My ideal job would be in something like the Bell Labs of yester-years. Do you know of labs that have that kind of environment? National labs are supposed to have such an atmosphere, but my stint in one of them makes me think otherwise..... Does Slashdot know of labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?
There are some government labs that maintain this type of environment - serveral posters have mentioned NRL, where I worked for a short time years ago, and I found it to be exactly the type of basic research / applied engineering environment you describe. NASA still does basic and applied research as well, as do a number of the other labs mentioned in other posts. DOE in particular maintains a number of national labs, many of which do interesting work. NIST, in Gaithersburg MD, has a fairly large segment of its work dedicated to research. NOAA also has research facilities, but this may not be your cup of tea.
In private industry, there are a number of organizations that may fit. W.L. Gore has an excellent atmosphere and encourages innovation and play; 3M practically requires its employees to spend about 20% of their time experimenting. Other organizations you might investigate: Dow/DuPont; Texas Instruments; Motorola; Apple. There many others, but the margin of this post is too narrow to contain them.
I got my hot little hands on my copy yesterday, and installed last night. Simple, straightforward, no problems with the install. Took about 30 minutes; most of that time was likely indexing, as the actual data transferred from the DVD to my machine was only about 2GB.
Spotlight is astounding. It is amazingly fast, beautiful to watch, easy to use, and wonderfully complete, searching applications, documents (word, pdf, txt, rtf, html, etc, etc), images, music (though I haven't checked *lyrics* yet), mail messages - everything. It's fast. It will change my experience as a user - completely.
I spent so much time playing with spotlight last night that I didn't even open the Dashboard.
I did open Safari, however, and sites (all those I opened) render much more rapidly than in Panther. The RSS feature is nice, but I didn't spend much time with it. Much of the interface responds much more rapidly to user requests, with the singular exception of Expose, as others have noted. I am hopeful that Apple will tweak Expose in an upcoming update.
If you don't own a Mac, visit the nearest Apple retail store and try spotlight. As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.
It's just a short hop to the tasp - the device used by the puppeteer in Niven's Ringworld books designed to remotely stimulate the pleasure center of the brain.
What a wonderful world it would be if you could "make someone's day" on the metro, or in the middle of a traffic-jam, or in the midst of a mob scene.
Think of how valuable a device like the tasp would be for subduing violent criminals - one second, a rampaging hoodlum, the next second a vegetable-like mass, drooling with uncontrollable pleasure that is pure and unadulterated. Better than sex, better than heroin, better than speed, and no hangover.
Of course, knowing humanity, our first use will be to produce agony and pain, not pleasure, as is the case with many new technologies with such potential. We'll see!
While the driver's death is unfortunate, and the destruction of the car a disappointment and perhaps a setback for the particular program that developed it, I fail to see how this
accident is "is a big setback for solar power advocates".
If it were, every automobile accident would be "a big setback" for the internal combustion engine, and every stubbed toe would be "a big setback" for bipedal motion. If the solar panels had spewed "solar waste" everywhere, contaminating the surroundings a-la Chernobyl, it would be considered "a big setback for solar power".
Fundamentally, this was a car accident, not a solar power accident. The operator of the vehicle lost control for some reason, and swerved. It happens with gasoline powered vehicles, diesel powered vehicles, four-wheeled autos, 18-wheeled trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles. Too bad that when gigantic, gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing SUVs crash it isn't "a big setback" for SUVs.
If you dd the line, how do you keep track of everything you've accomplished?
Anal as it may be, I use text-based to-do lists too, but I also keep a contemporaneous work log in a {not-to-be-named} spreadsheet program.
To-Do lists are great for things you plan to do, but they don't handle all of the things customers/coworkers/supervisors ask you to get done, often immediately, and often with no notice. And you don't want to lose track of all of that material - sometimes your review can depend on what's in a contemporaneous work log like this.
It's a simple spreadsheet, with 5 columns. Time start, time end, customer, project, notes. Time start and time end run from about 0700 to 2400 hours, in 15 minute increments. Customer is usually a department, and notes is freeform, often abbreviated, but includes pertinent information like who I spoke with, did something get delivered/emailed/deployed, etc.
Anal, obsessive-compulsive, whatever. It's saved my bacon a couple of times. A to-do list that you erase, saving no record of your work (except the work, in most cases)? No thanks.
The Insane Times-Record reported today that legislation outlawing the hammer, screwdriver, shovel, and frying pan has been introduced in the US Congress.
