Wow) relate stories on WoW conquests or adventures or things that happened in Quake[1-3,Wars] or Unreal or BaldursGate.
On the other hand, maybe kids todays are just as excited, captivated and immersed by the latest version of Crysis, WoW, Bioshock, SMS txting, MSN or whatever - somehow I don't see it. My kids aren't as impressed, enthralled or excited about games as I (and my friends) were, I'm sure of it. It's a bit like when William Gibson said he wrote Neuromancer on an old mechanical typewriter and then later got an AppleII and realised how primitive computers actually were. He said if he'd known computers were that crappy he never could have written about advanced cybertech in the visionary way that he did. In the same way I think today's familiarity with computers limit kids' imaginations.
It's more than that though. Kids attention span in general is shorter. I remember not that long ago when many European versions of games were different and longer than US versions because if the game was too long or hard it didn't sell as well in the US. Generally the US is ahead of the curve and that shortening of attention span has filtered out and down today. I watched my kids playing Age of Wonder
I recall playing Qwest in 1990 that Jeff Prothero ran - it had up to 130 simultaneous users which was a lot in those days - I think it ran on an SGI.
Before that was hack which we used at the office after hours on a Xenix machine, that was about 1986. MOOs came later and there were a few used for academic purposes. I recall given a talk in a MOO set up to discuss VR and multi-user environments by the Midlands(UK) VR-SIG, that would have been in the early 90s I guess.
I remember a game that was written on a BBS chat channel that loaded as a client (modified terminal software) and was pretty good. That was in mid 80s using a 300baud modem - phew!
modern day MMORPGs owe an awful lot to MUDs and MOOs. Often because you don't need as much imagination, a MMORPG like WoW is pretty disappointing. I'm yet to find a game that has the immersion level of those early MUDs, but maybe that's because I was younger then. These days something has to be very impressive to get me interested and pretty much all modern games fail in that. To my mind, none are sufficiently open ended and diverse to replace those older games. It seems modern games have gone down a particular direction and left a massive field of gaming/socialising open which has been filled (partially) from time to time by things like CuCMe, or IRC or SMS txting, ICQ etc but then each of these specialises and as the world's communities unite more and more vistas open up that are not being addressed. I think there's a lot of scope for imagination based gaming with high social networking and dynamic (or on the fly) content creation that just doesn't exist at all today. Combine this with almost permanent availability (phones), GPS and the HUDs (heads up displays) that we don't have yet and I suspect there's significant new genres of games to come that will redress some of the things we've missed sinced those very early days of gaming.
On the other hand, maybe kids todays are just as excited, captivated and immersed by the latest version of Crysis, WoW, Quake, SMS txting, MSN or whatever - somehow I don't see it. My kids aren't as impressed, enthralled or excited about games as I (and my friends) were. It's a bit like when William Gibson said he wrote Neuromancer on an old mechanical typewriter and then later got an AppleII and realised how primitive computers actually were. He said if he'd know computers were that bad he never could have written such a cybertech advanced book. In the same way I think todays computers limit kids imaginations.
Yeah - my first attempts as something similar were in 1990 on a 386SX16 and all the 3D graphics were in wireframe. I figured one day the internet would take off and be 3D based so I wrote a system that would run on that "far in the future" system. By 95 I'd rewritten a couple of times and the web appeared. I had some VC money fo it in the late 90s (under the name House of Vert Ego - don't ask) and am somewhat ambivalent o all these new things trying to reinvent the wheel and making the same mistakes again and again.
There are good systems out there that solve various parts of the problem: massive multi user (not WoW which is shards, but true MM), rendering large spaces, dynamic/self generating environments, realworld crossover/tie-ins, level of immersion, persistence+memory/history etc etc.
Someone will eventually get it right. We've had Ultima Onine II (that never hit the market) that had brilliant ideas, Croquet (brilliant too with on the fly creation of virtual spaces, but only experimental and only 2 users for now), LivePlace by Brad Greenspan (MySpace founder, still in development), Blaxxun Interactive (german group, defunct), WoW+other games, my own cyberterm and there's many more I probably missed.
I'd say hw is almost there to tie this together well. I see a crossover to mobile phones with GPS enabled heads up displays (augmented reality, see through glasses) and this could all tie in together to be the next big thing. Don't hold your breath though. It still needs brilliance and dollars.
I've worked in a number of engineering companies (employees ranging from 60 to a few 1000 over 25 yrs), one of which I was IT Manager and looking back the ratio was always about 1:25 though there were technical/IT specialist embedded in departments who helped out on support so the true ration was maybe 1:20. Banks don't need as many IT ppl as they have lots of clerks and secretarial type workers who can all be easily supported (at 1:50 or even 1:100).
A friend heads up a NGO (non government organisation, doing charity work) and supports 600+ desktops and servers with 4 people but they're all exactly the same desktop with only a small handful of linux and windows servers.
