Basically, the law says you can't "assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise" any device or software that conceals "the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service."
Good heavens, that would even make every bog standard NAT and Proxy illegal!
IT is not one industry or one technology, and I have personally survived two prior boom/bust cycles in IT, both undiscussed in the Economist article. First it was mainframes,
then it was workstations, this one it was PC's,
and sure, if we follow that trend, the next wave will be PDA's, but not as we know it.
Each wave
involved computers that were roughly as powerful
as those of the previous generation. When workstations could do the work of mainframes,
workstations were the cool new thing, and there
was a major shake-out in the mainframe sector, while the workstations took some time to get going, and the big iron was relegated to do things that only big iron could do (eg handle big databases, MSRP systems, billing systems, etc). Then workstations and mini-mainframes (starting with PDP-11's, VAXen, then on to Sun,
Appollo, SGI...) were king for half a decade.
Remember the anti-trust suit against IBM?
Remember when DEC pulled out ahead of IBM?
Kinda like Linux starting to pull out ahead of Windows during the anti-trust suit agains MS.
Same s**t, different decade.
After the crash of '87, a lot of the startups in silicon valley that were writing software primarily for Sun and SGI workstations started seeing their
marketshare get gobbled up by the rise of the
PC Clone -- which offered a much cheaper OS (DOS)
and much cheaper hardware to do it on. While
the applications that used to run on big iron
have been moved first to the ever more powerful
UNIX servers in the back room and are now being
moved onto PC's running Linux...because they can.
Can we extrapolate the trends we saw in the last two boom/bust cycles and say that the next wave of innovation will be PDA's with an easily
programmed OS (symbian?) talking
to servers running linux at the home office or corporate HQ?
Sounds good to me.
Right now the name of the game in the last gasp er I mean "deployment phase" of the current wave is "Pick up the Pieces" (Brecker Brothers' wailing in the disco in the background).
In more specific terms this means: Data auditing, database integration, data forensics, data security and data warehousing.
Data auditing for all those firms that are trying very hard not to crash and burn in an
Enron-like blaze.
Data auditing for all those firms now
subject to far stricter regulatory regimes--
for financial firms, in their accounting data,
and for pharmaceuticals, in their FDA compliance.
Database integration for those firms that bought up the dregs of the others.
Database integration to pull together data from different state and federal agencies for tracking criminals and terrorists.
Data forensics for doing the background work necessary to do the aforementioned database integration.
Data security -- well because hackers be.
Data warehousing to pull all the pieces together into
an integrated picture of the whole. Ever see a business analyst try to do a join between two multimillion-row tables in Access? It's a real hoot.
But being able to access your company data over a secure connection with your PDA -- it's sort of
happening now, but, extrapolating from the trends of the last two waves, this would logically be the next one. PDA's are where PC's were 10 years ago, PC's are where workstations were 10 years ago, and workstations are where mainframes were 10 years ago. "Where" as in terms of size, functionality, maturity of the code base, special security, power and AC requirements -- and, consequently, where they sit in organisations.
The beauty of social software is that it opens up a whole new class of people I can say to: "Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script."
Just imagine it: half the managers and all of HR: whoosh! evaporating into a cloud of their own useless chatter, while they themselves are replaced by bots.
As we discovered early on in MIMD parallel computing, MIMD (aka grid computing) parallelism can only really help processes that are CPU bound in the first place.
Most of the processes
that require 'big iron' are memory bound and I/O bound--e.g. databases that are hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes in size.
This is why so many CPUs are '90% idle' in the first place, and this is why system designers devote more attention to bit-striping their disks, a good RAID controller, bus speeds, disk seek time and so forth.
Problems that require brute-force computation on small amounts of data, and produce small results, are simply few and far between -- and the people addressing those problems have been onto MIMD for decades. For instance, my first publication, in 1987 to the USENIX UNIX on Supercomputers proceedings,
involved putting ODE solvers wrapped in
Sun RPC, so that hundreds of servers could
work on a different part of initial condition and
boundary condition space, to provide a complete
picture of the properties of certain nonlinear
ordinary differential equations. Cryptanalysis
and protein folding problems are already being addressed in a similar manner, and the tools to distribute these services as well as the required communications standards have been around for more than a decade.
Furthermore, if you've already got a marginally communications-bound domain decomposition of a parallel problem, and you want to cut down the
communications overhead in order to take advantage of MIMD parallelism, the last
communications protocol you're going to use
is a high-overhead one such as CORBA, or a
text-based message protocol such as XML.
Both XDR and MPI are faster, more stable and better
established in the scientific computing community than Yet Another layer of MIMD middleware--which is all Grid Computing is.
Grad school does not pay you. At least, not reliably. (Disclaimer: All of the following claims are about the humanities)
...Which is why I started out with the qualification with "in CS, mathematics, EE, or any of the 'hard' or even soft sciences." Where
offering students teaching assistantships, research assistantships, research fellowships and lab assistantships on acceptance is the norm .
Also, most schools most certainly do
offer subsidized, inexpensive housing to grad
students. You're not entirely on your own. Living in cheap housing is a part of grad
student life, and you're actually better off
sharing a big old house with a bunch of fellow
grad students than trying to live like a dot-com himbo in limbo the rest of your life. Living in
cooperative housing is part of the grad school
experience--and it's the greatest source of the intellectual stimulation you're in grad school for in the first place.
You'll have to get creative to find cheap entertainment, too, by the way. We had a neverending game of bridge running in the living room, which had modified "Tenement" rules. Anybody who had to go to class could pass on their hand to someone else, shouting which suit
was currently trump as they ran out the door.
In Tenement Bridge (not to be confused with
Tournament Bridge, which is also a good way to
make money) it was valid to end a really bad
hand by saying "Who dealt this river of s**t" which, if the other players reiterated this code phrase, it was a reasonable point to break out into a "card fight" --google
on "Ricky Lee" and "Cards as Weapons" for more
info:)
Then there was "Mad Max Wednesday." The local movie theatre had a dollar off for the first show of the day, another dollar off on Wednesdays, and another dollar off for students. Movies were five bucks in those days, so we'd get everybody together to skive off early on Wednesdays to see a movie if there was something good on--for two bucks a head. The first one we saw was "Mad Max--Beyond The Thunderdome" which is how the practice came to be called "Mad Max Wednesday" or, conflating it with another contemporary movie, "A Mad Max Afternoon."
On the topic of funding, some of my fellow grad students in mathematics used to play tournament bridge and backgammon in the local bridge and backgammon parlors for money,
two used to take alternate semesters off to work as traders at the Chicago Board of Trade.
Another worked as an actuary alternate semesters,
in a cooperative arrangement.
But be prepared to live on beans and rice for a few years. Dried beans cost next to nothing, onions and carrots are cheap, and do go to the farmers markets. Some indian shops and co-ops
sell nuts and oats in bulk very cheaply. And you can't imagine how good a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a big cold glass of milk can taste sometimes.
You can also find out when and where various
receptions are being held on campus, and, well,
dress nicely and eat up, it's
expected! Do attend the seminar, too, though--you pick up a lot of interesting notions. This is called "participating in the life of the mind," and this, too, is expected.
Sure, it hurts your wallet in the short run...
as does any good investment . Plus, it's a fun way of life--I did it for nearly 20 years, counting undergrad, MSc, a 2-year stint as a unix sysadmin in one of the departments, then as a grad student again to get my Ph.D., and then several years of research on postdoctoral grants and fellowships in North America, Australasia and Europe. Wouldn't have missed it for the world. Plus, your alumni associations and your associations with alumni are
an ongoing source of interesting correspondences and friendships for the rest of your life.
As an alum, also, you have substantial influence in changing some things on campus for the rest of your life.
All in all, the plusses outweigh the minuses, but it's not a purely financial calculation.
Oh yeah, well, the arts is different from the sciences and engineering like that. There
are fellowships and awards available, but
you really need an angle -- or an angel.
