Before my father retired, he was doing research into hypervelocity impacts. It's really intense and pretty scary. He showed me the results of a glass bead the size of a grain of rice that had been shot out of a magnetic rail gun at 17,000 kph (around the orbital velocity of the shuttle, etc.). The glass bead was shot into a steel plate 1 inch thick and ~1 sq foot in size. The entry hole was the size of a quarter, and the exit hole (yes it went all the way through) was the size of a baseball with frozen metal in a splash pattern heading out of the plate.
So, yea, small things can do a LOT of damage at high speeds. That's one reason that sattelites are covered in ~50 layers of mylar. Each layer takes some of the energy out of the micrometerite, so hopefully it will slow down enough before getting to the sattelite itself
I agree also. My 1st introduction to a union was at a large telecomm. I didn't understand them at all, and was wondering how friends I had made could hate me when a strike was getting ready to happen (It was because I was on the non-union employment side). I was talking with my father about the experience, and he; being a history buff; answered this way.
Unions came into being during a time when US labor was merely slave labor to the Robber Barons of the 19th century. They did really good things in getting some sanity injected into the US when 7 day/14 hour day work weeks were pretty common.
{Sound familiar to the death march software dev practices of today????}
In the 90's when Unions were just starting to be REALLY dismantled, he said that the main companies still having Unions were those that "really deserved to have them"
Think about that... !!!!
Unions of the past might be outdated, but it may be time to think of a new kind of union to try and get some sanity put back into the IT world.
Set up an internal IT Shop where people "buy" services using internal money which comes out of their budget.
I had exactly one boss (A VP) who got a system exactly like that set up. It was wonderful from our SA group, because it made things run really smooth. There were definite expectations on both sides, and the groups actually had to think about what they really wanted ahead of time.
Unfortunately, corporate America is so trained to get all the IT support they want for free, the complaining got so loud that both the VP and our group got let go so that things could be run "cheaper" (Meaning that the groups wouldn't have to budget for IT support any more).
And in case you think that was unusual, I recently left a position where the entire IT organization has been outsourced to save money. Unfortunately, those users were also used to the "free" support they received, and are suffering huge amounts of pain since the outsourcing company requires up-front payment for anything outside of their contract. Of course, their contract is so limited; that fixing a server that is required for the contracted work (read.. making $$ for the main company) is "outside" the outsourcing contract. Turns out that 100% of the machines I used to take care of are "outside" that outsource contract. They got a 5 year contract, and in the 1st year, costs are 3-4x what it was before the outsourcing began. Of course it's been trumpeted as a success because somebody's bonus check depends on it.
There's more OSX and Linux malware out there than you might think. Especially OSX.
One of the Windows users I work with says the same thing. Like you, he can't provide any examples either.
And if you're talking about those instances of trojans that rely on social engineering, what anti-virus program can defend against a user who willingly types in an administrative password and installs the malware on his own?
I've installed/used various commercial AV products on both OSX and Linux. The last was Symantec AV. While I was wondering why my OSX machine ground to a halt (72hrs to scan 100,000 files???), I looked at the signature file for the product. Out of 190,000 definitions, only 3 were Mac related. All or them were pre 1995 (The CD Worm, ABv, etc.). Absolutely none of the things being scanned for would run on anything later than Mac OS8, and I haven't run MS Office or other MS products for 10 years. Needless to say, that product was ripped out real fast.
The Linux version of Symantec was loading as a kernel level java process, and we were developing in java. Within 2 seconds of launching another java process, the kernel would hard-lock. The only way around that was to power off the machine. Nothing else would respond.
So, the results are: No protection No usage of the machine while it runs (I guess that means it's protected since NOBODY can use it) No satisfaction No longer used!!
Some really great commercial software has had Easter Eggs! My favorite was from the "Igor" data analysis and graphing program. What that program couldn't do wasn't worth doing! The entire Numerical Methods book was included in that software! This was from the middle 90s...so date me!
