I am a retired 71 (soon to be 72) year old engineer. NOTHING I worked on the last two decades of my career existed when I graduated. That is the difference between an education, which teaches you how to think and how to learn things that, "have never been done before" and training, which teaches you how to do things that are already known and how to just do those. The difference can be thought of as follows:
Which would be more appropriate for your teenage daughter? A class on sex education or a class in training on sexual techniques.
I graduated with a BS in engineering in late 1970 and entered the Air Force in 1971. In mid 1973, I took a graduate course in E.E. at a university in Ohio near where I was stationed at that time. I was very surprised, when at the first session of the class, there were only two people in the course that HAD Slide Rules. Me, with my trusty K&E log log duplex decitrig, and the professor teaching the course! Every one else taking the course had a scientific calculator.
I think the professor noticed and may have cut me a little slack! However, after that course was over, when the TI-35's broke through the $$100 level at the BX on base I was first in line for one.
I think the idea of reusable rockets is the way they should be built! I am old enough to remember The Polaris (Buzz Corbit's rocket) landing tail first and have always thought that is the way it should be! However, one thing I very quickly learned a long time ago and far away in a tropical jungle was that.....
In combat EVERYTHING is considered expendable. It is something you learn very early. Everything and EVERYBODY IS expendable.
Where I worked long long ago we trashed all our old Model M keyboards. And I do mean trashed as in the can. My boss retrieved a few of them and took them home and that is something I regret not doing to this day. My wife went looking for some on eBay over a decade ago, but the best she could find were some
Model KB's which, while good and is what I am using now, is not in the same league as the Model M. I have looked at and bought at least a dozen other keyboards over the years and use them on machines other than my primary computer, Fortunately, I have been retired now for over ten years and am not chained to the keyboard as in those past days.
I do not yet have a smart phone addiction. In fact I most often leave mine completely OFF unless I need to use it for something. Sometimes it stays off for a week at a time. Amazingly liberating.
I have been trying to get people I know in my state to request an absentee paper ballot for each election and use it to cast their vote. The process here is very easy, with virtually no tests for actually needing to vote absentee. Perhaps this should be done nation wide as much as possible. If the VOTERS overwhelmed the ballot boxes with absentee paper ballots that might just send the message that computers should not be used for voting!
My state still uses the old Diebold DRE machines that CAN NOT be audited. I was on the evaluation group when they were chosen after the 2000 election and was a lone voice pointing out their lack of security and impossibility of being audited or having a valid recount.
I think that retailers seem to be trying to reduce their inventory and as a result they no longer stock a wide enough variety of products to keep the customers coming to the store. I think there is a feedback loop here that the PHBs (Pointy Hair Bosses) don't understand. When I go to a store and want to buy something that they no longer carry and that I can't find elsewhere locally, I order it on line and usually never look for it from a local store again. I think a lot of people are doing this and this is at least one factor driving local retail stores out of business.
Although it might be unrelated, I can't help but wonder if some patent troll is behind this. Newegg has been giving them a hard time and I wouldn't put some form of obscure payback past them.
Project mis-managers make nice pretty Gantt charts to show the C-suite, but try to actually use them to plan and manage a project. Gantt and PERT were developed as REPORTING visuals during the Polaris missile program to show Congress how things were working. I got a degree in Industrial and Systems engineering before being seduced by computers and during my entire career I never saw any Project Manager that understood that. What's worse they would pull times for task completion out of somewhere the sun never shone.
At one time I was over a group that did final post production QA on in house programs. The project manager allocated a week for the QA testing of the entire system and I told him that it would take at least four and maybe six weeks. I had no input to the original time allocated. On the very first day of testing I was able to find enough problems that when I wrote them up and turned them over to the project manager that day he turned blue. It was at least three weeks work before he was able to get those fixed and give us another shot at testing. Final outcome was that we were right at the six week point before we were able to report the system clean enough to use.
The card says it is not to be used for identification. Which is now a joke. Maybe they should just publish everyone's SSN and loose the dogs of war er Law on those that do use it for ID.