So in general the more diversified the computing needs of the users, the more IT support you'll need. The Eng company that I worked at with 60 people needed 4 IT staff (1:15) as they had, Windows, Linux and SGI servers+workstations, your regular MS Office Apps, accounting and some serious high end applications (like where the sw costs more for one year's maintenance than the users salary) and was spread over 3 countries. But then that was the exception - of the 60 people, 17 had Phds, which is not normal!!
I think it was last year a terrorist drove a 4 weheel drive (SUV) into a bank in Scotland. The vehicle didn't blow up as intended and a mobile phone found in it was traced to an owner who's registration number was checked against the nationwide system of camera's usually used for traffic control and the guy was pulled off the road within 3 hours.
I was really impressed by the computer system behind being able to scan every registration plate going down hundreds (if not thousands) of major roads over the whole country. In this case it worked very effectively and quickly.
It's a balance between the police/bigbrother state and security. I don't know if anyone in the UK actually voted to have this kind of security but I imagine if you asked the average person in the street they'd be happy that criminals can be caught quickly using such a system. I doubt it gets used for every car theft or minor cases, but I'm only guessing.
In the US it might be pointless because people would just drive on the minor roads and thre's a lot more to monitor in the first place. My thought was that this sytem must have been design and built up over many years - possibly well before the excuse of terrorist threats came into view. Hence it must have been a very far sighted, paranoid and powerful body that pushed for the system to be implemented in the first place
In the UK in several cities as you approach on major arterial roads there are electronic boards showing how many parks are left in each nearby car park. This gives you an idea of where to go to get your park. There's no point in heading for a park with 3 spaces left when there's another with 70 free spaces. So people aren't competing for individuals spaces but it helps a lot. A minor variation would be to add an up or down arrow to show if the free spaces are increasing or decreasing over, say, the last 10 minutes. That way if there's 10 spaces and decreasing (down arrow) you know it's probably not worth trying there.
Also, in Switzerland in 1977 I recall going into a massive car park in Geneve that had blue indicator lights next to each parking space. If the park was empty the light was on. It was very easy to drive down the ends of the very long rows of cars and spot the individual lights that were on - even if it was way off in the distance. This is a simple idea that I'm surprised hasn't taken off over the last 30+ years. Possibly maintenance of individual car detectors and the power and light bulbs needed creates considerable ongoing costs. Still, you'd think there'd be a market for this. I've never seen it again in any park anywhere in the world - though it may be out there.
Reminds me of Geoffrey Hoyle (astronomer brother of SF author Fred Hoyle) and some Indian guy suggested that the flu virus could come from comets and we get a different dose each year as we go through the tails of countless comets. It was seriously debunked at the time (1980s?) but it seems a bit rash to exclude that idea out of hand, or at least the possibility of some parts of life ie significant organic molecules (if not a whole chunk of DNA) coming from outside Earth. Recent discoveries like the one this announcement covers is just the beginning of our exploration of "what's out there". I'd say it's way too early to say "impossible".
The amusing side to this is if there was some protoplanet a long way away that exploded or was hit by a big asterid and spewd genetic material (and I mean almost whole organisms) into deep space to seed the galaxy (or nearby space) over the following few billion years. Then when they all get to the point (well, some of them) of developing space travel they all find these bipedal humanoids just like in Star Wars or any other early years SciFi move (on a cheap budget).
This reminds me of the "best minds of the day" at the turn of the 20th century who mathematically proved that it was impossible to build a rocket that could escape earth's gravity (something to do with using dynamite as the most "powerful" substance for it's weight they knew of at the time).
I still prefer Arthur C Clarke's notion that "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic."
Hence I agree wholeheartedly with the previous poster who is wise enough to realise he doesn't know everything and not everything can be measure by what he currently knows.
It'd be a bit presumptive to think that in the future (which is a long time) we will not develop or discover or encounter forces and things that today appear to be magic/gods etc. If we don't understand it, will these unexplained things cease to exist?
I have a wad of punch cards from 1978 that printed out a calendar. I can't believe I kept them all these years.
The oldest code that I wrote and still use occassionally is some neural network code I wrote in C on a CP/M machine in 1984. It is very generic code and I dust it off now and then to apply to various ideas.
I also have some random name generation code I used for AD&D characters from the same era and code that created a random village on the screen of my trusty AppleII - these are in Compas Pascal (from a German company, which later sold the compiler to Borland which renamed it to Turbo Pascal) which I ran using a Z80 CP/M card in the Apple. I haven't got any compiler/interpreter for these though. The dates on the file are 1989 but inside comments go back to 1985.
From replies here some people say "stop complaining and appreciate what you've got", others say "take a chance while you can".
It really depends on you and your wife's attitude to lifestyle, risk and your need for change. Your kids can probably handle a change to a new school or the country side or whatever. They're flexible. Wives are trickier. Does she want to move away from her friends/family? Does she want to lose the SUV? Does she want to lose the nice clothes and not having to work (or not have to work too much)?