A friend of mine got undergraduate advising added to her duties in a lectureship in Medieval Literature, and was hard-pressed to come up with
some ideas for one student to fund the balance of
his education. He'd exhausted his loan eligibility, he was already working 30 hours a week on campus, and still he was looking at having to drop out for financial reasons. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Well, you could win the lottery, I guess...".
He bought a lottery ticket that day, and guess what. He won!
I guess the moral of the story is that miracles
can happen -- and sometimes do. In both the liberal arts and the fine arts, unfortunately, you pretty much need them.
Hmm. I hadn't considered that. It sounds like when I finished grad school--it was just after the wall came down and there was this huge flood of former soviet block applied mathematicians, physicists, and geophysicists -- all with several dozen publications under their belt, all willing to work for next to nothing, and all being encouraged to come to the US by some special programs being run by the National Academy of Sciences -- as the alternative was to watch them go contribute to various efforts in Iraq, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
So, there were between 200 and 1000 people applying for each research post. In this case, I was able to use the fact that I was a US national to work on military projects, as the
main source of new competition simply could not.
But what can EE/CS/IT people do right now? While I don't know for sure, it stands to reason that the bulk of people
returning to school will be going back in
EE, CS and IT. The reasonable course of action
in this case is to go back in something that is not one of these fields, but rather in a field that you
really enjoyed in college -- physics, chemistry,
biology, earth and atmospheric sciences, psychology and mathematics departments
are always hungry for people who are interested in, and capable of mastering a new field and who can apply
commercial-grade IT skills to their particular
problems. The use of big relational databases,
for example, is just starting to catch on in
research projects. Device drivers and hardware for automating data acquisition is another big area where, if you've done that sort of thing before, you could be extremely valuable.
Data auditing techniques, I wish they were being used to prevent scientific fraud. I, for one, think that part of the standard boilerplate for research proposals should absolutely require a section on document version control, data quality and auditing (including timestamps and user details being recorded against various experimental runs) and automated application of
test cases for range checking and cross-checking of data--
things that are fairly standard in corporate IT
and software development environments, but woefully lacking from most research programs.
You see, these are biologists, chemists, physicists, atmospheric and earth scientists
by profession, not database experts, not linux
device-driver experts, not EE's, not programmers, not web-based application
designers. They need you! And they'll recognise immediately that if they can get you in as a graduate student, they can get some very specialized help for next to nothing, while you get the deal of your life not having to pay for graduate school. Both win. Do not be afraid of addressing a faculty member's pragmatic
research project needs, because it is this kind of
pragmatic, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-the-job-done attitude combined with a specialised skill set honed to a very sharp edge in years of work in the real world that is just not to be found in kids coming fresh out of college.
Depends on if its a terminal masters program, or if you're in the Ph.D. program and are getting your masters along the way. The latter is the so-called pro forma masters, usually awarded when you pass your candidacy exam. Some schools insist that you write a publishable paper for this, some just want to see a good research proposal. It's in the latter area that work experience really helps, because, unlike kids fresh out of college, you know how to run a railroad.
Terminal masters programs in engineering, on the other hand, are more like a year or two more of
upper-level undergraduate courses, and a project, rather than a thesis. And yes, you usually have to pay cash money for those, unless you manage to get a co-op.
Teaching and computer support are always needed. These jobs normally goes to the Ph.D. candidates, unfortunately, along with the research assistantships--but if you manage to get one, they cover your tuition in the deal. You need to be constantly
applying for outside fellowship support, and the research proposals that you produce for fellowship applications can often be recycled into more formal proposals, with a faculty member, for state and federal research funding.
I found that I had to write three grant proposals for each one that I got, which was about the odds then. Now it's more like five to one, which is an awful lot of overhead, but a lot easier now that you've got LyX, etc. I had to typeset all of mine in TeX using vi on the VAX (4.2 BSD) and you couldn't see how it would look until you printed it out. ("...we lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road, and our father used to come home and cut us up with swords! We had to wake up before we went to bed...")
In CSEE and the hard sciences, mathematics and engineering, you're thankfully not limited to "curiosity driven" research, but
can do some really applied things that can lead to new product development afterwards in the real world. In addition to the NSF, you've got
all those RFP's (Request For Proposal) coming out from the DOE, the AFOSR, the ARO, the ONR and DARPA (Dept. of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research and Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration). Typically these RFPs are focussed on researching very specific issues and solving very specific problems -- and they're WAY fun!
Some of the research requested and techniques suggested often doesn't
seem to match the pretext, er, I mean ostensible
goal of the research. Seek clarification from the guy or gal who issued the RFP, and ask the faculty who they are .
Yeah, sometimes it's the spooks wanting some work done, but can't say exactly what the real application is. They might averr in private, in order to help you write your proposal, if they feel that you and your team--the faculty, staff, lab equipment, fellow students, research associates, industry sponsors--are up to the job. See, you're developing your leadership, project management and political skills in the course of drumming up funding for your research project.
These shall we say, more applied projects require, for obvious reasons, that you be a US National. If you are,
you have a real leg up on about half the potential competition -- because more than half of the graduate students in science and engineering (look around you) are not US nationals.
Scan the RFPs published by the various agencies for every program, learn to spot the ones that are related to things you've either done in class, are in specialties associated with prominent faculty in your department or what your department is particularly well-known for being good at. Get familiar with these agencies funding cycles, and who is in charge of the various lines of research under each agency.
Another important thing to do in this
exploratory phase of your project is to
find out what the various labs on campus do,
and where their
Oh, come on. All you need is a B+ average, halfway decent GRE's, some idea of what you want to do there, and three people who really think you can hack it.
Some places don't even count your freshman year for your GPA, and some places calculate your GPA in-major separately from GPA overall.
If you're changing fields and/or returning after
a long absence and/or your grades were not so
hot, take some senior undergraduate or first-year graduate-level courses extramurally. And ace them.
You can raise your GPA, make important contacts, potentially get a good reference out of it, get some ideas as to what you might like to do your thesis on, and generally get back into the swing of things.
The only potential killers are some combination of failed courses, D's, several C's in major, lousy GRE's, and/or all of the above. And I've even seen some of those explained away or not taken seriously by selection committees. I "failed" gym once because I had a tough lab course just prior, and rarely made it on time. Nobody ever even asked for an
explanation -- guess the physics grade made up for it.
The advantages of going to grad school, particularly when slightly older, during a recession are numerous. I did it during the last two recessions (MSc in the early eighties, a Ph.D. and a couple postdocs during the early nineties), so I speak from experience:
The cost of living goes down during a recession, which does make it a little bit easier to get by on what you'll be earning during your graduate school indentu^h^h^h^h^h^h^hadventure.
You'll use the time and the freedom and the access to resources to develop a new technology which could be a super-big bargaining chip when you get out of jai^h^h^hschool.
As a more mature person with, presumably,
assets, a decent credit rating and a good relationship with your banker, it's much more reasonable to consider starting your own business when you get out -- based perhaps on some of the ideas you've had the time and freedom to develop in grad school -- and the advanced degree will make it much much easier for you to respond credibly to RFPs, particularly for SBIR/STTR grants to do ongoing
technology transfer/R&D/productisation of what
you developed in graduate school.
You make terrific international contacts in graduate school, and are usually required to master a second (spoken, natural) language. This expands your opportunities and employability immensely.
University career services are particularly helpful to graduates with advanced degrees, because they're able to think creatively about how your unique skills and the technology or principle you've developed (it certainly better be unique and useful, otherwise you've wasted your time and don't deserve the degree!) can be useful to their more interesting corporate and industry contacts. i.e. you're not just the 654th MSCE that just rolled off the assembly line. You have something unique and important to contribute, beyond just coding coding coding for some dumb-ass business process. You're more likely to find yourself in new product development, R&D,
Play Co-Ed Softball in the graduate intramural league. This may be your only chance to make contacts in the B school and Law school that will be extremely valuable to you in the future, especially if you're considering starting your own high-tech business in the real economy when you finish. Uh, and the med school students might be helpful if you're, like, really old...:)
Faculty (and people in general) find it easier to relate to people their own age, so being older is a
benefit. Also, (on a more cynical note) since you're obviously industry-oriented rather than truly academically inclined, you're not offering any future competition for their little pets and bright-boys, so they're less likely to shaft you.
