The problem isn't the degree, it's title inflation: most system "engineers" are, in fact, system technicians: managing and maintaining working systems, rather that designing the system (bridging the gap between a real-world problem and various technical solutions.) That someone not have an 'engineering' degree is secondary. The fact is that very few people are really doing any kind of architecture or process design. An MCSE, for example, just teaches you how to maintain and, occassionally, implement a specific kind of solution in a fairly cut-and-dried manner. I wouldn't call it engineering by any real standard.
"Software engineer" is usually less of an exaggeration.
You seem to think the organism is a human life only after reading Descartes. Personally, I think human life begins just after graduate school. Although post-docs are a bit iffy.
Wow, this is some of the most convoluted apologetics I've ever seen. The denial of the security clearance to the investigation team was directly authorized by the president, with the knowledge that it would, indeed, block the investigation of the problem. The AG said as much - I'm astounded by your analogy's inappropriateness.
You don't lose the rights: you waive them in echange for a privilege (attending one institution or another.) This is part of life for many careers and activities, and even relationships. (I have a right to chat with whomever I want; I wave the right to chat flirtatiously with strange women if I want to remain in my current relationship.)
Now that I think of it, there's a bunch of countries that should be on that list but aren't... I really doubt Iran has an extradition treaty, or Cuba, or North Korea for that matter. But those countries have no official diplomatic relationship with the US of any sort...
I'm responding more out of fascination than pickiness.
I don't want to pretend that I remember the exact figure, but I remember a very disturbing study that indicated just how many men admitted they would rape if they thought they could do so with impunity. The number was below 50%, but not by very much.
Your story and others like it rings far too true. For my part, I find Linux and other community-made open-source OS's suitable when I have a stable list of things I expect from the system: file sharing, print sharing, routing, firewall services, web services, etc.
When I want a computer as a flexible environment, however, in which I will install and uninstall games, media players, various productivity applications that I may be trying out, and the like, I just can't imagine going back to Linux. In the 4+ years I tried to use a Linux desktop, I went through more blind alleys, false-promises, aborted projects, package inconsistencies, etc. than I care to recount. When I relegated my Linux system to serve as a general home-office server and moved to a (hardened) Windows as a desktop, I actually regretted the time I spent trying to make Linux work for me as a desktop system. Granted, by the time I moved to Windows, W2K was out and XP was around the corner, and so I probably missed Windows' most painful years.
Now, I prefer my linux headless, or tiny (as in my iRiver.)
The people in the southern reaches of the southern hemisphere do not think it is a hoax: the incidence of skin cancer mushroomed in southern Chile as the hole in the ozone increased. Not the end of the world, but a real and ongoing health hazard.
I don't accept this simplistic formula, that science is only science if it involves experimentation. There are plenty of knowledge-creating practices that I would describe as "scientific" that do no use laboratory or strictly experimental methods: meteorology and climateology are two of them, as are different types of evolutionary and behavioral sciences (some animal behavior study is lab-based, but the more important work is field work.) Observing patterns and creating models based on observed patterns, and making predictions based on those models, is, as far as I'm concern, a scientific posture.
And the "verification" is the same as it would be for a laboratory model: the model needs to explain the extant data, whether laboratory-produced or gathered from the field. Using models to make policy based on field-gathered data is substantially more "scientific" than using wishful thinking based on economic self-interest.
That's why you should distrust the idea of tradition. After all, all those secrets were once innovations - gussying them up in the austere robes of tradition hides the fact that there was experimentation and trial-and-error in their origins. The "art" is really what happens when a "science" gets stodgy and cautious.
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
Um, huh?
Why would a bunch of Windows kids buy Macs?
I have to tell you the truth: I used to dual-boot between Linux and Windows "just for the games." Eventually I got tired of rebooting back to Linux on my desktop system as more and more minor applications ran in Windows. It is a trojan horse, in a way - but not the way you think. Linux wound up relegated to my server.
The drive for interoperability could mean the displacement of OS X by Windows for all but specific applications. This could put a crimp on development for OS X.