One of the windows was titled "History" and collected all the messsing around you did trying to get a graph to look just right. You could then copy the History into a script to replicate the graphs anytime. Deleting contents of the History window brought up a Dialog box that asked:
"Are you sure you want to change history?"
with the selection buttons of
"Da" and "Nyet".
That was 10 of the most enjoyable laughing minutes I've ever had with any program. It's still my favorite program for data analysis!
"but part of me wonders how effective a PhD would be at teaching high school students"
Actually, it works out pretty well. At my High School, both the Electronics and Chemistry Teachers held PhD's in their subjects. However that was Los Alamos, New Mexico (USA) where 70+% of the population of the town has a Masters degree or above, so it COULD have been just some Joe they pulled off the street (Will write dissertations for food).
Sometimes I still miss the Theoretical Physics debates that went on in the checkout line for the Grocery store.
It's already been done! Benoit Mandelbrot wrote it up in Scientific American a few years ago (Feb 1999...sorry I didn't link, the only one I could find was pay-per-view). He was even able to match the stock market trends from 1929 - today.
What I learned from that is the BEST way to play the stock market is completely random since ANY change to the starting conditions of a chaotic system changes the system overall. I'd always wondered why those News shows where they gave $5000 to a stock broker and picked $5000 of stock randomly were always won by the random method.
Not that I do the stock market outside of my 401k, etc. I just don't have the gamblers mindset, and don't want to randomly throw money around.
"Actually, I think MS Word -the Windows version- resembled MacWrite more than it did WordPerfect."
That's because it was.....copied that is.
MS Word started on the PC (bought of course.. never developed in house), then was ported to the Mac. Then they took the UI stuff they learned there and ported them back to the Windows version. Then making sure that the feature set for the 2 versions was at least 1-2 years behind for the Mac versions.
Where do you think the Cut(Cmd-X) Copy (Cmd-C) and Paste (Cmd-V) came from? They were original Mac UI command sequences (I don't remember if those also were part of the PARC implementations). They are listed in the Original Human Interface Guidelines Book (~1986) from Apple that I still have a copy of.
Interestingly when MS Word first showed up on the Mac Platform, they tried to force the Alt-key sequence onto the users at the time, and were laughed off the platform for a little while.
2 historical points here: 1) The gift is coming from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, not Bill himself. The foundation is an independent organization run by Bill's parents so it's them we need to thank not Bill.
2) Bill had never given ANY of his $$ away (unlike the rest of the M$ originals) UNTIL the DOJ started with the Monopoly proceedings against M$.
So while I applaud the foundation's work, Bill's part of it was an attempt to shield his $$ from collection by the Feds should the monopoly proceedings have gone the way that most/.'rs hoped.
Actually most good works are still being done by the independent organizations set up by the robber barons of the 19th century. The barons themselves very rarely gave $$ away willingly. The initial foundation seed money was given set up by the barons for similar reasons as Bill, and it is mostly because they fought to remain independent that they still exist today. Doing their works from the interest off the seed money and further donations.
I grabbed the X11 server from fink, compiled it locally, and had WindowMaker running on it in a couple hours (well the X11 compile took ~12 hrs, but it was a Grape iMac (90MHz G3) my G4-400 can do it in ~3-4 hrs).
I haven't been back for a few months to see if the X11 is from Xfree86 or X.org, but either way, fink has it AND instructions on getting it functional.
Not only are they extremely rugged for the outer case, but the Pu itself is put into a ceramic matrix to keep it stable. Even if this was crushed it would just shower low level radioactive pellets. Kind of like finding natural Uranium pellets on the ground (which can still be done in some parts of the US).
These RTGs have ONLY enough Pu to produce thermal energy that in turn runs heaters and electrical energy generation from conversion of the heat to electricity via thermocuples (a few hundred watts at most). If they happen to break up, there's not enough material in one place to go critical anyway.
There have actually been one or two of these that have been on failed missions that survived being blown up. I remember hearing that one of them was actually re-processed and used again on a later mission.
What's cool is that the Voyager spacecraft both have these, and even though the power output is down to something like 20W after almost 30 years (I think they started with ~170W), we can still communicate with them via a 2W transmitter, and they are still doing science.
