in linking sundry phenomenon as part of a poorly understood hypothesis that our global climate system may be in some sort of collapse or runaway condition. Its JUST NOT THAT SIMPLE. The jump in CO2 may be real but the presumed jump in temps may
be
more illusory than previously supposed
Of course, you are absolutely right. With Microsoft on one side of the teeter-totter, writhing madly in '96 to recover from its 1994 dismissal of the internet as an irrelevant fluke, and pretty much the rest of the software world on the other side of the teeter-totter, and W3C in the middle, we were lucky
that more MS ideas did not become "standards". They embraced and extended [read, made proprietary changes] to HTML and many standards then and later.
in
other comments here I have mentioned a bit of history demonstrating how standards can foster the success of your company. But it occurs to me that the situation is more pervasive and more universal when it comes to the benefits of standards to folks who develop software.
The essence of the situation is that virtually all of us who develop products or systems are integrators. No matter how much original code we concoct, we no longer write whole systems from scratch. Instead, we succeed or fail according to how well our bit plays with all the other bits that combine to function in the way the users perceive. Any grown-up software engineer simply MUST either look deeply into the work that [many] others have done or trust and understand the standards to which those others have presumably worked.
Thanks! Thats a fascinating story. Though I am not sure how to apply it to computer/comms/electrical standards, it clearly does apply. There was a scandal [to mech-E's] a few years back about Taiwanese knock-offs of name brand or standards-compliant threaded fasteners...inferior materials or incompetant machining brought cheaper products into the market but they were more noted [in the end] for their failure modes than their price. My point, as a ramafication to yours, is that producers who just say that they are complying with a standard are a hazard to the conusumer and to the integrator who depends on that standard to achieve an desired quality of end-product.
Not sure which I am but to make my comment, I must betray a bit of both.
When I got my first software engineer job, a PDP-20
was a cool toy. Back in the day, one thing about DEC that just blew us away was that they actually published the bus standard. Any garage or EE grad could design peripherals to plug into a PDP backplane. It was a defacto standard and it turned a "good" processor family into a great product family because any would-be customer in a laboratory could just about be certain that whatever odd data-capture, storage, display or comms device was needed, someone had developed.
It made DEC's fortunes to multiply the advantages of a [then] cheap new processor by the advantages of a published "standard" architecture. The ironic thing is that when the PC revolution got under way, DEC's response was to emphasize the PRO350, a [by then] relatively closed PDP based architecture over its "Rainbow" product. The IBM PC architecture rules to this day because IBM beat DEC at its own game. Those of us in the early 70's who said "Digital is crazy: they're gonna let everyone else make the peripherals that DEC could be sellng" just didn't get it. Gordon Bell was a chief architect and engineering manager of the original PDP...he did get it, at least back then. There are lessons in the parabola of DEC's fortunes that bear study by any of us, engineers to marketing, who compete in development of technical products. Favorite geek-geezer link is to a
book that recounts the history on which my pathetic career was spent. See also a link to much of Bell's commentary and output since joining Microsoft
1. If as the article says, some jobs go abroad but most of the increase in domestic jobs was absorbed by workers coming here:
a. the H1-B visa doesn't exempt the worker from paying federal income tax. At that point the worker is doing as much good for the country as any other worker
b. the worker is possibly on his/her way to becoming a citizen.
then
2. where's the "extinction"? you still have a programming job being done in america, paying taxes in america and maybe by a "new" american.
When was it ever different?
3. If the US had a net increase in programming jobs despite being in a recovery from an economic aberation that bid up the price of programming talent, even while many programming jobs opened up in places like India, that suggests to me that the world wide demand for programmers has only continued its long upward trend.
While that trend continues, my challenge as a programmer on a US payscale trying to compete when software can be written anywhere that people speak a little english and can get a college education, is to keep up with emerging needs and techniques and to make sure I choose application areas where there is a lock-in for my services or the tools available make me so productive that my wages are not the major factor in the cost of the components or systems I work on.
I am afraid to read the responses! the/. crowd are usually such well spoken, rational folks. There is nothing nice to see here so I am going to move along.
a warmongering idiot running the country, a guy who'll spend us into the poorhouse if thats what it takes to keep the DOD and Homeland Security supplied
with all those hightech, software intensive tools that insure our safety. A programming job that requires a security clearnce just doesn't get farmed out to Bangalore Binaries Ltd and non-citizens need not apply.
