Yeah, also known as the "last Thursday" hypothesis (as in, everything was just poofed into existence last Thursday with all our memories and history intact). Pretty much useless as a way of describing the world. I wouldn't say that we take it on faith that we're not just Boltzmann Brains or some such, but insofar as we trust the evidence of our senses we trust that the outside world is real and can affect us directly and profoundly. It therefore follows that we can try to understand it on its own terms.
If we _can't_ trust our senses (and as human beings sometimes we actually cannot, take any optical illusion or hallucination for an example) then all bets are off. But as I said, that's just not a very useful way to view ourselves and the world.
Which is the whole damned point. "Faith" doesn't work. It doesn't have tangible effects. Believe me, know about of "having faith" will cure my cancer. On the other hand, evidence-based science is doing _just fine_, thank you very much. It's not faith, as others here have said, because it has concrete effects in the real world. And as far as QM goes, some of those "concrete effects" are being taken advantage of in the electronics that allow us to communicate here.
While "faith" may have concrete effects in terms of why people do things, it doesn't directly effect anything outside of those people. On the other hand, a laser will handily burn a hole in your retina just fine, and no amount of "faith" will either cause or prevent it.
Once more, some fool is conflating "faith" and "confidence," which are two utterly separate things. Sigh.
Have you looked into Google video chat? I haven't used it as a regular consumer (I'm an employee) but it seems to work pretty well. It's probably at least worth checking out. http://www.google.com/talk/
I've been doing this for a few years and the one gap I'm seeing more and more of doesn't actually have anything to do with programming techniques, "design patterns" or anything else that's hugely technical. All of these things are pretty well-known and accepted by everyone, and you can always be sure that there'll be someone around pushing one or another of them as the be-all and end-all of Programming.
The one gap you might have as a self-taught programmer is in fact in the _history_ of computer science. There's a lot of stuff that has happened and in fact people keep finding and solving the same problems, never realizing that the problems have been encountered and solved many times. (An example that's particularly relevant to me at the moment has to do with extent-based file systems; ext4 has extents and so do a number of new file systems. Great idea, right, particularly for large file systems? Thing is, extent-based file systems have been used at least since the 70s in mainframe operating systems. Odd that it took 40 years to get it into Unix.)
But don't feel bad that your self-teaching has skipped the history of computing. It appears that most university computer science programs neglect that little bit of background as well, in favor of jumping straight into C++ or Java.
Maybe I'm an old fart but that half-semester of history I took back in 1981 made a small but significant improvement in my ability as a software engineer.
...the three reasons are performance, performance and performance.
Ext4 has extents (and therefore loses indirect blocks), a better on-disk layout policy and generally better algorithms in its allocation code. Of course, performance varies depending on the app in question but we've found that it beats ext2 in almost every respect in our environment. (We don't run ext3 because journals cost performance [by buying reliability] and that's all ext3 gets you: a journal. This is why we wrote and submitted the no-journal hack for ext4.) In particular, ext4 beats ext2 for write-heavy loads by, well, lots. Yes, we've measured this stuff.
So why would one go to ext4 over ext3? Because it's a better file system, not to mention one that's actually (a) being developed and (b) past pre-alpha.
Of course, our environment is a tad different from most. We have *ahem* more than a _couple_ of servers.
Like everything else, it's "use it or lose it." Keep learning new stuff, keep remembering stuff, keep using it, don't slow down and for Bob's sake don't stop! I'm 48 and so far, so good. Hell, I'm even learning Mandarin at this late date.
Oh, and for the person who blames Google? I _work_ at Google.:-)
And if you have the misfortune to actually see one of the episodes (I promise you that you will only ever want to see one), look for the "created by" credit.
"Cordwainer Bird."
HE had a great story about the show and his involvement in same in the afterword to Edward Bryant's novelization of his original script, Phoenix Without Ashes, that went into detail. A truly archetypal story of what shouldn't ever happen.
Sigh. Had you been paying attention for the last eighteen months, you would know that, one, the rovers are quite close to the equator, albeit on opposite sides of Mars. Mars Polar Lander, right? Sure, compared to the distance between here and there, they're right next to each other, but that doesn't make your idea any less inane.
Well, I dunno if I can say whether or not the lab is "in decline," but as far as I can tell my current employer, HRL Laboratories (yes it's a crappy website, but it's the only one they've got), is still going strong. This is the former Hughes Research Labs, the place where some folks invented things like the laser and mosfet, among other things.