I used this as a joke for some mid year review forms that I was sick of. Just created a few misson statements and randomly sprinkled the form with them. The manager said those parts I pasted from the generator were the best parts of the form.
He didn't believe me when I told him I was only joking, and wouldn't even believe me when I told him they were randomly generated buzz words and didn't make any sense. He insisted that that was the wording he was looking for.....sheese.
If I was still working there, guess where I'd fill out ALL the forms;-P
I don't know what kind of crack you've been on, but it must be awfully good. Not designed to be "special " for science? Sheese what a crock. Let me show my age!! Apple helped designed the IEEE standard for SANE (Standard Apple Numerics Engine) yea it's self gratifying, but WHAT an engine. It was the 1st Numeric engine to have NAN codes. I've seen those elsewhere but that was the 1st time I'd seen them. 96 bits of math accuracy on a 32 bit machine at the time that the fastest Cray could only produce 46 bits of accuracy (I worked on both at the time). The only engine at the time where cos(180 degrees) was EXACTLY 0, not some approximation. I haven't been doing numerical programs for a few years, but I (and many collegues at Los Alamos National Laboratories) dropped both the PCs and VT100s in favor of the Macs. They were more accurate than the Cray machines, and due to the batch sytems were faster to develop on. So development/debugging was done on the Macs, then the programs were batched to the mainframes for full runs which could take 2-3 weeks of Cray CPU time (at ~$700 per CPU hour). The Lab at the time even went so far as to make the Mac the main desktop standard in preference to the PCs for the simple fact that the Phds at the lab could take care of the machines themselves, and there didn't have to be huge overhead for Q-Cleared M$ Monkeys to keep them alive.
I went for an interview last spring (almost made the cut) and was gratified to find Linux Clusters doing a lot of the mainframe work, and shiny new G5s sitting on all the desks of the Sys Admins and Phds doing research for the lab.
So I guess if you meant "special" in the short bus sense I guess you made your point, but for getting real work done they were plenty special.
And let's not even go to the "special" science programs and projects that were developed 1st on the Mac and then ported to the PC once they were working correctly:
Mathmatica LabView PGP (yep Zimmerman did it on a Mac laptop at CU Boulder) The Human Genome project was solved by banks of Macs.
The list goes on: Even Excel and Word got their shiny interface from the Mac (where do you think Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X, etc came from??? maybe they were in the PARC stuff before the Mac...don't remember)
yes you can password the OpenFirmWare. You can even lock down the boot so that no one can boot frm anything except the partition you want them to.
I set up a web kiosk system using OS-X and iCab for a chain of Arby's Restaurunts to replace a Windows set up that they could not keep up and running no matter what they did....someone could always bypass the BIOS settings and screw up the system. After 5 months, the ONLY thing that anyone has been able to mess with is changing the color scheme on the machine to greyscale. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image so that they could build additional systems for their other stores.
By the way, CC is nopthing more than a shell script using the ditto command (a deep copy used to handle the Openstep App framework on OS-X Apps)wrapped in a AppleScript Generated window. Pretty easy and elegant when you see it as an example.
There's more than enough blame to go around. One High blame point is the fact that even IF you get the higher degree, the possibility of jobs are fairly small. I've met PhD Chemists teaching High School or working as Administrative assistants at the local telco. My cousin looked for 2 years to get a job w/ his PhD in Molecular Genetic Engineering...now he works as a Software Tester. Another friend of mine looked into getting a PhD in CS until he was that for an Associate Professorship in a back water College (think glorified Teacher Assistant) there were over 600 applicants for a SINGLE posisiton....and this was during the boom years.
To top it off, a great number of the PhDs I've met were stuck in Post Doc positions (Think apprenticeship where you're a slave to the REAL PhD, and get to work for less than 24k per year since it's REALLY only training to be a REAL researcher. You work on the Master's projects and cannot work on, nor propose your own as you still don't know enough about how to do REAL research). I've known people who've been "training" for a real career for over twelve years, and one of my good friends from High School just completed her 20th year as a "trainee" in X-Ray Crystallography. So the problem isn't JUST w/ education. Those w/ the education have a heck of a hard time using it as there's no one wanting their skills. Even in the "hot" technologies of the time.
