Authors like this fail to appreciate the actual nature of an OS, the Internet, and hardware. I get the impression from reading pablum like this that people see the web browser as some fundamental new technology, above the scope of desktop apps, simply because they use the Internet. Your average user wouldn't know that essentially any app could be written to use the Internet to transfer data, or that the Internet is simply a mindless mechanism for moving data. It's this tunnel vision of "the browser as the Internet" that has really limited development of better Internet technologies. Things like Flash or Java apps can run on their own, but they're always embedded in a browser, leading people to assume the primacy of the browser. I was really kind of surprised over the years to see that Java apps never caught on, while browsers, nonstandard and programmatically inelegant, became the norm. Maybe the new WPF model will garner a bigger following. It'd be nice to have a sane programming model instead of the freakish raft of Javascript/PHP/ASP/CSS/DOM hacks I currently have to deal with, and I know, I know... Microsoft is evil, monopoly, blah blah, but come on! Javascript is too slow to be of any use beyond manipulating the DOM, so you can't write any real programs in it. Even as a display mechanism browsers suck. I can't overlay a div on a video? A dropdown list? It's just sorry.
Current speeds won't really cut it either as even with a cable modem, to get a movie that quality it'll take too long and require a lot of storage.
My feelings exactly. HD discs are going to have a bitrate of 36.55Mbps, which falls well outside the average broadband connection. This means that the majority of the movie will need to be preloaded, which would take ~5+ hours. This also assumes that there is some standardized and convenient IP mechanism/device for Joe User to plug into his TV to begin with. I don't doubt that this will eventually become the case, but I really don't see it happening en masse within even the next 10 years. It's most likely that digital cable TV devices will fill such a role, but they're not network neutral devices, and don't offer much market freedom. I imagine we'll see HD or Blu-Ray run their course for 5-8 years, and then perhaps optical media will fade away. Broadband speeds seriously need to speed up in order to replace physical media, though. I also wonder if we might not see flash based devices come into greater use as physical formats for the future, given the increasing sensitivity of optical surfaces to scratches and fingerprints (and the plummeting cost of flash memory).
Good point. It seems unlikely that something as crude as an advanced ape would ever be able to completely fathom the full nature of reality. The Bell Curve gives us a handful of mental pioneers for the species, and our ability to document and learn collectively has extended the abilities of our science, but there is a limit to what we'll ever be able to formulate, that limit being our brains. We evolved to think of things in a very animal-centric manner, and it's remarkable that we advanced far enough to be as generalized as we are mentally. Maybe if the world had required a bit more intelligence to survive in, we'd be farther along. Brains are expensive, evolutionarily, and like muscles they don't expand without a constant requirement. Now that we've become as successful as we are, we're not likely to evolve any smarter. We'll become like cockroaches, and remain relatively static until intelligence once again becomes a primary factor in survival. Even if we were 20 times smarter, however, how could we ever really master all of the laws of nature? We may design theories that describe all that we can practically account for, but it's presumptuous to say that because our ability to measure things stops at a given scale, reality ends there. If superstrings are accepted, do we stop wondering what the deeper nature of the strings are? Science reminds me of a child that keeps asking "why?" to every given response; the exercise may cover dozens of iterations, but there will ultimately come a "why?" for which there is no pat reply. We'll never know it all, but we'll eventually know as much as we're capable of, which is practically (in the literal sense) the same thing. We'll be able to live longer, happier monkey lives, and that's pretty cool.
I think you're right about this aspect. I haven't had a land line in 3 years, and don't plan on getting one. In my area (Tallahassee), there are two options: Sprint (now Embarq) DSL, or Comcast cable. There is no "naked" DSL available, so you need to shell out about $35/mo for the land line, and then $25 for the DSL. If you go with Comcast, you'll either pay $43 + $17 for the cheapest cable/Internet bundle, or roughly the same for just the Internet. So, assuming you didn't need a land line or cable, you're still looking at ~$60/mo for broadband. Considering that I need cable TV more than phone access, I go with Comcast. I'm amazed by all the people with the options for naked services at low prices. What's up with Tallahassee? Of course, if I were to forgo my cell phones, it would be quite economical to just use Embarq and dust off my old phone. Considering how socially isolated I am, this is beginning to make sense. I wonder about rural users. Supposedly, the telcos aren't adding any new land lines, or users are too far from an exchange, and most rural households have dish television. What do they do? My parents still have to use dial-up, and they live within 10 minutes of a major metropolitan area (Peoria, IL).