It's NOT just "more years of the same academic crap." Some terminal masters' programmes are like that, but in general, in grad school, you will be challenged to think more creatively and critically than you ever have before. You will be required to zoom out to the big picutre and then zoom back in again to the finest details--and then synthesize them into something comprehensive: a new big picture. It's about creating new knowledge and new technologies, understanding things that have not yet been understood by anybody else in the world except you , not just learning more stuff from more stuffy old professors. And it will be this ability to think that will make you valuable over the much longer term, not just specific coding skills on specific platforms.
They pay you, rahter than you paying them, and the class sizes are much smaller. What a deal!
Obviously, in a computer game, the way the narrative evolves during the course of play is the "hook" and also the substance of the player's
engagement with the game.
But, beyond the cultural context, image and storyline, what are underlying features of
the evolution of the interaction that
make it "interesting," and can these features
that be modelled
mathematically or computationally in order that those interesting
features of interaction be built into games with
other basic storylines, other images, and other
cultural contexts?
And how might these be used in casino gaming? A
great deal of applied cognitive psychology,
traditional game theory and plain old statistics is applied in the development of electronic slot machines -- but what if there were a casino game
where the player could be rewarded for developing winning strategies in an evolving but artificial electronic
world?
If you're a programmer wanting a productive way to ride out the recession in school and you've already got a bachelor's degree, consider going to grad school in CS, mathematics, EE, or any of the 'hard' or even soft sciences. (particularly if you're
female )
Why? First of all, it's a great way to develop all those great ideas you weren't "allowed" to when working in a closely managed and directed "role" with the concommittant "responsibilities." Second of all, here's a little secret: in grad school in the US, they pay YOU , not the other way around. Low wages, but beats workin'! Third of all, your entering, say, CS with a psyche background, or math with a bio background, or physics with an engineering background is not only possible at the best schools, but positively encouraged. It's not "off topic" or "irrelevant" background, it's cross-disciplinary .
A few years work experience-- or even more than a few years--particularly in any area of computer support, installation, management, programming, are all viewed very positively by selection committees (I know, I've sat on them). Why is this? Well, for one thing, they can get certain kinds of specialist work done around the department for about a third of the commercial rate. For another, you're going to appreciate the chance to work on your own projects far more actively than a kid fresh out of college who's maybe done one or two closely supervised "independent" projects. You know how to organise and present your work. You can make decisions for yourself. You don't necessarily believe everything the professor says. This is called critical thinking and it's positively discouraged in
high school, can get you labelled as a troublemaker at work, is encouraged in some university classes, discouraged in others
-- but in graduate school and beyond in academics it is absolutely essential .
Furthermore, hving been in the "real world" you know the real economic advantages of developing and owning your own Intellectual Property-- as distinct from developing IP for someone else.
You can develop all sorts of ideas into almost
marketable products in graduate school--prototypes--and create the opportunity for yourself to develop it further when you get out. It's much, much easier to get invesment with that Ph.D. after your name, and the prototype you and only you developed in your pocket .
For those of you who quit to go to work for awhile say, half way through your undergraduate degree, you might as well take a few courses at a time while still working, at the local state or community college to get back into it. Cheaper, and it gives you more flexibility in which course of study you choose to get your undergraduate degree in, because the
competition at those institutions is just not as stiff. If your heart is in the field you're switching to, believe me, you will ace these courses, and be able to transfer into a "real" school -- with scholarships .
The other advantage of taking a few classes
is that it will eat into your savings enough
that these won't literally count against you
when it comes time for the real school
to calculate your financial aid package. If
you've switched to working-part-time while
taking your classes, all the better.
Basically, there are a number of winning strategies for finishing degrees and even changing fields in the process that don't involve taking out huge loans and going for broke. What you need to do is take up the discussion with the financial aid officer and some of the faculty you are interested in working with at your "dream" school, your "safety" school and your "University Near Mom" school where you can take a few courses(that's what we used to call UNM, which is a very good school for a very reasonable price BTW).
The parallels are more than skin deep, and Stephenson takes many of Pynchon's more interesting ideas further and on related-but-different topics. This serves serves to highlight some of the underlying ideas in the two Pynchon books, and provides a fascinating but slightly off key to decode the Pynchon. I've re-read them interleaved over the years, exceping Quicksilver of course.
Not alleged theft, but well established, and admitted. Maurice Wilkins gave Watson and Crick the keys to Franklin's lab, and the locked drawer where she kept her X-ray photos. Of the DNA that she grew. Using the X-ray camera she designed and built herself .
In their own defence, they tried to dismiss her as a mere "lab tech" (with a Ph.D. and several publications? I don't think so!) and then put her down in their book The Double Helix by wondering repeatedly, in print, whether she'd look any more attractive if she did "something more interesting with her hair."
One thing that that you're going to have to tell the girls you do attract to IT, is watch out for women "in IT" who do not have a proper math/science/CS background
I hate to say it, but these queen bee bitches will be "out to get" any woman with a real technical background and real skills, because you show
them up so badly.
You've seen it. The ex-operators who got to be IT "managers" of some sort and who outsource everything because they understand nothing. The ex-secretaries who started doing computer procurements and writing documentation with word.
They'll have another nasty surprise when they get out into the workforce with their brand shiny new CS degrees. They'll be expected to be documentation bitches and help-desk sluts because "that's what Susie used to do."
In other words, there are so few women with proper CS/physics/mathematics degrees out there, that the ones that do have a proper background will be lumped in with the ones who don't, and will be assumed to be just as stupid. And will be shunted into roles where, before too long, their very real technical background will become less and less relevant because the only technology they'll be allowed to use is Word, and maybe Excel.
Even worse than the queen-bee ex-operators and ex-secretaries are the psyche major gals who got to be "in" technology rather than creating technology through HFE like that stupid, stupid MS "researcher" gal who's going around saying that girls have poor spatial relations.
Oh, she WISHES. Everybody who was at Cornell during CS's "billyuns and billyuns" phase knows that "the inspiration for Contact" was every "ambitious" female grad student he'd ever bedded.
"Not inherently less secure" is a strange way of advocating your position. Double-negatives like this usually betray a defensive mind set. Why didn't they have the conviction to say "we're *more* secure"?
Because only AS/400 programmers have the right to say that.
it's yours, even if you signed a contract saying that everything you publish while in this company's employ is theirs.
You should get this advice directly from a
good IP lawyer with experience in this area (I give the google cached version because they're working on their server this weekend). You might find that he also tells you that you need not consult your present employer because the contract they made you sign is in breach of this basic legal principle of IP law. He will probably tell you that you are the equitable owner anything you do in your own time, on your own equipment, and outside the scope of your current position with that employer.
There is, of course, ample precedent for entities, including individuals publishing under pseudonyms, retaining copyright of their work.
Your main order of business (besides getting the half hour of preventative legal advice that you can pry get on a free initial consultation), is to, through your own internal CVS logs for example, continue to
document the fact that the OSS work you are doing is in fact being conducted on your own equipment and in your own time.
Another measure you can take is to timestamp, sign and encrypt and periodically mail the CVS logs (heck why not a snapshot of the whole repository) off to a trusted third party, with instructions to store, and not to open the files unless it becomes necessary. This is the digital equivalent of sending yourself a registered letter with your copyrighted documents in it, and then not opening it -- unless you need to do so in front of the judge. Which you probably won't have to, but it's a heck of a good thing to have. If someone informs you they're going to challenge your copyright, your counsel will tell their counsel that you've taken these preventative measures, and poof! the problem will, in all likelihood, magically go away.
