The reason the US founding fathers put in taxes on inheritance is that the sucess of one generation shouldn't create subsequent generations already ensconced in privalege. In a way this is unavoidable, but if the future generations aren't people of merit, they will eventually loose wealth. Now we're hitting a period in American history where ridiculous wealth is tied to a strong push to eliminate inheritance taxes. Already a number of families are bastions of old money and privilege, but watch as their wealth becomes a trivial matter of their heridity. The one thing the American founding father thought was odious about Monarchies - that mediocre men ruled the world because their great-great-great grandfather was a great man - is now becoming part of American society.
First the wag: The idea that the interveiwee states early on, that software development is not introspective, is horse-hockey. We think about it all the time. We invent new, clever ways to diagram software, capture requirements, interview users, validate functionality and come with all sorts of certifications. More than, say accounting, we are process focused people. Maybe our processes suck, but we spend a lot of time, energy, certification exams, etc, on those processes.
Tip of my hat: He does mention starting small and iterating. I think that's the best way to build software.
I think that's the most disturbing part for me. Imagine getting picked up when landing in London because you were accidentally tagged as a "money launderer" by the Spanish. It would probably take weeks to get sorted out. In the mean time you could kiss your job good-bye. On top of that with so many databases sharing so much information, you might never be really "cleared." You might land in the US again and get detained for days while they sort out the fact that the Spanish tagged you as a "money launderer," even though it was fixed on the British copy of the Spanish database.
I saw a news item recently about a girl who'd been held for 30 days for having condoms full of flour, which airport official claimed were drugs. (Apparently filling condoms with flour is how the girls at her school make stress releaving squeezies - odd but eccentricity is not a crime). She spent 30 days in jail while substance was re-tested, only to discover it was, in fact, flour.
Another example is the US no-fly list. It has literally cost people their livelihoods when they were no longer able to fly. The worst part is they use really poor matching techniques like name matches - so anyone with certain names were not able to board airplanes! Another man interviewed by the Daily Show was labeled as Saddam Huessein's *dead* son, whose age would have required Saddam to have sired him at the age of 11!.
Here's another delicious example. People who buy large boats that were siezed as part of drug raids often get boarded by the coast guard. The identification number on the ship is almost impossible to change, and the coast guard decides to board the ship based on the registration number. Even though the original owner was arrested and his property was siezed.
The first is Chertoff's assertion that thi will deter the "unknown terrorist." If they are unknown, then we probably don't have their finger prints. The second was the addition of the word "crime" along side terrorism. First, not everything that is a crime in one country is a crime in another. For example, it's against the law to spout Nazi propagand in Germany, but not a crime to do so in the US. Who's standard would we apply when determining someone is a criminal? Would we arrest and detain Chinese dissidents at the airport because China said they're "criminals"? Given the volume of data, even a very low incidence of false positives may result in the detention of hundreds of innocent people.
Take a program like Word and tell people they can get a "simpler" version of Word for half the cost. Now, go out and sell that "simpler" version and few people buy it. (Microsoft Works). Even though for many users Word is well beyond what they will ever need. Even Works has many more features than they will use. I make web apps for a living and I get bizarre and contradictory requests from users. Basically they want a big, fat button in the middle of the page that does exactly when they're thinking, with all the defaults values they have in their mind.
Okay, that's a little bit of a poke in the eye and a cop-out, but largely it's true. In New Hampshire (surprisingly Starbucks free) a 25 mile search radius is needed. In the DC area 5 miles is more than adequate. Set the value to reasonable quantity and most users will probably ignore it. You can maks options behind an "advanced options" screen, but then the users that want feature X all claim to be unable to find it. Software doesn't suck, it for the most part what users request.
It sounds like R.L Polk had the wrong architecture for the job. It doesn't sound like they dealt with lots of transactions. It sounds like they were doing some analytics on a large database (I could be wrong about this, but that's the impression I got from the article). If the latter is they case they need large quantities of bulk processing power. That's where clusters are much better. I'm surprised, however, that it takes fewer people to administer the Linux boxes than the mainframe. They must have laid off a bunch coders after squeezing the life out of them in a technology backwater. (Refering to the assembler code - not the fact it was a mainframe). I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the performance improvement also came from the code re-write. After many years of patching and layering code you wind up with some pretty ugly stuff.