The Home Abuse Tool Enforcement Act (HATE), citing reports of hammers, screwdrivers, shovels, and frying pans being used to perpetrate violent incidents in the home, requires all owners of such tools to turn them in to local law enforcement officials.
The HATE Act seeks to prevent further mis-use of such heinous tools in the home. While recognizing the important contributions these tools have made to home-ownership, and civilization in general, the risks of such tool technology being used for ill have finally become significant enough that no one can be trusted to utilize the tools for their intended purposes.
Repairmen, workshops, and machine shops will be required to register each tool with the US Dept. of Commerce's new "Heinous Tool Registry", which will ensure that these important implements are still valuable tools for good, as long as they are kept in the right hands.
Also see this article in Business Week - not a fringe publication -titled Linux Spreads its Wings. The business folks are finally turning the corner on Linux:
Wait a second. Doesn't Linux reside mostly on servers, the powerful computers that run data centers, publish Web pages, and drive corporate networks? Until recently, the answer was yes. However, Tux the Penguin -- Linux' mascot -- has escaped from the server closet and is now waddling across a much wider expanse of the technology landscape.
I find it somehow reassuring that Darl, in his statement about "seven U.S. Supreme Court justices", has failed to recall basic middle-school civics, let alone all news items regarding the Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court has 9 [NINE] justices.
What a nitwit.
For those of you so inclined, FindLaw has an excellent page on the U.S. Supreme Court, including a history of the court.
"A Cup of Tea" for the PHBs
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A long time ago, I read a book by Paul Reps titled "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", that includes a story, "A Cup of Tea", that is particularly appropriate given the material in this article. I reproduce the story here:
A Cup of Tea
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meji era (1868 - 1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
Like this cup", Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
The PHBs have had their heads filled so full with material, and are so unwilling/scared/unable to unlearn it, that their education becomes a liability. Corporations encounter the same kind of problem when they develop "core rigidities" and are unable to rapidly adapt to the ever-changing marketplace.
Aside: someone has been kind enough to reproduce this story, along with a number of other excerpts from "101 Zen Stories", and they can be found here.
A Windows virus of this sort affects more than just Windows networks; many corporate networks are more heterogeneous, and a lot of corporate sysadmins read Slashdot. Sometimes they read/. before they check CERT or SANS, and that shouldn't be a surprise!
Aside from that, normal users - I mean non-sysadmins - also read/. - why shouldn't an informed user be able to count on/. for "Stuff that matters"?
I find it interesting that I submitted this story shortly after 0900 EST in an effort to get the word out to/. readers, but it was rejected.
Was I wrong to consider using/. as an effective way to communicate issues like this to the technical community, or am I just bitching because my story was rejected?
Good luck everyone out there who should be checking/cleaning your systems -
It would be awfully damn hard to build a spaceship without mathematics, let alone trying to calculate launch trajectories or transfer orbits.
Take a moment to consider:
Roman aqueducts built without modern engineering skill/techniques
Mayan calendars built without telescopes/calculus
Naval battles, with cannon, fought without the benefit of modern targeting electronics/radar/etc.
This last item is particularly relevant - how do you aim a firearm? By your eye. How do you get a rocket to escape velocity without the benefit of math/computers? By experience.
There is nothing written that indicates that space travel requires complex computing machinery. Just because that's how we're doing it does NOT mean it's the ONLY way to do it.
Actually, I'd been waiting expectantly for iTunes for Windows, so I could purchase the iPod.
Well, shame on me - it's only supported on 2000 and XP. I haven't upgraded from ME, because I don't want to deal with MS' invasiveness. I had already decided that my next machine would be an mac. As you point out, this just speeds up my purchase.
In a recent article in Business2.0 ( September 2003), The Coming Job Boom, the authors demonstrate quite handily that over the next 20 years or so ( beginning sooner, rather than later, for the impatient or unemployed out there ), the baby boomers are going to be retiring. IN DROVES. HUGE FLOCKS, running from the workplace to drive their RVs around the country ( Side Note: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holding company just invested some ungodly amount in an RV insurance company. Don't think he's doing that just for a few extra bucks.)
The article describes, sometimes in painstaking detail (and with a number of information-dense graphs), that this demographic issue is inexorable, and that the most serious problems will be in the skilled job market. Those retiring booomers are going to leave gaps in the job market the size of Meteor Crater, and those of us in Generations X and Y will have some sense of job security again.
