In all of today's tragedy, and for the uncounted thousands who have lost their lives today, I would like to mourn one of our own community who was lost.
Daniel Levin, the CTO and a founder of Akamai, was on board the American Airlines Boston to LA flight that crashed into the WTC towers today. I have only met him once, but I was impressed with his inteligence, poise and personality. He will be sorely missed.
I run the bioinformatics department for a biotech company in Cambridge, MA, and I face this problem every day. I have found that the specific type of programmer you need really depends on the application. Learning to program is not all that difficult- pretty much anyone can learn a programming language with just a sort period of study, at least to write simple scripts in something like perl or python. If all you are doing is 'all around lab hacking' it might be enough to look for ex-scientists which have gotten interested in programming. About half the resumes we get are from this type of individual, and they have the benefit of knowing quite a bit about science and the laboratory activity.
Where this approach breaks down is when larger-scale projects are being contemplated, where the activity of more than one programmer must be coordinated, or where the software is going to be shipped as a shrink-wrapped software product. Even if is is just in-house software, but it must perform to certain specific standards (such as required by the FDA or other standards groups) you are going to need more. In this case, I have found that experienced software engineers are required. The best way to evaluate them is to look for applicants who have degrees in software engineering or computer science (with a strong software engineering emphasis) and have been involved in at least one succesful group project. Find out how they specified the project (did they use any specific methodologies?) and find out how they collaborated (listen for the use of version control systems, for example) finally, find out how they did their testing (again, they key here is methodology- not just 'it ran fine and we shipped') You do not need to know that much about software engineering- you just want to see that there is strong experience in the people you recruit. Ask for references, and when you check them, ask them about the candidate's programming and software engineering strengths.
I know this all seems pretty basic, but I have found it works pretty well. In my case, I have hired a mix of scientific programmers and software engineers, as well as drawing on the expertise of the scientists outside my department. As long as you keep your eye on the desired end result, you can locate and hire an excellent staff!
This morning, as I prepared to leave the house, I happened to ask my 3-year-old daughter if she wanted to go with me to vote. Her eyes lit up and immediately she started jumping up and down with "Yes! Yes, please!". I was a little surprised at the enthusiasm, but I figured that she liked to ride in my car, which doesn't happen vary often. After we went through the voting process, where she was very patient and quiet, we got back in the car to go home. At this time, she got animated again and said "now do we get to go see the boat daddy?".
I realized that this is the same reaction we all have to voting- you get all excited for the event, anticipating all the great things that are going to happen after the election, and then (no matter who wins) nothing of any importance happens...
Buried deep in the copy of the Ucentric website is this gem:
Service providers have an opportunity to generate additional revenue beyond broadband subscription rates by deploying new value-added services. To date, they have not had the necessary platform to meet consumer demands. The Ucentric Home Server fills this void.
Great. More amazing new ways for the broadband companies to drag money out of you. Count me out. I have a system I put together and am happy with. I agree with other posters that the right way to do this is provide the pieces and let the user put together their own personal solution.
I would like a book-reader a-la Rocket's eBook, but one that takes a variety of input formats, say PDF, PS, HTML, ASCII, RTF, etc. How hard could this be? I bet it could be made for not much more than 300$US...
Make it connect to your system via 10BT or WaveLAN/Bluetooth and run Linux, and I wouldn't wait to buy it myself!
One of the main reasons that young tech people rush to amass vast amounts of fortune is because of the very fagility of their jobs in the 'new economy'. After watching what happened to our parents generation, getting laid off (or 'made redundant') and no longer being able to find meaningful work, many people have decided to make hay while the sun shines. Work hard now (while your tech skills are still relevant), so that you can eat when you get kicked out of the workforce. Depending on the government to take care of you is just silly.
How big are these ROM archives, anyways? Why not just pack them all together and put them out on FreeNet, etc.? Is there a location where large numbers of ROMS are all tarballed together and accessible to the public?
When digital books can be presented in a way virtually indistinushable from the paper variety, will the differences really matter? Some of the projects on the horizon, such as the electronic paper project at the MIT Media Lab create the potential for a high-resolution digital reader which would look and feel like a hardback book, pages and all. The interface for the system could be as simple as turning pages. I have a whole bookshelf full of big, heavy, and rapidly-obselete books in my office (The Java Class Libraries books, for example) that I would love to replace with something like that. Add to that books which are primarily available online like the GIMP User's Manual and the contents of something like Project Guttenberg, and you have real potential.
If the only limitations are resolution and expense (as it is for me,) it is only a matter of time, as better and cheaper readers become available. For those like Billington, one wonders if there is more than simple satisfaction over piles of paper...