Oh and by the way, my dad was a PhD Metalurgist, and he made me think HARD abouut going to the PhD level for those very same reasons. Most Companies will look at a PhD , and say "Well we can get 3 Masters Holders, 10 Bachelor's holders or a boat load of Certificate Holders for the cost of one PhD!" The PhD takes a very strong desire, an ability to focus on your subject to the exclusion of all else, and a good dose of ego to be able to fight your way into a job. You eat an awful lot of Ramen Noodles and don't get a whole lot of pay along the way.
It comes as no suprise to me that this is happenening.....knowledge costs in both time and money, and the US has not been willing to invest in either for the past 20 years....then they complain about brain drain??? There's plenty of unused PhDs from my circle of friends. They just couldn't make any kind of a living from their education.
The good part is that NONE of them have ever regretted the fact that they got the PhD and look to it as one of the most exciting times of their lives.
I've done the manual DB filler also (10,000 snail-mail addresses that were sent on PAPER for me to build a mailing list from for a National Laboratory Symposium) The main reason was when I worked at a contractor to a National Paging Company about 10 years ago. Here's the list:
-- PHB of project worked in another state. Was always on vacation, and was overheard "I will kill everyone on this project"
-- Code review was trapping PHB at some resort or the other and showing him the program. He would critique it (nothing written about what the damm thing was supposed to do), and send changes back requiring huge rewrites as well as making the next milestone.
-- Everyone worked ~20 hrs per day 7 days per week. I was considered a slacker when I only put in 110 hrs per week w/ a newborn at home.
-- Phone menu system that covered 3 walls of a 10k sq foot office. Even the designers got lost in there every day, and they had rejected voice samples for the "Press one for...." voice. One number in a string would be OK followed by a number that sounded like it was said thru 10 inches of insulation in a whisper.
-- 20 yrs of RDBMS research was thrown out in favor of a custom built (from the ground up) database that crashed every time one message passed thru it (it was supposed to handle 100K concurrent connections)
-- Company stole all the development systems so that they could fleece some investors. They had a lackey in the back room to do the following. Message was sent and system flamed out. Lackey powered off the system, got another working, and repeated until 8 mesages went thru (60 systems flamed all over the ground by that point). It took 3 days to rebuild the charred remains back for development, and we were still required to make that week's milestones.
-- Windows code took over 2 days to compile (I guess that's a feature...less time for it to actually cause damage by running)
-- Some idiot decided that MFC was easy enough to work with (It's C++ after all), so they stuffed the entire MFC code set on top of the Macintosh C++ Libraries unchanged....man talk about a cat fight of code......NOTHING worked. Every call had to pass thru the MFC to the Mac Libraries, and back again so double the effort for ANY action...including touching the mouse or keyboard.
-- I was asked to debug a problem in the Macintosh code. I found it in a very low level library and fixed ~20 other bugs that hadn't even been identified yet. I got yelled at for going outside the code for the one window that the bug had been listed for.
I lasted about 6 months and actually cried on the way to work on occasion. When I quit, the only reaction from the others left behind was jealousy that I had actually had the balls to quit.
I still love the programming process, but now I do it for the odd CGI need, to automate my Sys Admin chores and to study Math and Graphics as a hobby. I'm MUCH happier
Slashdot Mirror
Before my father retired, he was doing research into hypervelocity impacts. It's really intense and pretty scary. He showed me the results of a glass bead the size of a grain of rice that had been shot out of a magnetic rail gun at 17,000 kph (around the orbital velocity of the shuttle, etc.). The glass bead was shot into a steel plate 1 inch thick and ~1 sq foot in size. The entry hole was the size of a quarter, and the exit hole (yes it went all the way through) was the size of a baseball with frozen metal in a splash pattern heading out of the plate.
