On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 21:30:39 -0700, "E. Robert Tisdale"
<E.Robert.Tisdale@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

The only justification that I can imagine for such a bizarre set of
unjustified declarations is that you are speaking of your own
experience.

I don't want to frighten you, but most of the software which affects
you in life-critical and mission-critical ways was probably written by
engineers.

--
Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
removebalmerconsultingthis@att.net

You mean, like, fiddling with a hundred Visual Basic lines?
That is not programming, my man.

But hey, with "what if's", we could build another America, right?

stock from.

jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote in message news:<bn0rab$ont$5@bob.news.rcn.net>...
Dear BAH, how about this citation:
(from: http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa--4.html)

"The environment we were operating in was one of open research. The
only payoff available was to have good work recognized and used.
Software was generally considered free. Openness wasn't an option; it
just was." (Crocker, 1993c)

It is about Arpanet. Sure, there must have been a lot of contractors
involved. But who had the seminal idea, so to speak.

BTW, no witty remarks about WWW-CERN and MIT, I mentioned?

--Baruch

glhansen@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen) wrote in message news:<bn0rkg$e8k$4@hood.uits.indiana.edu>...
Well, the major issue is whether employers see such skills as a
profession. The typical combination is as somebody above explained a
field and programming on the top. Say, CFD and knowledge of some
packages, which includes skills to write customizations. If you apply
for a position in computational fluid dynamics, saying in your resume
that you did scientific programming, which include everything that you
mentioned, in say CHARM framework, the chance to get an interview is
nil.

The reason is that in computationally intensive fields like
computational chemistry of physics the fact that you are able to
program is something close to the statement that you can write
English. Everybody can do that. Some do that better some worse but by
and large it is a common knowledge. It does not give you any special
advantage.

There is very narrow niche that is filled by companies that produce
such packages and this is very interesting work. But the amount of
people employed is very small. University guys who spin off small
companies that in time sustained the market stress have started most
of them in the past. Usually they grow around the initial core people
that are pretty stable in time. So, you have to be in the right time
in the right place.

Old Pif

omission9 replied:

I think that lots of investors in dot.com's might argue this with you.

Rich

"William" <Reply@NewsGroup.Please> wrote in message news:<O5OdnaFhhut4ZQ6iRVn-gw@giganews.com>...
The state is an owner too. It represents taxpayers in this respect.
Some (non necessarily, many) R&D programs in Universities are
conducted under commercial contracts. Still, in my parts of the world,
Universities still have a major degree of academic freedom, supported
by state funds. Governments do recognize the importance of long term
investment that the private sector wouldn't even consider if it can't
see immediate profits there. Think about the human genome project.
AFAIK, it is an Academic/Governmental initiative. Hope Universities
will not turn into commercial contractors. That will end their
academic freedom.

Oh great! Imagine, F = m*a, in a patent. It will be $5 each and every
time you use it, thank you very much. Thanks God that Newton and
Einstein lived before our commodization era.

Some difference: when people buy shares in a factory they don't mind
if working conditions there are slave-like. They buy shares for
profit, selling them when there is no profit. Not so, with taxpayers.
They don't expect profits, they expect to improve quality of life.
Well, stock holders are taxpayers as well. However, their profit
seeking might come at the account of somebody elses quality of life.
Not sure if the inventor of Penicillin profited much from it. A lot of
taxpayers certainly did. Now, back to the present. Expensive medicines
are more profitable. An interesting factor, isn't it?

--Baruch

mephistopheles_01@hotmail.com (Sam Banerjee) wrote in message news:<7ec3a9b5.0310161043.2223750c@posting.google. com>...
[snip]
Lessee here. You sprayed this message over what, five groups?
Only one of which was a "jobs" related news group. Well, if
your CV shows up at my company, I will be telling the HR folk
to recycle it and not even respond to you.
Socks

omission9 <omission9@fake.email.net> wrote in message news:<bn180b$rl3ei$2@ID-201473.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Just where do you think the revenue from an IPO goes, and how it is used?

Harry C.

Harry Conover wrote:
you knew this and were just being a wise-ass than sod off. Otherwise,
sod off.


--
I do not make it a habit of using a working e-mail address in newsgroups
so as to reduce the amount of SPAM I get. If you'd like to get ahold of
me please do so via the group. If you'd like to exchange e-mail just say
so in the group.

"Old Pif" <old_pif@my-deja.com> wrote:

This is exactly what I've been thinking recently. Being
able to program (communicating in a structured way with
computers) is quite analogous to being able to write
(communicating in a structured way with humans). Once upon
a time, being able to write was enough to get prestigious
jobs in many places. As literacy spread, few are able to
make a living purely based on their ability to write well.
I think the same is likely to happen for programming.

Dan.

Just passing through this group briefly;

How to get into Scientific Programming? Work in a scientific or engineering
position and write software which will make your job or someone elses job
easier, faster, more efficient. You MUST be in the situation in order to
experience the work needing to be done, and then ask yourself: There should
be a computer program that can do this quicker, right?

G C

gerryq@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote in message news:<%aTkb.1859$bD.8033@news.indigo.ie>...

[snip some issues already discussed in my reply to William]

Ergo - if you want to be creative like Wright brothers, do not attend college???
Beware of fool's paradise.

