Lets see, feeding BS to computers, whipping up a nifty algorithm in order to show the results you want to see? Sounds a lot like what the climatologists have done to stir up belief in "Global Warming", and only when confronted with their lies, they changed it all to "Climate Change"... still doesn't change the fact they made all this stuff up and invented a problem along the way.
How much time & effort do we need to expend trying to solve imaginary problems?
As far as this financial market mess goes, all one needs to do is rescind the mark-to-market rules that were enacted by SarBox regulations and the crisis is over.
It doesn't matter what you say, they won't remember that the next day. They will remember how you make them feel. So giving candy at the start isn't a half bad idea. I like the idea of peeling back the covers on the information networks that actually tie our world of computers together. It is like opening the hood of a car and seeing what makes it get-up-and go. These kids are at the early stages of their "Love of Learning" phase in life. I remember at that age that I wanted to be a computer programmer. I had no idea what that was but I knew I liked it. All I needed was someone to give me some kindling to start that fire and I was off.
If you can spark an interest in those who show a proclivity toward all things tech related, you've done your job.
And those kids that are headed towards a career path in management, could you please explain to them that there is no such thing as an "EASY" button?
This is just an observation, but Barack Obama has amassed an email list of young supporters, and these are precisely the demographics of the people who are talked about in this article.
I'm not saying that other departments are unimportant or non-essential. Simply that IT reaches deep into every department of an organization and if IT fails to do its job, everyone can suffer. Companies nowadays are equally run from the server room as they are the board room.
Can you name a single business function that isn't dependent upon Information Technology? We are the common thread that ties all business functions together.
My second point reflects the previous commenter - that this must be a highly regulated industry with numerous safeguards. This creates 2x the IT workforce for any job function such that the inadvertent activities of one worker does not compromise an entire system. Much like in the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies - it takes at least two people to get one task done. This way one worker can't open up a firewall port to enable remote desktop/vnc/pcanywhere to a system - for the sake of convenience in getting a really important task done - and in doing so introduces a breach to the network by providing the conduit for infection (example based upon a real example). By having such divided responsibilities with checks and balances, if ONE person were able to accomplish this task, this prevents an uneducated user from making a mistake that causes a breach - they must prove they know enough to subvert the security system which in turn proves their intent to subvert the security system - and can therefore be terminated, demoted, or charged criminally with improper handling of classified information.
This is the very reason you do not hear about IT workers being brought up on spy charges.
My brother was laid off from one of the nations largest banks for this very reason. He oversaw the Oracle database that cleared ACH transactions and he also wrote the code that identified 'suspicious' purchases based upon previous card activity and brought the card up for review or suspension. He had full unfettered access to the database, including the logs. They replaced him with 3 people. Inefficient? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But much less expensive than had one co-worker discover his password, compromised his account and caused billions in losses from shipping account info overseas. They told him at the time he was laid off that they would welcome him back to the bank after 9 months, long enough to put different security measures in place and have him in a different, yet related position.. it was never that he personally was a threat, but you can see that he could possibly be a weak link in the chain.
He is now coding software document management components for the SIPRNET and working in a TS environment.
This is a MUST SEE TED issue - Jeff Hawkins - Founder - Numenta
Jeff is the inventor of the Palm & Handspring. He has gone on to start up a phenomenal research company that has figured out how the brain learns, and has adapted it to solve the problem of artificial intelligence. He is close to solving the problem of having computers being able to actually SEE.
From showing a computer a line drawing of a sail boat, the computer can crawl Google images and pick out actual pictures (clip art) and photos of sailboats from any orientation, from the top, side, rear, bottom, just as a human could.
I did more than my fair share of VoIP and QoS deployments. The trick is that you provide HIGH QoS to voice, and low to EVERYTHING ELSE. Think of it this way, turning off QoS gives everything low priority, you need to mark the voice packets as 'important' and subject to 'special' treatment. Giving anything else medium QoS, you will telling the router to not let voice take top priority, that medium QoS queues will get serviced even if the high priority queue has packets waiting for transmission. Voice packets are very small, about 100 bytes on the large side. You want your voice queues to get serviced the instant a packet needs transmitting and put everything else on 'hold' until the high priority queue is empty.
I learned how to build & troubleshoot circuits using the Electronics Learning Lab from Radio Shack, but I have also taught other people electronics using this same lab. The lab guides provide a high level overview of what you're doing and how the circuit works (suitable for kids), as well as an in-depth explanation that'll satisfy an Electrical Engineer.