Assuming global warming is real, is human caused, and will get worse, what will people do about it? I believe that they will, by and large, continue to practice whatever policy is most economical for themselves. Sure, there will be some people who will buy more fuel efficient cars and try to conserve energy, but they will be those who can afford to do so. It takes a substantial initial investment to buy a hybrid car (or any new car, for that matter), to buy fuel-efficient windows, to buy solar panels, etc. Until alternative energy sources and newer, more efficient energy use technologies are cheaper than the status quo, little will change. At best, our CO2 emissions won't grow as much as they have been, but they won't substantially decrease. If the standard argument for current CO2 levels being way too high already is accurate, we're screwed anyway. Wishful thinking about "green lifestyles" and media noise about global warming aren't going to affect things in real life. It's simple economics. What is needed from those in the activist camp are pragmatic solutions - cheaper alternate energy sources and plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. A pragmatic solution is one that makes sense to the individual consumer. CDs replaced cassette tapes because they offered better quality. No one had to be shouted into making the switch, it just proceeded as a matter of choice. If fuel cell cars or wind power plants are going to become the new standard, they will also have to offer an obvious and compelling value to do so. Anything else is an incomplete plan. Quitting smoking is the kindest analogy I can think of for people changing their behavior due primarily to a suspected risk. The smoking risk is thoroughly proven, and quitting smoking actually saves the user money, yet plenty of people continue to smoke. With global warming, no one has precedent to relate the risk to, and changing is a sacrifice. Without a "no-brainer" reason for our carbon energy system to change, I doubt it's going to. If the government is to do anything about the carbon issue, I think that money would be best spent on sequestering atmospheric CO2, since we're assuming that's the problem, and funding research for "clean" fuels. Any ham-handed legislation to try to force individual change would suffer the same fate as prohibition.
10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?
Not particularly. I think that you're overstating the case to say that Ritalin is speed. Ritalin has a much slower onset, and therefore is not as reinforcing. Kids with genuine ADD actually tend to feel "better" off of the drug, and ADD kids who were treated with Ritalin prove less likely to abuse illegal drugs later in life than those left untreated. Ritalin has been researched and reviewed more than almost any other drug, and found to be safe and effective. What's also hard to appreciate is the fact that such drugs affect different people differently. Some people do get a rush from taking Ritalin, particularly if they insuffulate it. Some feel simply calmed. Some feel anxious. It's not uniformly a euphoriant or even reliably performance enhancing. It all depends on the brain chemistry of the user. The problem with every psychotropic drug (or any prescription drug) is that there will always be some people who are incorrectly diagnosed, and medicated needlessly. I don't doubt that there are kids who have something other than ADD, but who were hastily diagnosed by a doctor under duress from their parents, or simply because they're poor doctors. It's not the drugs that are bad, however, it's the doctors. Ritalin can be a godsend for someone who really needs it, such as myself. Without it, I often find myself locked out of my own brain, unable to initiate or sustain a train of thought. My brain does what it wants, and I'm at its whim. With it, I am able to simply think and have control over what I think about. Not better or faster or happier, just normally, like everyone else can. Whether it's natural or right or whatever isn't of concern to me. Humans have learned to manipulate chemistry to our advantage, and we'll continue to do so. It's simply another tool.
I've done multimedia CD-ROM programming, 3D development, web development, and traditional desktop app development. These are all good jobs, but they're also prone to technology drift and don't necessarily pay very well. I've recently been heavily involved in creating and maintaining databases, which has been relatively easy to pick up compared to the raft of technologies involved in web development. In looking at jobs on Monster a while ago, I found that DB admins are in demand, and very well paid. The pay/difficulty ratio is more attractive than many programming positions. As much as I like programming, if I need to find a new job in the future, I'm skewing towards databases.
We were pretty much warned our careers were over, automation was here to generate what we as professionals had studied years to create.
I vaguely recall that fad as well. A lot of executives were jazzed about the idea, as they seemed to assume that software was rote and procedural anyway. They viewed programmers as simple translators, not realizing that program code doesn't just facilitate the resulting software, but was the software. Regardless of how many tools you devise to commoditize the basic functions of software, the effort required to actually make it is proportional to the complexity of describing its total functionality. You'll just end up having to specify all of the procedures involved, anyway, whether you do it in code or through some meta-coding tool. By the same token, code checkers can't know what your intentions are for every variable and class relationship. They can tell you if you generate invalid or null variables, or if a function is orphaned, stuff that is strictly boolean. Beyond mistakes like that, you'll have to tell the checker in explicit manners what to look for, negating the benefit of the tool. We have time saving techniques already. They're called code libraries, design patterns, and error handling.
The idea of erring on the side of caution can be invoked to force any kind of change. It's one of the screeds I would often get against me being an athiest ("what if you're wrong? You'll go to hell."). Erring on the side of caution is a tactic best used when one has a reasonable concern about a proven danger, like wearing a seatbelt or buying car insurance. A proven risk is addressed at a modest cost. One of the things that strikes me as unusual about global warming in the media is the unquestioned assumption that warmer conditions would be uniformly bad. You hear about a desert expanding in a given direction, but not about the possibility of some other location becoming more arable. At least the ozone layer made some sense. Increased radiation is demonstrably bad for your skin. A 3 degree increase in mean temperature, though? Aside from rising sea levels (a few inches) along coastlines, anything else is speculation.