Great! but as tiny linuxes go,
ramf has support for Reiserfs, and a lot of people I know rely on tomsrtbt . Almost all of the information in the IBM page submitted here is already available, but it's really nice to see IBM providing a stable home for this type of information -- while the original linux from scratch server flounders (was it those big bandwidth bills from being/.ed did it in?) and the first cool rescue thing I used, cclinux, has all but disappeared. sigh!
I'll also point out that no one really knows how the planet's magnetic field is generated.
CT: Sure we do. It's from dynamo currents caused by convection in the (liquid) outer core.
Ok wiseguy. So you've got a forward model of MHD in spherical shells at high Reynolds number with perfect predictive power? Yeh Sure.
Look, even if you did, you'd have to have the initial conditions measured within like half a millimeter, at the formation of the earth, to deploy it successfully in predicting the next flip with any accuracy.
Right now, we're doing the best anyone can do with an inherently chaotic system (such as an MHD dual dynamo in planetary interiors) which is to make predictions about what will happen in the next time-step based on windowed autocorrelation of the time-series of measurements in the past.
But as far as really understanding the dynamos that generate planetary magnetic fields, i.e. having a mathematical model with demonstrated predictive power, no we don't.
If you do, we look forward to seeing your results at the next AGU meeting.
This guy is just trying to make money the easiest way he can.
Yah. More likely he's fishing for further "research" grants so he can be an even bigger research baron, holding the very lives of yet more and more graduate students in his sweaty compromised little hands. To academics, particularly the more prestigious institutions, it's more about power than it is about money.
Pathetically small amounts of money can buy faculty huge amounts of power and prestige, even if the recipient spouts pure self-serving horseshit like this Galertner. It's pretty sad, really.
Look for it to come pouring into him in a variety of ways -- prestigious named fellowships for his students, all-expenses paid conferences in exotic locations to deliver keynote addresses, sudden anonymous infusions into the endowment fund off whose interest the man's salary is paid, highly paid summer internships for his students and post-docs, large piles of hardware and software arriving free on the doorstep of his lab, etc. etc. etc.
IBM bought off Cornell University in exactly the same way in the late 80's. Ever hear of "the Theory Center"? No, you haven't because they never did anything worthwhile and it remains a complete boondoggle. BUT the nobel prizewinning faculy member in Galertner's shoes (and his sexpot geek chick trophy wife) was run out of town on a rail.
IBM had not only bought The Great Man of Science and His Wife (or thought they had). They were also paying the VP of Computing's salary, plus had funded half a dozen other named endowed chairs in the engineering school. Whose recipients proceeded to run our proto-Galertner out of Ithaca on a rail when he stopped spouting IBM-brainwashed sycophantic nonsense, and started telling the truth. This made him a threat to the IBM gravy train all of his esteemed colleagues were riding.
So Galertner is playing a very dangerous game here. No good deed will go unpunished once he tries to stop saying what MS has paid him to say. Should he ever decide to come clean and finally acquire half an ounce of the decency and intellectual integrity university faculty members are supposed to represent, look for the U-haul trucks outside his house, destined for some little teaching/admin job at a no-name midwestern college where the sexpot geek chick trophy wife can go back to writing user manuals and making sure the other user-services gals are properly deferential to The Brilliant Men of Science above them.
Q: Why are academics such petty people, so easily corrupted?
A: Because the stakes are so low.
"You come work for me-- we write papers, we get famous....I get you girls..."
If I get what you are saying about drivers under Linux or BSD, you are suggesting that the card itself could disable itself if you don't follow the rules exactly. I don't think this is likely or even part of the TCPA spec. After all, it is designed to be disabled, although there may be a lot of things that won't function if it is disabled, but those things aren't going to work under *NIX anyway. I've never seen anything to suggest that I/O cards will do anything to support TCPA, just that drivers may be effected, or at least approved (signed) to be used.
Actually, a lot of information about each device will be recorded and checksums validated in the ACPI subsystem. And, it appears that the keys for making use of each device will be issued by a CA. Therefore, if you're building or modding boards and writing drivers for them, and the CA is simply unresponsive in issuing keys for the device you built and the driver you wrote for it , your whole system is SOL--not just that one device. If you disable the TBB & TCPA entirely, you run, as you point out, the risk of disabling all the devices which require it. Which could be the motherboard itself.
Now, about devices checking information in ACPI memory -- which will now contain not just power management data, but also TPM data -- plenty already do. How long will it be before "trusted" devices are manufactured which do, as part of their self-check on power-up, check for the TPM data of other, "non-trusted" devices prior to coming on line? True, this is not currently part of the TCPA standard, but the opportunity exists to lock *nix out of systems at this level. Given the level of FUD that will circulate about "trusted hardware" and "trusted drivers," how hard will it be for, say, HP/Compaq and INTEL to accept a massive kickback from MicroSoft in exchange for making their hardware..."trusted." i.e. unable to get a Linux driver running on it without (illegally according to DMCA) bypassing the TPM checking firmware on the device?
Sure you can bypass the whole TCPA system *now*, in the current standard. But how long will it be before it is deemed an infraction of the DMCA to do so? And how long will it be before it becomes impracticable to do so because the overwhelming majority of devices on the market require it?
So your point about having to get a certificate from a CA every time you go and play with your MBR is well-taken, and it got me thinking...that the way TCPA is set up, it makes a whole host of anti-competetive practices possible at the device firmware level -- and make the process of installing and operating linux on your home computer an even more questionable and difficult practice for the average user than it already is.
Like I said, if it were the IETF or IEEE or ISO heading this "standard" architecture for "trusted" computing, even if the committees were stacked with people from the largest companies trying to push things in a direction that would make the standard open to this kind of abuse (as they do), at least there would be half a dozen national lab/university types calling them on it (as they do).
sw: Not just overwriting your MBR -- what about the potential of the TCPA subsystem in collaboration with the TBB to block your own device drivers written for your own (experimental, read: uncertified) devices?
gg: It's a bit unclear (or maybe I didn't completely 'get' that part), how the trusted drivers would be pulled in.
It doesn't require that you know how the drivers are mapped and pulled in by the OS -- which you can set up by hand if you want to, with BSD or Linux. What concerns me is how the way TBB/PCR/TCMA is set up to enable interference with any device or driver you could ever write, and how it could be applied in an anti-competetive manner towards makers of third party peripherals.
The TBB consists of two parts: a trusted BIOS and some non-volatile data (stored in the ACPI unit) containing the fingerprints of the trusted devices, which it reads and verifies at power-up or reset.
You know how annoying it is when you've got a BIOS that thinks it knows what you want better than you do, and re-maps your/dev/hd's when you install a new IDE drive, thus invalidating your boot block, your/etc/fsck etc etc.? Think of TBB as something ten times worse, and you can't even re-flash your BIOS with something less "user-friendly/programmer-hostile."
Now, what does the TBB do with all the data it gathers (and/or incorrectly presumes) about your devices, including the checksum verifications and IPL codes? It stores them in the ACPI -- for further "system verification." Now what if the big device manufacturers (e.g. HP) set up their devices to shut themselves down, at the firmware level, when ACPI suddenly has "wrong" information about the device? (It's a power-saving feature, right? Don't you feel all warm and fuzzy.)
All the device would need to do is change its IRQ (remember these are PnP devices...) to something out-of-range. All the TBB would need to do would be to write either garbage or bad words to the ACPI any time it sees a "non-trusted" device. Thus hosing your whole system. Heck it could even send a few packets down its "trusted" network device notifying the authorities that you just installed a "non-trusted" disk drive or operating system.
Now say you were real careful and figured out a way to say, not change the MBR but trick the boot loader into to boot linux anyway, and do all your own device probing and mapping by hand, and simply bypass the ACPI where the checksums are stored. BUT! say all new monitors, printers, video cards, keyboards -- everything -- is now manufactured to check its data in ACPI. It won't matter if you've written a custom driver for it, because the device needs a valid (and fresh) key from the ACPI to continue to function.
