If the Brits were looking about for a third-party nation to lease launch facilities from, they could do worse than negotiating with the Chileans to lease a facility for a spaceport in the high Chilean deserts. About 10 degrees closer to the equator than Cape Canaveral, and around 10,000 ft higher, they are also one of the driest spots on the planet (less ice build up than launching out of a tropical wetlands).
Given :
Twelve billiard balls, numbered 1-12, otherwise identical
except for the fact that one (and only one) differs in
weight from all the others. It is unknown whether it is
lighter or heavier.
The Problem :
Part 1:
Using only a balance scale (capable of determining
heavier/lighter or equal), what is the smallest
number of trials necessary to determine (over all
cases) which ball is the odd one and whether it is
heavier or lighter than the others ?
If we apply that old Watergate adage, "Follow the money", and examine the financial implications of this, we quickly see that multinational corporations are the ones whose oxe gets gored.
What will happen to Wal-Mart (or any of a bazillion other companies) if they cannot easily communicate over the internet between Arkansas and China? How will Apple ship iPods in a timely manner, given the very close connections between the Apple Web Store and the manufacturing plants in China?
There's an incredible amount of money riding on the continued smooth operation and openness of the internet. Globalization depends upon it.
Maybe Kim Jung Il will be able to live without the commerce managed over the internet, but the list of countries that are so isolated as to be able to get by is a very short one.
The internet will continue unchanged, due to its dual nature, the other side being globalization. As soon as anything upsets the rivers of money flowing around the world via the internet, the true rulers of this small blue orb, the multinationals, will stomp it to death and return things to their previously smooth operation. Not even China dares disrupt the flow of commerce. One might say that China has the most to lose by tinkering with the internet. If the Euros would shut their collective pie-hole and think for just a second, they would see the reality of the situation as well.
On the one hand, they make a VERY strong case that US engineers are 5 to 10 times more expensive to employ than those where the jobs are going (India and China)...
And on the other hand, they advocate a massive program to train many more engineers and scientists than we already have, but to what end?
If there is no neutralization of the cost of labor differentials between the United States and India/China, all of these newly created scientists and engineers will be unemployed. How is THAT going to help things?
In theory, in the fullness of time, the third-world economies will expand and their costs of labor will rise, as ours is falling due to inability to compete. Somewhere in the middle things will meet, and we will be able to sustain a population of technical workers.
But in the interim, I see nothing being proposed by the panel of "experts" to prevent careers in technical areas or the sciences from being stigmatized as "loser" careers, good routes to unemployment.
Keynes said "But in the long run, we are all dead", meaning that one cannot only plan things based on a long term point of view. The short term must be also accommodated, else we'll never make it to the long term goal.
Somebody needs to devise a plan that will preserve a national capability in the sciences, and will be not make our economy non-competitive in the process. It's certainly not going to be the Republicans, as they represent only the rich, with the rest of us as a resource to be plundered, and it's not going to be the Democrats, as they see business as a resource to be plundered.
"... Congress can go against the majority of the people in order to protect the minority.
"
And the problem here is that corporations are treated as "people" -- in fact, are given a preferred status to those people who are actually able to cast votes.
Corporations, not being able to influence Congress through voting in elections, go a different route, that of stuffing money into the congressperson they desire to influence until said congressperson's eyes roll up and they become in thrall to the corporation.
Plus corporations are not held to influencing any specific representatives based on geography, and using the lobbyist channel, they go after the lot of them.
I view the lack of any Constitutional regulation of corporation's influence on Congress as one of the biggest flaws in the magnum opus of the Founding Fathers. It has resulted in our society assuming a multi-tiered nature, with the multinational corporations at the top, the Republican and Democrat parties next, followed by the elected national government, with the "people" near the bottom rung in the scheme of things.
For some time now, I've felt that the "dark matter" hypothesis was considerably lacking in the expermental verification area.
If the bulk of the universe was supposedly made up of dark matter, it ought to be fairly easy to get some under the microscope, so to speak.
The absence of such experimental verification has made me want to treat dark matter as the modern day equivalent of the "ether" of a century ago that facilitated transmission of "light waves" across the universe.
Hopefully, not too many textbooks have been already printed telling us that dark matter exists and explains the details of the expansion of the universe.
In my experience, the existence of the degree says about 70% of what is communicated by an engineering degree, the school it is from about 25%, and the GPA at most 5%.
Most of what nearly all prospective employers look at the GPA for is to verify that you weren't just hanging on by your fingernails, a hair's breadth away from flunking out. Perfect GPAs are nice, and *might* even get noticed, but I doubt that they do much in the way of cinching employment or a bigger salary.
Grad school is another matter, but even there it's not a deal-breaker. Mostly, a high GPA is just icing on one's cake of self-esteem.
In the Institution from which I graduated with a BME and a minor in electrical engineering, we had classes 6 days a week (in my freshman year, anyhow), it took nearly two hundred credits to graduate -- as opposed to the approx 125 credits at most engineering schools (yes, my credits transfer credit for credit to anywhere in the world). Our students were restricted to those that had high SAT scores (high being 600 and up in math (clustered between 700 and 800), >200 in verbal -- my verbal score was higher than my math score, wasted skills) and were from the top 10% of their high school classes. There were also other filters, in addition to a 6-hr admissions test. When you're competing against a room full of people like that, the distribution is fairly narrow and grading on the curve is merciless.
