Elder Holland’s Talk

Elder Holland’s talk during the Saturday afternoon session was completely amazing. When he said he was going to speak with much boldness, he wasn’t lying. Several people in my peer group have gotten married in the last year, and all of us guys are computer people. Listening to a prophet of God lay down the law so plainly is a powerful reminder to stay true to our faith. In a world where the signs of moral decay are everywhere, it is great to have the testimonies of such great examples guild us.

FDA Badness

Power

I know several people that have a total aversion to electronics. Invariably they are more interested in craft or trade skills then in the tech sector. The funny thing is that they all use electronics more than I do. Almost every task today requires the use of electronic tools, and every tool can and is being enhanced with a microprocessor to help it function better. After all, if your tools have miniature brains, they do their jobs beI know several people that have a total aversion to electronics. Invariably they are more interested in craft or trade skills then in the tech sector. The funny thing is that they all use electronics more than I do. Almost every task today requires the use of electronic tools, and every tool can and is being enhanced with a microprocessor to help it function better. After all, if your tools have miniature brains, they do their jobs better! So to the naysayers of technology, I humbly request that you toss everything that requires a power cord, batteries, or a microprocessor. tter! So to the naysayers of technology, I humbly request that you donate everything you own that requires a power cord, batteries, or a microprocessor to charity. Including your car purchased in the last 15 years.

The Lead Developer

Every project worth anything has a competent leader heading it up. A project where the person(s) in-charge of allowing updates or revisions let bad code, or none-uniform code into the code base you have much more difficulty. Not having a leader at all is even worse, and is one of the pitfalls of group projects in our curriculum. If we actually had an authorized leader for each project we had, things would be done much more correctly and efficiently then just dividing up work and then throwing mixed functions into the basket and then wiring them together with pitiful hacks.

What the future holds

I’ve been thinking a lot about the amount of technology and tools to harness it available to us these days lately. It is extraordinary how much we can do with little time. It is easier than ever to start a company developing iPhone apps, or web services than ever before. As I look around me I see people using languages like flex to make multi-platform web apps that are beautiful in just a few days. I myself have found supercomputing to have an extremely low barrier of entry. There seem to be no limits on what we can do.

Along with this lowered barrier of entry, comes a global world. There is nothing unique about my classmates or I that give us an enormous leg-up over the rest of the world. If we can do something, then so can hundreds of thousands in India, China, and the rest of the world. To stay competitive in the United States we have to be assertive and do things on our own to prove that we have what it takes to add value to a business, or to start our own thing.

The gains in computing today are incredible. I can’t wait to see what is around the next corner, and I’m very excited to be a part of it. I will probably be in this field for the next 30-40 years, and I can’t even imagine the technology I will be able to help develop. What is next?

Copyright Woes

The whole digital rights mess will probably never go away. As long as people produce things that can be digitized (and pretty much everything can be digitized at this point) there will be people prepared to hack whatever protection there was on it and expose it for free. Whether over the internet, or through cheaply made substitutes (think pirated Windows 7 on USB sticks in Southeast Asia).  In many cases I think that it is a hopeless cause and that the best action the government can take is to make it difficult for pirated things to be easy to obtain – easier said than done because the same outlets used to pirate content are used to create it!

The Digital Age

In Hanover, Germany, the CeBIT fair opened this morning. It is the world’s largest high-tech show where companies display their latest and greatest technology; this year 3-D seems to be the rage. It is amazing that technology is moving to the point where the internet is going to become 3-D and we will be able to “virtually try on cloths” when we do our online shopping. However, the most incredible news: “Nearly one in four Germans would be prepared to have a microchip implanted into their body if they thought they would derive concrete benefits from it.” I know I would–would you? (original article)