So, yea, small things can do a LOT of damage at high speeds. That's one reason that sattelites are covered in ~50 layers of mylar. Each layer takes some of the energy out of the micrometerite, so hopefully it will slow down enough before getting to the sattelite itself
I agree also. My 1st introduction to a union was at a large telecomm. I didn't understand them at all, and was wondering how friends I had made could hate me when a strike was getting ready to happen (It was because I was on the non-union employment side). I was talking with my father about the experience, and he; being a history buff; answered this way.
Unions came into being during a time when US labor was merely slave labor to the Robber Barons of the 19th century. They did really good things in getting some sanity injected into the US when 7 day/14 hour day work weeks were pretty common.
{Sound familiar to the death march software dev practices of today????}
In the 90's when Unions were just starting to be REALLY dismantled, he said that the main companies still having Unions were those that "really deserved to have them"
Think about that ... !!!!
Unions of the past might be outdated, but it may be time to think of a new kind of union to try and get some sanity put back into the IT world.
Set up an internal IT Shop where people "buy" services using internal money which comes out of their budget.
I had exactly one boss (A VP) who got a system exactly like that set up. It was wonderful from our SA group, because it made things run really smooth. There were definite expectations on both sides, and the groups actually had to think about what they really wanted ahead of time.
Unfortunately, corporate America is so trained to get all the IT support they want for free, the complaining got so loud that both the VP and our group got let go so that things could be run "cheaper" (Meaning that the groups wouldn't have to budget for IT support any more).
And in case you think that was unusual, I recently left a position where the entire IT organization has been outsourced to save money. Unfortunately, those users were also used to the "free" support they received, and are suffering huge amounts of pain since the outsourcing company requires up-front payment for anything outside of their contract. Of course, their contract is so limited; that fixing a server that is required for the contracted work (read .. making $$ for the main company) is "outside" the outsourcing contract. Turns out that 100% of the machines I used to take care of are "outside" that outsource contract. They got a 5 year contract, and in the 1st year, costs are 3-4x what it was before the outsourcing began. Of course it's been trumpeted as a success because somebody's bonus check depends on it.
Color me un-impressed
One of the Windows users I work with says the same thing. Like you, he can't provide any examples either.
And if you're talking about those instances of trojans that rely on social engineering, what anti-virus program can defend against a user who willingly types in an administrative password and installs the malware on his own?
I've installed/used various commercial AV products on both OSX and Linux. The last was Symantec AV. While I was wondering why my OSX machine ground to a halt (72hrs to scan 100,000 files???), I looked at the signature file for the product. Out of 190,000 definitions, only 3 were Mac related. All or them were pre 1995 (The CD Worm, ABv, etc.). Absolutely none of the things being scanned for would run on anything later than Mac OS8, and I haven't run MS Office or other MS products for 10 years. Needless to say, that product was ripped out real fast.
The Linux version of Symantec was loading as a kernel level java process, and we were developing in java. Within 2 seconds of launching another java process, the kernel would hard-lock. The only way around that was to power off the machine. Nothing else would respond.
So, the results are:
No protection
No usage of the machine while it runs (I guess that means it's protected since NOBODY can use it)
No satisfaction
No longer used!!
Arrrrrrr! Ye be spyin' me flag!
....Jesus freaking Christ, can't companies do employee evaluations at all? ....
Simple answer..no way in heck!!
Best evaluation I ever got was worded directly from the old Catbert Mission Statement Generator.
The reviewer even had the gall to suggest that the 1 non-random (read real) part of the review was the one bad part of my evaluation!!
Some really great commercial software has had Easter Eggs! My favorite was from the "Igor" data analysis and graphing program. What that program couldn't do wasn't worth doing! The entire Numerical Methods book was included in that software! This was from the middle 90s...so date me!
One of the windows was titled "History" and collected all the messsing around you did trying to get a graph to look just right. You could then copy the History into a script to replicate the graphs anytime. Deleting contents of the History window brought up a Dialog box that asked:
"Are you sure you want to change history?"
with the selection buttons of
"Da" and "Nyet".
That was 10 of the most enjoyable laughing minutes I've ever had with any program. It's still my favorite program for data analysis!
