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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Give them time.
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800V crammed in a 20cm round box, it's FUN!
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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charlieg wrote: 120v scares me, 240+ I want to pee. 480 and up? hell no.
LOL!!! I don't blame you for that. But since I design systems that transport power at 120V through 69kV, I've had to get used to it. But it's still strange to open a cabinet and realize that if I stand a few inches closer, an arc could form and kill me, not to mention dimming the lights for a bit.
Will Rogers never met me.
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I will weigh in on both sides of this.
Engineering has a history of what emerged as accepted designs, formulas, and processes that generally produce safe, reliable products. Software can't make this claim, though I'd say that OO and patterns, in most settings, are an step in that direction. But systems are very diverse, so software remains far more craft and art than it does engineering.
On the other hand, much of my career (starting in 1981) was spent in a company whose products were becoming more and more dependent on software, and less so on hardware. Consequently, many EE types moved into software. Yes, they could do it, and most had a smattering of it in university, but few were or became good at it. I said it was like putting me in an EE role if my expertise was that I'd noodled around, building speakers in my basement.
One major difference, as I see it, is that the essence of software systems is evolution. Expecting a bridge to be lengthened by 30m as part of its "next release" would provoke derisive laughter, yet the equivalent is commonplace when working on software. How to deal with this is a central challenge.
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I agree. What "triggered" me - in a humorous way - was the term Firewall Engineer. I'm still chuckling.
I think I would lean more toward an engineer having more solid foundations in the basic sciences - physics, thermo, etc. Having said that, I have NEVER seen an engineer including myself pound out code like some of the CompSci folks I've worked with. Looking at the code witch as an example. I've worked with a few others. The code springs from their fingers, and their minds work at a level that makes me dizzy.
There was a book a read long ago about Star Wars. Not the movie, but President Reagan's vision of strategic missile defense. One of the pillars of the concept was the space based X-Ray laser. This was a device that was nuclear bomb powered - you aimed the lasing rods at targets and detonated the weapon where upon the x-rays from the detonation were directed at targets. Now, there are treaties and all sorts of problems putting (more?) nuclear weapons in orbit, but the idea came from some Lawrence Livermore PhD (might have been CalTech, I forget) who had a blue sky moment.
He spent the next few days pounding out simulation code to validate his idea. The concept had such potential that they piggy backed it on an upcoming nuclear weapons test. Yes, at the time the US was still detonating weapons under ground (mainly to develop the data so that designs could be confidently simulated). As I recall, the test was not successful, it was wildly successful.
Anyway, I still want to know what a firewall engineer is 
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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It's a Wizard from Dungeons & Dragons that can cast the spell Fire Wall with precision.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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Today there are so-called "engineering" students whose Bachelor's degree specialization is "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning". Am not exactly sure whether these students will be engineers when they come out with the degree.
And once this AI hullabaloo dies down, where can they be employed, employable?
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Back in the early 80s (can't speak to much earlier or later since that is when I was in college) most of the major technical colleges (one of which I was attending) referred to their programming degrees as Software Engineering.
Why? Most likely because there were two camps, science and engineering, and you had to be in one or the other. The Computer Science side, which included both hardware and software, was much more abstract and theoretical and, at the time, tended not to produce people doing the actual work.
The disappearance of SE degrees in favor of CS degrees and the "developer" moniker came later as programming degrees proliferated. Probably because the other engineering programs derided software engineering as a degree for people who couldn't hack being "real" engineers so both sides felt the need for an amicable divorce.
Given what started happening at that time, I'm sure many of those newly minted SE's were crying all the way to the bank a few short years later.
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charlieg wrote: "Senior Firewall Engineer."
sounds to me like a fancy bricklayer.
Also the apocryphal
Yesterday I couldn't spell Engineer. Today I are one!
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: "Senior Firewall Engineer."
So...an almost-retired brick layer?
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Sometimes (most of the time) I am dense. I missed the joke. 
good morning
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I've never been comfortable calling myself an engineer, but it's because I view programming as more of an art, a knack.
What I mean is with a system of any significant complexity things get complex rather than complicated in software, and the ability to repeat the project with a different set of developers is effectively nil.