More likely: he sells to Google, which lost the buying-war for Flickr to Yahoo and is probably looking for a Flickr-competitor to work with Picasa, Hello, and Blogger. This thing has "acquire me" written all over it.
The article is terse, inapplicable to those many markets which are almost entirely price-sensitive, and ill-supported. Pension policies don't really compete on price; they are about service and ROI.
And people often say that they will take their business elsewhere, but then stick to the cheapest vendor when push comes to shove. Self-report is not the best indicator of actual behaviour, especially for a hypothetical.
The point is that somebody did the heavy lifting and created the exploit. Yet that somebody gets called a "script kiddy," which originally implied someone who used exploits that they wouldn't be skilled enough to produce. The disdain for their relative lack of skills has been changed into a disdain for their lack of ethics, and the term has migrated "upstream" to include the people who could and did, indeed, produce the exploit.
"Script kiddie" has become a moral category, not a technical one. It is meant to express disdain, because people are uncomfortable with the idea that someone could be both clever and unethical.
Where I disagree is the assumption that the "container" or "delivery mechanism" is neutral. The kind of attention and focus you give to games is so starkly different than the attention you give to other media, that I really don't think the same kind of signs - the representations, the scale of experience - really gets through. Playing a game as a game (as distinct from, say, cut-scenes) moves you to an operational, problem-solving, systematic mode of interaction - which in its way is fine, and can even be compelling in its way, and given a kind of semantics (I'm thinking of Sid Meiers games as an instance of that - they really can be a way of thinking about ideology and society, although I do think he has a simplistic progressive notion of history in technology ladders that can be challenged...) But it isn't the same kind of mental state that other modes of aesthetic experience, like novelistic reflection on inner experience or the experience of sensation in the picture-plane offers.
In fact, if game-thinking could complement these other ways-of-seeing and ways-of-understanding, I think it could be quite compelling. But I worry that, due to the incredible time commitment that game-play often demands, in the way that games are designed now to take so much spare time, that it is replacing, rather than augmenting, these other modes of perception.
Even though the grandparent poster was responding critically to my post, I have to defend him in this: his "le sigh" was self-directed at his own formatting problems, not at me.
I remain skeptical about the expressive possibilities (as distinct from the creative possibilities) of games-as-games (the "game-ish" parts of games, rather than the games as containers for stories, visual art and landscapes, etc.) And I believe that a generation that plays games in lieu of a significant informal education in literature and art (an education that has long been too weak in the US, IMO) is going to perpetuate a kind of spiritual poverty, on cognitive grounds. I'm not completely pessimistic - of course I think game-think is adaptive in many ways, and has a lot of possibilities - but I am not as sanguine about it as I used to be: I think I have developed an acute sense of what really is being lost.
It is a real word, just a specialized one from philosophy and the psychology of attention: it refers to a type of attention oriented toward the future. It is the complement to "retention."
And it is, indeed, in my Oxford English Dictionary, albeit as the 'alternative' - that is, American - spelling of the British-styled "protension". I'm afraid the online dictionaries, like Orwell's Newspeak, do not list many of the more specialized terms.
From the New Shorter OED: "3a. Extension in time, duration. b. In phenomenology. extension of the consciousness of a present act or event into the future; an instance of this."
Kyle Orland is right to catch this as sensationalist media pap, but there is another issue with videogames and human development that I think is more important and substantial: the way that games, in conjunction with other media, have affected the nature of attention, protention, and concentration, and how these changes affect the ability for certain types of interior experience (aesthetic, moral, philosophical). Not that it creates amoral psychotics, but I would, casually, make the following observations:
Affect has become a commodity, and videogames make this worse.
We have a generation that completely naturalizes the context of the problems it has to solve, even while it is more flexible about solving those problems. We think of cleverer and more novel ways to make money and become successful middle-class people, without asking about the core values that being middle-class really mean and what alternatives might exist (and particularly alternatives that are not commoditized).
Visually, we do not interact with aesthetic objects the way we used to: the ability to appreciate much great painting requires a kind of dogged patience, a kind of restraint, that is very inconsistent with videogame thinking. (This is why I think that videogame aesthetics is almost - almost - a contradiction.) Likewise with literature, etc.
