"There may be policies in place that dictate his actions"
A policy isn't an excuse. Too often in america today, company policy is used as carte blanche to get away with the most abyssmal behavior. I can name you more examples that I've experienced than you can count, things that are just ridiculous. So can everybody else.
IMO, it's all about people's sophistication in reasoning skills being so very poor. Somebody came up with a policy, usually considering the interest of only one side in a multi-party action, and then it became gospel and not to be questioned.
"Most people spend that time [...] stealing IP belonging to the employer."
If this is your impression of what most people do, remind me to never employ you in any capacity. Honestly, if you think that this is a norm then I'd have to post a guard on you 24/7 to make sure you don't engage in other damaging or dishonest behavior.
I don't think most people engage in such spitefulness when treated well. People, in my experience, when treated without trust tend to act in a manner that justifies their treatment. When treated honorably, people tend to rise to the level of their treatment over time.
Me? I'd say get your degree in whatever you want - unless you're going to a top 5 school it won't matter what it's in. If you *want* to be a programmer, then you don't need college to be employed, and academic programs are turning into vocational ones under pressure from industry. Something about managers who want their new hires to show up already knowing everything about everything or work for less than you need to pay your loans. Note that this is a failure of the educational institutions for not telling industry to go to hell and industry for having managers who don't know the difference between a monkey and somebody who can learn.
Whatever you do, unless you move up the ladder, is going to be toast in 5 years or less. Count on it. Then you'll be stuck trying to learn a new skillset so that you can get a new job doing the next hot thing that will be gone in 5 years.
But somebody asking for advice? If you've got a degree or job or are mostly through, get your job, do what you can, but set yourself up to LEAVE IT AND DON'T COME BACK for after your industry collapses or shrinks. If you're just starting, do something else. The promise of CS is ash. If the technical side appeals to you, go into engineering and if the reasoning side appeals, go into math. If you're looking for something other than these, please for the love of god get your degree in something appropriate like psychology or art or english rather than creating little bastardized fields that will leave you unemployable and CS with a bad name.
"The form should not dictate the comment. And that point is where the techie utopians fail."
I'm going to assume you meant "content" here. Even so, content may determine form, but only the first time. If that same form is used by another, it will force the compromises made by the creator of the original onto the author of the new content. This remains true whether the object is a building or a manuscript.
It's just the way things work.
The trick is coming up with a new frame (no, not that kind of frame!) that is less restrictive, knowing that a complete removal of all implementation-based restrictions is not achievable. This is what I think drives this kind of research.
Now, I'm not going to speculate on the usefulness or desire of most people for this particular system. However, the utility will be derived from peope pushing this envelope, hard, in a research setting. This grail led to the WWW. Where will it lead next?
"Wrong. *buzz* You don't get to come back tomorrow. You don't even get a lousy copy of our home game."
I was afraid I'd have to take one. If it was made in the last 20 years, it probably sucks.
"What the scientists you have chosen to believe are telling us that. Others are saying otherwise."
And what do the numbers of climate scientists say?
I don't know, because I've not seen the numbers on this one, but I would speculate that if you stopped climatologists in the street (hah!, they're all in a lab somewhere trying to get published like all the other scientists), you'd get a pretty clear consensus on the matter, based on my past experiences with people in that field.
It's not a scientific answer. But not being an expert in this field, I will go with this one.
"[...] context to a new ice age"
I must reject your use of this straw man argument. In fact, most of the rest of this post is a collection of informal fallacies that have little bearing on the balance of how I replied.
I will restate my observation in the hope that you can see what I'm getting at - the environmental doomsday scenario due to human action has proliferated in the years since it has been demonstrated fairly effectively that determined humans *could* make a very credible attempt at ruining the world for humanity.
"I want a clean environment. However, I also want honest science. Both of these things are important."
What is "honest science"? In my field (NOT climatology), it is very rare to actually have a paper published that is not basically a distortion of the facts to please one political faction or another or to meet some arbitrary metric. I consider this dishonest. I am also in the minority.
The articles referenced by the original post seem to say: the ozone levels in the upper atmosphere were shrinking, we reduced the use of CFCs, now the ozone levels are shrinking more slowly and look to stabilize soon.
In this case it seems reasonable to conclude that it is likely that these events are correlated. Given the fact that the catalysis of ozone by CFCs is fairly well established, it becomes more probable that CFC emission is a cause.
Is this good or bad? I don't think the cost of removing or reducing CFCs is very great given that the only way to find out if they were a problem would be to wait until the ozone layer was potentially catastrophically degraded.
"What I totally agree with you on is that the weight of inaction is huge, but remember, so is the weight of misguided action."
I do not at all fathom how elimination of CFC based processes, a reduction in C02 emissions, or transition to renewable technologies has this huge weight. In fact, none of the solutions that I have seen poposed by the reasonable have nearly as drastic an outcome as you suggest by the comparison, and, in general, have desirable side benefits.
"I really love George Carlin's routine on the environment. He make a single statement that really brings it all into focus. Are humans so arrogant that we think we can destory the earth let alone save it?"