--Baruch

In article <78680710.0310201147.99683d8@posting.google.com> , vainas@walla.co.il (Baruch Vainas) wrote:
F = ma is not patentable. However, if nobody had ever used forces to
accelerate things, and Newton patented it, that would surely have been a
great advance, and the concept would probably have rolled out earlier
and been in more widespread use by the time the patent ran out 14 years
later and everyone could use forces freely.

And Einstein would have starved without the patent laws.

Where you live taxes may be voluntary, but that is not the case in most
places. Taxes are extracted with the implied threat of force and used
by the state in any manner they choose. By contrast, slavery doesn't
exist in most modern societies and workers enter willingly into a
contract to work in a stockholder's factory. If they don't like it they
are free to leave anytime.

If they are better than the previous out-of-patent medicines, why
shouldn't they be more expensive? Nobody is forced to use them. Feel
free to use free medicines invented at universities instead, if you can
find some. In under twenty years, every patented drug will be out of
patent. Will generic drug manufacturers be happily making them cheaply
and using them? Hell no, there will be a bunch of left-wingers
screaming that they are no longer in production...

- Gerry Quinn

In article <QY_kb.11089$Y1.3919@nwrddc03.gnilink.net>, omission9 <omission9@askformyemail.info> wrote:
Building a house, rather than selling it, is an exception too. But
nobody would build (or at least the market would be very different and
much smaller) if the re-sale market didn't exist.

The initial purchasers of a company buy a property, which may be
re-sold, and whose initial value largely exists *because* it may be
re-sold. There is nothing sinister about this, and to say that
subsequent purchasers have somehow inferior claims to ownership is
disingenuous.

- Gerry Quinn

In article <78680710.0310202315.26343b42@posting.google.com>, vainas@walla.co.il (Baruch Vainas) wrote:
Just pointing out that if you want to make planes, academic study of
fluid dynamics is not necessarily the way to go. Or not to excess - an
engineering degree would be a good start, but if you want to make planes
rather than talk about them, you'll find little scope at university.

- Gerry Quinn

In article <bn0rkg$e8k$4@hood.uits.indiana.edu>,
glhansen@steel.ucs.indiana.edu (Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:
That's what we considered scientific programming. I had not realized
that the meaning of the term had changed. The programmers who
developed, tested, maintained, and shipped the software you scientists
use were called compiler developers and/or application developers
depended on the layer of the software.

Another example of scientific programming were those amazing people
who took bare gear and hooked it up to some thingie that captured
data. The software that ran on the bare gear to transfer data from
the real world to a storage device was scientific programming.
Only note that this flavor of programmer was also his own field
service guy.

From the definition that seems to be emerging here, I would have
been called a scientific programmer because I worked on FOROTS
which was the bundle of code that was called in when a FORTRAN
program ran. I was NOT a scientific programmer; I was the
maintainer of the object time system and it had nothing to
do with science.

/BAH


Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

In article <78680710.0310201017.6aff7a0d@posting.google.com>,
vainas@walla.co.il (Baruch Vainas) wrote:
So what? Arpanet is new from my POV.

We weren't contrators. We were in the the hard/software
manufacturing business.

WWW is a new-born babe in the biz. MIT has a very, very, very
long history of producing kids who made good stuff. Just about
everything good that came from DEC was due to MIT trained kids.
A lot of computing work was also done at Harvard during WWII
when hardware bugs were fauna.

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

In article <53b3f6c1.0310200626.760dd1f0@posting.google.com>,
old_pif@my-deja.com (Old Pif) wrote:
No, they don't. That's not what scientific programming is.

If you're talking about the percentage of total jobs, I
sure would hope so. The industry doesn't need a gazillion
interpretations of the FORTRAN^WFortran standard or anything
else to do with computing arithmetic.

But that's NOT scientific programming. Using your logic:
Gregory uses screwdrivers; therefore, I'm a scientist because
I used a screwdriver to reattach my cupboard doors.
So? That doesn't make those developers scientific programmers.

They are not mere users if they're coding. And coding can
also be writing scripts.

Somebody who develops a set of instructions to a computer that
produces repeatable results is a programmer. Once upon a time,
this was done by hardwiring. As we developed better techniques,
we moved the convenience of changing instructions to a computing
device from changing plugs on a board to changing ASCII characters
on a paper tape or IBM card. Then, JOY!, people figured out how
to skip the paper tape bit and gave us disks which now made the
modification of computer instructions mostly software (HINT:
that's why it's called soft and not hard.)
Also see above ;-).

/BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.

In article <bn34vh$4b1$1@bob.news.rcn.net>, <jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
I think there's also a view that if you're working in something like Igor,
or Mathematica, or Visual Basic or Matlab, then you're not programming,
you're writing macros or scripting. It's not programming unless you're
writing almost the exact same thing in a compiled language like C,
although you're still allowed to call GNUPlot to display the data instead
of diving directly into the OS to roll your own display functions.

I took "scientific programming" to be too broad a category to give really
useful advice. It could be just reduction of data, or it could be
simulations of systems, or it could be writing the data acquisition
software which controls the equipment, or it could be working up the next
version of Mathematica. But unless you're developing software
commercially, scientific programming seems like it's more part of a job
than a job itself.
--
"Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the
truth... But let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been
put to the proof by the waking understanding." -- Friedrich August Kekulé