I suspect what you're thinking of is a change or career without losing income. This will save a lot of grief on the home front.
I really understand where you're coming from in terms of needing a change. Sure some people are ok in the same career for life. Others just slowly die on the inside having to get up and do the same job every day. It gets to the point where you can't relate to your family or you feel you've not done anything significant with your life and time is ticking by.
After 20+ yrs in computing I went back and studied counselling and built up a practice in the evenings. It was very fullfilling but a lot more stress really. I ended up with major health issues so had to cut right back. Now I do share trading and am building up enough skill and funds to retire in 5 or so years (at the current rate). It has the main advantage of not requiring much time and still being intellectually stimulating.
Other pursuits such as setting up an online business (or less likely to succeed, writing) are good too, because, like share trading, the profit returned is not directly connected to the hrs you work. Like if you write some software and sell it online you write once and sell again and again, same with a book. How about a technical book on the area you specialise in at work? That will utilise your experience so you're not throwing those years away. You can build up slowly in the evenings. The chance of publishing technical material is far greater than fiction. Also writing, an online business and shares can all be done from anywhere in the world.
Or start an online newsletter, again on the technical subjects you know. You might even get your wife to work with you helping with layout or web design (if you're going to do it yourself) and startup costs are very low.
It may take a while and you'll make mistakes but just starting on something new will be a breath of fresh air and may give you impetus to try other things. It'll at least give you the heart to realise there's an end in sight, a way out.
If your heart is saying you need to get out before you die inside, then listen to it, speak to your wife and then write down some plans, set some goals. Idealise your perfect life you want in 5 or 10 yrs and work back from that to see what you have to do to get there - where would you be in 2 years then? So if you're at that point in 2 yrs, where do you need to be in 12 months, 6 months, next month? This will help you to act and also see it is possible to change. The first steps are small but with a plan you can see how it will start you towards that final goal.
This may be nonsense talk to some people and to others it'll be a breath of fresh air before they go postal or the last light fades from their weary eyes. I guarantee your wife and kids will love a newly reinvigorated you and your zest for life will be infectious. Your kids have great lessons to learn from watching you work through your own issues and sorting out what's important. Later in life they then have the option to choose to do the corporate 9-5 thing or branch out on their own and they know they have a great example to look up to for both of those things.
I wouldn't say anything to the people at work though - just do it quietly on the side until you're ready to leave. Then, when you're ready to jump, still take accumulated annual leave or better yet, negotiate to cut back your day job to 3 or 4 days a week (tell them it's for health reasons or something). This way you can transit
'Cause when I was a lad there was only a handful of users on the internet so we didn't need numbers, as you knew everyone by name anyway. All you had to remember was a few IP numbers for the ftp servers and everyone's email adress just had their first name with @.[edu|com|org|net] In fact most of the time you could guess someone's email address and get it right.
Of course some jerks spoilt it by introducing gophers, and veronicas and wais and then those crazy CERN clowns tipped mosaic onto Mr Clark and young Andreesson (whom I recall exchanging emails with after I guessed his address). It's all gone to the dogs since then. No I don't want to buy any cookies and don't walk on the lawn as you're leaving!
I recall a phase in the mid to late 80s when many terminals were amber. They were meant to be much easier on the eyes than grenn screens. The colour was usually orange and the background sort of a dark muddy brown. It was much easier on the eyes in a poorly lit room (ie late at night or any office desk not next to a window). I know some people hated them (I had one client who used to throw up with an amber screen and get headaches, but with the green she was fine - so your mileage may vary!)
I've personally tried many variations once colours became available and usually I end up with some form of black on grey, turned way down, with the "temperature" set as cold (ie as "brown") as possible, usually with muted green, grey or brown borders.
I used the same 21" Sony Trinitron at home from the mid 90s to last year at 1600x1200 at 60Hz and then changed to a top end flatscreen last year. It was a huge shock as now I can't do work at night without the light on as the screen is so bright. I have to turn the room light way up otherwise it almost hurts and I can't see a thing when I get up:-) It'd be great if flatscreens could cut the backlight way way down. When mine's on the whole room lights up - big waste of power it seems. The brightness controls do almost nothing (it's a 24" Samsung widescreen). I've talked to many, many others who have the same problem. (It could be my old screen had faded a bit, I admit)
Call me fussy but a rough estimate says I've been using screens for 12+hrs a day for 25 yrs or so from 30" away and I'm a bit stuck in my ways:-)
I recall reading that a significant problem in the field is getting injured soldiers back to safety or medical aid. That was a key problem this type of robot is meant to solve. It wouldn't have to be quiet or particularly fast. It just needs to be reliable and able to carry a soldier plus gear over uncertain terrain. It'd be a rough ride but better than stuck on the front line with your foot blown off.
