Still being able to read, at more than a 6th grade level, write coherently in story form as well as technical/documentation type writing, and math, more than a basic calculator can handle. An understanding of basic economics (what does 'balancing your accounts' or 'living on less than you make' really mean), and retirement ABC's (what is an IRA, ROTH, 401(k), 403(b), HSA, and how and why fund them - what is an emergency fund and why ) -- Also, for when their pending (zombie, skynet, etc) apocalypse of some flavor, be able to do all these without REQUIRING electronic devices.
Yes, many may never go 'hard core back-pack' camping out of the reach of a cell tower, but some will. Prepare for it.
Physical education, musical education, literary, history, economic (macro and micro), political science (civics in the old days), public speaking, all should be required and add to the quality and tapestry of life.
The trick is to balance them.... Who's next on the soap box!
and secondarily Federal Management (not allowed to raise rates or reduce schedule to live within means, so deficits ensue, paid for from the General Fund, and Congress not willing to provide more support/funds).
Poor management? OK, some of that in there too.
Mix well, bake for 100+ years of 'rail experience' in the US, and you get the current Amtrak. But then, this is just my perspective. I am sure pubic healthcare will work equally as well as Amtrak or USPS.
Having open source and public scrutiny is good and needed. But having Linus to be a benevolent despot over the kernel, his single mindedness that it needs to grow from NEEDS not DESIREs, AND the community having overall faith in his judgement for yo theses 30-is years (or however long) has been as asset to the overall kernel support.
Yes, there have been power grabs, politics, and any other kind of thing we could guess (I only assume someone has tried to 'buy Linus off' but thankfully he and his family have been well taken care of so that wasn't a primary need.
There are other great leaders and curmudgeons in the Linux arena, but Linus is still top dog, and for one, I approve.
As a retiree, I look at programming as a fun thing. I did do COBOL and FORTRAN and assembler for pay in the past (PL/1 was my favorite, but did more REXX than anything).
But to get me to program again in any language, I need to be paid enough to cover MY 'threshold of pain' involved in working for someone else.
My threshold was less when I needed to feed, clothe, and house my family. Now days, that is a LOT easier to do, so I can set my threshold where I want it to be.
My current consulting rate for a rusty programmer/sysadmin is $80/hr + expenses on a W2. That is enough to get me interested. Less than that, give GEEK SQUAD a call and see if they can help. (I do get some consulting at that rate, but mainly give away services to help local 'little old people' get their AOL account working again).
---
I hated COBOL, but did enjoy maintaining code that had gone through 'automatic' PL/1 to COBOL and then back to PL/1 translations... they were worse that just maintaining COBOL or PL/1 (or even accounting programs in FORTRAN IV years before). But if COBOL is that important, folks will pay ANYTHING to get their systems running. If they are smart, they also pay to have the system re-analyzed and re-built using a newer and more maintainable systems. Systems designed for punch cards, tapes, and paper printouts need to be re-designed to work well in interactive environments (old ones tended to be batch only, now days, batch is OK but interactive is better if the application lends itself to it. And real-time is a different beast than interactive too - especially 'hard real time', that yes, I did some of all of it over the years.)
Continuing on the 'supply chain management' and 'fulfillment' rolls of places like Amazon that has gone a long way to reduce the human involvement. Newer Amazon warehouses (using Kiva robots) are using 'bots to bring stacks of warehouse shelves to the pickers. With more automated 'picking equipment' then even pickers aren't needed. Maintenance could be real maintenance on robots or just 'regrind and re-build 3D plastic robots' if they are wearing out.
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Yes, my generation and the next won't get 'full replacement androids', but mail sorting and package handling has little people involvement even today.
Look at todays robo-bartender drinkbots. I would think 'frybots' would be easy enough to do. Cleaning bots are harder, but Roomba and commercial versions already take care of floors.
Factories already put out food without human touch. We are just talking about moving it to the 'next logical step'.
Am I afraid of it? No. But we need to figure out how to make people with limited skills useful, if you don't want 'Goodwill' or similar to be the predominate employer in the years to come.
This has been needed for a LONG time! It was outdated when I was learning to fly in '70, even NASA updated their mission control a few times in those years.
Yes, only doubling capacity is not as much as I hoped, but it should mean if we start developing the next version in 5 or 10 years, we can hopefully have it going before another 40 years are up.
The trays of paper tracking chits always made me nervious.
I always know being an air traffic controller was stressful, one of my flight instructors taught noobs how to fly as a 'stress relief' from being an ATC at the DFW center.
Or stack up to 9 of them in parallel to get enough. If that isn't enough, they have refrigerator size units really designed for commercial work that are available. The price was not disclosed.
If they do this, DIY cars and rebuilt junkers from the trash bin will be coming to a road near you... SOON!