The author mixes the idea that the business process (how you do stuff in the business) is modernized if the architecture (the tools used for implementation) is modernized. So, if we use an SOA wrapper over a COBOL app we've modernized the business process. The business process is completely orthogonal to the language/platform being used. While tools like BEPL and SOA can enable flexible and modern practices, they don't guarantee that will be the fruit of your labor. A green screen app may represent an interface into the most modern, agile, and well thought out business process (i.e. how you do stuff for the business). An SOA may be an interface into the most 19th century, retrograde, stupid means of doing something business related (like sending e-mails to 3 different people to get approval to spend $10 on a new pencil sharpner).
There's no such thing as a bad or dead language. There are languages that are better or worse than others for certain tasks. I make my bread and butter doing web apps. I started in C++, moved to Java, and now I'm working with Ruby. I've used what I felt were the best tools for the job at hand. For graduate school I spent a lot of time with Lisp, because that was the best tool for the job. For all my IT brothers and sisters out there busting COBOL for a living, I say be proud!
Ruby has hooks for curses (Ruby is a fairly simple language). It also has a database API and an object relational layer ActiveRecord (part of Rails but doesn't require rails). You might take a look at that. You can extend Ruby using C if you need or you can write the C/C++ programs as callable from inside of the ruby script.
This is NOT something I've done before (except for using Ruby and Rails and the database api). But it might be something to take a peek at.
Excellant caveat. I was using a SCSI tape for backup on the one server my company used to run (a bazillion years ago) and when to examine the tapes produced by NT 3.5.1 (or very early 4.0's) backup tool, a number of them were unreadable. I did not have the same problem on Linux with the "st" commands and tar. Also, be careful of ecryption and compression. Let's say a few bits on the tape get flipped. Uncompressed, this can result in one or a handful or corrupt files. On a compressed tape you could loose the entire archive. If you encrypt on a file by file basis you should be fine, but if you encrypt the entire volume, you could run into the same problem. Also, with Windows, make sure you export your disk encryption certs and that they're recoverable.
You should at least explore the use of a removable hard drive cage (like CRU) and relatively inexpensive 250Gb hard drives. The downside is $80 a drive versus a few bucks for tapes (although tapes get expensive). On NewEgg you can get 120-160 GB hard drives in the $60 range. Add another $20 or so for the enclosure.
I just went through the IBM site and it seems their shipping architecture is Power5+ at about 2.0 to 2.5? Ghz. While I'm not disputing that IBM is capable of jumping to 4Ghz on the first series of Power6, I take a very skeptical approach to performance promises. Given the delays on the first series of the Cell, I'd definitely take a wait and see on that one.
I'm also extremely skeptical of (production) 80 core x86_64 chips, BTW.
In the world of technology a promise of more/better performance counts as much as a drunken "I love you." One reason why Apple jumped from PPC is that IBM failed to deliver a 3.0 Ghz chip within a reasonable time frame (in the PPC970 series) and completely failed on delivering a laptop chip. Believe it when you actually see shipping servers.
Actually, because Sony refused to license BetaMax to pornographers. I remember going to some of the first video-rental places and there was always a back-room, and it was always VHS. So, if you were in the market for a new fandangled VCR you might pick the one that gave you the "broadest" choice. To the best of my knowledge, Motorola and IBM have not restricted the use of their CPUs.
Motorola (now X-Scale), who used to make Apple's PPC chips, saw their future in the embedded market. Apple was about 2% of their sales. They had little or no incentive, and perhaps even a disincentive, to spend a lot of time and money making better desktop and laptop chips. It takes a lot of money to go toe-to-toe with the very smart people over at Intel, and for Motorola there was not much bang for those bucks. For every dollar in desktop PPC chips sold, they sold $50 PPC chips for everything from air conditioners to automobiles.
IBM uses the PPC in their Power series computers (which are both Unix and i5 OS). They view the Power PC as an embedded and server chip. Servers (especially large CPU count servers) are less interested in raw single CPU performance. They have plenty of other issues, such as backplane bandwidth, IO bandwidth, cooling, etc. to worry about. They're interested in the over-all performance of a multi-core, multi-cpu server. (I.e. 16 CPUs with 2 cores each). IBM had little incentive to produce castrated, low-heat versions of the Power architecture for laptops and desktops.