Certainly things aren't booming there but they could certainly be worse. It probably helps a lot, though, that the lab is jointly owned by no fewer than three huge corporations.
Not so much, no. The bits that were ported were never tainted and the bits that were tainted weren't ported. Because of the way we did our development, what belonged to us was never mixed with what was merely licensed. So when I said "strip out all the bits related to Unixware" I meant precisely that. Not "strip out all the Unixware bits" but strip out all the stuff in the locally-developed code that was Unixware-specific.
Of course, I was only there for the very beginning of the port; by the time the code was placed under the GPL I had been at BSDi for a while.
It's simply not true that "a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI" is "something that no other operating system can do today." We were doing it at Locus in 1994 with SVR4 then with Tandem in 1996 with NonStop Clusters for Unixware. Now some of the same folks at HP have introduced OpenSSI, which is essentially the same code, less all the Unixware-related bits, ported to Linux and placed under the GPL. They are coming up hard on their 1.0 release, which is not bad for five people and such a large task.
OpenSSI is the real thing, it has processes that migrate from node to node, distributed file systems, the works. And it's running now on clusters literally all over the world. (Not many clusters, true, but maybe that will change if the Slashdot crowd finds out about it.)
I'm happy to say that there's a lot of my code in that system, as well.
I know a little about what Matt wants to do with his SSI in Dragonfly, but he should certainly take a look at OpenSSI; we had to solve a lot of the problems you run into when you build such a beast.
(And a beast it is. As complex as a kernel can be, when you have what is essentially a distributed kernel across several nodes, the complexity goes up by orders of magnitude. Makes tracking down those weird hangs pretty exciting, in a painful, time-consuming kind of way.)
Well, you could look at my take on Jeremiah's experience. Basically, if what he said he saw is indeed what he saw, the test was a complete fraud. See the article on my weblog. You may also want to look at another article I wrote the day before in which I discuss some security issues with respect to the Diebold machines.
What are my qualifications for making these judgements? Well, twenty years of software engineering experience, for one thing. You can look at my resume here if you want more details.
I don't know Jeremiah's qualifications, but in my professional opinion, his conclusions seem sound. At the very least they raise serious questions about the methodology used for these "logic and accuracy" tests, questions that should definitely be answered before the Diebold devices go into service.
Too bad they are already in service. Oops.
(Oh, and thank you to those who have been kind enough to donate to the upkeep of the site. Being out of work makes life a tad complicated and every little bit helps.)
... I've got 100 million-year-old DNA coding for my basic body shape. I think that probably would count as firmware.
At least as much as your cross counts as "hardware," anyway.
(On-topic: P200 running [intermittently] as a GPS-based NTP server. Bits and pieces of it date to 1994 or earlier. Most of the really old stuff I have long since retired in favor of newer, smaller, faster or lower-powered hardware.)
My real talent likes in software. I'm good at it. I'm not good at selling real estate, or designing missiles, or any of the other 10,000 things I could possibly get a job doing if I wanted to go back to school for another four years and start over from the bottom again.
My talents are in demand. People just like me are getting jobs left and right. The reason I can't compete with them is that it costs them a tiny fraction of what it costs me just to live.
"Get a job that is available." Right. You're a fool.
As it happens, I recently wrote a short bit about this. It's pretty relevant here. I go a bit further than Grove, though:
Ah, so the "economy" actually "gained" some 57,000 jobs last month. Well, not so much gained as failed to lose, really. (Links via skippy the bush kangaroo; thanks, skippy.) The pain is no less than it was in August and we're all a month closer to the end of unemployment compensation. I note, though, that software engineering jobs in Bangalore are booming. And the boom is not just in Bangalore, either. I guess all these jobs the United States is exporting have been a real windfall for those guys. I have worked with folks from Bangalore and other parts of India, many of whom are undoubtedly benefiting from this situation. Those of us here in the States, though, are left high and dry.
You know, I have no particular desire to learn a new career when my current career is still in strong demand. Just not here, where companies actually have to pay their employees something reasonable. In India, they pay a fraction of the wage they would have to pay here, making for a situation in which an American cannot compete. Personally, I think there is a simple and potentially very effective legislative solution: Force companies based in the United States to pay their overseas workers on the same wage scale as their American workers. Not only would this eliminate the inequity of outsourcing jobs overseas, it would also provide legal weapons against abuses like the Nike sweatshops in southeast Asia.