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Most non-trivial programs can be drawn as diagrams at a conceptual level, which is probably the level you're talking about when you say you "think about algorithms but don't program" (I'm paraphrasing). Sounds like you're looking for an excuse not to learn programming. As soon as you do the answer to your question will be obvious: there's so much detail and complexity in a real program that a picture can't capture the information in a succinct way.
Sure, you can actually describe every variable and data structure and nuance of any program as a diagram, but it's going to be very complex and unmaintainable (ie very messy to debug) and have a lot of text in it to describe exactly what you want.
Some programming languages can be very good at simply defining certain types of programs - APL can do some awesome matrix and vector calculations in a few lines, or Perl can describe some very complex data manipulation in a few lines. In both cases you'd spend much, much longer describing it in a diagram that includes every nuance of the program, or trying to describe them in sentences.
All these things are self evident to programmers. They know there's fiddly detailed things you have to do in C or Assembler sometimes, or graphics that easier/faster done in Python/Tk or text manipulation best done in Awk or Perl or symbolic manipulation best done in Lisp or whatever. And to those programmers those programs ARE the most efficient way to encode ("draw") the problem. Furthermore other programmers look at well written code and quickly build an understanding of what code is doing. Comments help her a lot, depending on the familiarity of the programmer with the kind of code. (eg a programmer specialising in interrupt driven driver writing for a living is going to have trouble understanding a program with simulates sonar echoes in water).
Again, bite the bullet, learn how to program in a few languages and all this is obvious.
Then there's complex systems that can be described AT A HIGH LEVEL in diagrams, but the caveats and exceptions and nuances to describe it fully might cover 1000s of pages, or much more, of design documents. In many cases the final programs of hundreds of megabytes of definition documents (like an autopilot system I worked on for an air force jet) ends up much bigger than the final source code (and then the final programs are way smaller again).
Stop pussy footing around though, teach yourself to code and write some substantial programs (at least a few 1000 lines, but probably a fews 10k lines) and do that a few times, then in a few languages and you'll understand coding these days is pretty efficient. I'm sure it'll be improved upon but for now you'll get insight into why your question so obviously shows you just need to learn how to program.
Hmmm, from what I've heard from and read about Susan Greenfield over the last 15 years or so, I would say she thinks a couple of notches deeper on neuroscience matters than most people. She is also very aware of the popular press and the reasons why the public respond the way they do. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a carry on argument from the unproven idea that vaccinations cause autism. There certainly is a huge increase in autism in the last 20 years. Something is causing it.
For what it's worth my opinion is that autism is usually diagnosed before the age of 5 years, sometimes by the age of 3. These kids won't have seen much video games by then - maybe a lot of TV though. I recall reading that autism is pretty much unheard of in developing countries, it's a western phenomena, so something that changed in the last few decades in developed countries is causing this.
I think this all highlights the need for proper research, not knee jerk responses, which may be the exact response the Baroness was after.
To say nothing of the Japanese, Indian and Chinese space efforts that have gone from nothing to orbital capability in the last 30 years. China now has put people into space too on their own. Japan and India are sure to follow (though Japan has used Russian flights for this so far I think).
The above poster is correct though in reprimanding US-centric thinking. I'm sure there are also still a few British people who think the UK is actually a dominant world power in space - which it was in the 50s.
I presented public lectures on a system I developed called Cyberterm, back in the early 90s. I presented lectures at UK VR_SIG Meeting at deMontfort University in Leicester in 1995 and at the HITL (Human Interface Technology Lab) at the University of Washington in that same year. I can name names or people in attendance if required.
Each talk was advertised and attended by the general public and outlined Cyberterm's use of pretty much exactly the system described in the patent (which I had up and running at the time). The system had also been demonstrated to numerous other people around the world at the time and since then and was written about in WAVE and Virtual magazines in the late 90s and described in written detail in many online papers as well as a series of ariticles in the PCVR-Magazine (also in the late 90s). Some of these articles are still available online archived by the HITL Librarian.
As the author of this system and the underlying technology, I would say I have some copyright ownership of the technology I developed. I still have archives of the earlier code and it runs with a copyright message.
I'll be happy to claim a big chunk of any money worlds.com make. Patent attorneys and lawyers of other companies (NC-Soft for instance) wishing to defend themselves can contact me via linkedin.com (amongst other places).
There was a great sci-fi movie back in the 60s, "Crack in the World" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/ that had a similar story line to this, only it ended up with a rift forming in the earth's crust that spread across Africa and they used nukes to end it all, causing a huge chunk of crust to be hurled into space. Life imitates art again.
I always thought Lamarckian Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamark/ was poo poo. Maybe we need to look at it again given recent discoveries like this one and finding that disease can change DNA and get passed on.
I think Richard has a sentimental position of favour in many people's minds. I have money fond memories of playing Ultima 1-4 on the AppleII back in the early 80s and then Ultima Online was the largest and most populated (and profitable) MMORPG for many year in the late 90s. There were other online games but none as enduring or with as many userds as UO. I used to love sifting through te source code that came with those early Ultima games to see how they were done (in AppleBasic and 6502 Assembler).
