Daniel Boorstin, Librarian of Congress (1975 - 1987) wrote The Discoverers. It's a book about the people and events surrounding some very early, essential discoveries. Some of the discoveries include
Time (remember, prior to clocks each day had hours of differing duration. The 12 daylight hours were longer in the summer, and shorter in the winter.)
Maps and map coordinates (such as the idea that they should be drawn to scale, or that coordinates were not evil)
the Compass
Money
It's history, not the future view you're discussing, but it does give lots of great insights into the discovery of things that fundamentally changed the world.
But really for most meetings, the individual doesn't need to be fully mentally involved
Dyslexia may explain why you don't need to be fully involved. It's my understanding that a lot of things work differently in the dyslexic mind vs. the non-dyslexic mind. Some are good, some are bad. Ask Richard Branson, Scott Adams or Steven Spielberg.
However, most of the population isn't dyslexic, and for them to contribute to or benefit from the meeting, they do indeed need to be fully mentally involved. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for your coworkers, or neighbors, or...
If you really feel that you don't need to be attentive, I'd suggest that you show some respect for your coworkers and simply dial in to the meeting. You'd be showing respect to them by not behaving in a way that annoys the crap out of them, while you're right in front of them.
See the May 1993 issue of Communications of the ACM, which was all about K-12 education. We here in Western culture have a history of telling girls and young women "don't even try doing {math | science | technology}, you can't do it, women are no good at that." And they hear it from both peers and adults. And they hear it from both women and men. When you hear something enough times, you start to believe it no matter how farfetched it is. Modern politics is based on that concept.
Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints...Only a stainless steel (shrew) can be at home in this environment.
Features like stream I/O support were in COBOL in the 80's / 90's. As was linking compiled COBOL to compiled non-COBOL. It was one of the very first portable languages (per Wikipedia). Substringing and multidimentional arrays were easy. And when I took my years of COBOL to C++ class, the instructor told me I was "too structured" - the COBOL I'd been writing was more structured than the C++ he was used to seeing. While a lot of people only needed simple COBOL, it actually had a lot of advanced features available back in the late 80's.
Back in 1961, if you were trying to create a billing system for a big company, your options included COBOL, Fortran, assembly language and not much else. Programmers in the 60's were grateful for the ease of COBOL when used in a business setting, which (back then) consisted mostly of reading punch cards and creating pretty reports for pointy-haired bosses. COBOL made their lives much easier at that time.
Easy to write, easy to structure, very versatile, capable of doing menial tasks to tons of data quickly. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Most computer languages are horrible if you choose to make them horrible. My point is that you don't have to make COBOL horrible, and most COBOL programmers don't.
It's more typing than most languages...but it's not horrible unless an inexperienced programmer chooses to make it horrible. Or unless you haven't spent much time with it in a business environment.
In the '90's I was working for BigTelCo on an ordering system.
Unix / C system "A" would enquire about account details based on any of various inputs (account number, main phone number, etc.). They sent a transaction to a central system "B" app server for which I wrote about 1/3 of the code. Well over 90% of system B was COBOL. Typically we were running about 0.7 sec response times. During that 0.7 sec, our system would:
ID the type of access inputs, look it up in an IMS database, figure out which datacenter (Georgia / Florida / Kansas / Colorado / Massachusetts) had the account, send the transaction there.
Pull the transaction, call a dynamic table to see what data were required (could be changed w/o recompiling or bouncing system), pull the data, create stream-style (not block I/O as the mainframe was used to) data, send it back to Unix for parsing.
Did I mention that part of the routing, and all the dynamic tables, were provided from software written in PL/1? So our COBOL modules were linked with PL/1 to create the final executables.
That's not the most clever or the least wanky system I've ever been on, but the old COBOL girl did pretty good. The Unix / C folks got intelligible data as soon as they figured out how to tweak HP's EBCDIC-to-ASCII tool so the non-alpha, non-numeric characters would be handled. And at that point the data stream looked just like what they'd been passing one another, from C to C.
And yes, the last time I heard, people were still creating wrappers around the mainframe system's feeds so that other C / C++ systems could use the data.
