Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips If a system designed to last a few months last 12 years, is that a success or a failure? A recent story hailed the success of the NASA Mars rover. The rover was “designed” to last a few months, but is still going after 12 years. Wow! What a great design and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If someone could overcome the scientific and logical barriers to backdoors to encryption systems, they would still face one of trusting liars. Many of our elected representatives want our technology companies to build encryption systems with “backdoors.” (Here is a link to one story of such.) These magical backdoors would permit the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A little-publicized factor in the computing world is that to understand something, you have to find someone, i.e., a warm body. Back in the dark ages of computing, I wrote software in a language called FORTRAN. We used FORTRAN code that had been written the pre-dark ages by a group of people […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As a job seeker, I often run into inexplicable confusion between these two job titles. I am a systems engineer. I do systems engineering. I am not a systems administrator. I do not do systems administration. A quick read of the two Wikipedia articles linked above shows that the two professions are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems the world has redefined what it means to be an engineer. A recent story on the web discussed how Twitter will change the appearance of its home page. Involved in the story is Twitter’s Vice President of Engineering. I am an engineer; I have been an engineer for several decades. […]

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