If Apple wanted to stay competative in terms of price and performance (especially in the laptop space), Intel is a probably their best choice. A major market for Intel *is* the desktop and laptop space. They are constantly striving to produce high performance/lower heat versions of their x86 or x86_64 chips that work specifically for desktops and laptops. AMD would have also been great, but for whatever reason they chose Intel. Either way - same basic architecture.
Power PC could be superior to x86/x86_64 in every single way, but if the companies that make the chip have no incentive to build competative, attractive desktop and laptop chips, then whatever theoretical benefits will never materialize. Moreover, for IBM and X-Scale the desktop/laptop market is a side-business and their focus is elsewhere. Both IBM and X-Scale see their long term Power PC plans in markets that are orthogonal to Apple's interests.
IMHO in the long run this will hurt both IBM and X-Scale. Constantly producing better and faster chips for the consumer market (always hungry for a few more clock cycles for FPS games), keeps your performance and speed up. In the 10 year horizon, I think X-Scale will evetually be marginalized to nothing, as very low power variants of common desktop CPUs will trickle in the embedded space. Why use an exotic chip, when you can prototype everything in VMware/parallels/Xen on your desktop? Eventually the $5 in quantity Power PC cpu will have so much less capability than the $5 Intel based CPU that Intel will take the embedded market. In the server market I think specialty processors like SPARC and PPC will get pushed into larger and more exotic iron. Eventually it will be more economical to build around the x86_64 platform than to maintain CPU R&D efforts for those chips.
You both miss the point of HFS+ and ZFS. In Solaris ZFS has not replaced UFS. ZFS is an elegant way to manage large amounts of storage tied together with inexpensive and simple SATA drives. If you have one disk in your Mac, ZFS probably will not be your choice. HFS+ will work very well and be very easy to manage. A file server with 3 or 4 750 GB drives however, might be cut up so that part of the storage is mirrored for safety, limited for certain uses, and spanned over drives for size. For example, 3 750's could be divided into 1 TB unmirrored storage, 250 GB mirrored, a temp area of up to 100GB and the rest (650+ GB depending on temp are usage) held in reserve. In addition ZFS does quite a bit of error checking on the data to avoid any possible corruption during reads. However, it will never replace HFS+ on an iMac for your average user.
First, I'll re-iterate what a lot of other posters said. A CS degree is not a programming degree. 'Nuff said. However, programming is the natural expression of what you larn in a CS class. For example you talk about AI, so now you implement a neural network as a class project. So, you need to know how to program at some level, but being able to understand and characterize the behavior of the NN on a particular problem is the real goal.
Second, I'll re-iterate what a lot of other posters have said: WRITE CODE. Write great heaping spoonfulls of it. Write it in different languages. For example, to understand those emulators, you might need to get a grounding in assembler. You'll need C/C++ to interact with the host O/S and graphics, or perhaps Java. You should have had a computer architectures class where you covered how a CPU works - now express it in code.
Third, programming is all about problem solving. Start with smaller related problem to help you along. For example, look at the assembler instructions for a set of chips? What's common about them? Could you emulate the CPU behavior? Could you translate the instructions to x86 assembler? Should you treat the assembler as a language to interprit or compile into x86 assembler? Break things down into manageable sub-problems and solve them.
Fourth, read books about programming. No one learns to work on their car without also reading about working on cars or watching car shows, or hanging out with other guys that work on cars. Read books on C++ to get you up to speed on C++, books on how to structure code so you don't paint yourself into a corner, books on specific technologies like Unix, and look for "classics" in each field. For example, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, or the dragon book on compilers.
It doesn't matter how many trained or intelligent people we have in IT in the US. Cresanti is framing the debate by making a statement that we will never have enough skilled people in the US to meet demand. It's not really a challenge, he's just making an assertion to support greater H1-B visas. As a UK resident you might not be familiar with the H1-B program, but essentially it brings people into the US on a non-citizenship track. Should the person loose their employment they are subject to almost immediate deportation. They have to remain with the same company for a period of time (3 years I think) before they can move to another company (but only if they're willing to sponsor the visa).
The companies that bring in H1-B people are often pretty shady. For example, they often "handle" taxes for their employees, which means filing the tax paper work and keeping the tax refund (which can be 1,000s of dollars). Often, employees that complain or question the situation are automatically dismissed and must leave the country on short order. The result is to create a pool of cheap, submissive labor for tech companies. Unlike nursing, medicine, law, and recognized engineering disciplines (civil, electrical, etc), there is nothing like a certification process. So, any engineer is pretty much as qualified as any other engineer in the eyes of non-technical people. (Which is why it's harder to bring in foreign labor into things like medicine).