Well... I think one thing that we have learned is that we *can* destroy the earth. There are probably any number of ways to do it, but we certainly have the ability right now to make it uninhabitable for us in a frighteningly short time.
I mean, really. I don't think that it's an accident that the environmental movement's fixation on the destruction of the planet happened after 1945. Before then, it involved more of a quality-of-life issue or a resources vs. consumption issue, not an apocalyptic endgame scenario. The very visual demonstration of the sheer level of destruction that people were able to perpetrate in the form of the nuclear weapon has changed things. Are you willing to bet that if an industrialized country were to bend its will to the task, it *couldn't* destroy the earth?
Not I. And if somebody figured out a way to do it, the only constant involved would be that it would get cheaper and easier to pull it off as time went forward.
"People who defend sensational scientific beliefs are just as contradictory as religious nuts."
Define sensational. In one sense, evolution is "sensational", yet there's no real controversy there. Some consider quantum mechanics to be "sensational", still others the fact that the earth is greater than 10000 years old.
Sensational is not to my way of thinking a good standard to use. Controversy is too easy to create.
"With the exception of spotting a huge space object heading for the planet, doomsday science can be summarily ignored."
What environmental science is telling us is: there's a pretty good chance that they're right, a miniscule one that they're wrong, and the weight on inaction is huge. You bet.
Well, there are many reasons the Itanic failed. It was a great architecture, a neat idea. Shift all of the intelligence in the chip up to the compiler, execute in-order, optimised code, get rid of deep bypassing, etc. Generally, get rid of the extra 50% of the chip that's dedicated to turning an instruction stream into a series of vectors.
Note, it *was* a neat architecture.
Then, everybody got involved. Imagine a roomfull of architecture, compiler, and systems PhD's, each with their own pet idea. And this chip had them ALL in it. Anybody remember the i432? In a way, this was the i433.
BUT. This meant a complete break with the current codebase, and in the final analysis intel didn't have the guts for it. Especially once their hopes for compilers weren't being borne out (once, Intel was a HUGE player in the market for compilers PhD's). So the guys at Intel decided to add x86 hardware compatilbility to this. Then, since their compiler plans weren't working out, they added out-of-order execution.
Now, all of these things had crazy interactions. Suddenly, who knew what it was doing? Then the power... all those units, executing all those dead instructions - it ran HOT. Then the fact that x86 compat and o-o-o were a gigantic boat anchor in terms of chip real estate, driving the cost through the roof pretty much sealed its fate. It became a "server processor". And if you get 7 or 8 P4's for the price of one Itanium... well, your cluster is better served with those 7 or 8 P4's.
Slashdot Mirror
"There may be policies in place that dictate his actions"
A policy isn't an excuse. Too often in america today, company policy is used as carte blanche to get away with the most abyssmal behavior. I can name you more examples that I've experienced than you can count, things that are just ridiculous. So can everybody else.
IMO, it's all about people's sophistication in reasoning skills being so very poor. Somebody came up with a policy, usually considering the interest of only one side in a multi-party action, and then it became gospel and not to be questioned.
"Most people spend that time [...] stealing IP belonging to the employer."
If this is your impression of what most people do, remind me to never employ you in any capacity. Honestly, if you think that this is a norm then I'd have to post a guard on you 24/7 to make sure you don't engage in other damaging or dishonest behavior.
I don't think most people engage in such spitefulness when treated well. People, in my experience, when treated without trust tend to act in a manner that justifies their treatment. When treated honorably, people tend to rise to the level of their treatment over time.
Me? I'd say get your degree in whatever you want - unless you're going to a top 5 school it won't matter what it's in. If you *want* to be a programmer, then you don't need college to be employed, and academic programs are turning into vocational ones under pressure from industry. Something about managers who want their new hires to show up already knowing everything about everything or work for less than you need to pay your loans. Note that this is a failure of the educational institutions for not telling industry to go to hell and industry for having managers who don't know the difference between a monkey and somebody who can learn.
Whatever you do, unless you move up the ladder, is going to be toast in 5 years or less. Count on it. Then you'll be stuck trying to learn a new skillset so that you can get a new job doing the next hot thing that will be gone in 5 years.
But somebody asking for advice? If you've got a degree or job or are mostly through, get your job, do what you can, but set yourself up to LEAVE IT AND DON'T COME BACK for after your industry collapses or shrinks. If you're just starting, do something else. The promise of CS is ash. If the technical side appeals to you, go into engineering and if the reasoning side appeals, go into math. If you're looking for something other than these, please for the love of god get your degree in something appropriate like psychology or art or english rather than creating little bastardized fields that will leave you unemployable and CS with a bad name.
"The form should not dictate the comment. And that point is where the techie utopians fail."
I'm going to assume you meant "content" here. Even so, content may determine form, but only the first time. If that same form is used by another, it will force the compromises made by the creator of the original onto the author of the new content. This remains true whether the object is a building or a manuscript.
It's just the way things work.
The trick is coming up with a new frame (no, not that kind of frame!) that is less restrictive, knowing that a complete removal of all implementation-based restrictions is not achievable. This is what I think drives this kind of research.