The authors provide a list of the jobs that will be highest in demand - and their comments in the text indicate that the shortage of tech workers in the late 1990s was nothing compared to what's coming.
While I agree with some of what Jeffries says, I'm surprised by two things -
Jeffries apparently didn't see fit to include any references to recent developments in engineering/technology that will benefit mankind
No slashdot readers did either.
As one example, in the last several days, a tidal energy turbine, apparently the first in the world, was turned on, and is generating electricity.
Now, while many consumers may have an interest in gadgets, unfortunately this may be the totality of "advanced technology" with which they knowingly come into contact on a regular basis. Most normal folks will never see a windmill farm ( at least for a couple of years ), or a tidal energy turbine farm, or the inside of a particle accelerators, or blast off to spend time on the International Space Station.
Most of the important new "gadgets" are simply too big and too expensive for regular folks to enjoy. And many people, unfortunately, really don't care about new technology unless it provides direct and tangible benefits to them. While tidal energy turbine farms may eventually be widespread, providing power for many coastal metropoli, you can't really impress your friends with it, and, most importantly, since you cannot have a tidal energy turbine of your very own, you can't impress women with one either.
While there may be "tons of rivers and lots of space", a great deal of that space in Oklahoma is fairly flat.
Now think about what happens when you dam a river and the land around the river for many many many miles is as flat as a pancake ( well, almost as flat as a pancake ).
Try to remember the Mississippi River floods in 1993 - that might give you a clue about what could happen if you put a largish sized dam in a (relatively) flat area. Mmmmm-kay?
Bring on a future where perfect health and longevity are available to us all
Oh, you mean, like decent housing is available to us all? <br>
Er...wait, how about vaccinations, food, free speech (not in the same category, but what the heck), organs for transplant, clean water, clean air...? <br> Perfect health and 'longevity' will <B>never</b> be available to everyone, most likely. To those able to afford them, it will be easier, certainly. <br> Even if either one of these were available, population pressure is soon going to erode the earth's ability to sustain humanity - 'perfect longevity' will simply hasten the inevitable. <bR> Now, if we can pour some more money into space habitation, whether on the Moon or elsewhere (including on satellites - artificial or otherwise), 'we' might have a chance to have our cake and eat it too. But remember, it's probably only going to be the 'well-off' (whatever that means) who are going to be able to extricate themselves from what's coming. <br> And just in case you've forgotten, there could be some pretty big zingers coming our way with this technology - as Bill Joy pointed out <A href=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.h tml ><b>recently</b></a>.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some government labs that maintain this type of environment - serveral posters have mentioned NRL, where I worked for a short time years ago, and I found it to be exactly the type of basic research / applied engineering environment you describe. NASA still does basic and applied research as well, as do a number of the other labs mentioned in other posts. DOE in particular maintains a number of national labs, many of which do interesting work. NIST, in Gaithersburg MD, has a fairly large segment of its work dedicated to research. NOAA also has research facilities, but this may not be your cup of tea.
In private industry, there are a number of organizations that may fit. W.L. Gore has an excellent atmosphere and encourages innovation and play; 3M practically requires its employees to spend about 20% of their time experimenting. Other organizations you might investigate: Dow/DuPont; Texas Instruments; Motorola; Apple. There many others, but the margin of this post is too narrow to contain them.
Good luck -
I got my hot little hands on my copy yesterday, and installed last night. Simple, straightforward, no problems with the install. Took about 30 minutes; most of that time was likely indexing, as the actual data transferred from the DVD to my machine was only about 2GB.
Spotlight is astounding. It is amazingly fast, beautiful to watch, easy to use, and wonderfully complete, searching applications, documents (word, pdf, txt, rtf, html, etc, etc), images, music (though I haven't checked *lyrics* yet), mail messages - everything. It's fast. It will change my experience as a user - completely.
I spent so much time playing with spotlight last night that I didn't even open the Dashboard.
I did open Safari, however, and sites (all those I opened) render much more rapidly than in Panther. The RSS feature is nice, but I didn't spend much time with it. Much of the interface responds much more rapidly to user requests, with the singular exception of Expose, as others have noted. I am hopeful that Apple will tweak Expose in an upcoming update.
If you don't own a Mac, visit the nearest Apple retail store and try spotlight. As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.
It's just a short hop to the tasp - the device used by the puppeteer in Niven's Ringworld books designed to remotely stimulate the pleasure center of the brain.
What a wonderful world it would be if you could "make someone's day" on the metro, or in the middle of a traffic-jam, or in the midst of a mob scene.