Sure MS will probably fall flat on its face repeatedly with successive versions of the Palladium application-level API. But while laughing at the funny clown (and trying to figure out how to circumven^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htake best advantage of the Palladium API, see how badly "trusted computing" misapplied by clueless MSCEs in wanna-be corps, whose data is then an open book to...anyone and everyone) we might be diverted from the observing that TBB is meanwhile grabbing all the new motherboards, devices and busses by the short hairs. In the name of trust and energy saving, and making systems easier to "configure" or "self-configuring" to save the poor user from having to actually know anything about his or her own computer.
So this is the danger: that the overwhelming majority of new peripherals require TBB/PCR/TCMA to be running. Which would have the side effect of making it nearly impossible and highly illegal to do your own system mods, OS development, device drivers, custom devices, etc etc etc. with the new hardware.
A friend of mine's two school-age daughters use linux exclusively. When the elder started high school, she told one of her new school chums on the bus. He informed her that linux was "illegal" and that "only hackers used it." Of course she thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and the parents in our neighborhood have been laughing about it ever since. How could they possibly make an operating system illegal?
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, the law says you can't "assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise" any device or software that conceals "the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service."
Good heavens, that would even make every bog standard NAT and Proxy illegal!
Who writes these laws?
IT is not one industry or one technology, and I have personally survived two prior boom/bust cycles in IT, both undiscussed in the Economist article. First it was mainframes, then it was workstations, this one it was PC's, and sure, if we follow that trend, the next wave will be PDA's, but not as we know it.
Each wave involved computers that were roughly as powerful as those of the previous generation. When workstations could do the work of mainframes, workstations were the cool new thing, and there was a major shake-out in the mainframe sector, while the workstations took some time to get going, and the big iron was relegated to do things that only big iron could do (eg handle big databases, MSRP systems, billing systems, etc). Then workstations and mini-mainframes (starting with PDP-11's, VAXen, then on to Sun, Appollo, SGI...) were king for half a decade. Remember the anti-trust suit against IBM? Remember when DEC pulled out ahead of IBM? Kinda like Linux starting to pull out ahead of Windows during the anti-trust suit agains MS. Same s**t, different decade.
After the crash of '87, a lot of the startups in silicon valley that were writing software primarily for Sun and SGI workstations started seeing their marketshare get gobbled up by the rise of the PC Clone -- which offered a much cheaper OS (DOS) and much cheaper hardware to do it on. While the applications that used to run on big iron have been moved first to the ever more powerful UNIX servers in the back room and are now being moved onto PC's running Linux...because they can.
Can we extrapolate the trends we saw in the last two boom/bust cycles and say that the next wave of innovation will be PDA's with an easily programmed OS (symbian?) talking to servers running linux at the home office or corporate HQ? Sounds good to me.
Right now the name of the game in the last gasp er I mean "deployment phase" of the current wave is "Pick up the Pieces" (Brecker Brothers' wailing in the disco in the background).
In more specific terms this means: Data auditing, database integration, data forensics, data security and data warehousing.
But being able to access your company data over a secure connection with your PDA -- it's sort of happening now, but, extrapolating from the trends of the last two waves, this would logically be the next one. PDA's are where PC's were 10 years ago, PC's are where workstations were 10 years ago, and workstations are where mainframes were 10 years ago. "Where" as in terms of size, functionality, maturity of the code base, special security, power and AC requirements -- and, consequently, where they sit in organisations.
Seems logical, but then, a lot of things do.
The beauty of social software is that it opens up a whole new class of people I can say to: "Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script."
Just imagine it: half the managers and all of HR: whoosh! evaporating into a cloud of their own useless chatter, while they themselves are replaced by bots.
What a wonderful world it would be.
Free mal vu !.As we discovered early on in MIMD parallel computing, MIMD (aka grid computing) parallelism can only really help processes that are CPU bound in the first place.
Most of the processes that require 'big iron' are memory bound and I/O bound--e.g. databases that are hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes in size. This is why so many CPUs are '90% idle' in the first place, and this is why system designers devote more attention to bit-striping their disks, a good RAID controller, bus speeds, disk seek time and so forth.
Problems that require brute-force computation on small amounts of data, and produce small results, are simply few and far between -- and the people addressing those problems have been onto MIMD for decades. For instance, my first publication, in 1987 to the USENIX UNIX on Supercomputers proceedings, involved putting ODE solvers wrapped in Sun RPC, so that hundreds of servers could work on a different part of initial condition and boundary condition space, to provide a complete picture of the properties of certain nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Cryptanalysis and protein folding problems are already being addressed in a similar manner, and the tools to distribute these services as well as the required communications standards have been around for more than a decade.
Furthermore, if you've already got a marginally communications-bound domain decomposition of a parallel problem, and you want to cut down the communications overhead in order to take advantage of MIMD parallelism, the last communications protocol you're going to use is a high-overhead one such as CORBA, or a text-based message protocol such as XML. Both XDR and MPI are faster, more stable and better established in the scientific computing community than Yet Another layer of MIMD middleware--which is all Grid Computing is.
Grad school does not pay you. At least, not reliably. (Disclaimer: All of the following claims are about the humanities)
Also, most schools most certainly do offer subsidized, inexpensive housing to grad students. You're not entirely on your own. Living in cheap housing is a part of grad student life, and you're actually better off sharing a big old house with a bunch of fellow grad students than trying to live like a dot-com himbo in limbo the rest of your life. Living in cooperative housing is part of the grad school experience--and it's the greatest source of the intellectual stimulation you're in grad school for in the first place.
You'll have to get creative to find cheap entertainment, too, by the way. We had a neverending game of bridge running in the living room, which had modified "Tenement" rules. Anybody who had to go to class could pass on their hand to someone else, shouting which suit was currently trump as they ran out the door. In Tenement Bridge (not to be confused with Tournament Bridge, which is also a good way to make money) it was valid to end a really bad hand by saying "Who dealt this river of s**t" which, if the other players reiterated this code phrase, it was a reasonable point to break out into a "card fight" --google on "Ricky Lee" and "Cards as Weapons" for more info :)
Then there was "Mad Max Wednesday." The local movie theatre had a dollar off for the first show of the day, another dollar off on Wednesdays, and another dollar off for students. Movies were five bucks in those days, so we'd get everybody together to skive off early on Wednesdays to see a movie if there was something good on--for two bucks a head. The first one we saw was "Mad Max--Beyond The Thunderdome" which is how the practice came to be called "Mad Max Wednesday" or, conflating it with another contemporary movie, "A Mad Max Afternoon."
On the topic of funding, some of my fellow grad students in mathematics used to play tournament bridge and backgammon in the local bridge and backgammon parlors for money, two used to take alternate semesters off to work as traders at the Chicago Board of Trade. Another worked as an actuary alternate semesters, in a cooperative arrangement.
But be prepared to live on beans and rice for a few years. Dried beans cost next to nothing, onions and carrots are cheap, and do go to the farmers markets. Some indian shops and co-ops sell nuts and oats in bulk very cheaply. And you can't imagine how good a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a big cold glass of milk can taste sometimes. You can also find out when and where various receptions are being held on campus, and, well, dress nicely and eat up, it's expected! Do attend the seminar, too, though--you pick up a lot of interesting notions. This is called "participating in the life of the mind," and this, too, is expected.
Sure, it hurts your wallet in the short run... as does any good investment . Plus, it's a fun way of life--I did it for nearly 20 years, counting undergrad, MSc, a 2-year stint as a unix sysadmin in one of the departments, then as a grad student again to get my Ph.D., and then several years of research on postdoctoral grants and fellowships in North America, Australasia and Europe. Wouldn't have missed it for the world. Plus, your alumni associations and your associations with alumni are an ongoing source of interesting correspondences and friendships for the rest of your life. As an alum, also, you have substantial influence in changing some things on campus for the rest of your life.