On the first day of my first semester of calculus, the instructor asked how many in the class had 3-4 semesters of calculus in high school. A smallish number of hands went up. He then processed to ask how many had at least 2 semesters, then 1. At the end, there were only 2 of us without our hands raised, one of which was me. I remember feeling the mildest of twinges of concern (hey, I was 17, who knew?) and thinking "Wonder what THIS means?" Some of the guys had 4 semesters of calculus using the SAME textbook we would be using.
I had a rough time, but managed to hang on and learn. In my first course in differential equations, I was frantically struggling to take notes as fast as the instructor was filling the blackboards, until somebody next to me stopped me and pointed out that he was merely copying the text to the blackboard, word-for-word, from memory. As soon as the class was over, I went straight to the bookstore and purchased a copy of Schaum's Differential Equations, as I knew that if I was ever going to pass this class, I would be doing it all on my own.
And you know? That was one of the most valuable lessons I learned in my time there. Repeat after me:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TEACHING. THERE IS ONLY LEARNING.
All that any instructor can do is present the material in a manner (hopefully more than one) that will stick when flung at a student's mind. Anybody wanting to be spoon-fed knowledge has watched the Matrix a few times too often, and thinks they can have knowledge downloaded into them.
The way I think of the learning process is that I'm building a neural net in meatware. It takes motivation, concentration, and reinforcement in the form of repetition to get good at anything. This process is called learning. It's a very active process, nothing passive about it.
In my day, motivation came from the fact that we were allowed only 2 failed courses before being ejected out of the program and losing our draft deferments, a sure trip to the far east. IF we successfully completed the program, we were virtually guaranteed well-paying jobs and lifetime employment. If we completed with a high enough GPA, we got a free ride to the grad school of our choosing (I didn't make the cut, had to pay for my own graduate degree). The stick and the carrot, time-honored tools in motivation.
But you know? We had people entering our program that had exited other programs which were suspected by the rest of us of being "more difficult". Those people invariably breezed through our program without breaking a sweat. I consider those schools Tier One (MIT, CalTech, any of the military academies). Guys that washed out of our program went on to breeze through state schools with good names -- names like Purdue, Northwestern, U of Michigan, etc. I consider those to be Tier 3 schools. And there are a large number of lesser (Tier Four) schools that turn out perfectly serviceable engineers. There's a definite hierarchy of engineering schools out there.
I have no sympathy for someone who isn't willing to do the work. Just because you were hot stuff in high school means very little as you move into larger ponds. You'll find that this situation exists in Med scho
... as the latest Microsft re-org gives witness to, with Alchin taking retirement.
It would appear that the Beast has resisted the attempt to bring order into its chaotic development processes, and has ejected the foreign body responsible for attempting to bring Order into Chaos.
Gates will continue to be the ultimate micro-meddler, introducing inconsistent and disruptive features and promoting competition between coders instead of cooperative endeavors to produce quality code.
Besides, everyone knows that corporate bean-counters who purchase software don't give a hoot about the quality or usefulness of the products they purchase. All they operate on is pricing, feature lists (where a broken feature is as good as a working one), and what "everyone else is doing".
Until we see some plan to place a substantial counterweight into an appropriate orbit, a space elevator is just a (carbon nano-)pipe dream.
We could either boost several hundred tons of material into place (a very expensive propostition), or capture a NEO asteroid of suitable size via robotic ion drive tugs and move it into place (a very time-consuming proposition).
But since all the attention is on constructing the cable, or selecting the most appropriate attachment site, it seems that this is all just a phantasm of techno-geekery speculation.
A serious plan to construct a space elevator would be considering how to anchor each of the ends of the cable, as well as the cable and lifter. Without all these components, it simply ain't gonna happen.
And another thing -- how will we keep the cable from intersecting the orbits of all the satellites currently in place, not to mention the orbiting ISS? The ISS can navigate around the path of the cable, but most of the satellites cannot, and sooner or later will come to intimate terms with the cable, at whatever delta-V the respective bodies possess.
One can make the case that a pre-emptive nuclear strike is tantamount to a declaration of war.
How very nice that we have our own version of Kim Jung Il -- a lunatic leader who has, in that wonderfully descriptive Texas aphorism, "too much hat for his herd".
... educating one in the sciences and training to use a particular manufacturer's lab equipment.
At least that's what the subjects listed in Zambonini's piece suggested to me. If someone trained according to his curriculum were called upon to develop a compiler for a new language, or an algorithm to calculate some complex function, they would assume the role of a fish out of water.
And it may well be that what you want is a trade school education -- after all, there are a lot more lab assistants than PhD researchers. If all you want is a job, and have no passion for the subject matter in the field, then the course of education suggested by Zambonini is certainly preferable -- and easier.
In a computer science curriculum you may well be obliged to learn about many of the topics he has listed, but as a byproduct on the way to some other goal. I can't imagine a computer science degree program these days that doesn't briefly touch on the nature of XML as a means of expressing a formal grammar. But I doubt that many will see the need to spend precious time explaining in detail the W3C's (or Microsoft's) views on DTDs and meta tags.