If one of the automakers would do a non-digital controlled car where the 'puters just monitor and report, not control, it will sell. This will allow pulling out the DCMA'ed puters by the roots.
Or even better, someone does a OSS computer that doesn't use the computer or DCMA software that Detroit/Tokyo/EU/etc use and just does a wholesale 'field replacement'.
With DIY & custom 3D printed cars, doing non-DCMA might be easier.
I wish they would work a little harder to get the geek things right. It is fiction, and may be believable by the masses, but still it needs to be closer to reality.
Overall NCIS is better than the CSI series in acting, and believability. But there are plenty of bad tech in both. Just be thankful it isn't another Scorpion.
It is discrimination to keep someone from or require some action of any person or group that is different from whatever they would otherwise want or be able to do.
Discrimination is not inherently bad. It is the application that is bad.
We don't have a 'right' to drive a car, it is a privilege. It is discriminatory against the people that want to drive a car that don't want to abide by other definition of 'civil conduct'. It is also discriminatory to allow ANYONE to get away with anything that EVERYONE is allowed (but not required) to do.
If the problem is big... use the 'appropriate size tool'.
When I was a systems geek on mainframes, it was the dawn of the PC (pre Mac) era. There were and are problems that are better suited to big data bases with lots of computing power. Sometimes it can't be parallelized. At the time, there were mainframes with 6MByte/sec i/o channels - 24 of them, 8 4-core processors run by a single Operating System (or several, users choice). Yes they were tuned to the workload of the company. -- Getting rid of the 24 mainframes in 12 data centers around the world cost a boat load of money. It cost much more to add in the number of 'file servers', desktop PCs, workstations, additional networking(that was needed in any case), add in UPSes wherever 'data was critical', in addition to the numbers of 'trained administrators' to help install, maintain, and train the PCs even after users were trained.... The old IT department was discarded, except for the most critical functions - printing paychecks.
The number of stories of people not backing up their PC because it was 'so reliable compared to the mainframe' and loosing years of effort, and still blaming IT even after being warned verbally and writing, was legon.
Mainframes are great. They are not all things to all people. They should be just ANOTHER tool in the tool bag of society to help get the job done.
(From the days of Beowulf clusters, PCs have been trying to figure out how to 'create a cheap mainframe'. Real mainframes are not just CPU power, they are I/O power, shared resources that can be dedicated in large or small portions to the task at hand. They never solve problems by themselves, but no computer does. It still takes systems designed, engineered, programmed, distributed, and maintained for the life cycle of the application system to make ANY computer useful no matter how large or small it is.)
IMHO they should let Tesla do their thing. Dealer networks are afraid that they are not needed any more and other companies will see the 'new' paradigm could work for them too and put dealers that don't add real value out of business.
GM & Ford could do it where their dealers aren't adding value and make more $$.
There was a 'system that did that' years ago. SUN had java stations that provided desktops. You plugged in your ID card and you got your desktop displayed. You un-pluged your ID card (when you got up or walked away), your session was locked, and available to be displayed anywhere else with the same ID card. You remained logged in, your display was locked. You did NO computing locally (other than driving a printer or access USB stick data), all computing was done on a shared server.
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It worked. Few bought into it. You were just born a generation late! =8-D
If you look at the Backblaze blogs, they publish their experiences with drives. Any 'green drives' are 'short life' drives, to date. They are just now starting to look seriously at 6T drives.
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Backblaze does actively monitor their drives in their pods (data server computers stacked full of drives). They tend to use FreeNAS if I remember right for their pods, due to file system does 'self healing' (think RAID 5 or more on steroids). It is good, just not perfect. And they keep multiple copies in different pods to keep down single point of failure issues.
There is more to data reliability than just drives, it is still a good place to start.
Tape is and will stay for the foreseeable future the best near-line storage. I like the high density disk drives, but the cost per gig to store data once you get into the multi-peta or exabyte range is huge compared to tape.
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I have always wanted a data 'black hole' that I could retrieve data from. But it still isn't there. One that does automatic HSM (hierarchical storage management) so you store in on fast devices, it stays there a while, then migrates (automagically) to slower devices, and eventually to 'archival storage' that can be slow to get to.
So far I haven't found an answer I can afford (personally). -- If you know of something, please let me know!
--- Think 'net to SSD, to Disk, to slow disk/nas, to tape or optical drives. Tape and optical data still needs to be read and written on occasion to stay fresh (especially tape). Tape also wares out (so do optical media after 50 or so years, tape degrades dramatically after 5). -- also need multiple copies for when one gets 'bit rot' happens.
Commercially I like IBMs Tivoli Storage Management (just because I used it), but that comes at a pretty hefty price, but it works well when set up and tuned correctly.