You can buy sheets of roughened film to still to the hull of your boat to provide the same effect. Not sure what it's called, but no doubt someone like 3M sell it.
I'd love to see a benchmark showing the incease in application performance (say on a TPC benchmark) going from even 128 to 256 cores on Windows 7 compared to say, Solaris, RedHat Linux and IRIX. Unless there's some awesome new magic going on in Win7, Microsoft is well known to be below the curve in actually making use of those extra cores/cpus compared to the aforementioned OSes.
To my mind "95%+ percentile of techsavvyness" and "linux...in the beginning it was insanely difficult to do anything" don't go together.
If you're techsavvy I'd have thought you would be using vi under linux and would know that you don't use a swiss army knife to shave, despite the swiss army knife being increadibly versatile and capable of all sorts of things that a disposable razor can't even dream of. But if I want a good shave I'll use a razor (even just a disposable one) every time.
It depends on the job. Sometimes I've used Linux (RedHat) or Solaris or HPUX or BSD or pSOS or QNX or Windows2k or XP or Vista or whatever depending on best fit (which factors in time, money, performance, enduser and functionality).
Having compiled linux since the 0.99r16 kernel (early 90s) and used distros from Yggrasil to Ubuntu both at home and for work and written my own micro kernel once for an embedded project I'd say I'm maybe 75 percentile techsavvy.
There are far smarter/more expert ppl out there who run linux just fine for all their daily needs and many "Joe Averages" who wouldn't know as OS if it hit them who use Linux just fine because they can surf the Net, send emails and edit some letters now and then. Yeah, Ubuntu falls short in a number or areas where XP doesn't, is that news?
Actually many substances dissolve by themselves (depending on your definition of dissolving).
I recall working in a biochemistry lab trying to weigh out pure carnitine back in the early 80s (this was before it was used bvy body builders, this was the first human trial of pure carnitine). Trying to weigh out 10mg of the pure crystals was very frustrating because if you took too long, it absorbed moisture from the air to such an extent that it would then dissolve.
It was weird to watch the white crystals slowly turn to water and get larger over a minute or so. Hence, they effectively were dissolving by themselves.
I was in Queensland a few weeks ago and it was wonderful except for the lack of daylight saving.
The sun was shining in my hotel window at 5am in the morning and by 6pm it was dark!! So after work there was no time at all to sight see or enjoy the place and by 9pm (despite being the school holidays and the Gold Coast) the streets were pretty much empty.
I prefer daylight savings so after work we can sit around in the evening sun and enjoy drinks and late dinners and walks on the beach. If I don't wake up in the morning till 7 or 7:30am then I don't want that sunshine wasted on thick, dark curtains when I could enjoy it at the end of the day.
Please excuse me for cross posting, but I just posted this on the "30 yr anniversary of MUDs" story, plus I made some relevant changes:
Modern day MMORPGs owe an awful lot to MUDs and MOOs. Often because you don't need as much imagination, a MMORPG like WoW is pretty disappointing (to my minds and similar freinds in my age group - 40-50yo).
In fact I'm yet to find a game that has the immersion level of those early MUDs, but maybe that's because I was younger then. There's a lot more competition for my time with a house/wife/kids/job etc than when I started playing computer games seriously in the early 80s (Ultima comes to mind and Defender on the Apple II).
These days something has to be very impressive to get me interested and pretty much all modern games fail in that. I've have enjoyed Assassin's Creed recently but aside from Counterstrike after work around christmas times, to my mind, none are sufficiently open ended and diverse to replace those older games. Remember we're the old fogies who played AD&D with pencil and paper and you had the imagien the entire scene/game in your head except for a few stats written down.
It seems modern games have gone down a particular direction and left a massive field of gaming/socialising open which has been filled only partially and from time to time by things like CuSeeMe, or IRC or SMS txting, ICQ etc but then each of these specialises and as the world's communities unite more and more vistas (opportunities) open up that are not being addressed.
I think there's a lot of scope for imagination based gaming with high social networking and dynamic (or on the fly) content creation that just doesn't exist at all today. Combine this with almost permanent availability (phones), GPS and the HUDs (heads up displays) that we don't have yet and I suspect there's significant new genres of games to come that will redress some of the things we've missed since those very early days of gaming.
There's considerable scope for new genres of games, such as audio only or on-the-fly player generated content. That's how the old AD&D was and no games get close to that - I'm yet to find a game where the stories/adventure is created by the players and the world is created just a step in front of you. Those old games and their stories outlast every level of every game I've ever played and hence had the biggest impact. Do you remember with relish a level of a game you've played and retell the story with laughter and the warm camerarderie of your old friends?? Well maybe there was a scene from LeisureSuit Larry or SpaceQuest III, or Ootopos but wait...they're all very old games. I do see young kids excited about relating stuff that happened in Halo with their friends and sharing it on YouTube, so maybe I just don't get it. I don't hear my kids (who play a lot of Wow) relate stories on WoW conquests or adventures or things that happened in Quake[1-3,Wars] or Unreal or BaldursGate.