Think of how valuable a device like the tasp would be for subduing violent criminals - one second, a rampaging hoodlum, the next second a vegetable-like mass, drooling with uncontrollable pleasure that is pure and unadulterated. Better than sex, better than heroin, better than speed, and no hangover.
Of course, knowing humanity, our first use will be to produce agony and pain, not pleasure, as is the case with many new technologies with such potential. We'll see!
Visions of the body reconstruction machine from The Fifth Element...
While the driver's death is unfortunate, and the destruction of the car a disappointment and perhaps a setback for the particular program that developed it, I fail to see how this accident is "is a big setback for solar power advocates".
If it were, every automobile accident would be "a big setback" for the internal combustion engine, and every stubbed toe would be "a big setback" for bipedal motion. If the solar panels had spewed "solar waste" everywhere, contaminating the surroundings a-la Chernobyl, it would be considered "a big setback for solar power".
Fundamentally, this was a car accident, not a solar power accident. The operator of the vehicle lost control for some reason, and swerved. It happens with gasoline powered vehicles, diesel powered vehicles, four-wheeled autos, 18-wheeled trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles. Too bad that when gigantic, gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing SUVs crash it isn't "a big setback" for SUVs.
If you dd the line, how do you keep track of everything you've accomplished?
Anal as it may be, I use text-based to-do lists too, but I also keep a contemporaneous work log in a {not-to-be-named} spreadsheet program.
To-Do lists are great for things you plan to do, but they don't handle all of the things customers/coworkers/supervisors ask you to get done, often immediately, and often with no notice. And you don't want to lose track of all of that material - sometimes your review can depend on what's in a contemporaneous work log like this.
It's a simple spreadsheet, with 5 columns. Time start, time end, customer, project, notes. Time start and time end run from about 0700 to 2400 hours, in 15 minute increments. Customer is usually a department, and notes is freeform, often abbreviated, but includes pertinent information like who I spoke with, did something get delivered/emailed/deployed, etc.
Anal, obsessive-compulsive, whatever. It's saved my bacon a couple of times. A to-do list that you erase, saving no record of your work (except the work, in most cases)? No thanks.
Dateline: Washington DC
The Insane Times-Record reported today that legislation outlawing the hammer, screwdriver, shovel, and frying pan has been introduced in the US Congress.
The Home Abuse Tool Enforcement Act (HATE), citing reports of hammers, screwdrivers, shovels, and frying pans being used to perpetrate violent incidents in the home, requires all owners of such tools to turn them in to local law enforcement officials.
The HATE Act seeks to prevent further mis-use of such heinous tools in the home. While recognizing the important contributions these tools have made to home-ownership, and civilization in general, the risks of such tool technology being used for ill have finally become significant enough that no one can be trusted to utilize the tools for their intended purposes.
Repairmen, workshops, and machine shops will be required to register each tool with the US Dept. of Commerce's new "Heinous Tool Registry", which will ensure that these important implements are still valuable tools for good, as long as they are kept in the right hands.
No word yet on the frying pan.
mod parent up -
I was going to state something similar, that the original pi-user's actual pin was no more or less random than if he hadn't made a mistake -
Washington Post has more coverage in this article, Hackers Strike Advanced Computing Networks.
I find it somehow reassuring that Darl, in his statement about "seven U.S. Supreme Court justices", has failed to recall basic middle-school civics, let alone all news items regarding the Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court has 9 [NINE] justices.
What a nitwit.
For those of you so inclined, FindLaw has an excellent page on the U.S. Supreme Court, including a history of the court.
A long time ago, I read a book by Paul Reps titled "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones", that includes a story, "A Cup of Tea", that is particularly appropriate given the material in this article. I reproduce the story here:
A Cup of Tea
The PHBs have had their heads filled so full with material, and are so unwilling/scared/unable to unlearn it, that their education becomes a liability. Corporations encounter the same kind of problem when they develop "core rigidities" and are unable to rapidly adapt to the ever-changing marketplace.Aside: someone has been kind enough to reproduce this story, along with a number of other excerpts from "101 Zen Stories", and they can be found here.
A Windows virus of this sort affects more than just Windows networks; many corporate networks are more heterogeneous, and a lot of corporate sysadmins read Slashdot. Sometimes they read /. before they check CERT or SANS, and that shouldn't be a surprise!
/. - why shouldn't an informed user be able to count on /. for "Stuff that matters"?