I spent a lot of time convincing a charter school I am involved with that the point of their computer systems was to enable students to get on with their regualar school work, not to train them to use a particular OS, or particular Spreadsheet/Charting/Word Processing programs. The idea of a "computer lab" seems as crazy to me as the idea of a "pencil lab" for a elementary/middle school student. If the client computer/OS can be configured to be robust, and the terminals can be durable and simple to operate, a network computing model based on linux might be just the thing. The easily-messed-up bits are safely tucked away in a server closet someplace, and the students can use NCs (iOpeners, anyone?) for their work. No local disk, floppies, etc. and cheap!
In many ways, such a linux installation may in fact be more stable than one using off-the-shelf PCs, especially if there is an attempt to build a simplified desktop interface for the students to use. The nice thing about linux or other X-based OSs is the ease in which such configurations can be done...
For more advanced kids, perhaps in high school, or late middle school, using UNIX can be an education in itself, at least for the minority of schools which teach any kind of serious programming/software engineering.
As a professional working in the field (I am the director of bioinformatics for a small biotech company) I am thrilled to see the hacker community taking an interest in the genome project and the information coming out of it. In many ways it is a unique example of 'big science' where the results are literally posted every day in digital format on the net. Furthermore, it is a field in which any talented individual, with some diligence and study, can contribute. You don't need a space probe or particle accelerator in your basement...
I would suggest taking a look at one of several good books on the topic, and peruse some of the excellent websites pointed out by others, then get involved!
My personal favorite book is Biological Sequence Analysis by Richard Durbin and Sean Eddy, two workers in the field whom I greatly respect. The book is engaging and pretty thorough, and plenty to get stared with!
The problem, IMHO, is not that Celera wants to make its own map of the genome, and make the sequence information available via subscription, but that they are essentially trying at the last minute to derail 10 years of public effort in the area. What they are proposing, in essence, is to help the publicly-funded effort to get done a year or so more quickly than expected, in exchange for assurances that the sequence data resulting from that collaboration will be availible only for a fee paid to Celera (and licencing/use restrictions) by other companies wishing to use that data. Since the public effort will then essentially not complete the genome, this puts Celera in a monopoly position for most of the genome data. This will have the effect of discouraging competition in the potentially very lucrative bioinformatics market (the subsequent analysis of the sequence and mapping data, and the potential discovery of new drugs) with fees and use restrictions.
This usurpation of the final results of a long-running publicly-funded study may be good business for Celera, but could be a disaster for the public at large, due to reduced competition and reduced opportunity for smaller and more innovate compaines to get traction early in their growth,. Craig Venter obviously would love to get a Microsoft-style stranglehold int he marketplace, but at the cost of cutting off the air to smaller competitors.
Three simple things that I have seen in both of the start-ups with which I have been involved:
1) Management is a technology like any other. Hire someone who has experience, and knows the ropes. Give him/her the authority to make the decisions. I saw my first start-up submarine when one of the other founders would not release his authority to the CEO we hired.
2) Make sure that the market really wants what you are building. A good sign of this is if there are other companies spinning up to do the same thing you are. Don't let it discourage you, let it _motivate_ you! Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) put it very well when he said:
Don't worry about our competitors, they are not the ones who give us money.
3) Finally- the journey is what matters, enjoy the ride. If you really love what you are doing, then just do it, and do not focus too much on the endgame. In the end you will be happier, healthier, (and maybe even richer) for doing it!
I think we should be asking what we can do as a community to help out Jon, as one neighbor would help out another. We should be sure that we separate the political from the personal!
software (DeCSS) that unlocks the system for preventing illegal copying of video discs.
Of all places, an article on Slashdot should get it right. This is not about copying of works, but about playing them. We have to make sure as a community that we make this perfectly clear to the lay public. We are going to have to fight against a very well-funded and media-savy organization, one that has already proven that they are willing to do whatever it takes to obfusicate the truth, and obscure the facts in the case...
Take a look a the work being done with etched nickel disks, of the sort made by Norsam Technologies. They are making disks which can have the actual textual content as the data-carrying element, visible under very high magnification. Norsam builds automated retrieval workstations, which are really just a computer attached to a powerful microscope, with some automation for finding and downloading the data. The beauty of the system is that the disks are _very_ long-lived and stable (expected to be _thousands_ of years.) and the content is readable by anyone with a microscope. Optical microscope readers can allow up to 20000 pages per 5cm disk, and electron microscope readers can allow something like 350000 pages. The key here is that data can be written either as text alone, or a combination of digital data and textual descriptions of the methods required to decode it. The Norsam web page shows color digital images (TIFF-format) etched onto the disk digitaly.
Several groups are looking into this technology as a possible way to stably maintain their archives over a very long period of time. Take a look at the Long Now Foundation library for an example.