On the other hand, maybe kids todays are just as excited, captivated and immersed by the latest version of Crysis, WoW, Bioshock, SMS txting, MSN or whatever - somehow I don't see it. My kids aren't as impressed, enthralled or excited about games as I (and my friends) were, I'm sure of it. It's a bit like when William Gibson said he wrote Neuromancer on an old mechanical typewriter and then later got an AppleII and realised how primitive computers actually were. He said if he'd known computers were that crappy he never could have written about advanced cybertech in the visionary way that he did. In the same way I think today's familiarity with computers limit kids' imaginations.
It's more than that though. Kids attention span in general is shorter. I remember not that long ago when many European versions of games were different and longer than US versions because if the game was too long or hard it didn't sell as well in the US. Generally the US is ahead of the curve and that shortening of attention span has filtered out and down today. I watched my kids playing Age of Wonder
I recall playing Qwest in 1990 that Jeff Prothero ran - it had up to 130 simultaneous users which was a lot in those days - I think it ran on an SGI.
Before that was hack which we used at the office after hours on a Xenix machine, that was about 1986. MOOs came later and there were a few used for academic purposes. I recall given a talk in a MOO set up to discuss VR and multi-user environments by the Midlands(UK) VR-SIG, that would have been in the early 90s I guess.
I remember a game that was written on a BBS chat channel that loaded as a client (modified terminal software) and was pretty good. That was in mid 80s using a 300baud modem - phew!
modern day MMORPGs owe an awful lot to MUDs and MOOs. Often because you don't need as much imagination, a MMORPG like WoW is pretty disappointing. I'm yet to find a game that has the immersion level of those early MUDs, but maybe that's because I was younger then. These days something has to be very impressive to get me interested and pretty much all modern games fail in that. To my mind, none are sufficiently open ended and diverse to replace those older games. It seems modern games have gone down a particular direction and left a massive field of gaming/socialising open which has been filled (partially) from time to time by things like CuCMe, or IRC or SMS txting, ICQ etc but then each of these specialises and as the world's communities unite more and more vistas open up that are not being addressed. I think there's a lot of scope for imagination based gaming with high social networking and dynamic (or on the fly) content creation that just doesn't exist at all today. Combine this with almost permanent availability (phones), GPS and the HUDs (heads up displays) that we don't have yet and I suspect there's significant new genres of games to come that will redress some of the things we've missed sinced those very early days of gaming.
On the other hand, maybe kids todays are just as excited, captivated and immersed by the latest version of Crysis, WoW, Quake, SMS txting, MSN or whatever - somehow I don't see it. My kids aren't as impressed, enthralled or excited about games as I (and my friends) were. It's a bit like when William Gibson said he wrote Neuromancer on an old mechanical typewriter and then later got an AppleII and realised how primitive computers actually were. He said if he'd know computers were that bad he never could have written such a cybertech advanced book. In the same way I think todays computers limit kids imaginations.
Thanks, I appreciate the recognition! :-)
Yeah - my first attempts as something similar were in 1990 on a 386SX16 and all the 3D graphics were in wireframe. I figured one day the internet would take off and be 3D based so I wrote a system that would run on that "far in the future" system. By 95 I'd rewritten a couple of times and the web appeared. I had some VC money fo it in the late 90s (under the name House of Vert Ego - don't ask) and am somewhat ambivalent o all these new things trying to reinvent the wheel and making the same mistakes again and again.
There are good systems out there that solve various parts of the problem: massive multi user (not WoW which is shards, but true MM), rendering large spaces, dynamic/self generating environments, realworld crossover/tie-ins, level of immersion, persistence+memory/history etc etc.
Someone will eventually get it right. We've had Ultima Onine II (that never hit the market) that had brilliant ideas, Croquet (brilliant too with on the fly creation of virtual spaces, but only experimental and only 2 users for now), LivePlace by Brad Greenspan (MySpace founder, still in development), Blaxxun Interactive (german group, defunct), WoW+other games, my own cyberterm and there's many more I probably missed.
I'd say hw is almost there to tie this together well. I see a crossover to mobile phones with GPS enabled heads up displays (augmented reality, see through glasses) and this could all tie in together to be the next big thing. Don't hold your breath though. It still needs brilliance and dollars.
I've worked in a number of engineering companies (employees ranging from 60 to a few 1000 over 25 yrs), one of which I was IT Manager and looking back the ratio was always about 1:25 though there were technical/IT specialist embedded in departments who helped out on support so the true ration was maybe 1:20. Banks don't need as many IT ppl as they have lots of clerks and secretarial type workers who can all be easily supported (at 1:50 or even 1:100).