Being an old codger going back to the days of big iron and wide green bar printouts I can remember when old printouts with full SSN, NAME, ADDRESS and other information that is now considered sensitive was freely available for anyone to take home for their kids to color on. We even used the back at work to sketch out program and process flows. Some lawyer should be able to milk the use of SSN's for granting credit for some number of gigabucks to discourage such use.
I was going to post this Heinlein quote if you hadn't. After two years in Aerospace Engineering I changed majors to Systems and Industrial Engineering so that I could take more courses in more different and unrelated subjects including Metallurgy, Geology, Linear Programming (which had nothing to do at that time with computers), Electrical engineering, fluid mechanics, psychology, and the list goes on. MY first "personal computer" was a PDP-8I, in college, in the late 1960's and I learned Algol 60 on a Burroughs B5500. After graduation I had a very interesting career and was always learning new things, and was always given and eagerly accepted assignments that drew on my diverse background.
Although I am 70 now and have been retired for about a decade, I still find that learning new things in almost every area is keeping me young at heart and probably in mind. After having worked with Big Iron IBM mainframes I moved into Servers PC's and Networking and spent my last decade in Network engineering and security. Now I am having more fun than ever with Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's. Oh, and I married a Geologist - so that course was REALLY useful!
In the US IFF you use a CREDIT card you are only liable for about $50 and most banks wave that. Although banks are always trying to get you to have Debit card I don't and won't have one since it is an open hole to your bank accounts. Debit cards are good for banks, Credit cards are better for everybody else.
Never trust a single source to be unbiased or even true. Use multiple sources, as independent as possible, from more than one country. This is FAR easier to do on line that via any mass media source. Most mass media news sounds like they are reporting a sporting event than things that have true life of death import.
I am an engineer and used discrete components and latter RTL, TTL, and CMOS chips long before the 4004 was even thought of. Although these "computers" ran only one "program" which was hard wired into them they used the same laws of logic and Boolean algebra that latter software programmable computers used, I have always thought of solder as my first programming language.
However, I have also written code in the following languages in roughly chronological order. Algol 60, PDP 8 assembler, Fortran, CDP-1802 op codes (hand assembled to Hex), C, Perl and probably a few more I can't remember. I also had to become at least fairly competent in using IBM JCL in order to run some packages of various kinds on big iron back in the day. Having just passed 70 years on this planet my current favorite toys are Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's. either of which are orders of magnitude past that PDP 8 I worked with decades ago. However, they still work the same way and everything I learned has built on everything I had learned before.
Alcohol prohibition got the US more problems that it solved with the rise of organized crime and undermining a general respect for the law. We have not really recovered yet. I wonder what it will do to the land down under.
I have had both Basal and Squamous skin cancers since the 1990's and keep a close watch on my own skin. If I see anything suspicious I have a note book where I keep a note of what I saw, when and where. In some cases I will take a close up picture of it. Both Basal and Squamous cancers tend to appear and go away when they are very small and by doing this I have a record of "something" reappearing in the same location. Following the old adage that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is most likely enemy action I will call for an appointment with my dermatologist and show them my records or pictures. For the last ten years I found every skin cancer well before the dermatologist would have seen it during an annual exam.
It did not used to be that way since for many years I had the same dermatologist or group and they got to know my skin about as well as I learned to. However, after that with almost yearly shifts in medical networks due to changes in insurance providers where I worked (always either the lowest bidder or highest campaign contributor), it got where I didn't see the same one twice until I got on Medicare. The patient-doctor relationship SHOULD be long term and more than just a diagnostic code and EMR's. I think it is going to get a LOT worse before it gets better so learn to know your own body and be assertive about your care.
If I had mod points this would get them! Why do some people who make a show of piety and THEIR religion forget all about love, tolerance and compassion. It seems that EVERYTHING these days is being turned into a zero sum game and a contest.