Part of the problem with trees, is we need to grow them, and once they are grown, we need to cut them down and plant new ones. To keep the wood from rotting, we need to sequester it, like bury it in old salt mines, or at least re-fill old coal pits that we want to 'reclaim'. They also need to be sealed from the general atmosphere so they don't rot or decay and turn back into free carbon available for being used even for nature made carbon based substances.... Making useful stuff we keep around (longer than houses in the USA - 20 to 50 years) makes sense too. Burning the wood or wood products just returns the carbon to the atmosphere.
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This is true for ANY organic organism, not just trees.
I think this flick will become a cult classic, more for the side story than for the quality of the movie itself. It won't be a "Rocky Horror Pictureshow" but it will probably be another "Plan 9 from Outer Space"
Yes, it is a bad thing, but depending on the context of the decisions, using it might have been throwing another many millions down a 'now known to be unproductive' drain.
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Possibly finding out WHY it was funded initially, and WHY it was 'mothballed' (I am guessing reduced funding) should combine to give you an answer.
You may need to take lower paying positions, or better, start a company to use both the 'liberal' and 'STEM' skills. Is it easy? No. But if it is your passion, easy doesn't need to be part of the equation. You have the thinking skills, now it the time to use them to take your life in the direction you desire.
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You might not get to work at NASA, but you can work toward your passion.
You may need some additional education, and you are taking good steps in that direction. Not gathering a lot of additional debt is also a good financial decision for now and your future.
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Yes, many may never go 'hard core back-pack' camping out of the reach of a cell tower, but some will. Prepare for it.
Physical education, musical education, literary, history, economic (macro and micro), political science (civics in the old days), public speaking, all should be required and add to the quality and tapestry of life.
The trick is to balance them. ... Who's next on the soap box!
and secondarily Federal Management (not allowed to raise rates or reduce schedule to live within means, so deficits ensue, paid for from the General Fund, and Congress not willing to provide more support/funds).
Poor management? OK, some of that in there too.
Mix well, bake for 100+ years of 'rail experience' in the US, and you get the current Amtrak. But then, this is just my perspective. I am sure pubic healthcare will work equally as well as Amtrak or USPS.
Yes, there have been power grabs, politics, and any other kind of thing we could guess (I only assume someone has tried to 'buy Linus off' but thankfully he and his family have been well taken care of so that wasn't a primary need.
There are other great leaders and curmudgeons in the Linux arena, but Linus is still top dog, and for one, I approve.
But to get me to program again in any language, I need to be paid enough to cover MY 'threshold of pain' involved in working for someone else.
My threshold was less when I needed to feed, clothe, and house my family. Now days, that is a LOT easier to do, so I can set my threshold where I want it to be.
My current consulting rate for a rusty programmer/sysadmin is $80/hr + expenses on a W2. That is enough to get me interested. Less than that, give GEEK SQUAD a call and see if they can help. (I do get some consulting at that rate, but mainly give away services to help local 'little old people' get their AOL account working again).
---
I hated COBOL, but did enjoy maintaining code that had gone through 'automatic' PL/1 to COBOL and then back to PL/1 translations ... they were worse that just maintaining COBOL or PL/1 (or even accounting programs in FORTRAN IV years before). But if COBOL is that important, folks will pay ANYTHING to get their systems running. If they are smart, they also pay to have the system re-analyzed and re-built using a newer and more maintainable systems. Systems designed for punch cards, tapes, and paper printouts need to be re-designed to work well in interactive environments (old ones tended to be batch only, now days, batch is OK but interactive is better if the application lends itself to it. And real-time is a different beast than interactive too - especially 'hard real time', that yes, I did some of all of it over the years.)
FORTH
.
Yes, my generation and the next won't get 'full replacement androids', but mail sorting and package handling has little people involvement even today.
Look at todays robo-bartender drinkbots. I would think 'frybots' would be easy enough to do. Cleaning bots are harder, but Roomba and commercial versions already take care of floors.
Factories already put out food without human touch. We are just talking about moving it to the 'next logical step'.
Am I afraid of it? No. But we need to figure out how to make people with limited skills useful, if you don't want 'Goodwill' or similar to be the predominate employer in the years to come.
This has been needed for a LONG time! It was outdated when I was learning to fly in '70, even NASA updated their mission control a few times in those years. Yes, only doubling capacity is not as much as I hoped, but it should mean if we start developing the next version in 5 or 10 years, we can hopefully have it going before another 40 years are up. The trays of paper tracking chits always made me nervious. I always know being an air traffic controller was stressful, one of my flight instructors taught noobs how to fly as a 'stress relief' from being an ATC at the DFW center.
Or stack up to 9 of them in parallel to get enough. If that isn't enough, they have refrigerator size units really designed for commercial work that are available. The price was not disclosed.
Yep. One of the things Elon commented on. Run your figures before you pre-order to see if it really makes cents =8-D for you!
It would be great, but I still want "None of the Above" on the ticket!