MediaOne owns roughly 25% of Time Warner- should we worry that our cheap and fast broadband access to the net is going to have to be through AOL? One of the truly great things about the broadband services available now is that they are independent of an AOL-style provider, and make it easy to hook up my Linux, Be, whatever machines to the Net- not so easy with AOL!
I have heard the Y2K problem called the El Nino of the 21st Century- It will cause no major problems directly, but every computer problem for the next 50 years will be blamed on it...
For those following this thread, some of the Vpr structure is available for 3D visualization at the Protein Data Bank
Note that the structure they have is only about half of what is already a small (96 amino acids) protein, so the 3D models are not too impressive. Pretty amazing how something so simple can be so deadly, though.
The site has JPEG graphics that anyone can visualize, plus, if your browser supports Java, there is a simple interactive viewer applet, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Daniel Levin, the CTO and a founder of Akamai, was on board the American Airlines Boston to LA flight that crashed into the WTC towers today. I have only met him once, but I was impressed with his inteligence, poise and personality. He will be sorely missed.
He was 31.
More details can be found here
Where this approach breaks down is when larger-scale projects are being contemplated, where the activity of more than one programmer must be coordinated, or where the software is going to be shipped as a shrink-wrapped software product. Even if is is just in-house software, but it must perform to certain specific standards (such as required by the FDA or other standards groups) you are going to need more. In this case, I have found that experienced software engineers are required. The best way to evaluate them is to look for applicants who have degrees in software engineering or computer science (with a strong software engineering emphasis) and have been involved in at least one succesful group project. Find out how they specified the project (did they use any specific methodologies?) and find out how they collaborated (listen for the use of version control systems, for example) finally, find out how they did their testing (again, they key here is methodology- not just 'it ran fine and we shipped') You do not need to know that much about software engineering- you just want to see that there is strong experience in the people you recruit. Ask for references, and when you check them, ask them about the candidate's programming and software engineering strengths.
I know this all seems pretty basic, but I have found it works pretty well. In my case, I have hired a mix of scientific programmers and software engineers, as well as drawing on the expertise of the scientists outside my department. As long as you keep your eye on the desired end result, you can locate and hire an excellent staff!
Good luck!
I realized that this is the same reaction we all have to voting- you get all excited for the event, anticipating all the great things that are going to happen after the election, and then (no matter who wins) nothing of any importance happens...
Make it connect to your system via 10BT or WaveLAN/Bluetooth and run Linux, and I wouldn't wait to buy it myself!
If the only limitations are resolution and expense (as it is for me,) it is only a matter of time, as better and cheaper readers become available. For those like Billington, one wonders if there is more than simple satisfaction over piles of paper...
In many ways, such a linux installation may in fact be more stable than one using off-the-shelf PCs, especially if there is an attempt to build a simplified desktop interface for the students to use. The nice thing about linux or other X-based OSs is the ease in which such configurations can be done...
For more advanced kids, perhaps in high school, or late middle school, using UNIX can be an education in itself, at least for the minority of schools which teach any kind of serious programming/software engineering.
I would suggest taking a look at one of several good books on the topic, and peruse some of the excellent websites pointed out by others, then get involved!
My personal favorite book is Biological Sequence Analysis by Richard Durbin and Sean Eddy, two workers in the field whom I greatly respect. The book is engaging and pretty thorough, and plenty to get stared with!
Join us! Hack the genome!
This usurpation of the final results of a long-running publicly-funded study may be good business for Celera, but could be a disaster for the public at large, due to reduced competition and reduced opportunity for smaller and more innovate compaines to get traction early in their growth,. Craig Venter obviously would love to get a Microsoft-style stranglehold int he marketplace, but at the cost of cutting off the air to smaller competitors.
1) Management is a technology like any other. Hire someone who has experience, and knows the ropes. Give him/her the authority to make the decisions. I saw my first start-up submarine when one of the other founders would not release his authority to the CEO we hired.
2) Make sure that the market really wants what you are building. A good sign of this is if there are other companies spinning up to do the same thing you are. Don't let it discourage you, let it _motivate_ you! Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) put it very well when he said:
3) Finally- the journey is what matters, enjoy the ride. If you really love what you are doing, then just do it, and do not focus too much on the endgame. In the end you will be happier, healthier, (and maybe even richer) for doing it!Good luck!
Several groups are looking into this technology as a possible way to stably maintain their archives over a very long period of time. Take a look at the Long Now Foundation library for an example.
Note that the structure they have is only about half of what is already a small (96 amino acids) protein, so the 3D models are not too impressive. Pretty amazing how something so simple can be so deadly, though.
The site has JPEG graphics that anyone can visualize, plus, if your browser supports Java, there is a simple interactive viewer applet, too.