Brian Kemp is the same Georgia (U.S.) Secretary of State that had his IT department send out CD's to dozens of places with the entire Georgia Voters list info including Names, Addresses, Social Security Numbers,and what primary's the voter voted in (Democratic or Republican). Anybody could get them they just had to pay the fee! When this hit the local news he sent a letter asking everyone who got them to return them so that "fixed" the problem. I don't think he even knows that any number of copies could have been made nor does he care. Get real. This guy doesn't know an IP address from a gnats ass.
The touch screens we use here are cool, but what is the point? There is no real audit trail and there is no way in hell to really know who or what your vote was counted for. Most of the rush to automated voting has been media driven. There is no requirement for elections to be decided by the morning news, and it is too important to leave something like this to us geeks, and yes I do consider myself one from WAY back. I am holding a copy of Running Wild: The Next Industrial Revolution by a Mr. Adam Osborne. If you don't know who he is look him up. He was one of the founding fathers of microcomputers. In his this book Chapter 7 is titled Powerful Tools or Powerful Weapons . The second sentence in the second paragraph says this, "Nevertheless, computers should be excluded by legislation from three important applications: the tabulation of election results, the transfer of large sums of money between banks, and the central operations of stock exchanges."
Too late for number two and three, but number one is probably the most important anyway and is by far the most difficult to audit in case of chicanery. WHY do we need computers to vote? What is the rush in getting the totals? My guess is that having real time or near real time election returns is driven mostly by the media and has been from the beginning. Newspapers wanted the scoop (remember Truman vs Dewey?) and the 24 hour cable news channels live for election night so they can "CALL" the election before the polls close.
Call me a Luddite if you wish but the more people actually involved in the voting process, and especially the counting of votes, the less chance there is that one or a few people can put their thumb on the scale. My vote is to go back to PAPER ballots counted by people from EACH party or person in the election in an open counting room with live coverage. It might take a few days to know who won, but it isn't a ball game, it is an election and knowing who won or lost in record time is not the point. The point is that the vote MUST be honest and counted HONESTLY.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's forget DST and the the time zone stuff and just make UTC universal for the whole country! ;-)
I am a retired 71 (soon to be 72) year old engineer. NOTHING I worked on the last two decades of my career existed when I graduated. That is the difference between an education, which teaches you how to think and how to learn things that, "have never been done before" and training, which teaches you how to do things that are already known and how to just do those. The difference can be thought of as follows:
Which would be more appropriate for your teenage daughter? A class on sex education or a class in training on sexual techniques.
I graduated with a BS in engineering in late 1970 and entered the Air Force in 1971. In mid 1973, I took a graduate course in E.E. at a university in Ohio near where I was stationed at that time. I was very surprised, when at the first session of the class, there were only two people in the course that HAD Slide Rules. Me, with my trusty K&E log log duplex decitrig, and the professor teaching the course! Every one else taking the course had a scientific calculator.
I think the professor noticed and may have cut me a little slack! However, after that course was over, when the TI-35's broke through the $$100 level at the BX on base I was first in line for one.
I think the idea of reusable rockets is the way they should be built! I am old enough to remember The Polaris (Buzz Corbit's rocket) landing tail first and have always thought that is the way it should be! However, one thing I very quickly learned a long time ago and far away in a tropical jungle was that .....
In combat EVERYTHING is considered expendable. It is something you learn very early. Everything and EVERYBODY IS expendable.
Where I worked long long ago we trashed all our old Model M keyboards. And I do mean trashed as in the can. My boss retrieved a few of them and took them home and that is something I regret not doing to this day. My wife went looking for some on eBay over a decade ago, but the best she could find were some Model KB's which, while good and is what I am using now, is not in the same league as the Model M. I have looked at and bought at least a dozen other keyboards over the years and use them on machines other than my primary computer, Fortunately, I have been retired now for over ten years and am not chained to the keyboard as in those past days.
Reminds me of a movie from back in the day. It was a real whopper. Or should I say WOPR?
I do not yet have a smart phone addiction. In fact I most often leave mine completely OFF unless I need to use it for something. Sometimes it stays off for a week at a time. Amazingly liberating.
In other words, "How Long Can You Tread Water?"