All in all, the plusses outweigh the minuses, but it's not a purely financial calculation.
Ari? RPG? Is this something out of Cryptonomicon?
Oh yeah, well, the arts is different from the sciences and engineering like that. There are fellowships and awards available, but you really need an angle -- or an angel.
A friend of mine got undergraduate advising added to her duties in a lectureship in Medieval Literature, and was hard-pressed to come up with some ideas for one student to fund the balance of his education. He'd exhausted his loan eligibility, he was already working 30 hours a week on campus, and still he was looking at having to drop out for financial reasons. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Well, you could win the lottery, I guess...".
He bought a lottery ticket that day, and guess what. He won!
I guess the moral of the story is that miracles can happen -- and sometimes do. In both the liberal arts and the fine arts, unfortunately, you pretty much need them.
Hmm. I hadn't considered that. It sounds like when I finished grad school--it was just after the wall came down and there was this huge flood of former soviet block applied mathematicians, physicists, and geophysicists -- all with several dozen publications under their belt, all willing to work for next to nothing, and all being encouraged to come to the US by some special programs being run by the National Academy of Sciences -- as the alternative was to watch them go contribute to various efforts in Iraq, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. So, there were between 200 and 1000 people applying for each research post. In this case, I was able to use the fact that I was a US national to work on military projects, as the main source of new competition simply could not.
But what can EE/CS/IT people do right now? While I don't know for sure, it stands to reason that the bulk of people returning to school will be going back in EE, CS and IT. The reasonable course of action in this case is to go back in something that is not one of these fields, but rather in a field that you really enjoyed in college -- physics, chemistry, biology, earth and atmospheric sciences, psychology and mathematics departments are always hungry for people who are interested in, and capable of mastering a new field and who can apply commercial-grade IT skills to their particular problems. The use of big relational databases, for example, is just starting to catch on in research projects. Device drivers and hardware for automating data acquisition is another big area where, if you've done that sort of thing before, you could be extremely valuable.
Data auditing techniques, I wish they were being used to prevent scientific fraud. I, for one, think that part of the standard boilerplate for research proposals should absolutely require a section on document version control, data quality and auditing (including timestamps and user details being recorded against various experimental runs) and automated application of test cases for range checking and cross-checking of data-- things that are fairly standard in corporate IT and software development environments, but woefully lacking from most research programs.
You see, these are biologists, chemists, physicists, atmospheric and earth scientists by profession, not database experts, not linux device-driver experts, not EE's, not programmers, not web-based application designers. They need you! And they'll recognise immediately that if they can get you in as a graduate student, they can get some very specialized help for next to nothing, while you get the deal of your life not having to pay for graduate school. Both win. Do not be afraid of addressing a faculty member's pragmatic research project needs, because it is this kind of pragmatic, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-the-job-done attitude combined with a specialised skill set honed to a very sharp edge in years of work in the real world that is just not to be found in kids coming fresh out of college.
Depends on if its a terminal masters program, or if you're in the Ph.D. program and are getting your masters along the way. The latter is the so-called pro forma masters, usually awarded when you pass your candidacy exam. Some schools insist that you write a publishable paper for this, some just want to see a good research proposal. It's in the latter area that work experience really helps, because, unlike kids fresh out of college, you know how to run a railroad.
Terminal masters programs in engineering, on the other hand, are more like a year or two more of upper-level undergraduate courses, and a project, rather than a thesis. And yes, you usually have to pay cash money for those, unless you manage to get a co-op.
Teaching and computer support are always needed. These jobs normally goes to the Ph.D. candidates, unfortunately, along with the research assistantships--but if you manage to get one, they cover your tuition in the deal. You need to be constantly applying for outside fellowship support, and the research proposals that you produce for fellowship applications can often be recycled into more formal proposals, with a faculty member, for state and federal research funding. I found that I had to write three grant proposals for each one that I got, which was about the odds then. Now it's more like five to one, which is an awful lot of overhead, but a lot easier now that you've got LyX, etc. I had to typeset all of mine in TeX using vi on the VAX (4.2 BSD) and you couldn't see how it would look until you printed it out. ("...we lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road, and our father used to come home and cut us up with swords! We had to wake up before we went to bed...")
In CSEE and the hard sciences, mathematics and engineering, you're thankfully not limited to "curiosity driven" research, but can do some really applied things that can lead to new product development afterwards in the real world. In addition to the NSF, you've got all those RFP's (Request For Proposal) coming out from the DOE, the AFOSR, the ARO, the ONR and DARPA (Dept. of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research and Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration). Typically these RFPs are focussed on researching very specific issues and solving very specific problems -- and they're WAY fun! Some of the research requested and techniques suggested often doesn't seem to match the pretext, er, I mean ostensible goal of the research. Seek clarification from the guy or gal who issued the RFP, and ask the faculty who they are . Yeah, sometimes it's the spooks wanting some work done, but can't say exactly what the real application is. They might averr in private, in order to help you write your proposal, if they feel that you and your team--the faculty, staff, lab equipment, fellow students, research associates, industry sponsors--are up to the job. See, you're developing your leadership, project management and political skills in the course of drumming up funding for your research project.
These shall we say, more applied projects require, for obvious reasons, that you be a US National. If you are, you have a real leg up on about half the potential competition -- because more than half of the graduate students in science and engineering (look around you) are not US nationals.
Scan the RFPs published by the various agencies for every program, learn to spot the ones that are related to things you've either done in class, are in specialties associated with prominent faculty in your department or what your department is particularly well-known for being good at. Get familiar with these agencies funding cycles, and who is in charge of the various lines of research under each agency.
Another important thing to do in this exploratory phase of your project is to find out what the various labs on campus do, and where their
Oh, come on. All you need is a B+ average, halfway decent GRE's, some idea of what you want to do there, and three people who really think you can hack it.
Some places don't even count your freshman year for your GPA, and some places calculate your GPA in-major separately from GPA overall. If you're changing fields and/or returning after a long absence and/or your grades were not so hot, take some senior undergraduate or first-year graduate-level courses extramurally. And ace them.
You can raise your GPA, make important contacts, potentially get a good reference out of it, get some ideas as to what you might like to do your thesis on, and generally get back into the swing of things.
The only potential killers are some combination of failed courses, D's, several C's in major, lousy GRE's, and/or all of the above. And I've even seen some of those explained away or not taken seriously by selection committees. I "failed" gym once because I had a tough lab course just prior, and rarely made it on time. Nobody ever even asked for an explanation -- guess the physics grade made up for it.
The advantages of going to grad school, particularly when slightly older, during a recession are numerous. I did it during the last two recessions (MSc in the early eighties, a Ph.D. and a couple postdocs during the early nineties), so I speak from experience:
This is an interesting question, and the topic of some interesting research proposals at the moment.
Obviously, in a computer game, the way the narrative evolves during the course of play is the "hook" and also the substance of the player's engagement with the game.
But, beyond the cultural context, image and storyline, what are underlying features of the evolution of the interaction that make it "interesting," and can these features that be modelled mathematically or computationally in order that those interesting features of interaction be built into games with other basic storylines, other images, and other cultural contexts?
And how might these be used in casino gaming? A great deal of applied cognitive psychology, traditional game theory and plain old statistics is applied in the development of electronic slot machines -- but what if there were a casino game where the player could be rewarded for developing winning strategies in an evolving but artificial electronic world?
If you're a programmer wanting a productive way to ride out the recession in school and you've already got a bachelor's degree, consider going to grad school in CS, mathematics, EE, or any of the 'hard' or even soft sciences. (particularly if you're female )
Why? First of all, it's a great way to develop all those great ideas you weren't "allowed" to when working in a closely managed and directed "role" with the concommittant "responsibilities." Second of all, here's a little secret: in grad school in the US, they pay YOU , not the other way around. Low wages, but beats workin'! Third of all, your entering, say, CS with a psyche background, or math with a bio background, or physics with an engineering background is not only possible at the best schools, but positively encouraged. It's not "off topic" or "irrelevant" background, it's cross-disciplinary .