Teach him about internet black lists, real-time black lists. Once he gets put on a blacklist for sending spam, his emails will never be able to traverse any spam filter ever again. He will no longer be able to send ANY emails from his company domain, or from his block of IP address'.
Promise him that the moment he pulls the trigger on the spam, he'll wish he hadn't done it. It will be a decision he'll regret for a long, long time.
I started off with the 160-in-one electronics project kit as a kid. I learned all the fundamentals of electronics, resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, potentiometers, etc. When my friend's son started getting to the appropriate age (12-13) I bought him the updated version called the Electronics Learning Lab
The kit provides you with everything you need to do simple projects on up to the point where you create your own devices to perform whatever you want.
Insurance concerns have absolutely no impact on the building of nuclear power generation facilities. What'll help you out here more, louder or slower: INSURANCE. ISSUES. ARE. A. STRAW. MAN. GOVERNMENT INDEMNIFICATION IS A STRAW MAN. You are clearly uneducated about this and are ready to believe whatever argument is most compatible with what you want to hear.
Chernobyl is more an example of failures of the Soviet system much more than the failure at a nuclear plant. There were so many problems at that facility that an accident was waiting to happen. Even still, the actual death toll from Chernobyl stands at 58 people. Less than 60 people have died, to this date from an accident which was projected to claim the lives of tens of thousands of people.
Then you'd just be exchanging one set of problems for another.
My god, that is a genius statement. Other problems like what, exactly? We already know how to deal with every single one of the problems that arises from the generation of nuclear power.
With nuclear power, we know where EVERY SINGLE MOLECULE OF WASTE PRODUCT GOES. There are BS arguments that we don't have enough Nuclear fuel, mmmkay... if we never mine another uranium mine we have enough energy for the next thousand years. The detractors (scaremongers) like to say that we don't have enough to last even a hundred years. Again, BS. That is only if we throw out the nuclear fuel after its first use. Nuclear fuel is "spent" when it has dropped to 98% purity. Hells bells, just recycle the fuel back to 100% and its good for another run.
To generate a lifetime of energy for all your personal needs, that is 80 years of power consumption, the amount of nuclear waste generated will fit inside your coffee cup. Using a coal fired plant or even natural gas would fill a football stadium.
I hope you've heard of terms like Base load, intermediate load, and peak load? Base load is the amount of known power consumption that must be generated to handle basic needs, it doesn't fluctuate. Hence the term base load. Intermediate load is the amount of variation that occurs through normal grid use. Peak load is certain events that cause sudden spikes in the energy demand such as everyones air conditioners turning on on a hot day.
Solar is an awesome option for peak load needs, because the peak loads are usually in conjunction with peak solar activity. Wind power can only begin to cover the intermediate load for the areas you mentioned. Sorry, but there is no viable granola option available to cover the base load power needs. Period.
I'm sick of hearing quotes crap like "using xxx power generation, we created enough power to power 500,000 homes..." What they don't tell you is that is taking the N-number of megawatts produced over 1 year, dividing it into the average consumption of power consumed by the average home in that same year. Its as if these 500,000 homes exist on its own private grid. Sure looks good on paper... what they aren't telling you is that when it is fed into the grid, it is only touching the intermediate load needs for power generation.
For base load, there are three options, Hydroelectric, Fossil fuel (NG/Coal), or Nuclear. Anything outside of those options for viable base load is some scientist who is looking for grant money.
The insurance argument is a a straw man. The entire nuclear industry is self-insured through a fund that is paid into by all of the nuclear power generating stations throughout the USA. It is something like a fraction of a penny per kilowatt hour gets paid into the fund. The fund is flush with cash because it has never had to pay a claim, yet it gets paid into by every nuclear facility.
It is quite clear you have no clue what you are talking about, especially with your final comment... Somehow, we manage to feed 6.5 billion people today... but without fuel to run tractors, we'd have to grow our own food.
People that make such sweeping claims as this crap just light my fuse. They want to complain, and it seems their only point is to offer compromised solutions... Its like they fell like they're being helpful by getting in the way. If people would just start thinking realistically about these problems and allow the building of Nuclear Power plants, this problem would be solved. But it seems that these people don't want solutions, they want to complain about something. All they can do is point to a NEAR catastrophe, which was a mere accident at 3 mile island 30 years ago. Give. Me. A. Break!