And best of all, you can self-educate yourself via a series of "XYZ in 21 Days" paperbacks and well-chosen how-to web sites, applied in the classroom of your own computer. If you think that a diploma will help you get a better job (and I think that it usually will), enrolling in the trade school or "technology" degree program of your choosing after you've prepared yourself will allow things to progress more smoothly. In fact, I suspect you'll find it easier to get a job as an intern while still a student, prove your worth to your employer and get that "big raise" upon attainment of your degree of choice.
But the half-life of things learned in a technology degree is very short, while the underlying sciences change very slowly, if at all. So a computer science degree will prove useful over and over again throughout your career, while a technology degree will be quickly left behind. I know that I found myself using parsing and organizational techniques learned 30 years ago in a compiler design course to create a piece of COBOL middleware using TCP/IP sockets SQL, and XML, methods that allowed me to craft a solution while my trade- and technology-schooled peers were scratching their heads wondering how they were going to accomplish the goal (don't blame me for the COBOL -- one thing you learn in a computer science program is that a particular programming language is merely the material from which you construct the algorithmic design. As much as COBOL reeks, it's just a tool -- and this time was the tool I was directed to use).
It's pretty clear that our (US) government now stands firmly between the citizens and those "rights" granted by God or birth.
And it's just as clear that, as a nation, we ran willy-nilly to the government, begging them to take those "Rights" from us when they passed the Patriot Act with such overwhelming support.
Ben Franklin's words have never rung more true: "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Not to mention the thawing of the Russian permafrost, and subsequent decomposition of the underlying peat into methane and CO2 over millions of square kilometers.
We have likely passed a trigger point beyond which global warming would continue even if all human releases of greenhouse gases fell immediately to zero, due to lags in the system.
The good news is that this is not the first time this has happened over geologic time, and whatever mechanism turns it off and into another Ice Age will eventually kick in.
But NOW would be a Real Good Time for researchers to begin bioengineering trees that produce carbon nanotube-laden bark, and grow at incredibly rapid rates.
I liked the official explanation that it was an internal tool targeting a particular vendor's product, as if that makes it any more justifiable.
So what happens to their "internal" tool when Microsoft changes the next version of IE?
Isn't it simply the rational thing to do to code to a vendor-independent programming framework?
The dweebs that support these kind of crappy business practices simply don't get it. And amazingly enough, more often than not they're the same crowd that pushes the "must have an alternative vendor, no sole-sourcing" meme (a good meme, by the way) whenever it fits their agenda to do so.
I would say "their loss" and be done with it, but in fact it's everybody's loss, when a public agency ties its services to a particular vendor. I'm strongly inclined to adopt the opinion that ANYTHING done by a public agency using a computer should be coded in java, using application frameworks that are publicly available (Or any other ANSI or W3C or other recognized standard) and recognized as being portable. That way, you stand a much better chance of being able to upgrade your hardware without having to incur heavy software recoding expenses, and maybe, just MAYBE you don't have agencies running 386s and obsolete hardware and/or software platforms because they're tied into software that they can't afford to upgrade.
This preference for software that is tightly bound to particular hardware can be found at the root of some past comuting debacles in our government, such as the FAA's adventure with hardware so old it used vacuum tubes, the FBI's pitiful "network" capability, where they couldn't even send a digital image from one office to another, the IRS and Social Security Administration's death-grip to obsolete mainframes (not that mainframes are obsolete, but when you are paying more in maintenance fees for old gear than a new mainframe costs, you've done something wrong),... you can see where this leads. Admittedly, some of these situations had no other choice in the past -- BUT TODAY THEY DO.
All too often a short-sighted focus on immediate costs vs life cycle costing allows (nay, FORCES) total expenditures to blossom many-fold, when architectural decisions aimed at balancing short-term and total expenditures are the responsible way to run a railroad (or government (or business)).
Believe me, I know whereof I speak, having created more than my share of non-portable, platform-specific applications... there is none so Righteous as a Reformed Sinner.
Now, back to coding assembler hacks to ISPF panel applications to run on a mainframe emulator on a Macintosh...
Google strikes back! -- ain't it wunnerful, kind of a cybernetic jujitsu, wherein one moves so as to allow an opponent to act against himself.
In my fondest dreams, some kind-hearted hacker incorporates the Balmer monkey dance video into the startup graphics of Windows XP. Allowing pompous blowhards to be seen in their most "flattering" light is a nice sort of vaccine for their attempts to instill fear into the hearts of those whose lives they have (or think they have) an influence over.
And so appropriate, a company whose corporate motto is "Don't be evil" being targeted by a company that is widely regarded as the acme of evil.
Kind of a capitalistic morality play. That Balmer guy, he's just a sweetheart, y'know? I call him "Balmy". ---------- And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
... either make use of it's "investment" in Sun and have Sun object, claiming OpenOffice is an infringement on some aspect of StarOffice, or just come out of the shadows and play the patent card.
I'm sure there is some set of dubious patents that have been awarded to Microsoft such that they can tie up the state of Massachusetts in the courts for years to come, with mind-numbing legal expenses, to the point that it will be easier for the state to reconsider and put on the BSA "Microsoft-only" shackles in exchange for a minimal annual license fee -- which may have been the state's goal to begin with.
If we examine the annual tax revenue that Massachusetts hauls in, vs the annual revenue that Microsoft bathes in, it becomes apparent that there is no contest in this. If Massachusetts courts had the final word on the issue, the state might stand a chance.