I have a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes strip that says it best:
Calvin says "The best proof for the existance of alien life is the fact that none of it has ever tried to contact us!"
"but part of me wonders how effective a PhD would be at teaching high school students"
Actually, it works out pretty well. At my High School, both the Electronics and Chemistry Teachers held PhD's in their subjects. However that was Los Alamos, New Mexico (USA) where 70+% of the population of the town has a Masters degree or above, so it COULD have been just some Joe they pulled off the street (Will write dissertations for food).
Sometimes I still miss the Theoretical Physics debates that went on in the checkout line for the Grocery store.
Sorry forgot to get the name of the paper:
"A Multifractal Walk down Wall Street"
It's already been done!
Benoit Mandelbrot wrote it up in Scientific American a few years ago (Feb 1999...sorry I didn't link, the only one I could find was pay-per-view). He was even able to match the stock market trends from 1929 - today.
What I learned from that is the BEST way to play the stock market is completely random since ANY change to the starting conditions of a chaotic system changes the system overall. I'd always wondered why those News shows where they gave $5000 to a stock broker and picked $5000 of stock randomly were always won by the random method.
Not that I do the stock market outside of my 401k, etc. I just don't have the gamblers mindset, and don't want to randomly throw money around.
"Actually, I think MS Word -the Windows version- resembled MacWrite more than it did WordPerfect."
That's because it was.....copied that is.
MS Word started on the PC (bought of course.. never developed in house), then was ported to the Mac. Then they took the UI stuff they learned there and ported them back to the Windows version. Then making sure that the feature set for the 2 versions was at least 1-2 years behind for the Mac versions.
Where do you think the Cut(Cmd-X) Copy (Cmd-C) and Paste (Cmd-V) came from? They were original Mac UI command sequences (I don't remember if those also were part of the PARC implementations). They are listed in the Original Human Interface Guidelines Book (~1986) from Apple that I still have a copy of.
Interestingly when MS Word first showed up on the Mac Platform, they tried to force the Alt-key sequence onto the users at the time, and were laughed off the platform for a little while.
2 historical points here:
/.'rs hoped.
1) The gift is coming from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, not Bill himself. The foundation is an independent organization run by Bill's parents so it's them we need to thank not Bill.
2) Bill had never given ANY of his $$ away (unlike the rest of the M$ originals) UNTIL the DOJ started with the Monopoly proceedings against M$.
So while I applaud the foundation's work, Bill's part of it was an attempt to shield his $$ from collection by the Feds should the monopoly proceedings have gone the way that most
Actually most good works are still being done by the independent organizations set up by the robber barons of the 19th century. The barons themselves very rarely gave $$ away willingly. The initial foundation seed money was given set up by the barons for similar reasons as Bill, and it is mostly because they fought to remain independent that they still exist today. Doing their works from the interest off the seed money and further donations.
my $0.02
One word....Fink
http://fink.sourceforge.net/
I grabbed the X11 server from fink, compiled it locally, and had WindowMaker running on it in a couple hours (well the X11 compile took ~12 hrs, but it was a Grape iMac (90MHz G3) my G4-400 can do it in ~3-4 hrs).
I haven't been back for a few months to see if the X11 is from Xfree86 or X.org, but either way, fink has it AND instructions on getting it functional.
Not only are they extremely rugged for the outer case, but the Pu itself is put into a ceramic matrix to keep it stable. Even if this was crushed it would just shower low level radioactive pellets. Kind of like finding natural Uranium pellets on the ground (which can still be done in some parts of the US).
These RTGs have ONLY enough Pu to produce thermal energy that in turn runs heaters and electrical energy generation from conversion of the heat to electricity via thermocuples (a few hundred watts at most). If they happen to break up, there's not enough material in one place to go critical anyway.
There have actually been one or two of these that have been on failed missions that survived being blown up. I remember hearing that one of them was actually re-processed and used again on a later mission.
What's cool is that the Voyager spacecraft both have these, and even though the power output is down to something like 20W after almost 30 years (I think they started with ~170W), we can still communicate with them via a 2W transmitter, and they are still doing science.