Unfortunately the Bush administration is tuned to short-term financial interests rather than long term, constructive leadership. If there were truly a dearth of technical talent in the US, it would be in our interests to bring in people under green-card status, which would put them on the citizenship track. However, if they were under greencard status they would not settle for the below-market rates that H1-B visa holders often accept. We would also start funding more university level research and development, offering more grants and scholarships to scientists, and seek to encourage entrepreneurship in technology related fields. Instead the administration has funneled money from Universities to private companies and cut student grants and loans.
I think the supreme irony is that this politico mentions that everyone he talked to was an engineer, and yet the "Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology" is not a scientist or engineer. You would think that he would at least ponder the respect that most countries have for education in the sciences, and wonder why science receives such short shrift in the US. (In many schools science is barely mandatory and there are a number of schools where science education is the job held by the football coach). From Mr. Cresanti's Bio: "Mr. Cresanti received his B.A. degree from Austin College and his J.D. degree from Baylor University."
Removal of trace fecal matter from the rectum by use of a matrix of cotton, fiberous matter and recycled paper placed into sheets. This invention allows the user to remove trace fecal matter from their own posterior, or the posterior of another without soiling their hands. After going to the toilette, many users are burdened by the clumps of fecal matter which my not fall into the toilette. This invention allows users to safely, and in a sanitary manner, remove the excess fecal material from their posterior. To dispose of the fiber sheets, the user simply flushes the soiled sheets in a standard toilette.
Using the protective sheets of fiberous matter to protect the users against dangerous fecal matter.
Using aborbant fiberous matter to trap trace amounts of fluids or liquids.
Placing sheets in a easy to use roll, which may have periodic perforations.
The sheets are composed of fiberous material which biodegrades easily.
The sheets are small enough for disposal using a common houshold toilette.
The fecal matter adhears to the sheet.
For ease of transportation the rolls of the sheets of fiberous matrix are placed in plastic wrap, in groups of 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24.
The sheets may be scented to provide users with the illusion their posterior will be cleaner.
Advertising or other designs may be incorporated on the fiberous sheets.
Abosorbency allows for the removal of excess urine from their genitalia.
The point of this exercise was to show we can take sufficiently well crafted language and make wiping one's ass with toilette paper seem non-obvioius.
You're right. No one writes articles about detecting sentences (for example) by looking for the first capital letter and then the period that follows. However, it is unfortunate that this occurs and it really irritates me and causes me to engage in posting while angry. I think the one thing that's hard to swallow is that this is defensive patent. IE they get "sued" by someone and need to fire back. I think the only way this patent is defensive, is if some mail program starts eating into their Outlook/exchange market share. This is an abuse of the patent system, which should be protecting real innovators from being ripped off. I think a lot of people look at this kind of patent and realize it has one purpose - to stop competition by closing off every little feature in your software.
People innovate in all sorts of ways every day. For example, I had to come up with an innovative way to let Cold Fusion applications find collections of non-application related files that would be consistent across several development and testing environments. However, using a shared drive mapped to a particular drive letter is an obvious solution. In a perfect world I would no more get a patent for this than detecting e-mails in an e-mail message. Apple had a toolkit called Apple Data Detectors that scanned text and found things like e-mail addresses. I've used other mail tools that take the e-mail address and match it against an address book and even offer to add the contact to the address book. Apple Mail already does this and has been doing it for years. Where's the innovation? What's the non-obvious part?
After scanning the claims in the patent, I think this pretty much shows the USPTO has no technical capacity to judge software patents. While I would think of patenting broad categories inventions and even software if it were truly a unique invention, this is just beyond the pale. This is not unique, people have been doing it for years, etc. etc. How did these people get their jobs?
It all depends on where you want to focus. There's a lot of detail around assembling electronics that has nothing to do with robotic path planning, sensor fusion, motion control, etc. You might want to consider robot simulators if you want to teach more of the software and algorithms.
However, sometimes you need a hefty math/CS background before you can really understand the algorithm.