Oh...wait...my cubemate just asked me why I was suddenly typing so furiously...
Uh, never mind.
Lower casing all identifiers works only if you have access to all supporting libraries and can make the corresponding changes OR are willing to hand check all references and not bugger up the case of the ones over which you have no control...its a mess.
It is, in fact what I am getting paid to do these days in translating Ada to C++. Ada that was written by multiple departed engineers over multiple years and never got in trouble for having package and variable names [and pretty much every symbol] with f**king random case usage. Its a job! Also, you can't just
awk '{print tolower($0);}' foo.ada > fixfoo.ada
because you clobber quoted strings and comments.
Its an ugly job! [and indeed, case issues are only one of the headaches.]
The page is now unavailable and from the looks of the http error page its an MS server:
The page cannot be displayed
There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.
Please try the following:
* Click the Refresh button, or try again later; it does not normally take a long time for an application to restart.
* Open the www.uwnews.org home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
HTTP Error 500-12 Application Restarting
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* Background:
The request cannot be processed while the Web site is restarting.
* More information:
Microsoft Support
Back in '99 when
NASA gave UWash the money to start the research, they should have set aside a thousand bucks for a bigger box and a Linux/BSD server...even if they are next door to Redmond.
BTW, following the instructions on the error mesage got me back to the same error mesage.
No, you got it about right. See the picture at the
NASA page on the original grant to UWash...it looks just like a mini version of earth.s magnetospheric sheilding of the solar wind.
NASA has this page explaining the physics and why it granted the money to the UWash research team.
And the NASA page responds...The UWASH page pointed to by the article is somewhere behind a cloud of smoke coming out of their poor slashdotted server. 350 comments later, I still cant raise it.
Stylistically, the IBM/mainframe roots of Rexx show in its case-insensitive commands
in the article on the IBM site is a further warning. You will be screwed if you write up anything in Rexx and later have to port it to a case sensitive language like C, C++ or Java unless you are very cautious about use of case...why invite trouble?
mod me down for growsing but when I submitted
an earlier Yahoo/AP story and the more informative
article in Tech Review to/. it wasn't my turn I guess.
And yes, the "subject" is my answer to all this e-voting crap.
In an organism as ancient and lowly as the slime mold, a genetic feedback mech evolved so that cheating would balance with altruism...You should hope your species hangs around as long as the slime mold [> 1 billion years!] see
this article at BetterHumans and elsewhere.
text file vulnerabilty...see my comment about
the ten holes not being a complete list. MSWord
can crash and IE's habit of opening anything it finds out there as long as its claims a MS format
means you can crash your browser by clicking on
a suitably booby trapped DOC file.
Microsoft is having a bad code day. Shocking! I'm shocked I tell you! Heres one the/. editors passed on back on the 7th. MS seems to have passed on it too.
About noon EDT,
InfoWorld got report via Secunia, of a MSWord vulnerability that
can crash a MSIE browser or any Office app that tries to load a properly
poisoned word doc file . It is categorized as a potential DOS attack
though it seems more a nuisance than a nightmare. My employer, a large
and very security conscious federally funded laboratory used to discourage
the use of MSIE and promote Mozilla. Today I find they have completely
disabled all older or unpatched MSIE versons for browsing outside the lab firewalls.
the companies that use them as window dressing "research" for PR purposes. The "robots from science" category might be legit.
A glaring omission
is a category like "robots from industry". Welders,
spray painters and lab technicians who prepare DNA
samples for sequencing engines may lament their lost jobs but few people have any idea how much their Ford or Chevy would cost or how many more decades it
would have taken to crack the human genome without those least spectacular and dumbest of automatons.
Except that I assume the hall of fame sponsors have hopes of keeping public interest in robotics from going all the way to zero, I think its kinda phony.
hmmm thats interesting. Ionic hydrogen couldn't
be that easy to handle though could it? Seems
like its just protons and would want to a plasama
or one bad-ass acid. Didn't sound like the single
bonded N was very stable either but I am not sure I
was getting the article straight.
they either sell the movies [they own the rights to
LOTS and LOTS of movies, new and old and yet to be made.] or if you to rip the movie while you rent it or have a download in the right format, they
will sell you the recorder...they make the bucks at one end or the other...that's the Sony solution to the whole copywrong battle.
