Yes I've often maintained that we could just drill a hole in the middle of Australia and dump the worlds nuclear waste in it. Its the perfect spot, no ground water (if you make sure its west of the great artesian basin), geologically and politically stable, no one lives there for miles, and there's already a shit ton of radiation there anyway - thats where the Uranium comes from.
One problem would be transporting it, but again, solvable problems, we tanker oil around the world, so it can be done. The trouble is though political. No one wants all that nuclear waste in their back yard, even if no one ever uses the backyard.
Fukishima added to the problem - if the Japanese, whose engineering skill is the best in the world, have problems then what about the rest of the world? I see this as a very valid objection.
One of the problems I see in the popular mind is the idea that radiation is somehow unique and only occurs in nuclear reactors, and any of it appears somewhere then we're all dead. The coal industry makes sure no one finds out that the amount of radiation expelled by coal powered stations exceeds that produced by nuclear reactors https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
As you say the amount to be stored is pretty small, and could probably be dumped down a hole in an afternoon and home in time for tea
An anecdote - I went to a radiology clinic a while ago for a tour (writing some software) and we stopped by the room where they store the radioactive material, pretty low level stuff and all stored away. The manager taking me around said "This is where we store the radiocative stuff" looking at me and waiting for a reaction - a bit of fun I imagine he has - expecting me to run away and panic, but I have a physics degree so no drama - he was disappointed, and we laughed. But this is the public mind - radiation is scary stuff that causes mutations and kills you, so there's a real marketing problem. No doubt this has been pumped up by the oil and coal industry over the years.
Thanks for sharing, I'm pleased to hear you recommend going to school, it seems there's an exceptional few who can make it without a degree. I'd thought there'd be more, maybe they have better things to do on their weekend :-)
I have too many stories...I had dinner with Edward Teller and he described what really happened at Los Alamos (saying that he would be put in prison for such disclosure), I was fired and rehired multiple times by Steve Jobs, I did a stint as an Oracle Product Manager for the core database and saw how they cook the books, I wrote code in the ATT UNIX kernel, in the Oracle source tree, and in the Apple source tree. I've been doing big data now and teach NSA, CIA,... (so I've heard stories about a level of spying that I can't repeat. But I will say that the people trying to keep us safe don't care about the laws and don't report what they are doing up the chain of command.) I taught technical classes at the School of the Americas to people who don't exist and heard more stories that I can't repeat. And I've coded while sitting beside several well-known names in programming. All of these are interesting stories.
But one for this group... Steve Jobs made yearly trips to give talks at major universities. His real goal was to convince post-grads who had innovated to drop out and port their work to our platform. Steve would fund them personally - with just enough cash to eat beans and live on friend's couches. If he thought he could sell it, he would later make them employees - and burn them out to get them to produce more and faster. After he got their work, those engineers would typically leave. So Steve would make more billions to hide offshore, and the innovators would get a salary and be burned out. A true robber baron.
Well, a lot of the stuff I really only tell friends. And even then I've had people tell me that I'm wrong (eg. they read all the books about Los Alamos - so they think they know the whole story even though it is top secret.) And there are Steve Jobs stories that really can't be repeated (involving his family and really unbelievable things.) Another example: Steve and Bill and Scott and Larry would meet to divide up the computer market. Bill & Steve broke their networking so that UNIX could have back office, Scott broke front office so that Bill could keep that, Steve got schools and DTP, Bill killed SQLServer features, Larry killed the low cost linux hardware project. Basically, we have been working in a rigged system our entire lives - with effective monopolies in all the profitable segments.
I find that one hard to believe - I can't believe Bill would open himself up to cartel laws, the others however :-) Though that would explain a few things
Bill and Steve would meet in a plane flying over the ocean - in order to prevent anyone else being involved and to prevent any monitoring. And, in general, these deals made them very rich, so the only people who could betray them had both made a lot of money and been involved in illegal activities themselves. Kind of hard to see much risk in something that is completely deniable. If I hadn't spoken to people with direct knowledge of these things, I wouldn't know it myself. I'm not sure what it would take to get people to admit to their involvement.
You are right, I am an exception - and I think those other commenters would also agree that we are exceptions. At two companies everyone else in my group had PhDs. And I've rarely worked with people who don't have at least Masters degrees. So, while it is possible to do this without a degree, it takes an unusual person. (I love to read. I would sometimes spend weekends at the Stanford library reading published papers. And I built my first computer from components after reading about logic gates and getting sample parts from chip vendors.)
I'm 64 and started as a mini computer tester in the mid 70s. Within two years I was forming my own programming team at one of the early microcomputer companies. I've been programming ever since.