I think there are several great kits on the market for various levels of experience. Try starting with a cheap kit with a limited controller and upgrading it. Sumobot comes to mind at $75. Add a more capable controller to it, like Acroname's brainstem. Lego Mindstorm + Handyboard is used for many graduate level projects at leading universities. You run into a lot of problems starting from scratch, not the least of which is bending aluminum or molding plastic for a base.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the US founding fathers put in taxes on inheritance is that the sucess of one generation shouldn't create subsequent generations already ensconced in privalege. In a way this is unavoidable, but if the future generations aren't people of merit, they will eventually loose wealth. Now we're hitting a period in American history where ridiculous wealth is tied to a strong push to eliminate inheritance taxes. Already a number of families are bastions of old money and privilege, but watch as their wealth becomes a trivial matter of their heridity. The one thing the American founding father thought was odious about Monarchies - that mediocre men ruled the world because their great-great-great grandfather was a great man - is now becoming part of American society.
Here's the story. It was attached to his credit report. http://cbs5.com/investigates/local_story_291012007 .html
Hope I spelled that right. Anyway, I can't think of a group of people more deserving of their fate.
First the wag: The idea that the interveiwee states early on, that software development is not introspective, is horse-hockey. We think about it all the time. We invent new, clever ways to diagram software, capture requirements, interview users, validate functionality and come with all sorts of certifications. More than, say accounting, we are process focused people. Maybe our processes suck, but we spend a lot of time, energy, certification exams, etc, on those processes.
Tip of my hat: He does mention starting small and iterating. I think that's the best way to build software.
I think that's the most disturbing part for me. Imagine getting picked up when landing in London because you were accidentally tagged as a "money launderer" by the Spanish. It would probably take weeks to get sorted out. In the mean time you could kiss your job good-bye. On top of that with so many databases sharing so much information, you might never be really "cleared." You might land in the US again and get detained for days while they sort out the fact that the Spanish tagged you as a "money launderer," even though it was fixed on the British copy of the Spanish database.
I saw a news item recently about a girl who'd been held for 30 days for having condoms full of flour, which airport official claimed were drugs. (Apparently filling condoms with flour is how the girls at her school make stress releaving squeezies - odd but eccentricity is not a crime). She spent 30 days in jail while substance was re-tested, only to discover it was, in fact, flour.
Another example is the US no-fly list. It has literally cost people their livelihoods when they were no longer able to fly. The worst part is they use really poor matching techniques like name matches - so anyone with certain names were not able to board airplanes! Another man interviewed by the Daily Show was labeled as Saddam Huessein's *dead* son, whose age would have required Saddam to have sired him at the age of 11!.
Here's another delicious example. People who buy large boats that were siezed as part of drug raids often get boarded by the coast guard. The identification number on the ship is almost impossible to change, and the coast guard decides to board the ship based on the registration number. Even though the original owner was arrested and his property was siezed.
Is this really a good idea?
The first is Chertoff's assertion that thi will deter the "unknown terrorist." If they are unknown, then we probably don't have their finger prints. The second was the addition of the word "crime" along side terrorism. First, not everything that is a crime in one country is a crime in another. For example, it's against the law to spout Nazi propagand in Germany, but not a crime to do so in the US. Who's standard would we apply when determining someone is a criminal? Would we arrest and detain Chinese dissidents at the airport because China said they're "criminals"? Given the volume of data, even a very low incidence of false positives may result in the detention of hundreds of innocent people.
Take a program like Word and tell people they can get a "simpler" version of Word for half the cost. Now, go out and sell that "simpler" version and few people buy it. (Microsoft Works). Even though for many users Word is well beyond what they will ever need. Even Works has many more features than they will use. I make web apps for a living and I get bizarre and contradictory requests from users. Basically they want a big, fat button in the middle of the page that does exactly when they're thinking, with all the defaults values they have in their mind.
Okay, that's a little bit of a poke in the eye and a cop-out, but largely it's true. In New Hampshire (surprisingly Starbucks free) a 25 mile search radius is needed. In the DC area 5 miles is more than adequate. Set the value to reasonable quantity and most users will probably ignore it. You can maks options behind an "advanced options" screen, but then the users that want feature X all claim to be unable to find it. Software doesn't suck, it for the most part what users request.
It sounds like R.L Polk had the wrong architecture for the job. It doesn't sound like they dealt with lots of transactions. It sounds like they were doing some analytics on a large database (I could be wrong about this, but that's the impression I got from the article). If the latter is they case they need large quantities of bulk processing power. That's where clusters are much better. I'm surprised, however, that it takes fewer people to administer the Linux boxes than the mainframe. They must have laid off a bunch coders after squeezing the life out of them in a technology backwater. (Refering to the assembler code - not the fact it was a mainframe). I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the performance improvement also came from the code re-write. After many years of patching and layering code you wind up with some pretty ugly stuff.