I started in a FORTRAN class on the university's CDC-3600, with punch cards and overnight turnaround of course. Eventually I'd spent enough time hanging around the Physics department that they let me try out the HP 9100-series (9100B, I think: I remember it had TWO memory pages of 192 instructions each). In retrospect, the wallet-sized cards to store your programs were very reminiscent of what a lot of subway systems now use for paper farecards. I tried but failed in my attempt to burn out the plotter with my planetary orbits program, for which I was grateful at the time.
I've seen this happen more often in small companies than in large. When that's the case, I don't think there's a thing you can do about it. If they helped save the company's skin once, ten years ago, then they've been Teflon coated. Nothing you can say or do will stick to them. Regardless of whether their code is poor, or they never bathe, or they demand their own way...they're beyond reproach at that point. Big companies, otoh, have a large enough talent pool on which to draw that they can say "adios muchacho" and replace the annoying staffer with one who's more of a team player.
Northern VA (at least) has both computerized machines and paper color-the-dots ballots. I did paper: I like having an audit trail of my vote. 150 or so people in front of me at 5:45 AM: was done and driving away at 6:15 (still AM).
In this world where people are not allowed to bring thumb drives or cell phones into intelligence agency / military secured rooms...and the agencies want to have absolute control over the computers in use...the desktop will probably stay in demand for a long, long time. After all, these agencies really don't care how inconvenient it is for you to work in their offices: security is their only concern, period. So arguments of "I'm much more productive using my wearable computer" probably won't fly. And it'll be a long time before a wearable computer would be cheaper than a desktop. Even the spook agencies have budgets to meet.
The importance of high resolution in these applications shouldn't be forgotten, either. No small physical display could trump a large monitor. A virtual heads-up type of display might get there, but they're difficult to share.
I expect the desktops will still be around at least until I'm gone.
Actually it's nitrogen, not CO2, according to their website. I'll let the OP update w/r/t whether CO2's thermal characteristics are similar to nitrogen's. Or perhaps CO2 was just a brain cramp.
Lots of organizations donate old cell phones to the underprivileged. The point is that the telcos are required to accept calls from cellphones dialing 911, regardless of whether they have a plan or not. As long as the old cell phone has a charge and a signal, it provides security to folks who might have (say) a problem with spousal abuse, or...
Absolutely right. A friend of mine is at one of the California universities doing and teaching brain research. The brains they get...well, remember that checkbox on your driver's license about "organ donor"? So the pool of volunteers for brain research is made of people who are either very recently dead, or suffering from "borked bits".
When I went back to school for my MS, one of my instructors (from a major think tank for the US Gummint, DC 'burbs) got this question during class one day. He suggested that two Masters degrees - say, an MBA and an MS - were much more useful than a PhD in terms of finding a job.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily get you into a skunkworks, if that was your plan. But if you're expecting to work in a business (vs., say, a scholastic or purely research setting), the combination of two Masters degrees could open a lot more doors than a PhD. Businesses like tech staff who understand business.
And I suspect most of us/.ers are working in some sort of business setting. But that's just a guess.
It could be difficult to buy a truck from Craigslist as the firestorm approaches. Then again, I suspect that UHaul and Ryder occasionally sell their used trucks for pretty cheap. I agree though, it doesn't have to be a new truck.
And remember, even new, a truck's only going to cost about the same price as a mid-range *nix server or a handful of commodity x86 servers. In the grand scheme of things it's just not that big an expense, compared to the loss risks. But ymmv.
If there's a wildfire coming your way, everybody who owns a Civic is going to be at the truck rental places ahead of you in line. Your facility will burn before you even get to the counter.
Buy a truck and park it on the facility property. Or buy two small vans (which would probably have more computer-friendly suspensions) and keep them there. They'll be useful every time the company needs to evacuate ahead of a fire...or move from one office to another...or help the CEO move when (s)he buys a new home...or help relo new employees from out of town.
