Ok, I'm an engineer and I write for businessmen and engineers. A lot. Grammar can be read by paying attention to/. grammar fascists and other respected sources, go have fun.
That said, I believe your students' ability to communicate in an engineering environment would likely be improved if you taught them to (a) learn to simplify their sentences, and (b) learn how to recognise and avoid ambiguity.
It might also help if you removed the parentheses keys from their keyboards until it was time to code again.
Just write it in every major language. Several languages have survived thousands of years through today, which is how the Rosetta Stone worked.
Which spins off another idea. The last decent Rosetta stone made in recent years was fired off into space aboard Pioneer 10.
How would we go about deliberately making a disaster-proof Rosetta stone for future generations, one whose sole purpose was to provide many languges in one place -- a key to future archaeologists? Wouldn't this be a good thing? I suspect it would need more than just side-by-side script, it would need to be readable beyond the use-by date of most paper, parchment and electronics.
Yep. Powered by Hydrogen Peroxide at torpedo fuel strengths. Bolted on back of a Halibrand race/custom diff for cars, iirc, think reaction engine only on go-karts though. I remember one person's complaint that at speeds over 150mph the front wheels of his kart tended to lift a bit.
What happens if you are in a car accident or have a stroke, and they need to stick you in an MRI machine?
You hope it's just an RFID and not a bit of memory, or your entire economic existence would be blanked. Think in terms of being scanned by an industrial-sized magnet with enough gauss to pull your braces out through your upper jaw. Mind you, with all the noise they make you might not notice it...
That sounds like a great strategy. Promise a technology that doesn't exist, and then just delay it until the technology is actually invented...
Worked for IBM, who announced System 360/OS360 immediately after CDC started shipping copies of their first Cray-designed 6000-series computers. IBM took another year to actually deliver it.
Nothing new here, except to note that Microsoft appears to have become the New "Old IBM".
I had such a terrible time trying to get as much as an interview until I took the certifications off my resume
That, my friend, is a very useful observation.
I've been in IT since 1970, writing thousands of lines of 3GL code and script to do what a one or two liner can do now. Half way or so between then and now I thought -- networks, better get a cert. Got the MCSE several years after dumping VMS godhood for bunny NT 3.1 and Exchange TR0, because I thought I needed it. Got one or two new facts from the study (not many) and a couple of insights into DNS. Useful in a minor way, but expensive - (shrug) cost of doing business.
But there was a long contract drought when I put the MCSE up there at the top, and now that you mention it things have looked up rather a lot since I started burying it below the experience in small print amongst the other quals.
Picks up the industrial-strength slap stick... DOH! (ouch!)
Yep -- crashed one or two 2311's myself. But dang, screwing the 10-high platters in and out made you feel all geeky, I loved it. The first Lisa I saw (the first one ever made, in fact -- just before it hit the market) took 20 min for the 5MB HDD to stabilise before boot sequenced.
The major source of vibration would have to be the oscillating mass of the head positioning arm. That could go away, at least. Constant temperature could be managed with a small temperature circuit and thermocouple, perhaps, no moving parts. The ideal of the spindle being the only moving part in a HDD is still strangely compelling, with bearing failure or massive outside shock being the only probable cause for HDD loss.
Remember the LGP-30? It's drum main memory had hand-coated oxide, and the heads were mounted on wood supports for thermal isolation. Neat, huh? Glue sometimes failed, guy would re-paint the oxide on after a head crash. Getting the right kind of wood was a problem iirc.
Could we make the disk and the head assembly out of the same material to minimise thermal expansion differences?
But if the head assembly was rigidly fixed relative to the spindle centre, and never moved you wouldn't need the closed loop positioning. Where the track was laid would be where the track was read. The point is that you would have no further need of a positioning arm at all, with it's lateral oscillations to take into consideration. And disks would end up cheaper, and smaller, and faster, without changing the recording surface or substrate. No vibration at all... ahh...
...has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?