I know that a million tons sounds like a lot, but consider that the total atmosphere is estimated at about 5,000 trillion metric tons. A million is only.00001% of a trillion. I think that as humans we tend to think about things in relation to our own scale. If we live in a city, we look around us at the density and activity of other humans and extrapolate that as the norm. We forget that the majority of the earth's surface is undeveloped. Also, 6 billion people sounds like a lot of people, but they would all fit comfortably in the grand canyon.
I hear your points, but I'm not ready to chuck drug regimens just because of indefinate duration of therapy. If there is a problem in the system, it's one of knowledge, both with the practitioners and the research community. Most antidepressants are prescribed by general practitioners, who seem to have very little knowledge of both the drugs and of diagnosing psychiatric conditions. I've suffered with depression and derealization (both of which raged in my drug/alcohol-virgin body for years) and went to several GPs who all gave me the mildest SSRIs they felt comfortable with, none of which helped. I tried numerous diet/supplement regimens which did nothing. I was ready to crawl into a hole when I finally went to a proper psychiatrist who had me feeling normal again within a week. The guy knew his psychiatry and pharmacology. The drugs he prescribed were generics, and cost me very little. Now, on the other hand I'm quite sure that there are people who aren't experiencing debilitating mental problems who are prescribed psychotropic drugs anyway. They were still able to function, and the severity of their problem didn't warrant drug intervention. These are the people who should follow your advice. Mental illness reminds me a great deal of diabetes in this regard. Mild cases can be probably be managed with diet and lifestyle changes. More severe cases will benefit from drugs. It's up to a competent doctor to make the call. Also, as I mentioned, the medical research on mental illness is pretty primitive. Both the causes of the disorders and the action of the drugs involved are pretty simplified. To assume that something like depression is a single disorder, and is governed by a handful of neurotransmitters is silly. Moreover, to treat mental disorders as something above other organic disorders is plain wrong. Most of the currently approved antidepressants are equally effective analgesics, and many anti-inflammatory drugs are effective antidepressants. Just becase someone feels sad along with all of their other physical discomforts doesn't make it different.
Totally agree. There seems to be this supernatural treatment of things brain related which sees consciousness as some exaulted entity above the brain, instead of being the output of the brain. A good example is the growing correlation of heart disease with depression and "stress." Instead of assuming that both derive from some common physical cause, the discussions revolve around how we should try to be less stressed and negative, assuming that we can will ourselves into health. Another good example from this topic tree is the high suicide rate amongst sufferers of psoriasis. It is tactitly asumed that this is due to people's conscious reaction to the unsightly appearance of and pain from the lesions, instead of more rationally assuming that the brain is also physically affected by whatever tangible process is causing the psoriasis. How is it that we can all relate to the fact that chemicals can alter our mental state, but fail to appreciate the reason for that? Behavior is just as subject to chemical processes as any other organ. Medical science has a long way to go.
Great point. Depression itself behaves like a drug. Much like one cannot perform any refined tasks while stone drunk, it's impossible to think or feel differently when depressed. Your very hardware for thinking is distorted, so the output is screwed up at a level below any type of control.
There are some types of things that counseling can address, mainly techniques for evaluating your thoughts. The utility of therapy lies in the input of thoughts (words from your therapist) generated by a brain other than your own. If your own brain can't form productive thoughts, you can benefit from one that does. It doesn't work for everyone, though. If your brain is beyond the ability to incorporate such help, you need something lower level (drugs, ECT).
I've actually found that when I'm depressed, my mind is useless. I can't keep a thought in my head, or even comprehend the environment around me. My senses are fuzzy and I feel like a robot. The world actually appears darker and fuzzier. Far from being creative and intelligent, I become blank and mindless. All motivation and drive are gone. I felt like I was dying. I was barely able to keep up with my job when I was depressed, and projects were pretty simple and slow back then. I'd never be able to tackle the projects I'm doing now if I were depressed. As far as emotions, though I did experience deeper emotions during the early phases of my depressions, they were all sadness. The sadness perpetuates itself, like a deepening groove on a record, so that nothing else gets played. All connections to prior emotions wither, and they become only an idea. You forget what it was ever like to feel differently, and lose hope that you ever will. Depression is so insidious, too. You can't point to a day when it occurs. It's like the slow buildup of dust on the TV screen, fading out the vibrancy. When it's finally removed, the world stands out in vivid contrast to the dimness. It always amazes me when that happens.