I have been trying to get people I know in my state to request an absentee paper ballot for each election and use it to cast their vote. The process here is very easy, with virtually no tests for actually needing to vote absentee. Perhaps this should be done nation wide as much as possible. If the VOTERS overwhelmed the ballot boxes with absentee paper ballots that might just send the message that computers should not be used for voting!
My state still uses the old Diebold DRE machines that CAN NOT be audited. I was on the evaluation group when they were chosen after the 2000 election and was a lone voice pointing out their lack of security and impossibility of being audited or having a valid recount.
I think that retailers seem to be trying to reduce their inventory and as a result they no longer stock a wide enough variety of products to keep the customers coming to the store. I think there is a feedback loop here that the PHBs (Pointy Hair Bosses) don't understand. When I go to a store and want to buy something that they no longer carry and that I can't find elsewhere locally, I order it on line and usually never look for it from a local store again. I think a lot of people are doing this and this is at least one factor driving local retail stores out of business.
Although it might be unrelated, I can't help but wonder if some patent troll is behind this. Newegg has been giving them a hard time and I wouldn't put some form of obscure payback past them.
Project mis-managers make nice pretty Gantt charts to show the C-suite, but try to actually use them to plan and manage a project. Gantt and PERT were developed as REPORTING visuals during the Polaris missile program to show Congress how things were working. I got a degree in Industrial and Systems engineering before being seduced by computers and during my entire career I never saw any Project Manager that understood that. What's worse they would pull times for task completion out of somewhere the sun never shone.
At one time I was over a group that did final post production QA on in house programs. The project manager allocated a week for the QA testing of the entire system and I told him that it would take at least four and maybe six weeks. I had no input to the original time allocated. On the very first day of testing I was able to find enough problems that when I wrote them up and turned them over to the project manager that day he turned blue. It was at least three weeks work before he was able to get those fixed and give us another shot at testing. Final outcome was that we were right at the six week point before we were able to report the system clean enough to use.
The card says it is not to be used for identification. Which is now a joke. Maybe they should just publish everyone's SSN and loose the dogs of war er Law on those that do use it for ID.
Being an old codger going back to the days of big iron and wide green bar printouts I can remember when old printouts with full SSN, NAME, ADDRESS and other information that is now considered sensitive was freely available for anyone to take home for their kids to color on. We even used the back at work to sketch out program and process flows. Some lawyer should be able to milk the use of SSN's for granting credit for some number of gigabucks to discourage such use.
Not worth that much. Damn good time sinks if you really try to make any use out of them.
I was going to post this Heinlein quote if you hadn't. After two years in Aerospace Engineering I changed majors to Systems and Industrial Engineering so that I could take more courses in more different and unrelated subjects including Metallurgy, Geology, Linear Programming (which had nothing to do at that time with computers), Electrical engineering, fluid mechanics, psychology, and the list goes on. MY first "personal computer" was a PDP-8I, in college, in the late 1960's and I learned Algol 60 on a Burroughs B5500. After graduation I had a very interesting career and was always learning new things, and was always given and eagerly accepted assignments that drew on my diverse background.
Although I am 70 now and have been retired for about a decade, I still find that learning new things in almost every area is keeping me young at heart and probably in mind. After having worked with Big Iron IBM mainframes I moved into Servers PC's and Networking and spent my last decade in Network engineering and security. Now I am having more fun than ever with Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's. Oh, and I married a Geologist - so that course was REALLY useful!
In the US IFF you use a CREDIT card you are only liable for about $50 and most banks wave that. Although banks are always trying to get you to have Debit card I don't and won't have one since it is an open hole to your bank accounts. Debit cards are good for banks, Credit cards are better for everybody else.
Never trust a single source to be unbiased or even true. Use multiple sources, as independent as possible, from more than one country. This is FAR easier to do on line that via any mass media source. Most mass media news sounds like they are reporting a sporting event than things that have true life of death import.
I am an engineer and used discrete components and latter RTL, TTL, and CMOS chips long before the 4004 was even thought of. Although these "computers" ran only one "program" which was hard wired into them they used the same laws of logic and Boolean algebra that latter software programmable computers used, I have always thought of solder as my first programming language.