If Microsoft can manage to appeal/otherwise escalate this into the federal courts, the DOJ will undoubtedly intervene on behalf of Microsoft. It's not called the "best government money can buy" for nothing, y'know.
There are a lot of "if"'s in the above statements. But when I examine each one, it comes out advantage: Microsoft.
If Creative is greedy (and who in the corporate world is not?), they will offer to sell the patent to the highest bidder, and play Apple and Microsoft off against each other.
In the end, Microsoft controls that game, as they have the resources to exceed any offer Apple can make, unless they choose to crank the bidding up so high as to have Apple blow all their cash and short-term investments (something close to $8B), or go into debt to finance the purchase, placing Apple at a serious on-going financial disadvantage. How much Apple spends will depend upon what the iPod market is worth to Apple.
The only player that really wins in this is Creative. Apple loses and Microsoft loses, because the mp3 player market is ruined (except for the Far Eastern manufacturers who could give a rat's ass about patents), and the consumer loses.
And all the people who squawk about the protected AAC format will get to see the DMR-friendly WMA format used to support renting the music on your iPod.
"... the most powerful windmill in existence can climb to about 10 megawatts."
A single windmill does not a windmill farm make, any more than a single fuel element makes a nuclear reactor.
Put a few hundred windmills into a farm, and you have something that produces power at levels comparable to a nuclear plant. Yes, the power density is lower. So what?
The goal of cheap photovoltaics covering rooftops in sunny climes is perhaps the epitome of low-density power, and will likely be as difficult to attain as fusion power. A mix of low- and high-desnity power generation is a Good Thing.
When you compare wind power to nuclear, the advantages of nuclear are that it is reliable (i.e., completely predictable output levels) while wind power has an inevitable certain amount of variation. However, the life cycle costs for nuclear power (including the fact that potential terrorist weaponry is involved throughout its processes, from theft of waste to destruction of a plant) are quite substantial.
As we shift away from fossil fuels in the coming decades (competition with China and India resulting in rising prices are enough to cause this, without getting into the credibility of "proven reserves" guesstimates or the need to reduce greenhouse gases), we're going to need every way of generating power that we can find. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, fission and fusion will all be needed. And yes, we'll probably also be mining coal to use in some sort of fuel cell-based power generation scheme.
...and was told by one manager that if I worked in his group I would spend two years debugging other people's code. That wasn't attractive to me at all.
So if you were offered a chance to debug Linux kernel code for money, that wouldn't be attractive to you at all either, I guess?
If you're working in the Real World, on mammoth aggregations of code that have evolved over decades, you cannot avoid "debugging other people's code".
Get over it. Despite a CS degree from Stanford, you're just not that special. If you were, you would strike out on your own and create a new industry or market niche.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but debugging other people's code is in many ways much more intellectually challenging than producing your own monsters for others to debug.
Quite possibly the reason the people were reticent to teach you anything is that you wanted to be taught, instead of learning. There's a considerable chasm between those things. Another possibility is that they were never informed that they were supposed to take time away from doing the work to nurse the newbies along.
In my experience, IBM documents things reasonably well -- so much so that a major challenge is learning to search the plethora of manuals for the particular clue one is looking for. Start with the Principles of Operation to understand the hardware. IBM Redbooks are sometimes a wealth of how-to info that is generally unavailable. I suspect that if asked, any of the older guys could have given you the view from 40,000 feet, which isn't much, but at least orients you so as to permit intelligent self-directed education from that point forward.
And there are some good texts available -- not many, and they're OLD, but they present a good view that's a lot closer than the view from 40,000 feet. Try Operating Systems: A Pragmatic Approach by Katzan (ISBN: 0442247389) or Systems Programming by Donovan (ISBN: 0070176035) or Invitation to MVS: Logic and Debugging (also by Katzan, ISBN: 0894330810).
Also, there is a wealth of helpful web sites out there, start at Planet MVS or MVShelp.com.
And for the truly dedicated, install a mainframe emulator and an old copy of a mainframe OS that's in the public domain onto your PC and debug THAT!
... for the country to identify traits of good managers and figure out how to encourage them. From there we could move on to improving teachers, and technical workers.
Oh -- but before we go that route, we need to start with the voters, who would then improve our leadership... and before we do that, we should figure out what makes good parenting skills and upgrade the parents in our fine nation.
I'm really very optimistic about our prospects, really I am.
"AMD/Intel are too cheap, too powerful, and too prevelant."
You have data to support this? Everything I have heard was that IBM was considerably cheaper than Intel (don't know about AMD) due to the smaller die size for the PPC chips.
Apple is not your typical razor-thin margins PC manufacturer, and could easily dial up the pricing in concert with a dose of hype to handle a hundred-dollar-per-Mac (or something like that) bump in cpu costs. Please take note: We Macheads prefer the term "boutique market" to "niche market".
It's possible that Apple will get humongous discounts due to lumping Macs in with iPods in their agreement with Intel, and wind up paying less for Intel Mac cpus than for IBM PPCs -- or not. They could easily see their way toward paying more for Intel cpus of lower compute power (compared to then-available G5 chips) and lower thermal power (compared to then-available G5 chips) so long as they get great pricing for iPod cpus of much greater power (throughput and watts) that they don't have today.