There are a number of kiss-of-death indicators I see. Parallel -- Digital Equipment Corp. had a superb 3GL / script environment on hardware that was very cost-effective, or so they thought. Nobody would be buying those underpowered PC things. However, they started losing money big time because the management structure under Ken Olson (one of the industry's true greats, don't get me wrong) had gone stodgy and their product direction became inflexible. Then they bought loser PC technology, late (after trying to sell their vision of a PC -- and they thought they were competing against Apple, ignoring IBM's shadow. Remember the Rainbow? Urrgh) and tried to patch it up with great service. After Ken's Looong tenure drew to an end, Digital was Compaqted and vanished, despite having huge cash reserves and a great reputation.
Similarly, Scott McNealy and his long tenure has built up a large, monolithic true-blue corporate direction that has begun to diverge from where the money is going, and is showing signs of trying to rein in the industry to their vision; the problem occurs when your financial plans are built on speculation and the book-to-bill ratio goes badly awry. It's the bees knees, honest... buy it because all your friends are going to be buying one too. Believe us. Ignore the disparity in price, ignore the fact that your flagship systems are no better than the open source equivalents, ignore the fact that people are not flocking en masse to the Network Computer, ignore that man behind the curtain...
And check their businss model -- Are they a software company? Their main software platform is competing with a product that is essentially free, as in beer. Yes, buy a Sun box because then you can use their version of Unix, which is wonderful and robust and... very much not free. And do they sell Java? No, it's essentially public domain. You're not paying Sun to use it, just to prove your version is compliant.
A hardware company? Weren't their E-series supers a direct acquisition from Cray Research? Where is their new hardware research budget? Can they compete with the re-invented IBM and their research labs?
Are they a services company? Give me a break -- that's what Digital was saying just before they went under, just like at least a half-dozen other major players I've seen go down since 1970. RCA, Burroughs, others, same song before they sank. They claim services when they have nothing else.
Recap:
(1) Their operating system competes with hugely popular Linux, which is free;
(2) Their applications platform, Java/J2EE etc. is in the public domain; they only license the verification suite (check me on this, but I think it's true), and
(3) their hardware technology was bought, not built, and Seymore Cray is no more.
Unload the stock now. Let the rationalisation begin.
Pff. My Mage isn't Time-geared. In my crowd that makes me a real outsider. I'm only mildly depressed about that. But it's ok, with a bit of KEI my manic phase will soon kick in.
One concern I have with treatment of people without their -- call it permission, for want of a better word -- is that sometimes people have to hit the bottom before they can bounce back up. Deconstruction-Reconstruction. There is sometimes a single full-cycle of that that has to be worked through before depressed people can be really brought back to reality. Makes a case for a Wanderjahr, beatnik or hippy sort of excursion away from the context that supports the negative behaviour.
Just don't let them near the guns, in case they see the bad spirits floating around in your eyes...
Larry Niven and Spider Robinson both explored the social aspects of this subject pretty thoroughly in SF literature. Ringworld Engineers comes to mind, when Louis Wu undergoes a euphoria/depression addiction cycle to a "TASP" (presumably an acronym for There Ain't Such Pleasure, a variation on TANJ used as an expletive throught his books) and a "DROUD" (no idea as to word origin).
Spider Robinson may have derived his stories from Niven's originals -- legitimately, I believe, as the "wirehead" meme now seems to be as much a part of SF as FTL has been since the Golden Age. Spider wrote it into "Lifeship" and one other short story involving deprogramming of a wirehead. (/soapbox)
Kernel, Executive, Supervisor, User modes, all with their own protected address space. Kernel for the OS, Executive for the drivers, Supervisor for scripts, and User for images with page-in activation.
Now, where have we all heard that before? VMS suffered from some pretty cruddy hardware (hey, that was then) but at least buffer overflows were not exploitable.
Nothing new under the sun, move along, nothing to see here.
I think I would disassemble the blender blades and bang them against the glass until I got the attention of someone who was the size of a half-dollar...or perhaps make a propellor by holding my shoes just right, sitting on top of the blade assembly, and waiting until someone pressed the button...