Anytime there's hardware that can't be replicated in advance in an offsite disaster recovery facility, you really need to be able to move it 24x7. And without the truck, your entire disaster recovery plan goes down the toilet. The truck is the critical path, and needs to be treated as such.
You seem to be assuming that they'd be killed...and then placed in a landfill, or ground up for fertilizer, or undergone some other non-destructive disposal. I would think that they'd be sent to a biohazard incinerator and burned at high temperature for a long time.
God bless all the nerds working on Wikipedia! Her name's Margaret Calvert and she has her own page, although they don't mention the uppercase / lowercase discussions. But yes, she talked on Top Gear about shape recognition and uc/lc issues.
Both the optics and the sensors are at risk. The optics heat up with direct exposure to the Sun's rays. The heating can cause them to crack.
From Jamey L. Jenkins, "The Sun and How to Observe It":
"A catadioptic telescope should never be used for solar projection because of the risk of damaging the internal components of the telescope from the heat of the sun."
Catadioptric = optical system with both mirrors and lenses. Hubble has lots of mirrors, built to be lightweight, but probably more susceptible to cracking as a result.
Let's assume that 50% of Apple's customers are new customers. Consider the other half...
It sounds like half the customers who've bought Apple products haven't thought the product was superior enough to come back and buy another. And I would think that heavy repeat sales would be an indication that the manufacturer had superior products. I'm not as impressed by 50% of their customers being new customers (that's marketing), as I would be by 80% being repeat customers (that's brand loyalty).
Remember - if you bought a Mac fifteen years ago but never bought another Apple product, you're still an "Apple customer". You've had plenty of opportunity to go back to Apple, but haven't done so. What does that say about the product?
The company I work for reads the manufacturer's white papers on their drives. That's been our testing strategy for years; doesn't everyone do it that way?
Slashdot Mirror
The Warsash Maritime Academy uses (or at least used to use) miniature ships to train captains how to maneuver oil tankers.
http://gizmodo.com/5285866/tiny-adorable-oil-tanker-makes-pilots-better-trained-slightly-awkward
Daniel Boorstin, Librarian of Congress (1975 - 1987) wrote The Discoverers. It's a book about the people and events surrounding some very early, essential discoveries. Some of the discoveries include
Time (remember, prior to clocks each day had hours of differing duration. The 12 daylight hours were longer in the summer, and shorter in the winter.)
Maps and map coordinates (such as the idea that they should be drawn to scale, or that coordinates were not evil)
the Compass
Money
It's history, not the future view you're discussing, but it does give lots of great insights into the discovery of things that fundamentally changed the world.
But really for most meetings, the individual doesn't need to be fully mentally involved
Dyslexia may explain why you don't need to be fully involved. It's my understanding that a lot of things work differently in the dyslexic mind vs. the non-dyslexic mind. Some are good, some are bad. Ask Richard Branson, Scott Adams or Steven Spielberg.
However, most of the population isn't dyslexic, and for them to contribute to or benefit from the meeting, they do indeed need to be fully mentally involved. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for your coworkers, or neighbors, or...
If you really feel that you don't need to be attentive, I'd suggest that you show some respect for your coworkers and simply dial in to the meeting. You'd be showing respect to them by not behaving in a way that annoys the crap out of them, while you're right in front of them.
See the May 1993 issue of Communications of the ACM, which was all about K-12 education. We here in Western culture have a history of telling girls and young women "don't even try doing {math | science | technology}, you can't do it, women are no good at that." And they hear it from both peers and adults. And they hear it from both women and men. When you hear something enough times, you start to believe it no matter how farfetched it is. Modern politics is based on that concept.
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/1993/5
Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints...Only a stainless steel (shrew) can be at home in this environment.
Thanks to Harry Harrison for predicting this one.
Features like stream I/O support were in COBOL in the 80's / 90's. As was linking compiled COBOL to compiled non-COBOL. It was one of the very first portable languages (per Wikipedia). Substringing and multidimentional arrays were easy. And when I took my years of COBOL to C++ class, the instructor told me I was "too structured" - the COBOL I'd been writing was more structured than the C++ he was used to seeing. While a lot of people only needed simple COBOL, it actually had a lot of advanced features available back in the late 80's.