I'm in my 30s, no degree, my career is in infrastructure/sysadmin/networking/management, doing devops now. I've done datataking for a detector at the LHC, managed datacenters, etc. Not having a degree has never been a problem.
I use a macbook air mid 2011. 1.7 Ghz i5, 4GB 133MHz DDR3, 128GB SSD, intel HD graphics 3000 384 MB memory, and it works fine. I run Yosemite on it and develop iOS apps. I actually run a Windows 8 VM on it as well - but I have to be careful with the memory usage :-). I keep looking for an excuse to upgrade it but I have no reason :-(
If you buy from Apple you can return it in 14 days no questions asked - at least in Australia last time I looked. I tried this once with an external hard drive (too noisy) and it was not a problem.
I'd get 8GB, I do have trouble now and then with the 4GB, but only because of the VM (I have to reboot), 8GB will give you a longer lifetime I think (I didn't think you could upgrade the RAM in the mini's any more).
Mac mini (Late 2014)
Mac mini (Late 2014) does not have user-installable RAM. You can configure the memory in your Mac mini (Late 2014) when you purchase it.
Yes. I just saw that. I cant reply to your comment directly as there is no reply button below your comment (probably nested too deep). stackexchange might be a good place to check. I think the 2012 mac mini was eating into their higher end machine sales and crippling the 2014 mac mini is move on their part to counter this.
oh, I just had a look and the base model doesn't have an SSD - I'd really not consider developing without an SSD any more. It will work but compile times are slower, how much I couldn't say. But then I've developed for years without an SSD before that so...
That's why I thought of 16Gb Ram. I'm thinking, The whole of XCode and the compiler and my program source would be in the buffer cache. So after the initial loading from disk, the dev experience would be quite smooth (that's the guess I'm making).
That was what a degree was for in the old days - it was to teach you how to learn. There are other paths nowadays I suppose, but a degree is a tick from an institution (who are experts in learning) that you can learn something and presumably if you've done this you can learn other stuff.
I was self taught then did a CS degree, so have a foot in both camps. Some of the things I learnt in the degree which I never would have learnt by myself were (and others have mentioned some of these) - algorithms, relational theory, O-notation, symbolic logic, stats, CSP. Then there were things I learnt myself that I never learnt at uni because I wanted to - assembler, 2d/3d graphics, c++. Then there are things I've taught myself since uni - compiler theory, database optimisation, functional programming (actually did this at Uni but couldn't see the point then - hardware was rubbish then though), web stuff.
So difference would be in broad for my case - uni gives you the theoretical foundations that you probably wouldn't learn yourself, teaching yourself programming gives you the hands on stuff you'd never learn in depth at a uni. Two sides of the same coin I suppose, it would be rare to have a self taught person learn the theory that you'd learn at uni, and I don't think you'd ever get that depth without some uni training imho.
The other thing that comes to mind is if you're smart and self taught - why wouldn't you do a degree? The only good answer I can think of is that you're so friggin awesome you're churning out code that everyone says is awesome and google or apple has hired you already, there are perhaps 10 people in the world like this - everyone else do your degree :-)
Managers who hire specialists in a field (i.e. me) then proceed to tell them how to work. It's solvable, but the cost is me taking on the risk of ignoring managers and proceeding, or present the reasons why their approach will fail and wait.
One problem would be transporting it, but again, solvable problems, we tanker oil around the world, so it can be done. The trouble is though political. No one wants all that nuclear waste in their back yard, even if no one ever uses the backyard.
Fukishima added to the problem - if the Japanese, whose engineering skill is the best in the world, have problems then what about the rest of the world? I see this as a very valid objection.
One of the problems I see in the popular mind is the idea that radiation is somehow unique and only occurs in nuclear reactors, and any of it appears somewhere then we're all dead. The coal industry makes sure no one finds out that the amount of radiation expelled by coal powered stations exceeds that produced by nuclear reactors https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
As you say the amount to be stored is pretty small, and could probably be dumped down a hole in an afternoon and home in time for tea
An anecdote - I went to a radiology clinic a while ago for a tour (writing some software) and we stopped by the room where they store the radioactive material, pretty low level stuff and all stored away. The manager taking me around said "This is where we store the radiocative stuff" looking at me and waiting for a reaction - a bit of fun I imagine he has - expecting me to run away and panic, but I have a physics degree so no drama - he was disappointed, and we laughed. But this is the public mind - radiation is scary stuff that causes mutations and kills you, so there's a real marketing problem. No doubt this has been pumped up by the oil and coal industry over the years.