My bet is that AMD will get their shot at Apple when The Steve tries to make Intel do the Apple crazy customer dance for less than 5% of its manufacturing volume.
Slashdot Mirror
The European Southern Observatory already operates two of the finest atronomical facilities on the planet there.
Given :
Twelve billiard balls, numbered 1-12, otherwise identical
except for the fact that one (and only one) differs in
weight from all the others. It is unknown whether it is
lighter or heavier.
The Problem :
Part 1:
Using only a balance scale (capable of determining
heavier/lighter or equal), what is the smallest
number of trials necessary to determine (over all
cases) which ball is the odd one and whether it is
heavier or lighter than the others ?
Part 2:
Demonstrate the answer to Part 1
... because ...
If we apply that old Watergate adage, "Follow the money", and examine the financial implications of this, we quickly see that multinational corporations are the ones whose oxe gets gored.
What will happen to Wal-Mart (or any of a bazillion other companies) if they cannot easily communicate over the internet between Arkansas and China? How will Apple ship iPods in a timely manner, given the very close connections between the Apple Web Store and the manufacturing plants in China?
There's an incredible amount of money riding on the continued smooth operation and openness of the internet. Globalization depends upon it.
Maybe Kim Jung Il will be able to live without the commerce managed over the internet, but the list of countries that are so isolated as to be able to get by is a very short one.
The internet will continue unchanged, due to its dual nature, the other side being globalization. As soon as anything upsets the rivers of money flowing around the world via the internet, the true rulers of this small blue orb, the multinationals, will stomp it to death and return things to their previously smooth operation. Not even China dares disrupt the flow of commerce. One might say that China has the most to lose by tinkering with the internet. If the Euros would shut their collective pie-hole and think for just a second, they would see the reality of the situation as well.
On the one hand, they make a VERY strong case that US engineers are 5 to 10 times more expensive to employ than those where the jobs are going (India and China) ...
And on the other hand, they advocate a massive program to train many more engineers and scientists than we already have, but to what end?
If there is no neutralization of the cost of labor differentials between the United States and India/China, all of these newly created scientists and engineers will be unemployed. How is THAT going to help things?
In theory, in the fullness of time, the third-world economies will expand and their costs of labor will rise, as ours is falling due to inability to compete. Somewhere in the middle things will meet, and we will be able to sustain a population of technical workers.
But in the interim, I see nothing being proposed by the panel of "experts" to prevent careers in technical areas or the sciences from being stigmatized as "loser" careers, good routes to unemployment.
Keynes said "But in the long run, we are all dead", meaning that one cannot only plan things based on a long term point of view. The short term must be also accommodated, else we'll never make it to the long term goal.
Somebody needs to devise a plan that will preserve a national capability in the sciences, and will be not make our economy non-competitive in the process. It's certainly not going to be the Republicans, as they represent only the rich, with the rest of us as a resource to be plundered, and it's not going to be the Democrats, as they see business as a resource to be plundered.
And the problem here is that corporations are treated as "people" -- in fact, are given a preferred status to those people who are actually able to cast votes.
Corporations, not being able to influence Congress through voting in elections, go a different route, that of stuffing money into the congressperson they desire to influence until said congressperson's eyes roll up and they become in thrall to the corporation.
Plus corporations are not held to influencing any specific representatives based on geography, and using the lobbyist channel, they go after the lot of them.
I view the lack of any Constitutional regulation of corporation's influence on Congress as one of the biggest flaws in the magnum opus of the Founding Fathers. It has resulted in our society assuming a multi-tiered nature, with the multinational corporations at the top, the Republican and Democrat parties next, followed by the elected national government, with the "people" near the bottom rung in the scheme of things.
For some time now, I've felt that the "dark matter" hypothesis was considerably lacking in the expermental verification area.
If the bulk of the universe was supposedly made up of dark matter, it ought to be fairly easy to get some under the microscope, so to speak.
The absence of such experimental verification has made me want to treat dark matter as the modern day equivalent of the "ether" of a century ago that facilitated transmission of "light waves" across the universe.
Hopefully, not too many textbooks have been already printed telling us that dark matter exists and explains the details of the expansion of the universe.
In my experience, the existence of the degree says about 70% of what is communicated by an engineering degree, the school it is from about 25%, and the GPA at most 5%.
Most of what nearly all prospective employers look at the GPA for is to verify that you weren't just hanging on by your fingernails, a hair's breadth away from flunking out. Perfect GPAs are nice, and *might* even get noticed, but I doubt that they do much in the way of cinching employment or a bigger salary.
Grad school is another matter, but even there it's not a deal-breaker. Mostly, a high GPA is just icing on one's cake of self-esteem.
In the Institution from which I graduated with a BME and a minor in electrical engineering, we had classes 6 days a week (in my freshman year, anyhow), it took nearly two hundred credits to graduate -- as opposed to the approx 125 credits at most engineering schools (yes, my credits transfer credit for credit to anywhere in the world). Our students were restricted to those that had high SAT scores (high being 600 and up in math (clustered between 700 and 800), >200 in verbal -- my verbal score was higher than my math score, wasted skills) and were from the top 10% of their high school classes. There were also other filters, in addition to a 6-hr admissions test. When you're competing against a room full of people like that, the distribution is fairly narrow and grading on the curve is merciless.