A few years work experience-- or even more than a few years--particularly in any area of computer support, installation, management, programming, are all viewed very positively by selection committees (I know, I've sat on them). Why is this? Well, for one thing, they can get certain kinds of specialist work done around the department for about a third of the commercial rate. For another, you're going to appreciate the chance to work on your own projects far more actively than a kid fresh out of college who's maybe done one or two closely supervised "independent" projects. You know how to organise and present your work. You can make decisions for yourself. You don't necessarily believe everything the professor says. This is called critical thinking and it's positively discouraged in high school, can get you labelled as a troublemaker at work, is encouraged in some university classes, discouraged in others -- but in graduate school and beyond in academics it is absolutely essential .
Furthermore, hving been in the "real world" you know the real economic advantages of developing and owning your own Intellectual Property-- as distinct from developing IP for someone else. You can develop all sorts of ideas into almost marketable products in graduate school--prototypes--and create the opportunity for yourself to develop it further when you get out. It's much, much easier to get invesment with that Ph.D. after your name, and the prototype you and only you developed in your pocket .
For those of you who quit to go to work for awhile say, half way through your undergraduate degree, you might as well take a few courses at a time while still working, at the local state or community college to get back into it. Cheaper, and it gives you more flexibility in which course of study you choose to get your undergraduate degree in, because the competition at those institutions is just not as stiff. If your heart is in the field you're switching to, believe me, you will ace these courses, and be able to transfer into a "real" school -- with scholarships . The other advantage of taking a few classes is that it will eat into your savings enough that these won't literally count against you when it comes time for the real school to calculate your financial aid package. If you've switched to working-part-time while taking your classes, all the better.
Basically, there are a number of winning strategies for finishing degrees and even changing fields in the process that don't involve taking out huge loans and going for broke. What you need to do is take up the discussion with the financial aid officer and some of the faculty you are interested in working with at your "dream" school, your "safety" school and your "University Near Mom" school where you can take a few courses(that's what we used to call UNM, which is a very good school for a very reasonable price BTW).
These people are experts in helping people
Well I for one would like to see a full scholarly treatment of the four books: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon vs. Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver .
The parallels are more than skin deep, and Stephenson takes many of Pynchon's more interesting ideas further and on related-but-different topics. This serves serves to highlight some of the underlying ideas in the two Pynchon books, and provides a fascinating but slightly off key to decode the Pynchon. I've re-read them interleaved over the years, exceping Quicksilver of course.
Stephenson's is a masterful trope .
Yes it's very very good! And no, it's not out of print!
Best quote: "No, you don't have a soul. You are a soul; you have a body."
But I must admit, I did check to see if John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline , Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker and Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven and Stanislaw Lem's Imaginary Magnitude were still in print!
They are. Whew!
Not alleged theft, but well established, and admitted. Maurice Wilkins gave Watson and Crick the keys to Franklin's lab, and the locked drawer where she kept her X-ray photos. Of the DNA that she grew. Using the X-ray camera she designed and built herself .
In their own defence, they tried to dismiss her as a mere "lab tech" (with a Ph.D. and several publications? I don't think so!) and then put her down in their book The Double Helix by wondering repeatedly, in print, whether she'd look any more attractive if she did "something more interesting with her hair."
READ ABOUT IT HERE
One thing that that you're going to have to tell the girls you do attract to IT, is watch out for women "in IT" who do not have a proper math/science/CS background
I hate to say it, but these queen bee bitches will be "out to get" any woman with a real technical background and real skills, because you show them up so badly.
You've seen it. The ex-operators who got to be IT "managers" of some sort and who outsource everything because they understand nothing. The ex-secretaries who started doing computer procurements and writing documentation with word.
They'll have another nasty surprise when they get out into the workforce with their brand shiny new CS degrees. They'll be expected to be documentation bitches and help-desk sluts because "that's what Susie used to do."
In other words, there are so few women with proper CS/physics/mathematics degrees out there, that the ones that do have a proper background will be lumped in with the ones who don't, and will be assumed to be just as stupid. And will be shunted into roles where, before too long, their very real technical background will become less and less relevant because the only technology they'll be allowed to use is Word, and maybe Excel.
Even worse than the queen-bee ex-operators and ex-secretaries are the psyche major gals who got to be "in" technology rather than creating technology through HFE like that stupid, stupid MS "researcher" gal who's going around saying that girls have poor spatial relations.
Oh, she WISHES. Everybody who was at Cornell during CS's "billyuns and billyuns" phase knows that "the inspiration for Contact" was every "ambitious" female grad student he'd ever bedded.
"Not inherently less secure" is a strange way of advocating your position. Double-negatives like this usually betray a defensive mind set. Why didn't they have the conviction to say "we're *more* secure"?
Because only AS/400 programmers have the right to say that.
IANL, but...
If you do your OSS work:
- in your own time
- using your own equipment
- outside the scope of your current employment
it's yours, even if you signed a contract saying that everything you publish while in this company's employ is theirs.You should get this advice directly from a good IP lawyer with experience in this area (I give the google cached version because they're working on their server this weekend). You might find that he also tells you that you need not consult your present employer because the contract they made you sign is in breach of this basic legal principle of IP law. He will probably tell you that you are the equitable owner anything you do in your own time, on your own equipment, and outside the scope of your current position with that employer.
There is, of course, ample precedent for entities, including individuals publishing under pseudonyms, retaining copyright of their work.
Your main order of business (besides getting the half hour of preventative legal advice that you can pry get on a free initial consultation), is to, through your own internal CVS logs for example, continue to document the fact that the OSS work you are doing is in fact being conducted on your own equipment and in your own time.
Another measure you can take is to timestamp, sign and encrypt and periodically mail the CVS logs (heck why not a snapshot of the whole repository) off to a trusted third party, with instructions to store, and not to open the files unless it becomes necessary. This is the digital equivalent of sending yourself a registered letter with your copyrighted documents in it, and then not opening it -- unless you need to do so in front of the judge. Which you probably won't have to, but it's a heck of a good thing to have. If someone informs you they're going to challenge your copyright, your counsel will tell their counsel that you've taken these preventative measures, and poof! the problem will, in all likelihood, magically go away.
NOAA provides Bathymetry data and electronic navigation charts (vectorized) and NIMA (that's right, .mil, -- NIMA used to be the Defense Mapping Agency provides city lists and populations for all the countries in the world, as well as DEMs (digital elevation models--i.e. gridded topography). The National Atlas project provides boundaries of federal lands, outlines of states, locations of major cities, stuff like that.
ENJOY!
Great! but as tiny linuxes go, ramf has support for Reiserfs, and a lot of people I know rely on tomsrtbt . Almost all of the information in the IBM page submitted here is already available, but it's really nice to see IBM providing a stable home for this type of information -- while the original linux from scratch server flounders (was it those big bandwidth bills from being /.ed did it in?) and the first cool rescue thing I used, cclinux, has all but disappeared. sigh!
So thanks, IBM. This time.
I'll also point out that no one really knows how the planet's magnetic field is generated.
CT: Sure we do. It's from dynamo currents caused by convection in the (liquid) outer core.
Ok wiseguy. So you've got a forward model of MHD in spherical shells at high Reynolds number with perfect predictive power? Yeh Sure.
Look, even if you did, you'd have to have the initial conditions measured within like half a millimeter, at the formation of the earth, to deploy it successfully in predicting the next flip with any accuracy.
Right now, we're doing the best anyone can do with an inherently chaotic system (such as an MHD dual dynamo in planetary interiors) which is to make predictions about what will happen in the next time-step based on windowed autocorrelation of the time-series of measurements in the past.
But as far as really understanding the dynamos that generate planetary magnetic fields, i.e. having a mathematical model with demonstrated predictive power, no we don't.