I used this as a joke for some mid year review forms that I was sick of. Just created a few misson statements and randomly sprinkled the form with them. The manager said those parts I pasted from the generator were the best parts of the form.
;-P
He didn't believe me when I told him I was only joking, and wouldn't even believe me when I told him they were randomly generated buzz words and didn't make any sense. He insisted that that was the wording he was looking for.....sheese.
If I was still working there, guess where I'd fill out ALL the forms
I don't know what kind of crack you've been on, but it must be awfully good.
Not designed to be "special " for science? Sheese what a crock. Let me show my age!!
Apple helped designed the IEEE standard for SANE (Standard Apple Numerics Engine) yea it's self gratifying, but WHAT an engine. It was the 1st Numeric engine to have NAN codes. I've seen those elsewhere but that was the 1st time I'd seen them. 96 bits of math accuracy on a 32 bit machine at the time that the fastest Cray could only produce 46 bits of accuracy (I worked on both at the time). The only engine at the time where cos(180 degrees) was EXACTLY 0, not some approximation. I haven't been doing numerical programs for a few years, but I (and many collegues at Los Alamos National Laboratories) dropped both the PCs and VT100s in favor of the Macs. They were more accurate than the Cray machines, and due to the batch sytems were faster to develop on. So development/debugging was done on the Macs, then the programs were batched to the mainframes for full runs which could take 2-3 weeks of Cray CPU time (at ~$700 per CPU hour). The Lab at the time even went so far as to make the Mac the main desktop standard in preference to the PCs for the simple fact that the Phds at the lab could take care of the machines themselves, and there didn't have to be huge overhead for Q-Cleared M$ Monkeys to keep them alive.
I went for an interview last spring (almost made the cut) and was gratified to find Linux Clusters doing a lot of the mainframe work, and shiny new G5s sitting on all the desks of the Sys Admins and Phds doing research for the lab.
So I guess if you meant "special" in the short bus sense I guess you made your point, but for getting real work done they were plenty special.
And let's not even go to the "special" science programs and projects that were developed 1st on the Mac and then ported to the PC once they were working correctly:
Mathmatica
LabView
PGP (yep Zimmerman did it on a Mac laptop at CU Boulder)
The Human Genome project was solved by banks of Macs.
The list goes on:
Even Excel and Word got their shiny interface from the Mac (where do you think Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X, etc came from??? maybe they were in the PARC stuff before the Mac...don't remember)
Funny, that's EXACTLY what CCC is.....a small shell script wrapped in a Applescript controlled window.
Small, sweet and rewritable if needed.
yes you can password the OpenFirmWare. You can even lock down the boot so that no one can boot frm anything except the partition you want them to.
I set up a web kiosk system using OS-X and iCab for a chain of Arby's Restaurunts to replace a Windows set up that they could not keep up and running no matter what they did....someone could always bypass the BIOS settings and screw up the system. After 5 months, the ONLY thing that anyone has been able to mess with is changing the color scheme on the machine to greyscale. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image so that they could build additional systems for their other stores.
By the way, CC is nopthing more than a shell script using the ditto command (a deep copy used to handle the Openstep App framework on OS-X Apps)wrapped in a AppleScript Generated window. Pretty easy and elegant when you see it as an example.
Here's a signature that I used for a while for this very ship:
In days long gone, the captain used to go down with his ship. Now that Windows NT is running Navy warships, the ships go down all by themselves.
There's more than enough blame to go around. One High blame point is the fact that even IF you get the higher degree, the possibility of jobs are fairly small. I've met PhD Chemists teaching High School or working as Administrative assistants at the local telco. My cousin looked for 2 years to get a job w/ his PhD in Molecular Genetic Engineering...now he works as a Software Tester. Another friend of mine looked into getting a PhD in CS until he was that for an Associate Professorship in a back water College (think glorified Teacher Assistant) there were over 600 applicants for a SINGLE posisiton....and this was during the boom years.