On the first day of my first semester of calculus, the instructor asked how many in the class had 3-4 semesters of calculus in high school. A smallish number of hands went up. He then processed to ask how many had at least 2 semesters, then 1. At the end, there were only 2 of us without our hands raised, one of which was me. I remember feeling the mildest of twinges of concern (hey, I was 17, who knew?) and thinking "Wonder what THIS means?" Some of the guys had 4 semesters of calculus using the SAME textbook we would be using.
I had a rough time, but managed to hang on and learn. In my first course in differential equations, I was frantically struggling to take notes as fast as the instructor was filling the blackboards, until somebody next to me stopped me and pointed out that he was merely copying the text to the blackboard, word-for-word, from memory. As soon as the class was over, I went straight to the bookstore and purchased a copy of Schaum's Differential Equations, as I knew that if I was ever going to pass this class, I would be doing it all on my own.
And you know? That was one of the most valuable lessons I learned in my time there. Repeat after me:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TEACHING. THERE IS ONLY LEARNING.
All that any instructor can do is present the material in a manner (hopefully more than one) that will stick when flung at a student's mind. Anybody wanting to be spoon-fed knowledge has watched the Matrix a few times too often, and thinks they can have knowledge downloaded into them.
The way I think of the learning process is that I'm building a neural net in meatware. It takes motivation, concentration, and reinforcement in the form of repetition to get good at anything. This process is called learning. It's a very active process, nothing passive about it.
In my day, motivation came from the fact that we were allowed only 2 failed courses before being ejected out of the program and losing our draft deferments, a sure trip to the far east. IF we successfully completed the program, we were virtually guaranteed well-paying jobs and lifetime employment. If we completed with a high enough GPA, we got a free ride to the grad school of our choosing (I didn't make the cut, had to pay for my own graduate degree). The stick and the carrot, time-honored tools in motivation.
But you know? We had people entering our program that had exited other programs which were suspected by the rest of us of being "more difficult". Those people invariably breezed through our program without breaking a sweat. I consider those schools Tier One (MIT, CalTech, any of the military academies). Guys that washed out of our program went on to breeze through state schools with good names -- names like Purdue, Northwestern, U of Michigan, etc. I consider those to be Tier 3 schools. And there are a large number of lesser (Tier Four) schools that turn out perfectly serviceable engineers. There's a definite hierarchy of engineering schools out there.
I have no sympathy for someone who isn't willing to do the work. Just because you were hot stuff in high school means very little as you move into larger ponds. You'll find that this situation exists in Med scho
... as the latest Microsft re-org gives witness to, with Alchin taking retirement.
It would appear that the Beast has resisted the attempt to bring order into its chaotic development processes, and has ejected the foreign body responsible for attempting to bring Order into Chaos.
Gates will continue to be the ultimate micro-meddler, introducing inconsistent and disruptive features and promoting competition between coders instead of cooperative endeavors to produce quality code.
Besides, everyone knows that corporate bean-counters who purchase software don't give a hoot about the quality or usefulness of the products they purchase. All they operate on is pricing, feature lists (where a broken feature is as good as a working one), and what "everyone else is doing".
Until we see some plan to place a substantial counterweight into an appropriate orbit, a space elevator is just a (carbon nano-)pipe dream.
We could either boost several hundred tons of material into place (a very expensive propostition), or capture a NEO asteroid of suitable size via robotic ion drive tugs and move it into place (a very time-consuming proposition).
But since all the attention is on constructing the cable, or selecting the most appropriate attachment site, it seems that this is all just a phantasm of techno-geekery speculation.
A serious plan to construct a space elevator would be considering how to anchor each of the ends of the cable, as well as the cable and lifter. Without all these components, it simply ain't gonna happen.
And another thing -- how will we keep the cable from intersecting the orbits of all the satellites currently in place, not to mention the orbiting ISS? The ISS can navigate around the path of the cable, but most of the satellites cannot, and sooner or later will come to intimate terms with the cable, at whatever delta-V the respective bodies possess.
One can make the case that a pre-emptive nuclear strike is tantamount to a declaration of war.
How very nice that we have our own version of Kim Jung Il -- a lunatic leader who has, in that wonderfully descriptive Texas aphorism, "too much hat for his herd".
... educating one in the sciences and training to use a particular manufacturer's lab equipment.
At least that's what the subjects listed in Zambonini's piece suggested to me. If someone trained according to his curriculum were called upon to develop a compiler for a new language, or an algorithm to calculate some complex function, they would assume the role of a fish out of water.
And it may well be that what you want is a trade school education -- after all, there are a lot more lab assistants than PhD researchers. If all you want is a job, and have no passion for the subject matter in the field, then the course of education suggested by Zambonini is certainly preferable -- and easier.
In a computer science curriculum you may well be obliged to learn about many of the topics he has listed, but as a byproduct on the way to some other goal. I can't imagine a computer science degree program these days that doesn't briefly touch on the nature of XML as a means of expressing a formal grammar. But I doubt that many will see the need to spend precious time explaining in detail the W3C's (or Microsoft's) views on DTDs and meta tags.
And best of all, you can self-educate yourself via a series of "XYZ in 21 Days" paperbacks and well-chosen how-to web sites, applied in the classroom of your own computer. If you think that a diploma will help you get a better job (and I think that it usually will), enrolling in the trade school or "technology" degree program of your choosing after you've prepared yourself will allow things to progress more smoothly. In fact, I suspect you'll find it easier to get a job as an intern while still a student, prove your worth to your employer and get that "big raise" upon attainment of your degree of choice.