Whatever, I miss the boom days of the computer industry, really I do. Once I hired 70 programmers for Apple in one year (pre-Lisa days) by reading and talking to everyone who threw a resume under the door. I hired people who convinced me they were smart, and could get things done. I did the first interview, and without fail the ones who lasted the year and got things done were the people I knew would do the job within 20 seconds after the first word they spoke. Education was entirely secondary. I hired people who loved code, and I overpaid them and expected the world of them. Lost about 3 of them in the course of a year, including me, due to burnout. But we were insanely great.
Yes, and the Xerox Sigma 7's had them around 1970 or so. everything a long time ago was expensive and had poor track density, so that's not much of an argument.
The idea here is that you might be able to make a monolithic head using MOS techniques and cheap-up the manufacturing process. The surface area of a 2.5" HDD is so small, we're not talking about a huge acreage of silicon. And the magnetic coils you would need are just little round circuits, aren't they? I'd have thought that would be amenable to some form of photo etch fab process. If you had to go 3D you might even use a fabber (3D printer, see http://www.ennex.com/ ) for much of it.
It's fun reading comments about seek time and rotational latency -- amazing how useful such stats can be.
However, a thought intrudes -- why are we still using movable heads at all? Considering the track-to-track density and small radius disk formats we're using, isn't it about time to shift back to head-per-track? Couldn't we make a fixed-position monolithic RW head to cover all tracks of a disk at once? Can we make multiple RW coils small enough to pack at the same density as tracks on a platter? Come to think of it, we could stagger them a bit; they wouldn't have to be all in a single line...
It just seems like such a waste of kinetic to constantly throw the heads back and forth across the platter.
The bottom line is that commercials give you the ability to watch content for free...
I may be a bit differentially-centric here, but I think I must disagree. One is paying to watch, it's just that the coin is distributed rather than in an all-up fee. Part of the fee is in the products I buy that I wouldn't otherwise choose because of some out-of-band communication to my hypothalamus (pick a more appropriate bit of brain, I'm only a rocket surgeon) and the rest is in that most valuable commodity, the time I can't spend leveling my Mage.
Half of me doesn't like commercials, half of me hates 'em. The rest of me is just plain bad mathematician...
In fact, the last car that you took to the junk yard will have it's metal recycled, and some of that may end up going into a war machine.
Around the time the original pressed-frame Honda 50 came out, an interviewer somewhat waggishly asked Sochiro Honda if the rather fragile-looking motorbike was indeed made from recycled beer cans. "No, it isn't," he replied, "It's made from recycled B-29's".
Sigh... legacy programmers had their idiots, too. I am reminded of one VMS/Pascal programmer who tried to persist an entire hydrology database into an enumerated data type, then complained to me that the system was no good -- he'd run out of space. "Darn!" was my response.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I believe your students' ability to communicate in an engineering environment would likely be improved if you taught them to (a) learn to simplify their sentences, and (b) learn how to recognise and avoid ambiguity.
It might also help if you removed the parentheses keys from their keyboards until it was time to code again.
Which spins off another idea. The last decent Rosetta stone made in recent years was fired off into space aboard Pioneer 10.
How would we go about deliberately making a disaster-proof Rosetta stone for future generations, one whose sole purpose was to provide many languges in one place -- a key to future archaeologists? Wouldn't this be a good thing? I suspect it would need more than just side-by-side script, it would need to be readable beyond the use-by date of most paper, parchment and electronics.
Yep. Powered by Hydrogen Peroxide at torpedo fuel strengths. Bolted on back of a Halibrand race/custom diff for cars, iirc, think reaction engine only on go-karts though. I remember one person's complaint that at speeds over 150mph the front wheels of his kart tended to lift a bit.
Hang on, aren't the lensmakers automatic now?
And lethal in near-microgram doses when ingested, isn't it?
Why not just reclassify and sell the iPod as a good looking battery with a few extra marketing features, such as the ability to play music?