To top it off, a great number of the PhDs I've met were stuck in Post Doc positions (Think apprenticeship where you're a slave to the REAL PhD, and get to work for less than 24k per year since it's REALLY only training to be a REAL researcher. You work on the Master's projects and cannot work on, nor propose your own as you still don't know enough about how to do REAL research). I've known people who've been "training" for a real career for over twelve years, and one of my good friends from High School just completed her 20th year as a "trainee" in X-Ray Crystallography.
So the problem isn't JUST w/ education. Those w/ the education have a heck of a hard time using it as there's no one wanting their skills. Even in the "hot" technologies of the time.
Oh and by the way, my dad was a PhD Metalurgist, and he made me think HARD abouut going to the PhD level for those very same reasons. Most Companies will look at a PhD , and say "Well we can get 3 Masters Holders, 10 Bachelor's holders or a boat load of Certificate Holders for the cost of one PhD!" The PhD takes a very strong desire, an ability to focus on your subject to the exclusion of all else, and a good dose of ego to be able to fight your way into a job. You eat an awful lot of Ramen Noodles and don't get a whole lot of pay along the way.
It comes as no suprise to me that this is happenening.....knowledge costs in both time and money, and the US has not been willing to invest in either for the past 20 years....then they complain about brain drain??? There's plenty of unused PhDs from my circle of friends. They just couldn't make any kind of a living from their education.
The good part is that NONE of them have ever regretted the fact that they got the PhD and look to it as one of the most exciting times of their lives.
I've done the manual DB filler also (10,000 snail-mail addresses that were sent on PAPER for me to build a mailing list from for a National Laboratory Symposium)
The main reason was when I worked at a contractor to a National Paging Company about 10 years ago. Here's the list:
-- PHB of project worked in another state. Was always on vacation, and was overheard "I will kill everyone on this project"
-- Code review was trapping PHB at some resort or the other and showing him the program. He would critique it (nothing written about what the damm thing was supposed to do), and send changes back requiring huge rewrites as well as making the next milestone.
-- Everyone worked ~20 hrs per day 7 days per week. I was considered a slacker when I only put in 110 hrs per week w/ a newborn at home.
-- Phone menu system that covered 3 walls of a 10k sq foot office. Even the designers got lost in there every day, and they had rejected voice samples for the "Press one for...." voice. One number in a string would be OK followed by a number that sounded like it was said thru 10 inches of insulation in a whisper.
-- 20 yrs of RDBMS research was thrown out in favor of a custom built (from the ground up) database that crashed every time one message passed thru it (it was supposed to handle 100K concurrent connections)
-- Company stole all the development systems so that they could fleece some investors. They had a lackey in the back room to do the following. Message was sent and system flamed out. Lackey powered off the system, got another working, and repeated until 8 mesages went thru (60 systems flamed all over the ground by that point). It took 3 days to rebuild the charred remains back for development, and we were still required to make that week's milestones.
-- Windows code took over 2 days to compile (I guess that's a feature...less time for it to actually cause damage by running)
-- Some idiot decided that MFC was easy enough to work with (It's C++ after all), so they stuffed the entire MFC code set on top of the Macintosh C++ Libraries unchanged....man talk about a cat fight of code......NOTHING worked. Every call had to pass thru the MFC to the Mac Libraries, and back again so double the effort for ANY action...including touching the mouse or keyboard.
-- I was asked to debug a problem in the Macintosh code. I found it in a very low level library and fixed ~20 other bugs that hadn't even been identified yet. I got yelled at for going outside the code for the one window that the bug had been listed for.
I lasted about 6 months and actually cried on the way to work on occasion. When I quit, the only reaction from the others left behind was jealousy that I had actually had the balls to quit.
I still love the programming process, but now I do it for the odd CGI need, to automate my Sys Admin chores and to study Math and Graphics as a hobby. I'm MUCH happier
Makes sense tho. By going outside the tech sphere, they are probably hoping to find someone who doesn't yet know that they are full of it.
Whoa.......
You just gave the Real Short(TM) summary version of Michael Crichton's "Prey"
You were right, I found it!!!
e s/mer_rovernav_240.mov
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movi