The author mixes the idea that the business process (how you do stuff in the business) is modernized if the architecture (the tools used for implementation) is modernized. So, if we use an SOA wrapper over a COBOL app we've modernized the business process. The business process is completely orthogonal to the language/platform being used. While tools like BEPL and SOA can enable flexible and modern practices, they don't guarantee that will be the fruit of your labor. A green screen app may represent an interface into the most modern, agile, and well thought out business process (i.e. how you do stuff for the business). An SOA may be an interface into the most 19th century, retrograde, stupid means of doing something business related (like sending e-mails to 3 different people to get approval to spend $10 on a new pencil sharpner).
There's no such thing as a bad or dead language. There are languages that are better or worse than others for certain tasks. I make my bread and butter doing web apps. I started in C++, moved to Java, and now I'm working with Ruby. I've used what I felt were the best tools for the job at hand. For graduate school I spent a lot of time with Lisp, because that was the best tool for the job. For all my IT brothers and sisters out there busting COBOL for a living, I say be proud!
And, if you want to put it on the Web, you can find a Java Applet that does terminal emualation back to your server.
Ruby has hooks for curses (Ruby is a fairly simple language). It also has a database API and an object relational layer ActiveRecord (part of Rails but doesn't require rails). You might take a look at that. You can extend Ruby using C if you need or you can write the C/C++ programs as callable from inside of the ruby script.
This is NOT something I've done before (except for using Ruby and Rails and the database api). But it might be something to take a peek at.
Excellant caveat. I was using a SCSI tape for backup on the one server my company used to run (a bazillion years ago) and when to examine the tapes produced by NT 3.5.1 (or very early 4.0's) backup tool, a number of them were unreadable. I did not have the same problem on Linux with the "st" commands and tar. Also, be careful of ecryption and compression. Let's say a few bits on the tape get flipped. Uncompressed, this can result in one or a handful or corrupt files. On a compressed tape you could loose the entire archive. If you encrypt on a file by file basis you should be fine, but if you encrypt the entire volume, you could run into the same problem. Also, with Windows, make sure you export your disk encryption certs and that they're recoverable.
You should at least explore the use of a removable hard drive cage (like CRU) and relatively inexpensive 250Gb hard drives. The downside is $80 a drive versus a few bucks for tapes (although tapes get expensive). On NewEgg you can get 120-160 GB hard drives in the $60 range. Add another $20 or so for the enclosure.
I just went through the IBM site and it seems their shipping architecture is Power5+ at about 2.0 to 2.5? Ghz. While I'm not disputing that IBM is capable of jumping to 4Ghz on the first series of Power6, I take a very skeptical approach to performance promises. Given the delays on the first series of the Cell, I'd definitely take a wait and see on that one.
I'm also extremely skeptical of (production) 80 core x86_64 chips, BTW.
In the world of technology a promise of more/better performance counts as much as a drunken "I love you." One reason why Apple jumped from PPC is that IBM failed to deliver a 3.0 Ghz chip within a reasonable time frame (in the PPC970 series) and completely failed on delivering a laptop chip. Believe it when you actually see shipping servers.
Thanks, I can never keep it straight. I still call them Motorola - in my head.
Actually, because Sony refused to license BetaMax to pornographers. I remember going to some of the first video-rental places and there was always a back-room, and it was always VHS. So, if you were in the market for a new fandangled VCR you might pick the one that gave you the "broadest" choice. To the best of my knowledge, Motorola and IBM have not restricted the use of their CPUs.
Motorola (now X-Scale), who used to make Apple's PPC chips, saw their future in the embedded market. Apple was about 2% of their sales. They had little or no incentive, and perhaps even a disincentive, to spend a lot of time and money making better desktop and laptop chips. It takes a lot of money to go toe-to-toe with the very smart people over at Intel, and for Motorola there was not much bang for those bucks. For every dollar in desktop PPC chips sold, they sold $50 PPC chips for everything from air conditioners to automobiles.