But the half-life of things learned in a technology degree is very short, while the underlying sciences change very slowly, if at all. So a computer science degree will prove useful over and over again throughout your career, while a technology degree will be quickly left behind. I know that I found myself using parsing and organizational techniques learned 30 years ago in a compiler design course to create a piece of COBOL middleware using TCP/IP sockets SQL, and XML, methods that allowed me to craft a solution while my trade- and technology-schooled peers were scratching their heads wondering how they were going to accomplish the goal (don't blame me for the COBOL -- one thing you learn in a computer science program is that a particular programming language is merely the material from which you construct the algorithmic design. As much as COBOL reeks, it's just a tool -- and this time was the tool I was directed to use).
It's pretty clear that our (US) government now stands firmly between the citizens and those "rights" granted by God or birth.
And it's just as clear that, as a nation, we ran willy-nilly to the government, begging them to take those "Rights" from us when they passed the Patriot Act with such overwhelming support.
Ben Franklin's words have never rung more true:
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
We have likely passed a trigger point beyond which global warming would continue even if all human releases of greenhouse gases fell immediately to zero, due to lags in the system.
The good news is that this is not the first time this has happened over geologic time, and whatever mechanism turns it off and into another Ice Age will eventually kick in.
But NOW would be a Real Good Time for researchers to begin bioengineering trees that produce carbon nanotube-laden bark, and grow at incredibly rapid rates.
Their strategy has been to quietly buy the company that supplies Microsoft with executive office furniture.
Now they're turning the crank on their investment.
... User Agent string should be replaced with a list of browser capabilities ...
That's great idea! I think I'll patent it.
I liked the official explanation that it was an internal tool targeting a particular vendor's product, as if that makes it any more justifiable.
/or software platforms because they're tied into software that they can't afford to upgrade.
... you can see where this leads. Admittedly, some of these situations had no other choice in the past -- BUT TODAY THEY DO.
... there is none so Righteous as a Reformed Sinner.
...
So what happens to their "internal" tool when Microsoft changes the next version of IE?
Isn't it simply the rational thing to do to code to a vendor-independent programming framework?
The dweebs that support these kind of crappy business practices simply don't get it. And amazingly enough, more often than not they're the same crowd that pushes the "must have an alternative vendor, no sole-sourcing" meme (a good meme, by the way) whenever it fits their agenda to do so.
I would say "their loss" and be done with it, but in fact it's everybody's loss, when a public agency ties its services to a particular vendor. I'm strongly inclined to adopt the opinion that ANYTHING done by a public agency using a computer should be coded in java, using application frameworks that are publicly available (Or any other ANSI or W3C or other recognized standard) and recognized as being portable. That way, you stand a much better chance of being able to upgrade your hardware without having to incur heavy software recoding expenses, and maybe, just MAYBE you don't have agencies running 386s and obsolete hardware and
This preference for software that is tightly bound to particular hardware can be found at the root of some past comuting debacles in our government, such as the FAA's adventure with hardware so old it used vacuum tubes, the FBI's pitiful "network" capability, where they couldn't even send a digital image from one office to another, the IRS and Social Security Administration's death-grip to obsolete mainframes (not that mainframes are obsolete, but when you are paying more in maintenance fees for old gear than a new mainframe costs, you've done something wrong),
All too often a short-sighted focus on immediate costs vs life cycle costing allows (nay, FORCES) total expenditures to blossom many-fold, when architectural decisions aimed at balancing short-term and total expenditures are the responsible way to run a railroad (or government (or business)).
Believe me, I know whereof I speak, having created more than my share of non-portable, platform-specific applications
Now, back to coding assembler hacks to ISPF panel applications to run on a mainframe emulator on a Macintosh
Google strikes back!
-- ain't it wunnerful, kind of a cybernetic jujitsu, wherein one moves so as to allow an opponent to act against himself.
In my fondest dreams, some kind-hearted hacker incorporates the Balmer monkey dance video into the startup graphics of Windows XP.
Allowing pompous blowhards to be seen in their most "flattering" light is a nice sort of vaccine for their attempts to instill fear into the hearts of those whose lives they have (or think they have) an influence over.
And so appropriate, a company whose corporate motto is "Don't be evil" being targeted by a company that is widely regarded as the acme of evil.
Kind of a capitalistic morality play.
That Balmer guy, he's just a sweetheart, y'know?
I call him "Balmy".
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And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.
History has proven that.
All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton (1834-1902)
... doesn't this cast doubt on the scientific validity of "Jurassic Park"? And what about "The Lost World"?
... either make use of it's "investment" in Sun and have Sun object, claiming OpenOffice is an infringement on some aspect of StarOffice, or just come out of the shadows and play the patent card.
I'm sure there is some set of dubious patents that have been awarded to Microsoft such that they can tie up the state of Massachusetts in the courts for years to come, with mind-numbing legal expenses, to the point that it will be easier for the state to reconsider and put on the BSA "Microsoft-only" shackles in exchange for a minimal annual license fee -- which may have been the state's goal to begin with.