Aside from that, normal users - I mean non-sysadmins - also read
I find it interesting that I submitted this story shortly after 0900 EST in an effort to get the word out to /. readers, but it was rejected.
/. as an effective way to communicate issues like this to the technical community, or am I just bitching because my story was rejected?
Was I wrong to consider using
Good luck everyone out there who should be checking/cleaning your systems -
Two words: Rent Control.
don't you mean "edumacated"?
Take a moment to consider:
Roman aqueducts built without modern engineering skill/techniques
Mayan calendars built without telescopes/calculus
Naval battles, with cannon, fought without the benefit of modern targeting electronics/radar/etc.
This last item is particularly relevant - how do you aim a firearm? By your eye. How do you get a rocket to escape velocity without the benefit of math/computers? By experience.
There is nothing written that indicates that space travel requires complex computing machinery. Just because that's how we're doing it does NOT mean it's the ONLY way to do it.
Actually, I'd been waiting expectantly for iTunes for Windows, so I could purchase the iPod.
Well, shame on me - it's only supported on 2000 and XP. I haven't upgraded from ME, because I don't want to deal with MS' invasiveness. I had already decided that my next machine would be an mac. As you point out, this just speeds up my purchase.
Have a nice evening -
The article describes, sometimes in painstaking detail (and with a number of information-dense graphs), that this demographic issue is inexorable, and that the most serious problems will be in the skilled job market. Those retiring booomers are going to leave gaps in the job market the size of Meteor Crater, and those of us in Generations X and Y will have some sense of job security again.
The authors provide a list of the jobs that will be highest in demand - and their comments in the text indicate that the shortage of tech workers in the late 1990s was nothing compared to what's coming.
Here's some of the list:
Systems Analyst - approx 60% growth
DBA - approx 65% growth
Network/System Admin - approx 80% growth
Software engineers - between 85-100%
So hang in there.
Actually, if you check, you'll see that the United States is also a republic.
Source: The Constitution.
Alternate Source: The Pledge of Allegiance
Have a great day!
Did anybody else notice the TPS acronym bandied about in the Computerworld article? I can hardly wait!
M'kay?
Jeffries apparently didn't see fit to include any references to recent developments in engineering/technology that will benefit mankind
No slashdot readers did either.
As one example, in the last several days, a tidal energy turbine, apparently the first in the world, was turned on, and is generating electricity.
Now, while many consumers may have an interest in gadgets, unfortunately this may be the totality of "advanced technology" with which they knowingly come into contact on a regular basis. Most normal folks will never see a windmill farm ( at least for a couple of years ), or a tidal energy turbine farm, or the inside of a particle accelerators, or blast off to spend time on the International Space Station.
Most of the important new "gadgets" are simply too big and too expensive for regular folks to enjoy. And many people, unfortunately, really don't care about new technology unless it provides direct and tangible benefits to them. While tidal energy turbine farms may eventually be widespread, providing power for many coastal metropoli, you can't really impress your friends with it, and, most importantly, since you cannot have a tidal energy turbine of your very own, you can't impress women with one either.
While there may be "tons of rivers and lots of space", a great deal of that space in Oklahoma is fairly flat.
Now think about what happens when you dam a river and the land around the river for many many many miles is as flat as a pancake ( well, almost as flat as a pancake ).
Try to remember the Mississippi River floods in 1993 - that might give you a clue about what could happen if you put a largish sized dam in a (relatively) flat area. Mmmmm-kay?
Bring on a future where perfect health and longevity are available to us all
h tml ><b>recently</b></a>.
Oh, you mean, like decent housing is available to us all? <br>
Er...wait, how about vaccinations, food, free speech (not in the same category, but what the heck), organs for transplant, clean water, clean air...?
<br>
Perfect health and 'longevity' will <B>never</b> be available to everyone, most likely. To those able to afford them, it will be easier, certainly. <br>
Even if either one of these were available, population pressure is soon going to erode the earth's ability to sustain humanity - 'perfect longevity' will simply hasten the inevitable. <bR>
Now, if we can pour some more money into space habitation, whether on the Moon or elsewhere (including on satellites - artificial or otherwise), 'we' might have a chance to have our cake and eat it too. But remember, it's probably only going to be the 'well-off' (whatever that means) who are going to be able to extricate themselves from what's coming. <br>
And just in case you've forgotten, there could be some pretty big zingers coming our way with this technology - as Bill Joy pointed out <A href=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.
Sorry about this, folks. Didn't know the link was bad.