Finally, videogames are both a culprit and a response to an existing problem: that children do not have an opportunity to "go out and play" in an unstructured way like they could in the past.
I think MMO addiction is also a real problem, but that's outside the scope of the piece.
I bought a nano, and ended up taking it back to get an iRiver 20 gig player for the same price. Supports OGG, stores and displays text files, has FM (I didn't think I would use the FM, but I forgot how much I like "Car Talk") and plays nicer with non-Apple OS's.
My iPod-owning friends envy its functionality. But they have the cachet.
I teach, and have given excellent and poor grades to people of all political and religious persuasions, and I know for a fact that my colleagues do likewise.
It may not be your opinion that is being critiqued, but your ability to defend it. There are some unfair grading moments, it's true (and whether it is in the interests of one ideology or another depends on the discipline - it is often difficult to depart from neoliberal doctrine in economics.) But the "poor grade" complaint is also usually a spurious one - bringing the material that is being graded poorly for review will almost always bring fair results - unless the work really was sub-par.
And, all that being said, a poor grade is not a significant curtailing of speech.
I think the whole Cindy Sheehan thing wasn't that big a deal per se. The erosion of civil liberties - or more specifically, the unchecked growth of the power of the executive branch to engage in an unspecified, vague, and open-ended "war," is the real problem.
The "thought police on campus" thing is completely overblown - every anecdote about conservative opinions being frozen out of campuses turns out to be a deception or a misconception when it is brought to air - or, at worst, something that was already corrected. The David Horowitz talking points are without merit.
The Protestant reformation set off the road to Bible literalism and scriptural infallibility, but the contemporary version of it didn't really take shape until the Anglo-American evangelical practice of the 19th century.
The key point is that the Catholic Church, as an institution, can be said to be older than the Christian bible, and, essentially, its primary editor.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't the degree, it's title inflation: most system "engineers" are, in fact, system technicians: managing and maintaining working systems, rather that designing the system (bridging the gap between a real-world problem and various technical solutions.) That someone not have an 'engineering' degree is secondary. The fact is that very few people are really doing any kind of architecture or process design. An MCSE, for example, just teaches you how to maintain and, occassionally, implement a specific kind of solution in a fairly cut-and-dried manner. I wouldn't call it engineering by any real standard.
"Software engineer" is usually less of an exaggeration.
You seem to think the organism is a human life only after reading Descartes. Personally, I think human life begins just after graduate school. Although post-docs are a bit iffy.
Wow, this is some of the most convoluted apologetics I've ever seen. The denial of the security clearance to the investigation team was directly authorized by the president, with the knowledge that it would, indeed, block the investigation of the problem. The AG said as much - I'm astounded by your analogy's inappropriateness.
You don't lose the rights: you waive them in echange for a privilege (attending one institution or another.) This is part of life for many careers and activities, and even relationships. (I have a right to chat with whomever I want; I wave the right to chat flirtatiously with strange women if I want to remain in my current relationship.)
Now that I think of it, there's a bunch of countries that should be on that list but aren't... I really doubt Iran has an extradition treaty, or Cuba, or North Korea for that matter. But those countries have no official diplomatic relationship with the US of any sort...
I'm responding more out of fascination than pickiness.
When did South Korea sign an extradition treaty with the US? I think Taiwan is, or at least was, a non-extraditor as well.
Anyway, submarine-lair-in-a-volcano works for me.
I don't want to pretend that I remember the exact figure, but I remember a very disturbing study that indicated just how many men admitted they would rape if they thought they could do so with impunity. The number was below 50%, but not by very much.
Your story and others like it rings far too true. For my part, I find Linux and other community-made open-source OS's suitable when I have a stable list of things I expect from the system: file sharing, print sharing, routing, firewall services, web services, etc.