If we examine the annual tax revenue that Massachusetts hauls in, vs the annual revenue that Microsoft bathes in, it becomes apparent that there is no contest in this. If Massachusetts courts had the final word on the issue, the state might stand a chance.
If Microsoft can manage to appeal/otherwise escalate this into the federal courts, the DOJ will undoubtedly intervene on behalf of Microsoft. It's not called the "best government money can buy" for nothing, y'know.
There are a lot of "if"'s in the above statements. But when I examine each one, it comes out advantage: Microsoft.
If Creative is greedy (and who in the corporate world is not?), they will offer to sell the patent to the highest bidder, and play Apple and Microsoft off against each other.
In the end, Microsoft controls that game, as they have the resources to exceed any offer Apple can make, unless they choose to crank the bidding up so high as to have Apple blow all their cash and short-term investments (something close to $8B), or go into debt to finance the purchase, placing Apple at a serious on-going financial disadvantage. How much Apple spends will depend upon what the iPod market is worth to Apple.
The only player that really wins in this is Creative. Apple loses and Microsoft loses, because the mp3 player market is ruined (except for the Far Eastern manufacturers who could give a rat's ass about patents), and the consumer loses.
And all the people who squawk about the protected AAC format will get to see the DMR-friendly WMA format used to support renting the music on your iPod.
A single windmill does not a windmill farm make, any more than a single fuel element makes a nuclear reactor.
Put a few hundred windmills into a farm, and you have something that produces power at levels comparable to a nuclear plant. Yes, the power density is lower. So what?
The goal of cheap photovoltaics covering rooftops in sunny climes is perhaps the epitome of low-density power, and will likely be as difficult to attain as fusion power. A mix of low- and high-desnity power generation is a Good Thing.
When you compare wind power to nuclear, the advantages of nuclear are that it is reliable (i.e., completely predictable output levels) while wind power has an inevitable certain amount of variation. However, the life cycle costs for nuclear power (including the fact that potential terrorist weaponry is involved throughout its processes, from theft of waste to destruction of a plant) are quite substantial.
As we shift away from fossil fuels in the coming decades (competition with China and India resulting in rising prices are enough to cause this, without getting into the credibility of "proven reserves" guesstimates or the need to reduce greenhouse gases), we're going to need every way of generating power that we can find. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, fission and fusion will all be needed. And yes, we'll probably also be mining coal to use in some sort of fuel cell-based power generation scheme.
So if you were offered a chance to debug Linux kernel code for money, that wouldn't be attractive to you at all either, I guess?
If you're working in the Real World, on mammoth aggregations of code that have evolved over decades, you cannot avoid "debugging other people's code".
Get over it. Despite a CS degree from Stanford, you're just not that special.
If you were, you would strike out on your own and create a new industry or market niche.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but debugging other people's code is in many ways much more intellectually challenging than producing your own monsters for others to debug.
Quite possibly the reason the people were reticent to teach you anything is that you wanted to be taught, instead of learning. There's a considerable chasm between those things. Another possibility is that they were never informed that they were supposed to take time away from doing the work to nurse the newbies along.
In my experience, IBM documents things reasonably well -- so much so that a major challenge is learning to search the plethora of manuals for the particular clue one is looking for. Start with the Principles of Operation to understand the hardware. IBM Redbooks are sometimes a wealth of how-to info that is generally unavailable. I suspect that if asked, any of the older guys could have given you the view from 40,000 feet, which isn't much, but at least orients you so as to permit intelligent self-directed education from that point forward.
And there are some good texts available -- not many, and they're OLD, but they present a good view that's a lot closer than the view from 40,000 feet. Try Operating Systems: A Pragmatic Approach by Katzan (ISBN: 0442247389) or Systems Programming by Donovan (ISBN: 0070176035) or Invitation to MVS: Logic and Debugging (also by Katzan, ISBN: 0894330810).
Also, there is a wealth of helpful web sites out there, start at Planet MVS or MVShelp.com.
And for the truly dedicated, install a mainframe emulator and an old copy of a mainframe OS that's in the public domain onto your PC and debug THAT!
... for the country to identify traits of good managers and figure out how to encourage them. From there we could move on to improving teachers, and technical workers.
... and before we do that, we should figure out what makes good parenting skills and upgrade the parents in our fine nation.
Oh -- but before we go that route, we need to start with the voters, who would then improve our leadership
I'm really very optimistic about our prospects, really I am.
You have data to support this? Everything I have heard was that IBM was considerably cheaper than Intel (don't know about AMD) due to the smaller die size for the PPC chips.
Apple is not your typical razor-thin margins PC manufacturer, and could easily dial up the pricing in concert with a dose of hype to handle a hundred-dollar-per-Mac (or something like that) bump in cpu costs. Please take note: We Macheads prefer the term "boutique market" to "niche market".
It's possible that Apple will get humongous discounts due to lumping Macs in with iPods in their agreement with Intel, and wind up paying less for Intel Mac cpus than for IBM PPCs -- or not. They could easily see their way toward paying more for Intel cpus of lower compute power (compared to then-available G5 chips) and lower thermal power (compared to then-available G5 chips) so long as they get great pricing for iPod cpus of much greater power (throughput and watts) that they don't have today.
My bet is that AMD will get their shot at Apple when The Steve tries to make Intel do the Apple crazy customer dance for less than 5% of its manufacturing volume.