IBM uses the PPC in their Power series computers (which are both Unix and i5 OS). They view the Power PC as an embedded and server chip. Servers (especially large CPU count servers) are less interested in raw single CPU performance. They have plenty of other issues, such as backplane bandwidth, IO bandwidth, cooling, etc. to worry about. They're interested in the over-all performance of a multi-core, multi-cpu server. (I.e. 16 CPUs with 2 cores each). IBM had little incentive to produce castrated, low-heat versions of the Power architecture for laptops and desktops.
If Apple wanted to stay competative in terms of price and performance (especially in the laptop space), Intel is a probably their best choice. A major market for Intel *is* the desktop and laptop space. They are constantly striving to produce high performance/lower heat versions of their x86 or x86_64 chips that work specifically for desktops and laptops. AMD would have also been great, but for whatever reason they chose Intel. Either way - same basic architecture.
Power PC could be superior to x86/x86_64 in every single way, but if the companies that make the chip have no incentive to build competative, attractive desktop and laptop chips, then whatever theoretical benefits will never materialize. Moreover, for IBM and X-Scale the desktop/laptop market is a side-business and their focus is elsewhere. Both IBM and X-Scale see their long term Power PC plans in markets that are orthogonal to Apple's interests.
IMHO in the long run this will hurt both IBM and X-Scale. Constantly producing better and faster chips for the consumer market (always hungry for a few more clock cycles for FPS games), keeps your performance and speed up. In the 10 year horizon, I think X-Scale will evetually be marginalized to nothing, as very low power variants of common desktop CPUs will trickle in the embedded space. Why use an exotic chip, when you can prototype everything in VMware/parallels/Xen on your desktop? Eventually the $5 in quantity Power PC cpu will have so much less capability than the $5 Intel based CPU that Intel will take the embedded market. In the server market I think specialty processors like SPARC and PPC will get pushed into larger and more exotic iron. Eventually it will be more economical to build around the x86_64 platform than to maintain CPU R&D efforts for those chips.
You both miss the point of HFS+ and ZFS. In Solaris ZFS has not replaced UFS. ZFS is an elegant way to manage large amounts of storage tied together with inexpensive and simple SATA drives. If you have one disk in your Mac, ZFS probably will not be your choice. HFS+ will work very well and be very easy to manage. A file server with 3 or 4 750 GB drives however, might be cut up so that part of the storage is mirrored for safety, limited for certain uses, and spanned over drives for size. For example, 3 750's could be divided into 1 TB unmirrored storage, 250 GB mirrored, a temp area of up to 100GB and the rest (650+ GB depending on temp are usage) held in reserve. In addition ZFS does quite a bit of error checking on the data to avoid any possible corruption during reads. However, it will never replace HFS+ on an iMac for your average user.
First, I'll re-iterate what a lot of other posters said. A CS degree is not a programming degree. 'Nuff said. However, programming is the natural expression of what you larn in a CS class. For example you talk about AI, so now you implement a neural network as a class project. So, you need to know how to program at some level, but being able to understand and characterize the behavior of the NN on a particular problem is the real goal.
Second, I'll re-iterate what a lot of other posters have said: WRITE CODE. Write great heaping spoonfulls of it. Write it in different languages. For example, to understand those emulators, you might need to get a grounding in assembler. You'll need C/C++ to interact with the host O/S and graphics, or perhaps Java. You should have had a computer architectures class where you covered how a CPU works - now express it in code.
Third, programming is all about problem solving. Start with smaller related problem to help you along. For example, look at the assembler instructions for a set of chips? What's common about them? Could you emulate the CPU behavior? Could you translate the instructions to x86 assembler? Should you treat the assembler as a language to interprit or compile into x86 assembler? Break things down into manageable sub-problems and solve them.
Fourth, read books about programming. No one learns to work on their car without also reading about working on cars or watching car shows, or hanging out with other guys that work on cars. Read books on C++ to get you up to speed on C++, books on how to structure code so you don't paint yourself into a corner, books on specific technologies like Unix, and look for "classics" in each field. For example, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, or the dragon book on compilers.
It doesn't matter how many trained or intelligent people we have in IT in the US. Cresanti is framing the debate by making a statement that we will never have enough skilled people in the US to meet demand. It's not really a challenge, he's just making an assertion to support greater H1-B visas. As a UK resident you might not be familiar with the H1-B program, but essentially it brings people into the US on a non-citizenship track. Should the person loose their employment they are subject to almost immediate deportation. They have to remain with the same company for a period of time (3 years I think) before they can move to another company (but only if they're willing to sponsor the visa).