Oh, and to those who claim that there will be "new jobs" to replace the old ones: That is simply not true. With the caliber of people in places like India and China, you can successfully outsource pretty much any high-tech job. These people are just as good at what they do as we are. Many (if not most) of them went to school here! But their cost of living is a fraction of ours and they can prosper on a salary that would put many of us on the street.
Meanwhile, a whole lot of us are watching our diminishing bank accounts and wondering just what we are going to have to do to get a job.
Just to fill in a bit, Joe grew up in a small town in East Texas and has spent pretty much his whole life there. He was one of those kids, apparently, who was contantly beaten up in school. As a result, he has (or had, it has been a long time since I've spoken with him) a black belt in American Defense Karate. Virtually all of his writing has been horror and, unfortunately (for those who live there), all too much of it was taken straight from his life in East Texas.
As I understand it, Bubba Hotep was a book long before it was a movie. I do know that Joe was intimately involved in the production of the film.
Me, I haven't read anything he has written since a reading he gave at a writer's group meeting in approximately 1981 gave me nightmares. I don't do horror.
I very strongly suspect that there's nearly zero chance that BSD/OS will be open-sourced. While the developers (hi, guys!) might want to do that, Wind River the company has shown itself, I think, to be pretty unfriendly to the open-source community. Just look at how the FreeBSD guys got the shaft in 2001.
As for the extinction of BSD/OS, well, when I heard a rumor that it was coming, I credited that rumor pretty strongly. When WR came along to buy us (I worked for BSDi at the time) I was skeptical of the future of BSD/OS there. One word: PSOS. So this news comes as no surprise at all.
The real nasty in this, though, is what it does to the development team. I haven't heard yet what is going on with them, but I doubt that it will be anything good. It could be that Mike, Pat, Peter, Geert Jan and I were just the first to get pink slips, though...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of nine-track tapes."
That's the way I heard it twenty years ago. These days that should be modified, I guess. Maybe "never underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV full of rewritable DVDs?"
Technology has changed, but the old laws still apply.
Or not. Some of us have no desire at all to go into management and some (not necessarily the same) make really lousy managers. The worst manager is often one who was promoted from a technical job and who has no real management training. I've seen more than one company run into the ground by these kind of people.
As for whether older folks can find jobs, I can say that I had a good telephone interview today with a physical interview coming in a couple of weeks, I've had a number of other good telephone interviews and am expecting an offer from a company I interviewed with a couple of weeks ago. In this amazingly bad market, that's not too bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, also known as the "last Thursday" hypothesis (as in, everything was just poofed into existence last Thursday with all our memories and history intact). Pretty much useless as a way of describing the world. I wouldn't say that we take it on faith that we're not just Boltzmann Brains or some such, but insofar as we trust the evidence of our senses we trust that the outside world is real and can affect us directly and profoundly. It therefore follows that we can try to understand it on its own terms.
If we _can't_ trust our senses (and as human beings sometimes we actually cannot, take any optical illusion or hallucination for an example) then all bets are off. But as I said, that's just not a very useful way to view ourselves and the world.
To steal a line from xkcd.
Which is the whole damned point. "Faith" doesn't work. It doesn't have tangible effects. Believe me, know about of "having faith" will cure my cancer. On the other hand, evidence-based science is doing _just fine_, thank you very much. It's not faith, as others here have said, because it has concrete effects in the real world. And as far as QM goes, some of those "concrete effects" are being taken advantage of in the electronics that allow us to communicate here.
While "faith" may have concrete effects in terms of why people do things, it doesn't directly effect anything outside of those people. On the other hand, a laser will handily burn a hole in your retina just fine, and no amount of "faith" will either cause or prevent it.
Once more, some fool is conflating "faith" and "confidence," which are two utterly separate things. Sigh.
I dunno, I kind of like "anviled" for "unveiled," particularly after all the unwanted interface changes I've had to deal with over the years.
Much like Gnome has anviled the whole "no minimize button" thing...
Have you looked into Google video chat? I haven't used it as a regular consumer (I'm an employee) but it seems to work pretty well. It's probably at least worth checking out. http://www.google.com/talk/
I've been doing this for a few years and the one gap I'm seeing more and more of doesn't actually have anything to do with programming techniques, "design patterns" or anything else that's hugely technical. All of these things are pretty well-known and accepted by everyone, and you can always be sure that there'll be someone around pushing one or another of them as the be-all and end-all of Programming.