Salient post. Indeed, there are some jobs "going overseas," but it doesn't stand to reason that the entire field is going with it, or that new jobs/technologies will not be created in the future. The main article seems alarmist. OMG, we're running out of coders, we'll fall behind! If this indeed bears out, it's likely that talent will begin to move here. It's why most of us are here. If there are good paying jobs in America and no one is applying for them, the free market will pull in required labor. No one is applying to do a lot of the low-wage manual labor jobs, for example, so Mexicans are coming here to pick up the slack. Trying to prevent foreign outsourcing or competition is a temporary, reactionist solution to a percieved problem. It will only result in ever greater global pressures on an artificially inflated wage structure, and degrade our eventual global competitiveness. A parallel would be astronauts in the ISS. Without the pull of gravity, their muscles atrophy. They must exercise vigilantly to retain their strength, so they can function back on Earth. They won't die if they don't, but after too long they'll be unfit to cope with gravity when they finally return. It's a force we must adjust to. You can ignore the cost or quality of Indian programmers or Chinese sysadmins, but that doesn't make them disappear. They will still be there and still affect you, visibly or no.
Parent has taken the words from my mouth. There seems to be a trend in many technologies of quality in the first generation of a new system (paradigm shifts) being lower than the standard for the prior generation. Digital photos have replaced film for most people, but most people's printouts aren't that great (or even existant). Cell phones have replaced land lines, but the voice quality is worse. Etc. Now, "Web 2.0" apps are supposedly replacing traditional OS apps, but they're slow and awkward to program. This doesn't mean that the technology will fail, but it's going to be crappy for a while. It will gradually standardize and improve, until the next wave replaces it.
I've always been fascinated with the great subglacial lakes. The residence time of the water is about a million years. Now that's some stale water. It's also under enormous pressure, and contains 50x as much oxygen as a typical freshwater lake.
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I wore glasses from age 10 until 30, when I tried contacts. I can safely say that I see much better now than I ever did. Glasses distort the visual field by nature of the fact that they represent the view a small distance in front of the eye. This screws with accurate depth perception. They're also prone to getty dirty, while contacts are cleaned every time you blink. I was agog at how vivid and "realisitic" the world looked that first week I got contacts.
If game companies get away with overworking or underpaying their employees, it's only because there is apparently an oversupply of coders eager to work in games. This is a lot like professional acting or singing. Everybody wants to do it, and those who aren't the best at it won't get any great reward, but may still be happy to be involved on some level. Sooner or later, the invisible hand will set a steady scale rate for developers with the requisite experience. What is probably most needed are HR people who are able too weed out the enthusiastic but mediocre from the pool of qualified candidates. Working a clueless hack to death isn't going to do anything to help your quality or release date, and as the industry matures, I think compensation levels will as well. Too much money is at stake to play Monty Burns with the workforce.
It seems to me that computer algorithms operating on simple algebraic equations accomplish the same things as the visual/mental shortcuts done in something like calculus, while making the process more clear. All of math is just manipulating ratios, to various degrees of procedures and relationships. Computers are best at the simple stuff (adding), so it makes less sense to try applying advanced math to a computer function. You'll have to break it down to functions within the #Math library at some point. Just write the correct loops and conditionals. Math evolved to help people manipulate numbers in a manner to best exploit the limits of human calculation. Now that we have computers, those symbolic systems aren't as germaine. The concepts still apply (geometry,statistics,set theory), but the process is different. In this light, perhaps schools should continue teaching math theory, but move manipulation and execution over to computer programming. Half the difficulty in learning math was remembering syntax and shortcuts that have nno analogue in the computer.
My prior boss at a lrage department within a State University was taken the the concept of XML many years ago when it first became a popular buzzword. "We've got to make everything XML!" he was often heard to say, and relishes the chances to demonstrate his knowledge of the term around higher-ups. As a result, all of the content for the web pages we were working on became text files in various folders. Some held one piece of data, some held hundreds. He essentially re-created the database using the folder tree as relationships. For this, he was promoted, and later stolen away by another company. I was left to maintain the sea of non-standard xml files of various names, and no-one listened to me because I obviously didn't undersatnd XML.
There is only one office in my building that doesn't ahve a window, and I snagged it up right away. In my prior office, I was always fighting the glare through the blinds, or wasting time watching the lizards fight our on the central air unit. I put a nice halogen lamp in the corner of my new office, which bathes the room in a low level of yellow light. Just enough to read easily. My office is also relatively isolated from sound, which can get very distracting, especially conversation, as your mind tries to interpret it even if you don't care to. As everyone has said, a comfortable chair is important. I like something I can lean back in, and pivot around on. I don't care for arms on my chair. It also has to be quiet; no cracks and squeaks when I shift positions. Finally, if you don't already have several monitors, get some. Three 17" LCDs can be had for about $600, and give you plenty of usable screen space. Getting back to your immediate topic, I'd just suggest raiding the office for any unused tables or desks, and building a surface suitable to your requirements. I was originally given an official computer station, with a pullout keyboard tray, which I quickly ditched in favor of a regular, flat desk that was just about my typing height. With a little discretion and the help of a co-worker, you can probably appropriate something useful.
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We'll survive by procreating. It's seemed to work in the past, and I reason that it will continue to do so.