Back in 1961, if you were trying to create a billing system for a big company, your options included COBOL, Fortran, assembly language and not much else. Programmers in the 60's were grateful for the ease of COBOL when used in a business setting, which (back then) consisted mostly of reading punch cards and creating pretty reports for pointy-haired bosses. COBOL made their lives much easier at that time.
Easy to write, easy to structure, very versatile, capable of doing menial tasks to tons of data quickly. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Most computer languages are horrible if you choose to make them horrible. My point is that you don't have to make COBOL horrible, and most COBOL programmers don't.
It's more typing than most languages...but it's not horrible unless an inexperienced programmer chooses to make it horrible. Or unless you haven't spent much time with it in a business environment.
In the '90's I was working for BigTelCo on an ordering system.
Unix / C system "A" would enquire about account details based on any of various inputs (account number, main phone number, etc.). They sent a transaction to a central system "B" app server for which I wrote about 1/3 of the code. Well over 90% of system B was COBOL. Typically we were running about 0.7 sec response times. During that 0.7 sec, our system would:
ID the type of access inputs, look it up in an IMS database, figure out which datacenter (Georgia / Florida / Kansas / Colorado / Massachusetts) had the account, send the transaction there.
Pull the transaction, call a dynamic table to see what data were required (could be changed w/o recompiling or bouncing system), pull the data, create stream-style (not block I/O as the mainframe was used to) data, send it back to Unix for parsing.
Did I mention that part of the routing, and all the dynamic tables, were provided from software written in PL/1? So our COBOL modules were linked with PL/1 to create the final executables.
That's not the most clever or the least wanky system I've ever been on, but the old COBOL girl did pretty good. The Unix / C folks got intelligible data as soon as they figured out how to tweak HP's EBCDIC-to-ASCII tool so the non-alpha, non-numeric characters would be handled. And at that point the data stream looked just like what they'd been passing one another, from C to C.
And yes, the last time I heard, people were still creating wrappers around the mainframe system's feeds so that other C / C++ systems could use the data.
I started in a FORTRAN class on the university's CDC-3600, with punch cards and overnight turnaround of course. Eventually I'd spent enough time hanging around the Physics department that they let me try out the HP 9100-series (9100B, I think: I remember it had TWO memory pages of 192 instructions each). In retrospect, the wallet-sized cards to store your programs were very reminiscent of what a lot of subway systems now use for paper farecards. I tried but failed in my attempt to burn out the plotter with my planetary orbits program, for which I was grateful at the time.
I've seen this happen more often in small companies than in large. When that's the case, I don't think there's a thing you can do about it. If they helped save the company's skin once, ten years ago, then they've been Teflon coated. Nothing you can say or do will stick to them. Regardless of whether their code is poor, or they never bathe, or they demand their own way...they're beyond reproach at that point. Big companies, otoh, have a large enough talent pool on which to draw that they can say "adios muchacho" and replace the annoying staffer with one who's more of a team player.
Northern VA (at least) has both computerized machines and paper color-the-dots ballots. I did paper: I like having an audit trail of my vote. 150 or so people in front of me at 5:45 AM: was done and driving away at 6:15 (still AM).
In this world where people are not allowed to bring thumb drives or cell phones into intelligence agency / military secured rooms...and the agencies want to have absolute control over the computers in use...the desktop will probably stay in demand for a long, long time. After all, these agencies really don't care how inconvenient it is for you to work in their offices: security is their only concern, period. So arguments of "I'm much more productive using my wearable computer" probably won't fly. And it'll be a long time before a wearable computer would be cheaper than a desktop. Even the spook agencies have budgets to meet.
The importance of high resolution in these applications shouldn't be forgotten, either. No small physical display could trump a large monitor. A virtual heads-up type of display might get there, but they're difficult to share.
I expect the desktops will still be around at least until I'm gone.
Now when I go to Mapquest and type in "Hottah" they're going to prompt me "Earth or Mars?"