This is like Bush talking about using hydrogen to solve the looming oil shortages... How much energy do you put in to the process and the material compared to the amount you can get out of it? These uneconomical fuels are a half assed notion that only have real applications where weight or efficiency are hard constraints and money is not, i.e. space craft propulsion.
on AP back on the 9th and in more obscure places like Hiese.de and North Country times:
2004.10.10: "Feds knock Microsoft footdragging disclosure"
North Country Times, reported Friday
that the Justice Department and the states that brought the anti-trust action against Microsoft are now complaining that: "... the company's current plan "significantly limits the practical usability" of the information Microsoft was compelled to reveal to its competitors." The basis of the complaint is that Microsoft plans to issue the information in the MHT format which is proprietary to Microsoft and only readable via a Microsoft browser. This story was not widely carried and I actually ran across it in heise.de while struggling with the fishy translation of the
German story on plans impose user fees on PCs hooked to the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
in linking sundry phenomenon as part of a poorly understood hypothesis that our global climate system may be in some sort of collapse or runaway condition. Its JUST NOT THAT SIMPLE. The jump in CO2 may be real but the presumed jump in temps may be more illusory than previously supposed
Of course, you are absolutely right. With Microsoft on one side of the teeter-totter, writhing madly in '96 to recover from its 1994 dismissal of the internet as an irrelevant fluke, and pretty much the rest of the software world on the other side of the teeter-totter, and W3C in the middle, we were lucky that more MS ideas did not become "standards". They embraced and extended [read, made proprietary changes] to HTML and many standards then and later.
in other comments here I have mentioned a bit of history demonstrating how standards can foster the success of your company. But it occurs to me that the situation is more pervasive and more universal when it comes to the benefits of standards to folks who develop software.
The essence of the situation is that virtually all of us who develop products or systems are integrators. No matter how much original code we concoct, we no longer write whole systems from scratch. Instead, we succeed or fail according to how well our bit plays with all the other bits that combine to function in the way the users perceive. Any grown-up software engineer simply MUST either look deeply into the work that [many] others have done or trust and understand the standards to which those others have presumably worked.
Thanks! Thats a fascinating story. Though I am not sure how to apply it to computer/comms/electrical standards, it clearly does apply. There was a scandal [to mech-E's] a few years back about Taiwanese knock-offs of name brand or standards-compliant threaded fasteners...inferior materials or incompetant machining brought cheaper products into the market but they were more noted [in the end] for their failure modes than their price. My point, as a ramafication to yours, is that producers who just say that they are complying with a standard are a hazard to the conusumer and to the integrator who depends on that standard to achieve an desired quality of end-product.
Not sure which I am but to make my comment, I must betray a bit of both.
When I got my first software engineer job, a PDP-20 was a cool toy. Back in the day, one thing about DEC that just blew us away was that they actually published the bus standard. Any garage or EE grad could design peripherals to plug into a PDP backplane. It was a defacto standard and it turned a "good" processor family into a great product family because any would-be customer in a laboratory could just about be certain that whatever odd data-capture, storage, display or comms device was needed, someone had developed. It made DEC's fortunes to multiply the advantages of a [then] cheap new processor by the advantages of a published "standard" architecture. The ironic thing is that when the PC revolution got under way, DEC's response was to emphasize the PRO350, a [by then] relatively closed PDP based architecture over its "Rainbow" product. The IBM PC architecture rules to this day because IBM beat DEC at its own game. Those of us in the early 70's who said "Digital is crazy: they're gonna let everyone else make the peripherals that DEC could be sellng" just didn't get it. Gordon Bell was a chief architect and engineering manager of the original PDP...he did get it, at least back then.
There are lessons in the parabola of DEC's fortunes that bear study by any of us, engineers to marketing, who compete in development of technical products.
Favorite geek-geezer link is to a book that recounts the history on which my pathetic career was spent. See also a link to much of Bell's commentary and output since joining Microsoft
1. If as the article says, some jobs go abroad but most of the increase in domestic jobs was absorbed by workers coming here:
a. the H1-B visa doesn't exempt the worker from paying federal income tax. At that point the worker is doing as much good for the country as any other worker
b. the worker is possibly on his/her way to becoming a citizen. then
2. where's the "extinction"? you still have a programming job being done in america, paying taxes in america and maybe by a "new" american.