Sure you can fulfill the same functional requirements, but the software will work entirely differently.
The electrical engineers I work with produce highly repeatable designs, for lack of a better way to express what I'm talking about.
And if I put a different team of engineers on the same project replicated twice, the results, while not identical, will be much more consistent between the two teams than they are with software.
That's not how I would define engineering though - like I don't want to commit a no true scotsman fallacy here. Rather, I'm trying to give an example where programming is more ... organic? messy? at the end of the day non-repeatable.
So among other reasons, that's why I'm uncomfortable with the term "software engineer", especially as it applies to me and the way I code.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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- "Programmer", "software developer" and "software engineer" are often lumped together and mean the same thing: a person who creates and modifies software. I don't have an issue with candidates describing themselves using any of these terms.
- Unlike software engineers, electrical, mechanical, civil, aeronautical and other types of engineers work with extremely well defined specifications. Experienced software engineers will design for extensibility and robustness (for example by building loosely coupled components) but this isn't guaranteed. Consequently, software often evolves in a manner that eventually causes it to become overly complicated and difficult or impossible to maintain, requiring The Great Rewrite.
- We software developers could learn a lot from the folks who engineered the modern day lightbulb. I can use a modern tri-light LED bulb in a 1960s lamp without worrying about compatibility. The tri-light feature may not work if the socket doesn't support it, but the lamp's operation will gracefully degrade to a simpler behavior. Granted, software is more complex, but you've gotta give credit to the designers of the light bulb and the machines that allow light bulbs to be manufactured, for designing for change.
/ravi
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honest assessment. But the point of the post was - tongue in cheek - what is a firewall engineer. The general consensus is a brick layer  .
This is the lounge folks, you are failing me.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: his is the lounge folks, you are failing me.
Apologies! 
/ravi
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You make an interesting point about the lightbulb.
Is your point that we need to design new systems so that they comfortably interface with old systems?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I was advocating designing software in a way that makes it easier to extend and change, when change is warranted. Some ways of achieving this is by modularity, maintaining separation of concerns, abstraction, loose coupling and encapsulation. While following these principles won't guarantee the software we build will be easy to extend and modify, not doing any of these things will almost certainly ensure that it will be difficult to extend the software.
cf: Bob Martin's story about the Sword C++ debugger.
Clean Code with Uncle Bob Episode 1[^]
/ravi
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: not doing any of these things will almost certainly ensure that it will be difficult to extend the software.
While doing those things poorly will make it impossible and cost more just to maintain
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jschell wrote: While doing those things poorly will make it impossible and cost more just to maintain
Doing anything poorly will make the software difficult and more costly to maintain.
/ravi
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote: Unlike software engineers, electrical, mechanical, civil, aeronautical and other types of engineers work with extremely well defined specifications.
Tell me you never worked for pharmaceutical, food safety, automotive, avionics, naval, trainlines and biomedical without telling it.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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yeah, I missed this comment. I've worked in missile systems (air to air, how to have a bad day) and electronic warfare. I suppose we had specs, but all it took was for the Soviets to get creative and the current specs went out the window.
I need to go fix my high tech washing machine... again....
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Some of those are hard and not negotiable though, i.e. the warhead has to be primed after a certain clearance from the aircraft. This includes a metric ton of physics, electronics and software to work together - in my opinion every time you have to know multiple disciplines to make a software you are doing engineering.
A simple push-piston eject system on a conveyor brings along a bunch of hard requirements that many "software developers" cannot approach, becasue you have to take into account mechanical delays, non uniform accelerations, blank times, shifting of items on the conveyor, synchronization between software, piston and items on the conveyor... and it's EASY, baceause usual tolerances are well above 10ms.
Managing the blank times of paired mosfets in 20 Mhz modulation center-pulse to avoid 100A short circuits is... different. And it's a tiny part of a FOC algorithm.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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Agreed. For the AIM54C, there was a minimum amount of acceleration before arming the warhead (my guess, I never saw the specs). But if the motor did not fire, then you had a very, very expensive dumb bomb.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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My old man (who was a civil engineer) would be laughing in his grave looking at some of the people who call themselves engineers. He would also smack me silly if I called myself a "software engineer", even from the grave I suspect.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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