Now, I'm not going to speculate on the usefulness or desire of most people for this particular system. However, the utility will be derived from peope pushing this envelope, hard, in a research setting. This grail led to the WWW. Where will it lead next?
"Wrong. *buzz* You don't get to come back tomorrow. You don't even get a lousy copy of our home game." I was afraid I'd have to take one. If it was made in the last 20 years, it probably sucks. "What the scientists you have chosen to believe are telling us that. Others are saying otherwise." And what do the numbers of climate scientists say? I don't know, because I've not seen the numbers on this one, but I would speculate that if you stopped climatologists in the street (hah!, they're all in a lab somewhere trying to get published like all the other scientists), you'd get a pretty clear consensus on the matter, based on my past experiences with people in that field. It's not a scientific answer. But not being an expert in this field, I will go with this one. "[...] context to a new ice age" I must reject your use of this straw man argument. In fact, most of the rest of this post is a collection of informal fallacies that have little bearing on the balance of how I replied. I will restate my observation in the hope that you can see what I'm getting at - the environmental doomsday scenario due to human action has proliferated in the years since it has been demonstrated fairly effectively that determined humans *could* make a very credible attempt at ruining the world for humanity. "I want a clean environment. However, I also want honest science. Both of these things are important." What is "honest science"? In my field (NOT climatology), it is very rare to actually have a paper published that is not basically a distortion of the facts to please one political faction or another or to meet some arbitrary metric. I consider this dishonest. I am also in the minority. The articles referenced by the original post seem to say: the ozone levels in the upper atmosphere were shrinking, we reduced the use of CFCs, now the ozone levels are shrinking more slowly and look to stabilize soon. In this case it seems reasonable to conclude that it is likely that these events are correlated. Given the fact that the catalysis of ozone by CFCs is fairly well established, it becomes more probable that CFC emission is a cause. Is this good or bad? I don't think the cost of removing or reducing CFCs is very great given that the only way to find out if they were a problem would be to wait until the ozone layer was potentially catastrophically degraded. "What I totally agree with you on is that the weight of inaction is huge, but remember, so is the weight of misguided action." I do not at all fathom how elimination of CFC based processes, a reduction in C02 emissions, or transition to renewable technologies has this huge weight. In fact, none of the solutions that I have seen poposed by the reasonable have nearly as drastic an outcome as you suggest by the comparison, and, in general, have desirable side benefits.
"I really love George Carlin's routine on the environment. He make a single statement that really brings it all into focus. Are humans so arrogant that we think we can destory the earth let alone save it?"
Well... I think one thing that we have learned is that we *can* destroy the earth. There are probably any number of ways to do it, but we certainly have the ability right now to make it uninhabitable for us in a frighteningly short time.
I mean, really. I don't think that it's an accident that the environmental movement's fixation on the destruction of the planet happened after 1945. Before then, it involved more of a quality-of-life issue or a resources vs. consumption issue, not an apocalyptic endgame scenario. The very visual demonstration of the sheer level of destruction that people were able to perpetrate in the form of the nuclear weapon has changed things. Are you willing to bet that if an industrialized country were to bend its will to the task, it *couldn't* destroy the earth?
Not I. And if somebody figured out a way to do it, the only constant involved would be that it would get cheaper and easier to pull it off as time went forward.
"People who defend sensational scientific beliefs are just as contradictory as religious nuts."
Define sensational. In one sense, evolution is "sensational", yet there's no real controversy there. Some consider quantum mechanics to be "sensational", still others the fact that the earth is greater than 10000 years old.
Sensational is not to my way of thinking a good standard to use. Controversy is too easy to create.
"With the exception of spotting a huge space object heading for the planet, doomsday science can be summarily ignored."
What environmental science is telling us is: there's a pretty good chance that they're right, a miniscule one that they're wrong, and the weight on inaction is huge. You bet.
Well, there are many reasons the Itanic failed. It was a great architecture, a neat idea. Shift all of the intelligence in the chip up to the compiler, execute in-order, optimised code, get rid of deep bypassing, etc. Generally, get rid of the extra 50% of the chip that's dedicated to turning an instruction stream into a series of vectors.
Note, it *was* a neat architecture.
Then, everybody got involved. Imagine a roomfull of architecture, compiler, and systems PhD's, each with their own pet idea. And this chip had them ALL in it. Anybody remember the i432? In a way, this was the i433.
BUT. This meant a complete break with the current codebase, and in the final analysis intel didn't have the guts for it. Especially once their hopes for compilers weren't being borne out (once, Intel was a HUGE player in the market for compilers PhD's). So the guys at Intel decided to add x86 hardware compatilbility to this. Then, since their compiler plans weren't working out, they added out-of-order execution.
Now, all of these things had crazy interactions. Suddenly, who knew what it was doing? Then the power... all those units, executing all those dead instructions - it ran HOT. Then the fact that x86 compat and o-o-o were a gigantic boat anchor in terms of chip real estate, driving the cost through the roof pretty much sealed its fate. It became a "server processor". And if you get 7 or 8 P4's for the price of one Itanium... well, your cluster is better served with those 7 or 8 P4's.
Pride goeth.