A friend heads up a NGO (non government organisation, doing charity work) and supports 600+ desktops and servers with 4 people but they're all exactly the same desktop with only a small handful of linux and windows servers.
So in general the more diversified the computing needs of the users, the more IT support you'll need. The Eng company that I worked at with 60 people needed 4 IT staff (1:15) as they had, Windows, Linux and SGI servers+workstations, your regular MS Office Apps, accounting and some serious high end applications (like where the sw costs more for one year's maintenance than the users salary) and was spread over 3 countries. But then that was the exception - of the 60 people, 17 had Phds, which is not normal!!
I think it was last year a terrorist drove a 4 weheel drive (SUV) into a bank in Scotland. The vehicle didn't blow up as intended and a mobile phone found in it was traced to an owner who's registration number was checked against the nationwide system of camera's usually used for traffic control and the guy was pulled off the road within 3 hours.
I was really impressed by the computer system behind being able to scan every registration plate going down hundreds (if not thousands) of major roads over the whole country. In this case it worked very effectively and quickly.
It's a balance between the police/bigbrother state and security. I don't know if anyone in the UK actually voted to have this kind of security but I imagine if you asked the average person in the street they'd be happy that criminals can be caught quickly using such a system. I doubt it gets used for every car theft or minor cases, but I'm only guessing.
In the US it might be pointless because people would just drive on the minor roads and thre's a lot more to monitor in the first place. My thought was that this sytem must have been design and built up over many years - possibly well before the excuse of terrorist threats came into view. Hence it must have been a very far sighted, paranoid and powerful body that pushed for the system to be implemented in the first place
In the UK in several cities as you approach on major arterial roads there are electronic boards showing how many parks are left in each nearby car park. This gives you an idea of where to go to get your park. There's no point in heading for a park with 3 spaces left when there's another with 70 free spaces. So people aren't competing for individuals spaces but it helps a lot. A minor variation would be to add an up or down arrow to show if the free spaces are increasing or decreasing over, say, the last 10 minutes. That way if there's 10 spaces and decreasing (down arrow) you know it's probably not worth trying there.
Also, in Switzerland in 1977 I recall going into a massive car park in Geneve that had blue indicator lights next to each parking space. If the park was empty the light was on. It was very easy to drive down the ends of the very long rows of cars and spot the individual lights that were on - even if it was way off in the distance. This is a simple idea that I'm surprised hasn't taken off over the last 30+ years. Possibly maintenance of individual car detectors and the power and light bulbs needed creates considerable ongoing costs. Still, you'd think there'd be a market for this. I've never seen it again in any park anywhere in the world - though it may be out there.
Reminds me of Geoffrey Hoyle (astronomer brother of SF author Fred Hoyle) and some Indian guy suggested that the flu virus could come from comets and we get a different dose each year as we go through the tails of countless comets. It was seriously debunked at the time (1980s?) but it seems a bit rash to exclude that idea out of hand, or at least the possibility of some parts of life ie significant organic molecules (if not a whole chunk of DNA) coming from outside Earth. Recent discoveries like the one this announcement covers is just the beginning of our exploration of "what's out there". I'd say it's way too early to say "impossible".
The amusing side to this is if there was some protoplanet a long way away that exploded or was hit by a big asterid and spewd genetic material (and I mean almost whole organisms) into deep space to seed the galaxy (or nearby space) over the following few billion years. Then when they all get to the point (well, some of them) of developing space travel they all find these bipedal humanoids just like in Star Wars or any other early years SciFi move (on a cheap budget).
This reminds me of the "best minds of the day" at the turn of the 20th century who mathematically proved that it was impossible to build a rocket that could escape earth's gravity (something to do with using dynamite as the most "powerful" substance for it's weight they knew of at the time).
I still prefer Arthur C Clarke's notion that "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic."
Hence I agree wholeheartedly with the previous poster who is wise enough to realise he doesn't know everything and not everything can be measure by what he currently knows.
It'd be a bit presumptive to think that in the future (which is a long time) we will not develop or discover or encounter forces and things that today appear to be magic/gods etc. If we don't understand it, will these unexplained things cease to exist?
I have a wad of punch cards from 1978 that printed out a calendar. I can't believe I kept them all these years.
The oldest code that I wrote and still use occassionally is some neural network code I wrote in C on a CP/M machine in 1984. It is very generic code and I dust it off now and then to apply to various ideas.
I also have some random name generation code I used for AD&D characters from the same era and code that created a random village on the screen of my trusty AppleII - these are in Compas Pascal (from a German company, which later sold the compiler to Borland which renamed it to Turbo Pascal) which I ran using a Z80 CP/M card in the Apple. I haven't got any compiler/interpreter for these though. The dates on the file are 1989 but inside comments go back to 1985.
From replies here some people say "stop complaining and appreciate what you've got", others say "take a chance while you can".