You get more radiation from eating a BANANA than you do from living next door to a nuclear power plant. And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
No, the way I recall the story I heard (and this is all complete hearsay) is that they built up memory and proc cards and then they had everything running in massive parallel structures using the cables to synchronize the reads writes, etc. That was the only way they could get massive parallel architectures working in those days. Nevertheless, my point is not to debate the finite points of the Cray architecture, but to share the chuckle I had when this article just reinforced the old axiom that "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
I live in Minnesota, home of the legendary Cray Research. I've met with several old timers that developed the technologies that made the Cray Supercomputer what it was. Hearing about the problems that multi-core developers are facing today reminds me of the stories I heard about how the engineers would have to build massive cable runs from processor board to processor board to memory board just to synchronize the clocks and operations so that when the memory was ready to read or write data, it could tell the processor board... half a room away.
As I recall: The processor, as it was sending the data to the bus, would have to tell the memory to get ready to read data through these cables. The "cables hack" was necessary because the cable path was shorter than the data bus path, and the memory would get the signal just a few mS before the data arrived at the bus.
These were fun stories to hear but now seeing what development challenges we face in parallel programming multi-core processors gives me a whole new appreciation for those old timers. These are old problems that have been dealt with before, just not on this scale. I guess it is true what they say, history always repeats itself.
Its called a MAID array: Massive Array of Idle Disks. Copan Systems has been providing these systems for ~4-5 years now? The majority of the disks sit idle (i.e. powered down) and are only spun up when data integrity checks are done or when data is read or written. They get capacity of 1 Petabyte on a single rack...
And the data records that need backing up for 1,000+ years are all of the worlds vital statistics. Essentially genealogical information which until the advent of computers has always been kept by every government of the world throughout all of human history. The other is all the official documents we create and books we write. We need to keep a history of our people and the next generation of the National Archives are going to be digital.
The reductions in Malted Barley yields are a direct result of more farmers growing corn in place of barley in order to produce ethanol. The price of corn has gone up because demand has gone up, so therefore more farmers are producing/planting/harvesting corn.
Just once, why can't one of our poorly considered quick fixes work?
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see, feeding BS to computers, whipping up a nifty algorithm in order to show the results you want to see? Sounds a lot like what the climatologists have done to stir up belief in "Global Warming", and only when confronted with their lies, they changed it all to "Climate Change"... still doesn't change the fact they made all this stuff up and invented a problem along the way.
How much time & effort do we need to expend trying to solve imaginary problems?
As far as this financial market mess goes, all one needs to do is rescind the mark-to-market rules that were enacted by SarBox regulations and the crisis is over.
It doesn't matter what you say, they won't remember that the next day. They will remember how you make them feel. So giving candy at the start isn't a half bad idea.
I like the idea of peeling back the covers on the information networks that actually tie our world of computers together. It is like opening the hood of a car and seeing what makes it get-up-and go. These kids are at the early stages of their "Love of Learning" phase in life. I remember at that age that I wanted to be a computer programmer. I had no idea what that was but I knew I liked it. All I needed was someone to give me some kindling to start that fire and I was off.
If you can spark an interest in those who show a proclivity toward all things tech related, you've done your job.
And those kids that are headed towards a career path in management, could you please explain to them that there is no such thing as an "EASY" button?
This is just an observation, but Barack Obama has amassed an email list of young supporters, and these are precisely the demographics of the people who are talked about in this article.
I'm not saying that other departments are unimportant or non-essential. Simply that IT reaches deep into every department of an organization and if IT fails to do its job, everyone can suffer. Companies nowadays are equally run from the server room as they are the board room.
Can you name a single business function that isn't dependent upon Information Technology? We are the common thread that ties all business functions together.
My second point reflects the previous commenter - that this must be a highly regulated industry with numerous safeguards. This creates 2x the IT workforce for any job function such that the inadvertent activities of one worker does not compromise an entire system. Much like in the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies - it takes at least two people to get one task done. This way one worker can't open up a firewall port to enable remote desktop/vnc/pcanywhere to a system - for the sake of convenience in getting a really important task done - and in doing so introduces a breach to the network by providing the conduit for infection (example based upon a real example). By having such divided responsibilities with checks and balances, if ONE person were able to accomplish this task, this prevents an uneducated user from making a mistake that causes a breach - they must prove they know enough to subvert the security system which in turn proves their intent to subvert the security system - and can therefore be terminated, demoted, or charged criminally with improper handling of classified information.
This is the very reason you do not hear about IT workers being brought up on spy charges.