You hope it's just an RFID and not a bit of memory, or your entire economic existence would be blanked. Think in terms of being scanned by an industrial-sized magnet with enough gauss to pull your braces out through your upper jaw. Mind you, with all the noise they make you might not notice it...
Forget that, I want a Lens. Where's Mentor when you need him? Dang, that guy could forecast...
Do both.
Worked for IBM, who announced System 360 /OS360 immediately after CDC started shipping copies of their first Cray-designed 6000-series computers. IBM took another year to actually deliver it.
Nothing new here, except to note that Microsoft appears to have become the New "Old IBM".
Could we get them to delay it a little longer, say perhaps another 20 years or so?
I'm still trying to get over WfW 3.11.
That, my friend, is a very useful observation.
I've been in IT since 1970, writing thousands of lines of 3GL code and script to do what a one or two liner can do now. Half way or so between then and now I thought -- networks, better get a cert. Got the MCSE several years after dumping VMS godhood for bunny NT 3.1 and Exchange TR0, because I thought I needed it. Got one or two new facts from the study (not many) and a couple of insights into DNS. Useful in a minor way, but expensive - (shrug) cost of doing business.
But there was a long contract drought when I put the MCSE up there at the top, and now that you mention it things have looked up rather a lot since I started burying it below the experience in small print amongst the other quals.
Picks up the industrial-strength slap stick... DOH! (ouch!)
The major source of vibration would have to be the oscillating mass of the head positioning arm. That could go away, at least. Constant temperature could be managed with a small temperature circuit and thermocouple, perhaps, no moving parts. The ideal of the spindle being the only moving part in a HDD is still strangely compelling, with bearing failure or massive outside shock being the only probable cause for HDD loss.
Remember the LGP-30? It's drum main memory had hand-coated oxide, and the heads were mounted on wood supports for thermal isolation. Neat, huh? Glue sometimes failed, guy would re-paint the oxide on after a head crash. Getting the right kind of wood was a problem iirc.
Could we make the disk and the head assembly out of the same material to minimise thermal expansion differences?
But if the head assembly was rigidly fixed relative to the spindle centre, and never moved you wouldn't need the closed loop positioning. Where the track was laid would be where the track was read. The point is that you would have no further need of a positioning arm at all, with it's lateral oscillations to take into consideration. And disks would end up cheaper, and smaller, and faster, without changing the recording surface or substrate. No vibration at all... ahh...
There are a number of kiss-of-death indicators I see. Parallel -- Digital Equipment Corp. had a superb 3GL / script environment on hardware that was very cost-effective, or so they thought. Nobody would be buying those underpowered PC things. However, they started losing money big time because the management structure under Ken Olson (one of the industry's true greats, don't get me wrong) had gone stodgy and their product direction became inflexible. Then they bought loser PC technology, late (after trying to sell their vision of a PC -- and they thought they were competing against Apple, ignoring IBM's shadow. Remember the Rainbow? Urrgh) and tried to patch it up with great service. After Ken's Looong tenure drew to an end, Digital was Compaqted and vanished, despite having huge cash reserves and a great reputation.
Similarly, Scott McNealy and his long tenure has built up a large, monolithic true-blue corporate direction that has begun to diverge from where the money is going, and is showing signs of trying to rein in the industry to their vision; the problem occurs when your financial plans are built on speculation and the book-to-bill ratio goes badly awry. It's the bees knees, honest ... buy it because all your friends are going to be buying one too. Believe us. Ignore the disparity in price, ignore the fact that your flagship systems are no better than the open source equivalents, ignore the fact that people are not flocking en masse to the Network Computer, ignore that man behind the curtain...
And check their businss model -- Are they a software company? Their main software platform is competing with a product that is essentially free, as in beer. Yes, buy a Sun box because then you can use their version of Unix, which is wonderful and robust and ... very much not free. And do they sell Java? No, it's essentially public domain. You're not paying Sun to use it, just to prove your version is compliant.