If they do this, DIY cars and rebuilt junkers from the trash bin will be coming to a road near you... SOON! If one of the automakers would do a non-digital controlled car where the 'puters just monitor and report, not control, it will sell. This will allow pulling out the DCMA'ed puters by the roots. Or even better, someone does a OSS computer that doesn't use the computer or DCMA software that Detroit/Tokyo/EU/etc use and just does a wholesale 'field replacement'. With DIY & custom 3D printed cars, doing non-DCMA might be easier.
I wish they would work a little harder to get the geek things right. It is fiction, and may be believable by the masses, but still it needs to be closer to reality. Overall NCIS is better than the CSI series in acting, and believability. But there are plenty of bad tech in both. Just be thankful it isn't another Scorpion.
If some humorous bureaucrat is going to say I shouldn't have a copy, it forced me to go get one and read it.
Discrimination is not inherently bad. It is the application that is bad.
We don't have a 'right' to drive a car, it is a privilege. It is discriminatory against the people that want to drive a car that don't want to abide by other definition of 'civil conduct'. It is also discriminatory to allow ANYONE to get away with anything that EVERYONE is allowed (but not required) to do.
Get over it. Life isn't 'fair'.
.
If the problem is big... use the 'appropriate size tool'.
When I was a systems geek on mainframes, it was the dawn of the PC (pre Mac) era. There were and are problems that are better suited to big data bases with lots of computing power. Sometimes it can't be parallelized. At the time, there were mainframes with 6MByte/sec i/o channels - 24 of them, 8 4-core processors run by a single Operating System (or several, users choice). Yes they were tuned to the workload of the company. -- Getting rid of the 24 mainframes in 12 data centers around the world cost a boat load of money. It cost much more to add in the number of 'file servers', desktop PCs, workstations, additional networking(that was needed in any case), add in UPSes wherever 'data was critical', in addition to the numbers of 'trained administrators' to help install, maintain, and train the PCs even after users were trained. ... The old IT department was discarded, except for the most critical functions - printing paychecks.
The number of stories of people not backing up their PC because it was 'so reliable compared to the mainframe' and loosing years of effort, and still blaming IT even after being warned verbally and writing, was legon.
Mainframes are great. They are not all things to all people. They should be just ANOTHER tool in the tool bag of society to help get the job done.
(From the days of Beowulf clusters, PCs have been trying to figure out how to 'create a cheap mainframe'. Real mainframes are not just CPU power, they are I/O power, shared resources that can be dedicated in large or small portions to the task at hand. They never solve problems by themselves, but no computer does. It still takes systems designed, engineered, programmed, distributed, and maintained for the life cycle of the application system to make ANY computer useful no matter how large or small it is.)
IMHO they should let Tesla do their thing. Dealer networks are afraid that they are not needed any more and other companies will see the 'new' paradigm could work for them too and put dealers that don't add real value out of business. GM & Ford could do it where their dealers aren't adding value and make more $$.
You had an 029? Woosie. We had 026's without interpreters. Had to submit cards to get the printing putt on the tops!
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It worked. Few bought into it. You were just born a generation late! =8-D
.
Backblaze does actively monitor their drives in their pods (data server computers stacked full of drives). They tend to use FreeNAS if I remember right for their pods, due to file system does 'self healing' (think RAID 5 or more on steroids). It is good, just not perfect. And they keep multiple copies in different pods to keep down single point of failure issues.
There is more to data reliability than just drives, it is still a good place to start.
.
I have always wanted a data 'black hole' that I could retrieve data from. But it still isn't there. One that does automatic HSM (hierarchical storage management) so you store in on fast devices, it stays there a while, then migrates (automagically) to slower devices, and eventually to 'archival storage' that can be slow to get to.
So far I haven't found an answer I can afford (personally). -- If you know of something, please let me know! --- Think 'net to SSD, to Disk, to slow disk/nas, to tape or optical drives. Tape and optical data still needs to be read and written on occasion to stay fresh (especially tape). Tape also wares out (so do optical media after 50 or so years, tape degrades dramatically after 5). -- also need multiple copies for when one gets 'bit rot' happens.
Commercially I like IBMs Tivoli Storage Management (just because I used it), but that comes at a pretty hefty price, but it works well when set up and tuned correctly.
Your just don't shop where some of the rest of us shop ;-D
.
This is true for ANY organic organism, not just trees.
I think this flick will become a cult classic, more for the side story than for the quality of the movie itself. It won't be a "Rocky Horror Pictureshow" but it will probably be another "Plan 9 from Outer Space"
.
Possibly finding out WHY it was funded initially, and WHY it was 'mothballed' (I am guessing reduced funding) should combine to give you an answer.
.
You might not get to work at NASA, but you can work toward your passion.
You may need some additional education, and you are taking good steps in that direction. Not gathering a lot of additional debt is also a good financial decision for now and your future.