My brother was laid off from one of the nations largest banks for this very reason. He oversaw the Oracle database that cleared ACH transactions and he also wrote the code that identified 'suspicious' purchases based upon previous card activity and brought the card up for review or suspension. He had full unfettered access to the database, including the logs. They replaced him with 3 people. Inefficient? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But much less expensive than had one co-worker discover his password, compromised his account and caused billions in losses from shipping account info overseas. They told him at the time he was laid off that they would welcome him back to the bank after 9 months, long enough to put different security measures in place and have him in a different, yet related position.. it was never that he personally was a threat, but you can see that he could possibly be a weak link in the chain.
He is now coding software document management components for the SIPRNET and working in a TS environment.
Obviously you've never worked a convention. At a trade show convention you'll see prices of $30,000 for a T3 for 5 days. This is pretty normal stuff.
This is a MUST SEE TED issue -
Jeff Hawkins - Founder - Numenta
Jeff is the inventor of the Palm & Handspring. He has gone on to start up a phenomenal research company that has figured out how the brain learns, and has adapted it to solve the problem of artificial intelligence. He is close to solving the problem of having computers being able to actually SEE.
From showing a computer a line drawing of a sail boat, the computer can crawl Google images and pick out actual pictures (clip art) and photos of sailboats from any orientation, from the top, side, rear, bottom, just as a human could.
http://snipurl.com/rsa2008
I did more than my fair share of VoIP and QoS deployments. The trick is that you provide HIGH QoS to voice, and low to EVERYTHING ELSE. Think of it this way, turning off QoS gives everything low priority, you need to mark the voice packets as 'important' and subject to 'special' treatment. Giving anything else medium QoS, you will telling the router to not let voice take top priority, that medium QoS queues will get serviced even if the high priority queue has packets waiting for transmission. Voice packets are very small, about 100 bytes on the large side. You want your voice queues to get serviced the instant a packet needs transmitting and put everything else on 'hold' until the high priority queue is empty.
Anything else, and you'll have choppy voice.
Joel
I learned how to build & troubleshoot circuits using the Electronics Learning Lab from Radio Shack, but I have also taught other people electronics using this same lab. The lab guides provide a high level overview of what you're doing and how the circuit works (suitable for kids), as well as an in-depth explanation that'll satisfy an Electrical Engineer.
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102913
Teach him about internet black lists, real-time black lists. Once he gets put on a blacklist for sending spam, his emails will never be able to traverse any spam filter ever again. He will no longer be able to send ANY emails from his company domain, or from his block of IP address'.
Promise him that the moment he pulls the trigger on the spam, he'll wish he hadn't done it. It will be a decision he'll regret for a long, long time.
The MPAA is seeking the same thing for movies & digital content. So are the cops against fleeing suspects. So is the FBI against Cybercrime.
Dangit, if we could only just get people to stop doing things that we don't want them to do!
I started off with the 160-in-one electronics project kit as a kid. I learned all the fundamentals of electronics, resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, potentiometers, etc. When my friend's son started getting to the appropriate age (12-13) I bought him the updated version called the Electronics Learning Lab
The kit provides you with everything you need to do simple projects on up to the point where you create your own devices to perform whatever you want.
Will this book help me increase my frag rate in Counter Strike?
Insurance concerns have absolutely no impact on the building of nuclear power generation facilities. What'll help you out here more, louder or slower: INSURANCE. ISSUES. ARE. A. STRAW. MAN.
GOVERNMENT INDEMNIFICATION IS A STRAW MAN.
You are clearly uneducated about this and are ready to believe whatever argument is most compatible with what you want to hear.
Chernobyl is more an example of failures of the Soviet system much more than the failure at a nuclear plant. There were so many problems at that facility that an accident was waiting to happen.
Even still, the actual death toll from Chernobyl stands at 58 people. Less than 60 people have died, to this date from an accident which was projected to claim the lives of tens of thousands of people.
My god, that is a genius statement. Other problems like what, exactly? We already know how to deal with every single one of the problems that arises from the generation of nuclear power.
With nuclear power, we know where EVERY SINGLE MOLECULE OF WASTE PRODUCT GOES. There are BS arguments that we don't have enough Nuclear fuel, mmmkay... if we never mine another uranium mine we have enough energy for the next thousand years. The detractors (scaremongers) like to say that we don't have enough to last even a hundred years. Again, BS. That is only if we throw out the nuclear fuel after its first use. Nuclear fuel is "spent" when it has dropped to 98% purity. Hells bells, just recycle the fuel back to 100% and its good for another run.
To generate a lifetime of energy for all your personal needs, that is 80 years of power consumption, the amount of nuclear waste generated will fit inside your coffee cup. Using a coal fired plant or even natural gas would fill a football stadium.