When I want a computer as a flexible environment, however, in which I will install and uninstall games, media players, various productivity applications that I may be trying out, and the like, I just can't imagine going back to Linux. In the 4+ years I tried to use a Linux desktop, I went through more blind alleys, false-promises, aborted projects, package inconsistencies, etc. than I care to recount. When I relegated my Linux system to serve as a general home-office server and moved to a (hardened) Windows as a desktop, I actually regretted the time I spent trying to make Linux work for me as a desktop system. Granted, by the time I moved to Windows, W2K was out and XP was around the corner, and so I probably missed Windows' most painful years.
Now, I prefer my linux headless, or tiny (as in my iRiver.)
The people in the southern reaches of the southern hemisphere do not think it is a hoax: the incidence of skin cancer mushroomed in southern Chile as the hole in the ozone increased. Not the end of the world, but a real and ongoing health hazard.
I don't accept this simplistic formula, that science is only science if it involves experimentation. There are plenty of knowledge-creating practices that I would describe as "scientific" that do no use laboratory or strictly experimental methods: meteorology and climateology are two of them, as are different types of evolutionary and behavioral sciences (some animal behavior study is lab-based, but the more important work is field work.) Observing patterns and creating models based on observed patterns, and making predictions based on those models, is, as far as I'm concern, a scientific posture.
And the "verification" is the same as it would be for a laboratory model: the model needs to explain the extant data, whether laboratory-produced or gathered from the field. Using models to make policy based on field-gathered data is substantially more "scientific" than using wishful thinking based on economic self-interest.
That's why you should distrust the idea of tradition. After all, all those secrets were once innovations - gussying them up in the austere robes of tradition hides the fact that there was experimentation and trial-and-error in their origins. The "art" is really what happens when a "science" gets stodgy and cautious.
Um, huh?
Why would a bunch of Windows kids buy Macs?
I have to tell you the truth: I used to dual-boot between Linux and Windows "just for the games." Eventually I got tired of rebooting back to Linux on my desktop system as more and more minor applications ran in Windows. It is a trojan horse, in a way - but not the way you think. Linux wound up relegated to my server.
The drive for interoperability could mean the displacement of OS X by Windows for all but specific applications. This could put a crimp on development for OS X.
More likely: he sells to Google, which lost the buying-war for Flickr to Yahoo and is probably looking for a Flickr-competitor to work with Picasa, Hello, and Blogger. This thing has "acquire me" written all over it.
The article is terse, inapplicable to those many markets which are almost entirely price-sensitive, and ill-supported. Pension policies don't really compete on price; they are about service and ROI.
And people often say that they will take their business elsewhere, but then stick to the cheapest vendor when push comes to shove. Self-report is not the best indicator of actual behaviour, especially for a hypothetical.
The point is that somebody did the heavy lifting and created the exploit. Yet that somebody gets called a "script kiddy," which originally implied someone who used exploits that they wouldn't be skilled enough to produce. The disdain for their relative lack of skills has been changed into a disdain for their lack of ethics, and the term has migrated "upstream" to include the people who could and did, indeed, produce the exploit.
"Script kiddie" has become a moral category, not a technical one. It is meant to express disdain, because people are uncomfortable with the idea that someone could be both clever and unethical.
Where I disagree is the assumption that the "container" or "delivery mechanism" is neutral. The kind of attention and focus you give to games is so starkly different than the attention you give to other media, that I really don't think the same kind of signs - the representations, the scale of experience - really gets through. Playing a game as a game (as distinct from, say, cut-scenes) moves you to an operational, problem-solving, systematic mode of interaction - which in its way is fine, and can even be compelling in its way, and given a kind of semantics (I'm thinking of Sid Meiers games as an instance of that - they really can be a way of thinking about ideology and society, although I do think he has a simplistic progressive notion of history in technology ladders that can be challenged...) But it isn't the same kind of mental state that other modes of aesthetic experience, like novelistic reflection on inner experience or the experience of sensation in the picture-plane offers.
In fact, if game-thinking could complement these other ways-of-seeing and ways-of-understanding, I think it could be quite compelling. But I worry that, due to the incredible time commitment that game-play often demands, in the way that games are designed now to take so much spare time, that it is replacing, rather than augmenting, these other modes of perception.