When was it ever different?
3. If the US had a net increase in programming jobs despite being in a recovery from an economic aberation that bid up the price of programming talent, even while many programming jobs opened up in places like India, that suggests to me that the world wide demand for programmers has only continued its long upward trend.
While that trend continues, my challenge as a programmer on a US payscale trying to compete when software can be written anywhere that people speak a little english and can get a college education, is to keep up with emerging needs and techniques and to make sure I choose application areas where there is a lock-in for my services or the tools available make me so productive that my wages are not the major factor in the cost of the components or systems I work on.
Probably why USA Today is not among my bookmarks.
I am afraid to read the responses! the /. crowd are usually such well spoken, rational folks. There is nothing nice to see here so I am going to move along.
a warmongering idiot running the country, a guy who'll spend us into the poorhouse if thats what it takes to keep the DOD and Homeland Security supplied with all those hightech, software intensive tools that insure our safety. A programming job that requires a security clearnce just doesn't get farmed out to Bangalore Binaries Ltd and non-citizens need not apply.
Oh...wait...my cubemate just asked me why I was suddenly typing so furiously...
Uh, never mind.
It is, in fact what I am getting paid to do these days in translating Ada to C++. Ada that was written by multiple departed engineers over multiple years and never got in trouble for having package and variable names [and pretty much every symbol] with f**king random case usage.
Its a job!
Also, you can't just because you clobber quoted strings and comments.
Its an ugly job! [and indeed, case issues are only one of the headaches.]
BTW, following the instructions on the error mesage got me back to the same error mesage.
No, you got it about right. See the picture at the NASA page on the original grant to UWash...it looks just like a mini version of earth.s magnetospheric sheilding of the solar wind.
NASA has this page explaining the physics and why it granted the money to the UWash research team. And the NASA page responds...The UWASH page pointed to by the article is somewhere behind a cloud of smoke coming out of their poor slashdotted server. 350 comments later, I still cant raise it.
And my kids are all going to HAVE to have one. Anybody see where you can buy these jems?
mod me down for growsing but when I submitted an earlier Yahoo/AP story and the more informative article in Tech Review to /. it wasn't my turn I guess.
And yes, the "subject" is my answer to all this e-voting crap.
In an organism as ancient and lowly as the slime mold, a genetic feedback mech evolved so that cheating would balance with altruism...You should hope your species hangs around as long as the slime mold [> 1 billion years!] see this article at BetterHumans and elsewhere.
seriously, rather sad irony that a breakthrough like that comes to our attention two days after Christopher Reeves passed away.
text file vulnerabilty...see my comment about the ten holes not being a complete list. MSWord can crash and IE's habit of opening anything it finds out there as long as its claims a MS format means you can crash your browser by clicking on a suitably booby trapped DOC file.
...Polymeric nitrogen will (hopefully) be stable once released from captivity. No one knows for sure though ...
OK, you do the experiment, I'll read [or hear] the report;)
the companies that use them as window dressing "research" for PR purposes. The "robots from science" category might be legit. A glaring omission is a category like "robots from industry". Welders, spray painters and lab technicians who prepare DNA samples for sequencing engines may lament their lost jobs but few people have any idea how much their Ford or Chevy would cost or how many more decades it would have taken to crack the human genome without those least spectacular and dumbest of automatons. Except that I assume the hall of fame sponsors have hopes of keeping public interest in robotics from going all the way to zero, I think its kinda phony.
hmmm thats interesting. Ionic hydrogen couldn't be that easy to handle though could it? Seems like its just protons and would want to a plasama or one bad-ass acid. Didn't sound like the single bonded N was very stable either but I am not sure I was getting the article straight.
they either sell the movies [they own the rights to LOTS and LOTS of movies, new and old and yet to be made.] or if you to rip the movie while you rent it or have a download in the right format, they will sell you the recorder...they make the bucks at one end or the other...that's the Sony solution to the whole copywrong battle.
This is like Bush talking about using hydrogen to solve the looming oil shortages...
How much energy do you put in to the process and the material compared to the amount you can get out of it? These uneconomical fuels are a half assed notion that only have real applications where weight or efficiency are hard constraints and money is not, i.e. space craft propulsion.