Authors like this fail to appreciate the actual nature of an OS, the Internet, and hardware. I get the impression from reading pablum like this that people see the web browser as some fundamental new technology, above the scope of desktop apps, simply because they use the Internet. Your average user wouldn't know that essentially any app could be written to use the Internet to transfer data, or that the Internet is simply a mindless mechanism for moving data. It's this tunnel vision of "the browser as the Internet" that has really limited development of better Internet technologies. Things like Flash or Java apps can run on their own, but they're always embedded in a browser, leading people to assume the primacy of the browser. I was really kind of surprised over the years to see that Java apps never caught on, while browsers, nonstandard and programmatically inelegant, became the norm. Maybe the new WPF model will garner a bigger following. It'd be nice to have a sane programming model instead of the freakish raft of Javascript/PHP/ASP/CSS/DOM hacks I currently have to deal with, and I know, I know... Microsoft is evil, monopoly, blah blah, but come on! Javascript is too slow to be of any use beyond manipulating the DOM, so you can't write any real programs in it. Even as a display mechanism browsers suck. I can't overlay a div on a video? A dropdown list? It's just sorry.
My feelings exactly. HD discs are going to have a bitrate of 36.55Mbps, which falls well outside the average broadband connection. This means that the majority of the movie will need to be preloaded, which would take ~5+ hours. This also assumes that there is some standardized and convenient IP mechanism/device for Joe User to plug into his TV to begin with. I don't doubt that this will eventually become the case, but I really don't see it happening en masse within even the next 10 years. It's most likely that digital cable TV devices will fill such a role, but they're not network neutral devices, and don't offer much market freedom.
I imagine we'll see HD or Blu-Ray run their course for 5-8 years, and then perhaps optical media will fade away. Broadband speeds seriously need to speed up in order to replace physical media, though.
I also wonder if we might not see flash based devices come into greater use as physical formats for the future, given the increasing sensitivity of optical surfaces to scratches and fingerprints (and the plummeting cost of flash memory).
Good point. It seems unlikely that something as crude as an advanced ape would ever be able to completely fathom the full nature of reality. The Bell Curve gives us a handful of mental pioneers for the species, and our ability to document and learn collectively has extended the abilities of our science, but there is a limit to what we'll ever be able to formulate, that limit being our brains. We evolved to think of things in a very animal-centric manner, and it's remarkable that we advanced far enough to be as generalized as we are mentally. Maybe if the world had required a bit more intelligence to survive in, we'd be farther along. Brains are expensive, evolutionarily, and like muscles they don't expand without a constant requirement. Now that we've become as successful as we are, we're not likely to evolve any smarter. We'll become like cockroaches, and remain relatively static until intelligence once again becomes a primary factor in survival.
Even if we were 20 times smarter, however, how could we ever really master all of the laws of nature? We may design theories that describe all that we can practically account for, but it's presumptuous to say that because our ability to measure things stops at a given scale, reality ends there. If superstrings are accepted, do we stop wondering what the deeper nature of the strings are? Science reminds me of a child that keeps asking "why?" to every given response; the exercise may cover dozens of iterations, but there will ultimately come a "why?" for which there is no pat reply.
We'll never know it all, but we'll eventually know as much as we're capable of, which is practically (in the literal sense) the same thing. We'll be able to live longer, happier monkey lives, and that's pretty cool.
I think you're right about this aspect. I haven't had a land line in 3 years, and don't plan on getting one. In my area (Tallahassee), there are two options: Sprint (now Embarq) DSL, or Comcast cable. There is no "naked" DSL available, so you need to shell out about $35/mo for the land line, and then $25 for the DSL. If you go with Comcast, you'll either pay $43 + $17 for the cheapest cable/Internet bundle, or roughly the same for just the Internet. So, assuming you didn't need a land line or cable, you're still looking at ~$60/mo for broadband. Considering that I need cable TV more than phone access, I go with Comcast. I'm amazed by all the people with the options for naked services at low prices. What's up with Tallahassee?
Of course, if I were to forgo my cell phones, it would be quite economical to just use Embarq and dust off my old phone. Considering how socially isolated I am, this is beginning to make sense.
I wonder about rural users. Supposedly, the telcos aren't adding any new land lines, or users are too far from an exchange, and most rural households have dish television. What do they do? My parents still have to use dial-up, and they live within 10 minutes of a major metropolitan area (Peoria, IL).
Assuming global warming is real, is human caused, and will get worse, what will people do about it? I believe that they will, by and large, continue to practice whatever policy is most economical for themselves. Sure, there will be some people who will buy more fuel efficient cars and try to conserve energy, but they will be those who can afford to do so. It takes a substantial initial investment to buy a hybrid car (or any new car, for that matter), to buy fuel-efficient windows, to buy solar panels, etc. Until alternative energy sources and newer, more efficient energy use technologies are cheaper than the status quo, little will change. At best, our CO2 emissions won't grow as much as they have been, but they won't substantially decrease. If the standard argument for current CO2 levels being way too high already is accurate, we're screwed anyway. Wishful thinking about "green lifestyles" and media noise about global warming aren't going to affect things in real life. It's simple economics.