The one gap you might have as a self-taught programmer is in fact in the _history_ of computer science. There's a lot of stuff that has happened and in fact people keep finding and solving the same problems, never realizing that the problems have been encountered and solved many times. (An example that's particularly relevant to me at the moment has to do with extent-based file systems; ext4 has extents and so do a number of new file systems. Great idea, right, particularly for large file systems? Thing is, extent-based file systems have been used at least since the 70s in mainframe operating systems. Odd that it took 40 years to get it into Unix.)
But don't feel bad that your self-teaching has skipped the history of computing. It appears that most university computer science programs neglect that little bit of background as well, in favor of jumping straight into C++ or Java.
Maybe I'm an old fart but that half-semester of history I took back in 1981 made a small but significant improvement in my ability as a software engineer.
The apps don't need fixing, neither does ext4. It's not an either-or. There's a third element in this little problem.
Might I suggest that it's the buffer handling in Linux that's messed up?
...the three reasons are performance, performance and performance.
Ext4 has extents (and therefore loses indirect blocks), a better on-disk layout policy and generally better algorithms in its allocation code. Of course, performance varies depending on the app in question but we've found that it beats ext2 in almost every respect in our environment. (We don't run ext3 because journals cost performance [by buying reliability] and that's all ext3 gets you: a journal. This is why we wrote and submitted the no-journal hack for ext4.) In particular, ext4 beats ext2 for write-heavy loads by, well, lots. Yes, we've measured this stuff.
So why would one go to ext4 over ext3? Because it's a better file system, not to mention one that's actually (a) being developed and (b) past pre-alpha.
Of course, our environment is a tad different from most. We have *ahem* more than a _couple_ of servers.
Like everything else, it's "use it or lose it." Keep learning new stuff, keep remembering stuff, keep using it, don't slow down and for Bob's sake don't stop! I'm 48 and so far, so good. Hell, I'm even learning Mandarin at this late date.
Oh, and for the person who blames Google? I _work_ at Google. :-)
And if you have the misfortune to actually see one of the episodes (I promise you that you will only ever want to see one), look for the "created by" credit.
"Cordwainer Bird."
HE had a great story about the show and his involvement in same in the afterword to Edward Bryant's novelization of his original script, Phoenix Without Ashes, that went into detail. A truly archetypal story of what shouldn't ever happen.
More at the Wikipedia entry, among other places.
So whatever happened to episodes 7, 8 and 9? (If anyone else can remember that far back, when Lucas was talking about his nine-episode epic.)
Sigh. Had you been paying attention for the last eighteen months, you would know that, one, the rovers are quite close to the equator, albeit on opposite sides of Mars. Mars Polar Lander, right? Sure, compared to the distance between here and there, they're right next to each other, but that doesn't make your idea any less inane.
So when will the divorce be final?
Well, I dunno if I can say whether or not the lab is "in decline," but as far as I can tell my current employer, HRL Laboratories (yes it's a crappy website, but it's the only one they've got), is still going strong. This is the former Hughes Research Labs, the place where some folks invented things like the laser and mosfet, among other things.
Certainly things aren't booming there but they could certainly be worse. It probably helps a lot, though, that the lab is jointly owned by no fewer than three huge corporations.
"Learn from," not "take code from."
(Sigh, kids these days, whatta ya gonna do?)
Not so much, no. The bits that were ported were never tainted and the bits that were tainted weren't ported. Because of the way we did our development, what belonged to us was never mixed with what was merely licensed. So when I said "strip out all the bits related to Unixware" I meant precisely that. Not "strip out all the Unixware bits" but strip out all the stuff in the locally-developed code that was Unixware-specific.
Of course, I was only there for the very beginning of the port; by the time the code was placed under the GPL I had been at BSDi for a while.
It's simply not true that "a transparently cluster-capable system implementing native SSI" is "something that no other operating system can do today." We were doing it at Locus in 1994 with SVR4 then with Tandem in 1996 with NonStop Clusters for Unixware. Now some of the same folks at HP have introduced OpenSSI, which is essentially the same code, less all the Unixware-related bits, ported to Linux and placed under the GPL. They are coming up hard on their 1.0 release, which is not bad for five people and such a large task.
OpenSSI is the real thing, it has processes that migrate from node to node, distributed file systems, the works. And it's running now on clusters literally all over the world. (Not many clusters, true, but maybe that will change if the Slashdot crowd finds out about it.)