The companies that bring in H1-B people are often pretty shady. For example, they often "handle" taxes for their employees, which means filing the tax paper work and keeping the tax refund (which can be 1,000s of dollars). Often, employees that complain or question the situation are automatically dismissed and must leave the country on short order. The result is to create a pool of cheap, submissive labor for tech companies. Unlike nursing, medicine, law, and recognized engineering disciplines (civil, electrical, etc), there is nothing like a certification process. So, any engineer is pretty much as qualified as any other engineer in the eyes of non-technical people. (Which is why it's harder to bring in foreign labor into things like medicine).
Unfortunately the Bush administration is tuned to short-term financial interests rather than long term, constructive leadership. If there were truly a dearth of technical talent in the US, it would be in our interests to bring in people under green-card status, which would put them on the citizenship track. However, if they were under greencard status they would not settle for the below-market rates that H1-B visa holders often accept. We would also start funding more university level research and development, offering more grants and scholarships to scientists, and seek to encourage entrepreneurship in technology related fields. Instead the administration has funneled money from Universities to private companies and cut student grants and loans.
I think the supreme irony is that this politico mentions that everyone he talked to was an engineer, and yet the "Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology" is not a scientist or engineer. You would think that he would at least ponder the respect that most countries have for education in the sciences, and wonder why science receives such short shrift in the US. (In many schools science is barely mandatory and there are a number of schools where science education is the job held by the football coach). From Mr. Cresanti's Bio: "Mr. Cresanti received his B.A. degree from Austin College and his J.D. degree from Baylor University."
Removal of trace fecal matter from the rectum by use of a matrix of cotton, fiberous matter and recycled paper placed into sheets. This invention allows the user to remove trace fecal matter from their own posterior, or the posterior of another without soiling their hands. After going to the toilette, many users are burdened by the clumps of fecal matter which my not fall into the toilette. This invention allows users to safely, and in a sanitary manner, remove the excess fecal material from their posterior. To dispose of the fiber sheets, the user simply flushes the soiled sheets in a standard toilette.
The point of this exercise was to show we can take sufficiently well crafted language and make wiping one's ass with toilette paper seem non-obvioius.
You're right. No one writes articles about detecting sentences (for example) by looking for the first capital letter and then the period that follows. However, it is unfortunate that this occurs and it really irritates me and causes me to engage in posting while angry. I think the one thing that's hard to swallow is that this is defensive patent. IE they get "sued" by someone and need to fire back. I think the only way this patent is defensive, is if some mail program starts eating into their Outlook/exchange market share. This is an abuse of the patent system, which should be protecting real innovators from being ripped off. I think a lot of people look at this kind of patent and realize it has one purpose - to stop competition by closing off every little feature in your software.
People innovate in all sorts of ways every day. For example, I had to come up with an innovative way to let Cold Fusion applications find collections of non-application related files that would be consistent across several development and testing environments. However, using a shared drive mapped to a particular drive letter is an obvious solution. In a perfect world I would no more get a patent for this than detecting e-mails in an e-mail message. Apple had a toolkit called Apple Data Detectors that scanned text and found things like e-mail addresses. I've used other mail tools that take the e-mail address and match it against an address book and even offer to add the contact to the address book. Apple Mail already does this and has been doing it for years. Where's the innovation? What's the non-obvious part?
After scanning the claims in the patent, I think this pretty much shows the USPTO has no technical capacity to judge software patents. While I would think of patenting broad categories inventions and even software if it were truly a unique invention, this is just beyond the pale. This is not unique, people have been doing it for years, etc. etc. How did these people get their jobs?
It all depends on where you want to focus. There's a lot of detail around assembling electronics that has nothing to do with robotic path planning, sensor fusion, motion control, etc. You might want to consider robot simulators if you want to teach more of the software and algorithms. However, sometimes you need a hefty math/CS background before you can really understand the algorithm.
I think there are several great kits on the market for various levels of experience. Try starting with a cheap kit with a limited controller and upgrading it. Sumobot comes to mind at $75. Add a more capable controller to it, like Acroname's brainstem. Lego Mindstorm + Handyboard is used for many graduate level projects at leading universities. You run into a lot of problems starting from scratch, not the least of which is bending aluminum or molding plastic for a base.