What is needed from those in the activist camp are pragmatic solutions - cheaper alternate energy sources and plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. A pragmatic solution is one that makes sense to the individual consumer. CDs replaced cassette tapes because they offered better quality. No one had to be shouted into making the switch, it just proceeded as a matter of choice. If fuel cell cars or wind power plants are going to become the new standard, they will also have to offer an obvious and compelling value to do so. Anything else is an incomplete plan.
Quitting smoking is the kindest analogy I can think of for people changing their behavior due primarily to a suspected risk. The smoking risk is thoroughly proven, and quitting smoking actually saves the user money, yet plenty of people continue to smoke. With global warming, no one has precedent to relate the risk to, and changing is a sacrifice. Without a "no-brainer" reason for our carbon energy system to change, I doubt it's going to.
If the government is to do anything about the carbon issue, I think that money would be best spent on sequestering atmospheric CO2, since we're assuming that's the problem, and funding research for "clean" fuels. Any ham-handed legislation to try to force individual change would suffer the same fate as prohibition.
10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?
Not particularly.
I think that you're overstating the case to say that Ritalin is speed. Ritalin has a much slower onset, and therefore is not as reinforcing. Kids with genuine ADD actually tend to feel "better" off of the drug, and ADD kids who were treated with Ritalin prove less likely to abuse illegal drugs later in life than those left untreated. Ritalin has been researched and reviewed more than almost any other drug, and found to be safe and effective.
What's also hard to appreciate is the fact that such drugs affect different people differently. Some people do get a rush from taking Ritalin, particularly if they insuffulate it. Some feel simply calmed. Some feel anxious. It's not uniformly a euphoriant or even reliably performance enhancing. It all depends on the brain chemistry of the user.
The problem with every psychotropic drug (or any prescription drug) is that there will always be some people who are incorrectly diagnosed, and medicated needlessly. I don't doubt that there are kids who have something other than ADD, but who were hastily diagnosed by a doctor under duress from their parents, or simply because they're poor doctors. It's not the drugs that are bad, however, it's the doctors.
Ritalin can be a godsend for someone who really needs it, such as myself. Without it, I often find myself locked out of my own brain, unable to initiate or sustain a train of thought. My brain does what it wants, and I'm at its whim. With it, I am able to simply think and have control over what I think about. Not better or faster or happier, just normally, like everyone else can. Whether it's natural or right or whatever isn't of concern to me. Humans have learned to manipulate chemistry to our advantage, and we'll continue to do so. It's simply another tool.
I've done multimedia CD-ROM programming, 3D development, web development, and traditional desktop app development. These are all good jobs, but they're also prone to technology drift and don't necessarily pay very well. I've recently been heavily involved in creating and maintaining databases, which has been relatively easy to pick up compared to the raft of technologies involved in web development. In looking at jobs on Monster a while ago, I found that DB admins are in demand, and very well paid. The pay/difficulty ratio is more attractive than many programming positions. As much as I like programming, if I need to find a new job in the future, I'm skewing towards databases.
I'm guessing it's a hairy woman. Maybe that's an undocumented side effect of exposure to aerogel.
I vaguely recall that fad as well. A lot of executives were jazzed about the idea, as they seemed to assume that software was rote and procedural anyway. They viewed programmers as simple translators, not realizing that program code doesn't just facilitate the resulting software, but was the software. Regardless of how many tools you devise to commoditize the basic functions of software, the effort required to actually make it is proportional to the complexity of describing its total functionality. You'll just end up having to specify all of the procedures involved, anyway, whether you do it in code or through some meta-coding tool.
By the same token, code checkers can't know what your intentions are for every variable and class relationship. They can tell you if you generate invalid or null variables, or if a function is orphaned, stuff that is strictly boolean. Beyond mistakes like that, you'll have to tell the checker in explicit manners what to look for, negating the benefit of the tool.
We have time saving techniques already. They're called code libraries, design patterns, and error handling.
The idea of erring on the side of caution can be invoked to force any kind of change. It's one of the screeds I would often get against me being an athiest ("what if you're wrong? You'll go to hell."). Erring on the side of caution is a tactic best used when one has a reasonable concern about a proven danger, like wearing a seatbelt or buying car insurance. A proven risk is addressed at a modest cost.
One of the things that strikes me as unusual about global warming in the media is the unquestioned assumption that warmer conditions would be uniformly bad. You hear about a desert expanding in a given direction, but not about the possibility of some other location becoming more arable. At least the ozone layer made some sense. Increased radiation is demonstrably bad for your skin. A 3 degree increase in mean temperature, though? Aside from rising sea levels (a few inches) along coastlines, anything else is speculation.