Even though the grandparent poster was responding critically to my post, I have to defend him in this: his "le sigh" was self-directed at his own formatting problems, not at me.
I remain skeptical about the expressive possibilities (as distinct from the creative possibilities) of games-as-games (the "game-ish" parts of games, rather than the games as containers for stories, visual art and landscapes, etc.) And I believe that a generation that plays games in lieu of a significant informal education in literature and art (an education that has long been too weak in the US, IMO) is going to perpetuate a kind of spiritual poverty, on cognitive grounds. I'm not completely pessimistic - of course I think game-think is adaptive in many ways, and has a lot of possibilities - but I am not as sanguine about it as I used to be: I think I have developed an acute sense of what really is being lost.
It is a real word, just a specialized one from philosophy and the psychology of attention: it refers to a type of attention oriented toward the future. It is the complement to "retention."
And it is, indeed, in my Oxford English Dictionary, albeit as the 'alternative' - that is, American - spelling of the British-styled "protension". I'm afraid the online dictionaries, like Orwell's Newspeak, do not list many of the more specialized terms.
From the New Shorter OED: "3a. Extension in time, duration. b. In phenomenology. extension of the consciousness of a present act or event into the future; an instance of this."
Kyle Orland is right to catch this as sensationalist media pap, but there is another issue with videogames and human development that I think is more important and substantial: the way that games, in conjunction with other media, have affected the nature of attention, protention, and concentration, and how these changes affect the ability for certain types of interior experience (aesthetic, moral, philosophical). Not that it creates amoral psychotics, but I would, casually, make the following observations:
Affect has become a commodity, and videogames make this worse.
We have a generation that completely naturalizes the context of the problems it has to solve, even while it is more flexible about solving those problems. We think of cleverer and more novel ways to make money and become successful middle-class people, without asking about the core values that being middle-class really mean and what alternatives might exist (and particularly alternatives that are not commoditized).
Visually, we do not interact with aesthetic objects the way we used to: the ability to appreciate much great painting requires a kind of dogged patience, a kind of restraint, that is very inconsistent with videogame thinking. (This is why I think that videogame aesthetics is almost - almost - a contradiction.) Likewise with literature, etc.
Finally, videogames are both a culprit and a response to an existing problem: that children do not have an opportunity to "go out and play" in an unstructured way like they could in the past.
I think MMO addiction is also a real problem, but that's outside the scope of the piece.
I bought a nano, and ended up taking it back to get an iRiver 20 gig player for the same price. Supports OGG, stores and displays text files, has FM (I didn't think I would use the FM, but I forgot how much I like "Car Talk") and plays nicer with non-Apple OS's.
My iPod-owning friends envy its functionality. But they have the cachet.
Why do iPods outsell alternatives that, by all reckonings, deliver more for less?
Brand-name cachet. The Apple brand is its biggest asset.
I teach, and have given excellent and poor grades to people of all political and religious persuasions, and I know for a fact that my colleagues do likewise.
It may not be your opinion that is being critiqued, but your ability to defend it. There are some unfair grading moments, it's true (and whether it is in the interests of one ideology or another depends on the discipline - it is often difficult to depart from neoliberal doctrine in economics.) But the "poor grade" complaint is also usually a spurious one - bringing the material that is being graded poorly for review will almost always bring fair results - unless the work really was sub-par.
And, all that being said, a poor grade is not a significant curtailing of speech.
I think the whole Cindy Sheehan thing wasn't that big a deal per se. The erosion of civil liberties - or more specifically, the unchecked growth of the power of the executive branch to engage in an unspecified, vague, and open-ended "war," is the real problem.
The "thought police on campus" thing is completely overblown - every anecdote about conservative opinions being frozen out of campuses turns out to be a deception or a misconception when it is brought to air - or, at worst, something that was already corrected. The David Horowitz talking points are without merit.
The Protestant reformation set off the road to Bible literalism and scriptural infallibility, but the contemporary version of it didn't really take shape until the Anglo-American evangelical practice of the 19th century.
The key point is that the Catholic Church, as an institution, can be said to be older than the Christian bible, and, essentially, its primary editor.