If you do, we look forward to seeing your results at the next AGU meeting.
This guy is just trying to make money the easiest way he can.
Yah. More likely he's fishing for further "research" grants so he can be an even bigger research baron, holding the very lives of yet more and more graduate students in his sweaty compromised little hands. To academics, particularly the more prestigious institutions, it's more about power than it is about money.
Pathetically small amounts of money can buy faculty huge amounts of power and prestige, even if the recipient spouts pure self-serving horseshit like this Galertner. It's pretty sad, really.
Look for it to come pouring into him in a variety of ways -- prestigious named fellowships for his students, all-expenses paid conferences in exotic locations to deliver keynote addresses, sudden anonymous infusions into the endowment fund off whose interest the man's salary is paid, highly paid summer internships for his students and post-docs, large piles of hardware and software arriving free on the doorstep of his lab, etc. etc. etc.
IBM bought off Cornell University in exactly the same way in the late 80's. Ever hear of "the Theory Center"? No, you haven't because they never did anything worthwhile and it remains a complete boondoggle. BUT the nobel prizewinning faculy member in Galertner's shoes (and his sexpot geek chick trophy wife) was run out of town on a rail.
IBM had not only bought The Great Man of Science and His Wife (or thought they had). They were also paying the VP of Computing's salary, plus had funded half a dozen other named endowed chairs in the engineering school. Whose recipients proceeded to run our proto-Galertner out of Ithaca on a rail when he stopped spouting IBM-brainwashed sycophantic nonsense, and started telling the truth. This made him a threat to the IBM gravy train all of his esteemed colleagues were riding.
So Galertner is playing a very dangerous game here. No good deed will go unpunished once he tries to stop saying what MS has paid him to say. Should he ever decide to come clean and finally acquire half an ounce of the decency and intellectual integrity university faculty members are supposed to represent, look for the U-haul trucks outside his house, destined for some little teaching/admin job at a no-name midwestern college where the sexpot geek chick trophy wife can go back to writing user manuals and making sure the other user-services gals are properly deferential to The Brilliant Men of Science above them.
Q: Why are academics such petty people, so easily corrupted?
A: Because the stakes are so low.
"You come work for me-- we write papers, we get famous....I get you girls..."
If I get what you are saying about drivers under Linux or BSD, you are suggesting that the card itself could disable itself if you don't follow the rules exactly. I don't think this is likely or even part of the TCPA spec. After all, it is designed to be disabled, although there may be a lot of things that won't function if it is disabled, but those things aren't going to work under *NIX anyway. I've never seen anything to suggest that I/O cards will do anything to support TCPA, just that drivers may be effected, or at least approved (signed) to be used.
Actually, a lot of information about each device will be recorded and checksums validated in the ACPI subsystem. And, it appears that the keys for making use of each device will be issued by a CA. Therefore, if you're building or modding boards and writing drivers for them, and the CA is simply unresponsive in issuing keys for the device you built and the driver you wrote for it , your whole system is SOL--not just that one device. If you disable the TBB & TCPA entirely, you run, as you point out, the risk of disabling all the devices which require it. Which could be the motherboard itself.
Now, about devices checking information in ACPI memory -- which will now contain not just power management data, but also TPM data -- plenty already do. How long will it be before "trusted" devices are manufactured which do, as part of their self-check on power-up, check for the TPM data of other, "non-trusted" devices prior to coming on line? True, this is not currently part of the TCPA standard, but the opportunity exists to lock *nix out of systems at this level. Given the level of FUD that will circulate about "trusted hardware" and "trusted drivers," how hard will it be for, say, HP/Compaq and INTEL to accept a massive kickback from MicroSoft in exchange for making their hardware..."trusted." i.e. unable to get a Linux driver running on it without (illegally according to DMCA) bypassing the TPM checking firmware on the device?
Sure you can bypass the whole TCPA system *now*, in the current standard. But how long will it be before it is deemed an infraction of the DMCA to do so? And how long will it be before it becomes impracticable to do so because the overwhelming majority of devices on the market require it?
So your point about having to get a certificate from a CA every time you go and play with your MBR is well-taken, and it got me thinking...that the way TCPA is set up, it makes a whole host of anti-competetive practices possible at the device firmware level -- and make the process of installing and operating linux on your home computer an even more questionable and difficult practice for the average user than it already is.
Like I said, if it were the IETF or IEEE or ISO heading this "standard" architecture for "trusted" computing, even if the committees were stacked with people from the largest companies trying to push things in a direction that would make the standard open to this kind of abuse (as they do), at least there would be half a dozen national lab/university types calling them on it (as they do).
sw: Not just overwriting your MBR -- what about the potential of the TCPA subsystem in collaboration with the TBB to block your own device drivers written for your own (experimental, read: uncertified) devices?
gg: It's a bit unclear (or maybe I didn't completely 'get' that part), how the trusted drivers would be pulled in.
It doesn't require that you know how the drivers are mapped and pulled in by the OS -- which you can set up by hand if you want to, with BSD or Linux. What concerns me is how the way TBB/PCR/TCMA is set up to enable interference with any device or driver you could ever write, and how it could be applied in an anti-competetive manner towards makers of third party peripherals.
The TBB consists of two parts: a trusted BIOS and some non-volatile data (stored in the ACPI unit) containing the fingerprints of the trusted devices, which it reads and verifies at power-up or reset.
You know how annoying it is when you've got a BIOS that thinks it knows what you want better than you do, and re-maps your /dev/hd's when you install a new IDE drive, thus invalidating your boot block, your /etc/fsck etc etc.? Think of TBB as something ten times worse, and you can't even re-flash your BIOS with something less "user-friendly/programmer-hostile."
Now, what does the TBB do with all the data it gathers (and/or incorrectly presumes) about your devices, including the checksum verifications and IPL codes? It stores them in the ACPI -- for further "system verification." Now what if the big device manufacturers (e.g. HP) set up their devices to shut themselves down, at the firmware level, when ACPI suddenly has "wrong" information about the device? (It's a power-saving feature, right? Don't you feel all warm and fuzzy.)
All the device would need to do is change its IRQ (remember these are PnP devices...) to something out-of-range. All the TBB would need to do would be to write either garbage or bad words to the ACPI any time it sees a "non-trusted" device. Thus hosing your whole system. Heck it could even send a few packets down its "trusted" network device notifying the authorities that you just installed a "non-trusted" disk drive or operating system.Now say you were real careful and figured out a way to say, not change the MBR but trick the boot loader into to boot linux anyway, and do all your own device probing and mapping by hand, and simply bypass the ACPI where the checksums are stored. BUT! say all new monitors, printers, video cards, keyboards -- everything -- is now manufactured to check its data in ACPI. It won't matter if you've written a custom driver for it, because the device needs a valid (and fresh) key from the ACPI to continue to function.
Sure MS will probably fall flat on its face repeatedly with successive versions of the Palladium application-level API. But while laughing at the funny clown (and trying to figure out how to circumven^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htake best advantage of the Palladium API, see how badly "trusted computing" misapplied by clueless MSCEs in wanna-be corps, whose data is then an open book to...anyone and everyone) we might be diverted from the observing that TBB is meanwhile grabbing all the new motherboards, devices and busses by the short hairs. In the name of trust and energy saving, and making systems easier to "configure" or "self-configuring" to save the poor user from having to actually know anything about his or her own computer.
So this is the danger: that the overwhelming majority of new peripherals require TBB/PCR/TCMA to be running. Which would have the side effect of making it nearly impossible and highly illegal to do your own system mods, OS development, device drivers, custom devices, etc etc etc. with the new hardware.
A friend of mine's two school-age daughters use linux exclusively. When the elder started high school, she told one of her new school chums on the bus. He informed her that linux was "illegal" and that "only hackers used it." Of course she thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and the parents in our neighborhood have been laughing about it ever since. How could they possibly make an operating system illegal?
How could they, indeed.
They certainly are trying.