I know that a million tons sounds like a lot, but consider that the total atmosphere is estimated at about 5,000 trillion metric tons. A million is only .00001% of a trillion.
I think that as humans we tend to think about things in relation to our own scale. If we live in a city, we look around us at the density and activity of other humans and extrapolate that as the norm. We forget that the majority of the earth's surface is undeveloped. Also, 6 billion people sounds like a lot of people, but they would all fit comfortably in the grand canyon.
I hear your points, but I'm not ready to chuck drug regimens just because of indefinate duration of therapy. If there is a problem in the system, it's one of knowledge, both with the practitioners and the research community. Most antidepressants are prescribed by general practitioners, who seem to have very little knowledge of both the drugs and of diagnosing psychiatric conditions. I've suffered with depression and derealization (both of which raged in my drug/alcohol-virgin body for years) and went to several GPs who all gave me the mildest SSRIs they felt comfortable with, none of which helped. I tried numerous diet/supplement regimens which did nothing. I was ready to crawl into a hole when I finally went to a proper psychiatrist who had me feeling normal again within a week. The guy knew his psychiatry and pharmacology. The drugs he prescribed were generics, and cost me very little.
Now, on the other hand I'm quite sure that there are people who aren't experiencing debilitating mental problems who are prescribed psychotropic drugs anyway. They were still able to function, and the severity of their problem didn't warrant drug intervention. These are the people who should follow your advice.
Mental illness reminds me a great deal of diabetes in this regard. Mild cases can be probably be managed with diet and lifestyle changes. More severe cases will benefit from drugs. It's up to a competent doctor to make the call.
Also, as I mentioned, the medical research on mental illness is pretty primitive. Both the causes of the disorders and the action of the drugs involved are pretty simplified. To assume that something like depression is a single disorder, and is governed by a handful of neurotransmitters is silly. Moreover, to treat mental disorders as something above other organic disorders is plain wrong. Most of the currently approved antidepressants are equally effective analgesics, and many anti-inflammatory drugs are effective antidepressants. Just becase someone feels sad along with all of their other physical discomforts doesn't make it different.
Totally agree. There seems to be this supernatural treatment of things brain related which sees consciousness as some exaulted entity above the brain, instead of being the output of the brain. A good example is the growing correlation of heart disease with depression and "stress." Instead of assuming that both derive from some common physical cause, the discussions revolve around how we should try to be less stressed and negative, assuming that we can will ourselves into health. Another good example from this topic tree is the high suicide rate amongst sufferers of psoriasis. It is tactitly asumed that this is due to people's conscious reaction to the unsightly appearance of and pain from the lesions, instead of more rationally assuming that the brain is also physically affected by whatever tangible process is causing the psoriasis. How is it that we can all relate to the fact that chemicals can alter our mental state, but fail to appreciate the reason for that? Behavior is just as subject to chemical processes as any other organ. Medical science has a long way to go.
Great point. Depression itself behaves like a drug. Much like one cannot perform any refined tasks while stone drunk, it's impossible to think or feel differently when depressed. Your very hardware for thinking is distorted, so the output is screwed up at a level below any type of control. There are some types of things that counseling can address, mainly techniques for evaluating your thoughts. The utility of therapy lies in the input of thoughts (words from your therapist) generated by a brain other than your own. If your own brain can't form productive thoughts, you can benefit from one that does. It doesn't work for everyone, though. If your brain is beyond the ability to incorporate such help, you need something lower level (drugs, ECT).
I've actually found that when I'm depressed, my mind is useless. I can't keep a thought in my head, or even comprehend the environment around me. My senses are fuzzy and I feel like a robot. The world actually appears darker and fuzzier. Far from being creative and intelligent, I become blank and mindless. All motivation and drive are gone. I felt like I was dying. I was barely able to keep up with my job when I was depressed, and projects were pretty simple and slow back then. I'd never be able to tackle the projects I'm doing now if I were depressed.
As far as emotions, though I did experience deeper emotions during the early phases of my depressions, they were all sadness. The sadness perpetuates itself, like a deepening groove on a record, so that nothing else gets played. All connections to prior emotions wither, and they become only an idea. You forget what it was ever like to feel differently, and lose hope that you ever will.
Depression is so insidious, too. You can't point to a day when it occurs. It's like the slow buildup of dust on the TV screen, fading out the vibrancy. When it's finally removed, the world stands out in vivid contrast to the dimness. It always amazes me when that happens.
Salient post.