A hardware company? Weren't their E-series supers a direct acquisition from Cray Research? Where is their new hardware research budget? Can they compete with the re-invented IBM and their research labs?
Are they a services company? Give me a break -- that's what Digital was saying just before they went under, just like at least a half-dozen other major players I've seen go down since 1970. RCA, Burroughs, others, same song before they sank. They claim services when they have nothing else.
Recap:
(1) Their operating system competes with hugely popular Linux, which is free;
(2) Their applications platform, Java/J2EE etc. is in the public domain; they only license the verification suite (check me on this, but I think it's true), and
(3) their hardware technology was bought, not built, and Seymore Cray is no more.
Unload the stock now. Let the rationalisation begin.
One concern I have with treatment of people without their -- call it permission, for want of a better word -- is that sometimes people have to hit the bottom before they can bounce back up. Deconstruction-Reconstruction. There is sometimes a single full-cycle of that that has to be worked through before depressed people can be really brought back to reality. Makes a case for a Wanderjahr, beatnik or hippy sort of excursion away from the context that supports the negative behaviour.
Just don't let them near the guns, in case they see the bad spirits floating around in your eyes...
Spider Robinson may have derived his stories from Niven's originals -- legitimately, I believe, as the "wirehead" meme now seems to be as much a part of SF as FTL has been since the Golden Age. Spider wrote it into "Lifeship" and one other short story involving deprogramming of a wirehead. (/soapbox)
Now if I could just get some Deep Brain Coffee into me...
Now, where have we all heard that before? VMS suffered from some pretty cruddy hardware (hey, that was then) but at least buffer overflows were not exploitable.
Nothing new under the sun, move along, nothing to see here.
Whatever, I miss the boom days of the computer industry, really I do. Once I hired 70 programmers for Apple in one year (pre-Lisa days) by reading and talking to everyone who threw a resume under the door. I hired people who convinced me they were smart, and could get things done. I did the first interview, and without fail the ones who lasted the year and got things done were the people I knew would do the job within 20 seconds after the first word they spoke. Education was entirely secondary. I hired people who loved code, and I overpaid them and expected the world of them. Lost about 3 of them in the course of a year, including me, due to burnout. But we were insanely great.
The idea here is that you might be able to make a monolithic head using MOS techniques and cheap-up the manufacturing process. The surface area of a 2.5" HDD is so small, we're not talking about a huge acreage of silicon. And the magnetic coils you would need are just little round circuits, aren't they? I'd have thought that would be amenable to some form of photo etch fab process. If you had to go 3D you might even use a fabber (3D printer, see http://www.ennex.com/ ) for much of it.
However, a thought intrudes -- why are we still using movable heads at all? Considering the track-to-track density and small radius disk formats we're using, isn't it about time to shift back to head-per-track? Couldn't we make a fixed-position monolithic RW head to cover all tracks of a disk at once? Can we make multiple RW coils small enough to pack at the same density as tracks on a platter? Come to think of it, we could stagger them a bit; they wouldn't have to be all in a single line...
It just seems like such a waste of kinetic to constantly throw the heads back and forth across the platter.
I may be a bit differentially-centric here, but I think I must disagree. One is paying to watch, it's just that the coin is distributed rather than in an all-up fee. Part of the fee is in the products I buy that I wouldn't otherwise choose because of some out-of-band communication to my hypothalamus (pick a more appropriate bit of brain, I'm only a rocket surgeon) and the rest is in that most valuable commodity, the time I can't spend leveling my Mage.
Half of me doesn't like commercials, half of me hates 'em. The rest of me is just plain bad mathematician...
Around the time the original pressed-frame Honda 50 came out, an interviewer somewhat waggishly asked Sochiro Honda if the rather fragile-looking motorbike was indeed made from recycled beer cans. "No, it isn't," he replied, "It's made from recycled B-29's".
Sigh... legacy programmers had their idiots, too. I am reminded of one VMS/Pascal programmer who tried to persist an entire hydrology database into an enumerated data type, then complained to me that the system was no good -- he'd run out of space. "Darn!" was my response.