However, I have also written code in the following languages in roughly chronological order. Algol 60, PDP 8 assembler, Fortran, CDP-1802 op codes (hand assembled to Hex), C, Perl and probably a few more I can't remember. I also had to become at least fairly competent in using IBM JCL in order to run some packages of various kinds on big iron back in the day. Having just passed 70 years on this planet my current favorite toys are Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's. either of which are orders of magnitude past that PDP 8 I worked with decades ago. However, they still work the same way and everything I learned has built on everything I had learned before.
This sounds almost like Maxwell's Demon -- which makes me very skeptical.
Alcohol prohibition got the US more problems that it solved with the rise of organized crime and undermining a general respect for the law. We have not really recovered yet. I wonder what it will do to the land down under.
I have had both Basal and Squamous skin cancers since the 1990's and keep a close watch on my own skin. If I see anything suspicious I have a note book where I keep a note of what I saw, when and where. In some cases I will take a close up picture of it. Both Basal and Squamous cancers tend to appear and go away when they are very small and by doing this I have a record of "something" reappearing in the same location. Following the old adage that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is most likely enemy action I will call for an appointment with my dermatologist and show them my records or pictures. For the last ten years I found every skin cancer well before the dermatologist would have seen it during an annual exam.
It did not used to be that way since for many years I had the same dermatologist or group and they got to know my skin about as well as I learned to. However, after that with almost yearly shifts in medical networks due to changes in insurance providers where I worked (always either the lowest bidder or highest campaign contributor), it got where I didn't see the same one twice until I got on Medicare. The patient-doctor relationship SHOULD be long term and more than just a diagnostic code and EMR's. I think it is going to get a LOT worse before it gets better so learn to know your own body and be assertive about your care.
If I had mod points this would get them! Why do some people who make a show of piety and THEIR religion forget all about love, tolerance and compassion. It seems that EVERYTHING these days is being turned into a zero sum game and a contest.
Brian Kemp is the same Georgia (U.S.) Secretary of State that had his IT department send out CD's to dozens of places with the entire Georgia Voters list info including Names, Addresses, Social Security Numbers,and what primary's the voter voted in (Democratic or Republican). Anybody could get them they just had to pay the fee! When this hit the local news he sent a letter asking everyone who got them to return them so that "fixed" the problem. I don't think he even knows that any number of copies could have been made nor does he care. Get real. This guy doesn't know an IP address from a gnats ass.
This sounds like a cover story for something else entirely. Anybody know if they are still using OTH Radar?
The touch screens we use here are cool, but what is the point? There is no real audit trail and there is no way in hell to really know who or what your vote was counted for. Most of the rush to automated voting has been media driven. There is no requirement for elections to be decided by the morning news, and it is too important to leave something like this to us geeks, and yes I do consider myself one from WAY back. I am holding a copy of Running Wild: The Next Industrial Revolution by a Mr. Adam Osborne. If you don't know who he is look him up. He was one of the founding fathers of microcomputers. In his this book Chapter 7 is titled Powerful Tools or Powerful Weapons . The second sentence in the second paragraph says this, "Nevertheless, computers should be excluded by legislation from three important applications: the tabulation of election results, the transfer of large sums of money between banks, and the central operations of stock exchanges."
Too late for number two and three, but number one is probably the most important anyway and is by far the most difficult to audit in case of chicanery. WHY do we need computers to vote? What is the rush in getting the totals? My guess is that having real time or near real time election returns is driven mostly by the media and has been from the beginning. Newspapers wanted the scoop (remember Truman vs Dewey?) and the 24 hour cable news channels live for election night so they can "CALL" the election before the polls close.
Call me a Luddite if you wish but the more people actually involved in the voting process, and especially the counting of votes, the less chance there is that one or a few people can put their thumb on the scale. My vote is to go back to PAPER ballots counted by people from EACH party or person in the election in an open counting room with live coverage. It might take a few days to know who won, but it isn't a ball game, it is an election and knowing who won or lost in record time is not the point. The point is that the vote MUST be honest and counted HONESTLY.