Actually it's nitrogen, not CO2, according to their website. I'll let the OP update w/r/t whether CO2's thermal characteristics are similar to nitrogen's. Or perhaps CO2 was just a brain cramp.
Lots of organizations donate old cell phones to the underprivileged. The point is that the telcos are required to accept calls from cellphones dialing 911, regardless of whether they have a plan or not. As long as the old cell phone has a charge and a signal, it provides security to folks who might have (say) a problem with spousal abuse, or...
Absolutely right. A friend of mine is at one of the California universities doing and teaching brain research. The brains they get...well, remember that checkbox on your driver's license about "organ donor"? So the pool of volunteers for brain research is made of people who are either very recently dead, or suffering from "borked bits".
The posters on this thread risk becoming illiterate.
When I went back to school for my MS, one of my instructors (from a major think tank for the US Gummint, DC 'burbs) got this question during class one day. He suggested that two Masters degrees - say, an MBA and an MS - were much more useful than a PhD in terms of finding a job.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily get you into a skunkworks, if that was your plan. But if you're expecting to work in a business (vs., say, a scholastic or purely research setting), the combination of two Masters degrees could open a lot more doors than a PhD. Businesses like tech staff who understand business.
And I suspect most of us /.ers are working in some sort of business setting. But that's just a guess.
The OP is alright in the head. He just wants to take us higher. He's a sly fox though.
It could be difficult to buy a truck from Craigslist as the firestorm approaches. Then again, I suspect that UHaul and Ryder occasionally sell their used trucks for pretty cheap. I agree though, it doesn't have to be a new truck.
And remember, even new, a truck's only going to cost about the same price as a mid-range *nix server or a handful of commodity x86 servers. In the grand scheme of things it's just not that big an expense, compared to the loss risks. But ymmv.
If there's a wildfire coming your way, everybody who owns a Civic is going to be at the truck rental places ahead of you in line. Your facility will burn before you even get to the counter.
Buy a truck and park it on the facility property. Or buy two small vans (which would probably have more computer-friendly suspensions) and keep them there. They'll be useful every time the company needs to evacuate ahead of a fire...or move from one office to another...or help the CEO move when (s)he buys a new home...or help relo new employees from out of town.
Anytime there's hardware that can't be replicated in advance in an offsite disaster recovery facility, you really need to be able to move it 24x7. And without the truck, your entire disaster recovery plan goes down the toilet. The truck is the critical path, and needs to be treated as such.
"they'll likely be killed anyhow"...
"Your post was not of any assurance..."
You seem to be assuming that they'd be killed...and then placed in a landfill, or ground up for fertilizer, or undergone some other non-destructive disposal. I would think that they'd be sent to a biohazard incinerator and burned at high temperature for a long time.
God bless all the nerds working on Wikipedia! Her name's Margaret Calvert and she has her own page, although they don't mention the uppercase / lowercase discussions. But yes, she talked on Top Gear about shape recognition and uc/lc issues.
Both the optics and the sensors are at risk. The optics heat up with direct exposure to the Sun's rays. The heating can cause them to crack.
From Jamey L. Jenkins, "The Sun and How to Observe It":
"A catadioptic telescope should never be used for solar projection because of the risk of damaging the internal components of the telescope from the heat of the sun."
Catadioptric = optical system with both mirrors and lenses. Hubble has lots of mirrors, built to be lightweight, but probably more susceptible to cracking as a result.
Let's assume that 50% of Apple's customers are new customers. Consider the other half...
It sounds like half the customers who've bought Apple products haven't thought the product was superior enough to come back and buy another. And I would think that heavy repeat sales would be an indication that the manufacturer had superior products. I'm not as impressed by 50% of their customers being new customers (that's marketing), as I would be by 80% being repeat customers (that's brand loyalty).
Remember - if you bought a Mac fifteen years ago but never bought another Apple product, you're still an "Apple customer". You've had plenty of opportunity to go back to Apple, but haven't done so. What does that say about the product?
The company I work for reads the manufacturer's white papers on their drives. That's been our testing strategy for years; doesn't everyone do it that way?