I hope you've heard of terms like Base load, intermediate load, and peak load? Base load is the amount of known power consumption that must be generated to handle basic needs, it doesn't fluctuate. Hence the term base load. Intermediate load is the amount of variation that occurs through normal grid use. Peak load is certain events that cause sudden spikes in the energy demand such as everyones air conditioners turning on on a hot day.
Solar is an awesome option for peak load needs, because the peak loads are usually in conjunction with peak solar activity. Wind power can only begin to cover the intermediate load for the areas you mentioned. Sorry, but there is no viable granola option available to cover the base load power needs. Period.
I'm sick of hearing quotes crap like "using xxx power generation, we created enough power to power 500,000 homes..." What they don't tell you is that is taking the N-number of megawatts produced over 1 year, dividing it into the average consumption of power consumed by the average home in that same year. Its as if these 500,000 homes exist on its own private grid. Sure looks good on paper... what they aren't telling you is that when it is fed into the grid, it is only touching the intermediate load needs for power generation.
For base load, there are three options, Hydroelectric, Fossil fuel (NG/Coal), or Nuclear. Anything outside of those options for viable base load is some scientist who is looking for grant money.
The insurance argument is a a straw man. The entire nuclear industry is self-insured through a fund that is paid into by all of the nuclear power generating stations throughout the USA. It is something like a fraction of a penny per kilowatt hour gets paid into the fund. The fund is flush with cash because it has never had to pay a claim, yet it gets paid into by every nuclear facility.
It is quite clear you have no clue what you are talking about, especially with your final comment... Somehow, we manage to feed 6.5 billion people today... but without fuel to run tractors, we'd have to grow our own food.
People that make such sweeping claims as this crap just light my fuse. They want to complain, and it seems their only point is to offer compromised solutions... Its like they fell like they're being helpful by getting in the way. If people would just start thinking realistically about these problems and allow the building of Nuclear Power plants, this problem would be solved. But it seems that these people don't want solutions, they want to complain about something. All they can do is point to a NEAR catastrophe, which was a mere accident at 3 mile island 30 years ago. Give. Me. A. Break!
You get more radiation from eating a BANANA than you do from living next door to a nuclear power plant. And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
No, the way I recall the story I heard (and this is all complete hearsay) is that they built up memory and proc cards and then they had everything running in massive parallel structures using the cables to synchronize the reads writes, etc. That was the only way they could get massive parallel architectures working in those days. Nevertheless, my point is not to debate the finite points of the Cray architecture, but to share the chuckle I had when this article just reinforced the old axiom that "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
I live in Minnesota, home of the legendary Cray Research. I've met with several old timers that developed the technologies that made the Cray Supercomputer what it was. Hearing about the problems that multi-core developers are facing today reminds me of the stories I heard about how the engineers would have to build massive cable runs from processor board to processor board to memory board just to synchronize the clocks and operations so that when the memory was ready to read or write data, it could tell the processor board... half a room away.
As I recall:
The processor, as it was sending the data to the bus, would have to tell the memory to get ready to read data through these cables. The "cables hack" was necessary because the cable path was shorter than the data bus path, and the memory would get the signal just a few mS before the data arrived at the bus.
These were fun stories to hear but now seeing what development challenges we face in parallel programming multi-core processors gives me a whole new appreciation for those old timers. These are old problems that have been dealt with before, just not on this scale. I guess it is true what they say, history always repeats itself.
Its called a MAID array: Massive Array of Idle Disks. Copan Systems has been providing these systems for ~4-5 years now? The majority of the disks sit idle (i.e. powered down) and are only spun up when data integrity checks are done or when data is read or written. They get capacity of 1 Petabyte on a single rack...
And the data records that need backing up for 1,000+ years are all of the worlds vital statistics. Essentially genealogical information which until the advent of computers has always been kept by every government of the world throughout all of human history. The other is all the official documents we create and books we write. We need to keep a history of our people and the next generation of the National Archives are going to be digital.
The reductions in Malted Barley yields are a direct result of more farmers growing corn in place of barley in order to produce ethanol. The price of corn has gone up because demand has gone up, so therefore more farmers are producing/planting/harvesting corn.
Just once, why can't one of our poorly considered quick fixes work?
You could always do this using the "site:" modifier, say you want to search bestbuy.com for memory, the query would be
site:bestbuy.com memory
Done.
Engineers mindset is "If it ain't broken, don't take it apart to find out why!"