It really depends on you and your wife's attitude to lifestyle, risk and your need for change. Your kids can probably handle a change to a new school or the country side or whatever. They're flexible. Wives are trickier. Does she want to move away from her friends/family? Does she want to lose the SUV? Does she want to lose the nice clothes and not having to work (or not have to work too much)?
I suspect what you're thinking of is a change or career without losing income. This will save a lot of grief on the home front.
I really understand where you're coming from in terms of needing a change. Sure some people are ok in the same career for life. Others just slowly die on the inside having to get up and do the same job every day. It gets to the point where you can't relate to your family or you feel you've not done anything significant with your life and time is ticking by.
After 20+ yrs in computing I went back and studied counselling and built up a practice in the evenings. It was very fullfilling but a lot more stress really. I ended up with major health issues so had to cut right back. Now I do share trading and am building up enough skill and funds to retire in 5 or so years (at the current rate). It has the main advantage of not requiring much time and still being intellectually stimulating.
Other pursuits such as setting up an online business (or less likely to succeed, writing) are good too, because, like share trading, the profit returned is not directly connected to the hrs you work. Like if you write some software and sell it online you write once and sell again and again, same with a book. How about a technical book on the area you specialise in at work? That will utilise your experience so you're not throwing those years away. You can build up slowly in the evenings. The chance of publishing technical material is far greater than fiction. Also writing, an online business and shares can all be done from anywhere in the world.
Or start an online newsletter, again on the technical subjects you know. You might even get your wife to work with you helping with layout or web design (if you're going to do it yourself) and startup costs are very low.
It may take a while and you'll make mistakes but just starting on something new will be a breath of fresh air and may give you impetus to try other things. It'll at least give you the heart to realise there's an end in sight, a way out.
If your heart is saying you need to get out before you die inside, then listen to it, speak to your wife and then write down some plans, set some goals. Idealise your perfect life you want in 5 or 10 yrs and work back from that to see what you have to do to get there - where would you be in 2 years then? So if you're at that point in 2 yrs, where do you need to be in 12 months, 6 months, next month? This will help you to act and also see it is possible to change. The first steps are small but with a plan you can see how it will start you towards that final goal.
This may be nonsense talk to some people and to others it'll be a breath of fresh air before they go postal or the last light fades from their weary eyes. I guarantee your wife and kids will love a newly reinvigorated you and your zest for life will be infectious. Your kids have great lessons to learn from watching you work through your own issues and sorting out what's important. Later in life they then have the option to choose to do the corporate 9-5 thing or branch out on their own and they know they have a great example to look up to for both of those things.
I wouldn't say anything to the people at work though - just do it quietly on the side until you're ready to leave. Then, when you're ready to jump, still take accumulated annual leave or better yet, negotiate to cut back your day job to 3 or 4 days a week (tell them it's for health reasons or something). This way you can transit
'Cause when I was a lad there was only a handful of users on the internet so we didn't need numbers, as you knew everyone by name anyway. All you had to remember was a few IP numbers for the ftp servers and everyone's email adress just had their first name with @.[edu|com|org|net] In fact most of the time you could guess someone's email address and get it right.
Of course some jerks spoilt it by introducing gophers, and veronicas and wais and then those crazy CERN clowns tipped mosaic onto Mr Clark and young Andreesson (whom I recall exchanging emails with after I guessed his address). It's all gone to the dogs since then. No I don't want to buy any cookies and don't walk on the lawn as you're leaving!
I recall a phase in the mid to late 80s when many terminals were amber. They were meant to be much easier on the eyes than grenn screens. The colour was usually orange and the background sort of a dark muddy brown. It was much easier on the eyes in a poorly lit room (ie late at night or any office desk not next to a window). I know some people hated them (I had one client who used to throw up with an amber screen and get headaches, but with the green she was fine - so your mileage may vary!)
:-) It'd be great if flatscreens could cut the backlight way way down. When mine's on the whole room lights up - big waste of power it seems. The brightness controls do almost nothing (it's a 24" Samsung widescreen). I've talked to many, many others who have the same problem. (It could be my old screen had faded a bit, I admit)
:-)
I've personally tried many variations once colours became available and usually I end up with some form of black on grey, turned way down, with the "temperature" set as cold (ie as "brown") as possible, usually with muted green, grey or brown borders.
I used the same 21" Sony Trinitron at home from the mid 90s to last year at 1600x1200 at 60Hz and then changed to a top end flatscreen last year. It was a huge shock as now I can't do work at night without the light on as the screen is so bright. I have to turn the room light way up otherwise it almost hurts and I can't see a thing when I get up
Call me fussy but a rough estimate says I've been using screens for 12+hrs a day for 25 yrs or so from 30" away and I'm a bit stuck in my ways
I recall reading that a significant problem in the field is getting injured soldiers back to safety or medical aid. That was a key problem this type of robot is meant to solve. It wouldn't have to be quiet or particularly fast. It just needs to be reliable and able to carry a soldier plus gear over uncertain terrain. It'd be a rough ride but better than stuck on the front line with your foot blown off.