Indeed, there are some jobs "going overseas," but it doesn't stand to reason that the entire field is going with it, or that new jobs/technologies will not be created in the future. The main article seems alarmist. OMG, we're running out of coders, we'll fall behind! If this indeed bears out, it's likely that talent will begin to move here. It's why most of us are here. If there are good paying jobs in America and no one is applying for them, the free market will pull in required labor. No one is applying to do a lot of the low-wage manual labor jobs, for example, so Mexicans are coming here to pick up the slack. Trying to prevent foreign outsourcing or competition is a temporary, reactionist solution to a percieved problem. It will only result in ever greater global pressures on an artificially inflated wage structure, and degrade our eventual global competitiveness. A parallel would be astronauts in the ISS. Without the pull of gravity, their muscles atrophy. They must exercise vigilantly to retain their strength, so they can function back on Earth. They won't die if they don't, but after too long they'll be unfit to cope with gravity when they finally return. It's a force we must adjust to. You can ignore the cost or quality of Indian programmers or Chinese sysadmins, but that doesn't make them disappear. They will still be there and still affect you, visibly or no.
Parent has taken the words from my mouth.
There seems to be a trend in many technologies of quality in the first generation of a new system (paradigm shifts) being lower than the standard for the prior generation. Digital photos have replaced film for most people, but most people's printouts aren't that great (or even existant). Cell phones have replaced land lines, but the voice quality is worse. Etc. Now, "Web 2.0" apps are supposedly replacing traditional OS apps, but they're slow and awkward to program. This doesn't mean that the technology will fail, but it's going to be crappy for a while. It will gradually standardize and improve, until the next wave replaces it.
I've always been fascinated with the great subglacial lakes. The residence time of the water is about a million years. Now that's some stale water. It's also under enormous pressure, and contains 50x as much oxygen as a typical freshwater lake. More can be read here.
I wore glasses from age 10 until 30, when I tried contacts. I can safely say that I see much better now than I ever did. Glasses distort the visual field by nature of the fact that they represent the view a small distance in front of the eye. This screws with accurate depth perception. They're also prone to getty dirty, while contacts are cleaned every time you blink.
I was agog at how vivid and "realisitic" the world looked that first week I got contacts.
"My celluar developent! it's been..."
"Reversed! For this first fim ever! Ha!?"
"Way to go Frank!"
If game companies get away with overworking or underpaying their employees, it's only because there is apparently an oversupply of coders eager to work in games. This is a lot like professional acting or singing. Everybody wants to do it, and those who aren't the best at it won't get any great reward, but may still be happy to be involved on some level. Sooner or later, the invisible hand will set a steady scale rate for developers with the requisite experience. What is probably most needed are HR people who are able too weed out the enthusiastic but mediocre from the pool of qualified candidates. Working a clueless hack to death isn't going to do anything to help your quality or release date, and as the industry matures, I think compensation levels will as well. Too much money is at stake to play Monty Burns with the workforce.
It seems to me that computer algorithms operating on simple algebraic equations accomplish the same things as the visual/mental shortcuts done in something like calculus, while making the process more clear. All of math is just manipulating ratios, to various degrees of procedures and relationships. Computers are best at the simple stuff (adding), so it makes less sense to try applying advanced math to a computer function. You'll have to break it down to functions within the #Math library at some point. Just write the correct loops and conditionals.
Math evolved to help people manipulate numbers in a manner to best exploit the limits of human calculation. Now that we have computers, those symbolic systems aren't as germaine. The concepts still apply (geometry,statistics,set theory), but the process is different. In this light, perhaps schools should continue teaching math theory, but move manipulation and execution over to computer programming. Half the difficulty in learning math was remembering syntax and shortcuts that have nno analogue in the computer.
My prior boss at a lrage department within a State University was taken the the concept of XML many years ago when it first became a popular buzzword. "We've got to make everything XML!" he was often heard to say, and relishes the chances to demonstrate his knowledge of the term around higher-ups. As a result, all of the content for the web pages we were working on became text files in various folders. Some held one piece of data, some held hundreds. He essentially re-created the database using the folder tree as relationships. For this, he was promoted, and later stolen away by another company. I was left to maintain the sea of non-standard xml files of various names, and no-one listened to me because I obviously didn't undersatnd XML.
There is only one office in my building that doesn't ahve a window, and I snagged it up right away. In my prior office, I was always fighting the glare through the blinds, or wasting time watching the lizards fight our on the central air unit. I put a nice halogen lamp in the corner of my new office, which bathes the room in a low level of yellow light. Just enough to read easily. My office is also relatively isolated from sound, which can get very distracting, especially conversation, as your mind tries to interpret it even if you don't care to.
As everyone has said, a comfortable chair is important. I like something I can lean back in, and pivot around on. I don't care for arms on my chair. It also has to be quiet; no cracks and squeaks when I shift positions.
Finally, if you don't already have several monitors, get some. Three 17" LCDs can be had for about $600, and give you plenty of usable screen space.
Getting back to your immediate topic, I'd just suggest raiding the office for any unused tables or desks, and building a surface suitable to your requirements. I was originally given an official computer station, with a pullout keyboard tray, which I quickly ditched in favor of a regular, flat desk that was just about my typing height. With a little discretion and the help of a co-worker, you can probably appropriate something useful.