I'm happy to say that there's a lot of my code in that system, as well.
I know a little about what Matt wants to do with his SSI in Dragonfly, but he should certainly take a look at OpenSSI; we had to solve a lot of the problems you run into when you build such a beast.
(And a beast it is. As complex as a kernel can be, when you have what is essentially a distributed kernel across several nodes, the complexity goes up by orders of magnitude. Makes tracking down those weird hangs pretty exciting, in a painful, time-consuming kind of way.)
Well, you could look at my take on Jeremiah's experience. Basically, if what he said he saw is indeed what he saw, the test was a complete fraud. See the article on my weblog. You may also want to look at another article I wrote the day before in which I discuss some security issues with respect to the Diebold machines.
What are my qualifications for making these judgements? Well, twenty years of software engineering experience, for one thing. You can look at my resume here if you want more details.
I don't know Jeremiah's qualifications, but in my professional opinion, his conclusions seem sound. At the very least they raise serious questions about the methodology used for these "logic and accuracy" tests, questions that should definitely be answered before the Diebold devices go into service.
Too bad they are already in service. Oops.
(Oh, and thank you to those who have been kind enough to donate to the upkeep of the site. Being out of work makes life a tad complicated and every little bit helps.)
... I've got 100 million-year-old DNA coding for my basic body shape. I think that probably would count as firmware.
At least as much as your cross counts as "hardware," anyway.
(On-topic: P200 running [intermittently] as a GPS-based NTP server. Bits and pieces of it date to 1994 or earlier. Most of the really old stuff I have long since retired in favor of newer, smaller, faster or lower-powered hardware.)
Right. Sure. Whatever you say.
My real talent likes in software. I'm good at it. I'm not good at selling real estate, or designing missiles, or any of the other 10,000 things I could possibly get a job doing if I wanted to go back to school for another four years and start over from the bottom again.
My talents are in demand. People just like me are getting jobs left and right. The reason I can't compete with them is that it costs them a tiny fraction of what it costs me just to live.
"Get a job that is available." Right. You're a fool.
As it happens, I recently wrote a short bit about this. It's pretty relevant here. I go a bit further than Grove, though:
Commit one murder or a few murders and you're going to prison for life at least.
Commit 160,000 murders, you're the leader of a country and are hailed as a hero.
Just to fill in a bit, Joe grew up in a small town in East Texas and has spent pretty much his whole life there. He was one of those kids, apparently, who was contantly beaten up in school. As a result, he has (or had, it has been a long time since I've spoken with him) a black belt in American Defense Karate. Virtually all of his writing has been horror and, unfortunately (for those who live there), all too much of it was taken straight from his life in East Texas.
As I understand it, Bubba Hotep was a book long before it was a movie. I do know that Joe was intimately involved in the production of the film.
Me, I haven't read anything he has written since a reading he gave at a writer's group meeting in approximately 1981 gave me nightmares. I don't do horror.
I very strongly suspect that there's nearly zero chance that BSD/OS will be open-sourced. While the developers (hi, guys!) might want to do that, Wind River the company has shown itself, I think, to be pretty unfriendly to the open-source community. Just look at how the FreeBSD guys got the shaft in 2001.
As for the extinction of BSD/OS, well, when I heard a rumor that it was coming, I credited that rumor pretty strongly. When WR came along to buy us (I worked for BSDi at the time) I was skeptical of the future of BSD/OS there. One word: PSOS. So this news comes as no surprise at all.
The real nasty in this, though, is what it does to the development team. I haven't heard yet what is going on with them, but I doubt that it will be anything good. It could be that Mike, Pat, Peter, Geert Jan and I were just the first to get pink slips, though...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of nine-track tapes." That's the way I heard it twenty years ago. These days that should be modified, I guess. Maybe "never underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV full of rewritable DVDs?" Technology has changed, but the old laws still apply.
Or not. Some of us have no desire at all to go into management and some (not necessarily the same) make really lousy managers. The worst manager is often one who was promoted from a technical job and who has no real management training. I've seen more than one company run into the ground by these kind of people.
As for whether older folks can find jobs, I can say that I had a good telephone interview today with a physical interview coming in a couple of weeks, I've had a number of other good telephone interviews and am expecting an offer from a company I interviewed with a couple of weeks ago. In this amazingly bad market, that's not too bad.
Oh, I'm 43.