Slashdot Mirror

I receive email at work now using a non-MS client. Works great and never hiccoughs through the worms that cause a furor for my win32 brethren.

This IRM that inserts an extra step of corresponding with an authenticating Win2003 server "enables":

• MS to sell licenses for such servers to MyCorp
• MyCorp to eliminate the possibility of using any MUA other than Outlook and increasing our dependence on a single vendor for our MUAs

Yes, this will be sold as an "enabling" technology in the glossy ads: businesses focus on their core competencies while MS "takes care" of all of your IT solutions, keeping email private, etc.

Other definitions of "enabler" would be more pertinent, but help is available.

I wrote about the Fortune's interview of Bill Joy a couple of days ago here. But I focused my summary on his comments about the article he wrote for Wired in April 2000, "Why the future doesn't need us," in which he said that rapid advances in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics (collectively known as GNR) could endanger our lives. And in this long text published by CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil also writes about the dangers introduced by new technologies. More specifically, he also gives his views about GNR. In his conclusion, he says that "we need to understand that these technologies are advancing on hundreds of fronts, rendering relinquishment completely ineffectual as a strategy. As uncomfortable as it may be, we have no choice but to prepare the defenses."

If you look here you will see that others are starting to realize what was not mentioned or covered by CIO magazine. Everyone that is a CIO reader should comment and add to the thread.

Vedanti, what you said is all true, but my underlying message is true, too. United States companies will lose intellectual property to their out-sourcing companies and the employees of out-sourcing companies. The intellectual property will go who knows where. It will become part of someone else's product, sometimes.

See the article referenced in the Slashdot story: The Hidden Costs of Offshore Outsourcing. Look at the comments at the bottom. Other people are discussing loss of intellectual property, not just me. Or, seen other Slashdot comments in this story, such as this one: I've seen this happen before my eyes.

I know that there are 13 major languages in India. I know that most educated people speak English. I didn't have time to write a thorough article; I only had time for a comment. So, I brushed in the broad strokes.

Hiring lawyers in India is not the best way for U.S. companies to spend their time, even if they win. Also, there is no winning. A company that gets into legal battles in another country has already lost.

What strikes me most immediately about the phenomenon of offshore outsourcing is the low level of the outcry about it in the mainstream media. Just one more revolution of the vicious circle - the global economy's levelling effect. Maybe even schadenfreude that it's happening to a highly-paid sector of the economy. But in RTFA, they make the comment that in the last offshore wave, the service-sector economy replaced the manufacturing economy, providing a soft landing. This time, they suggest, is the "structural" adjustment for which there doesn't seem to be another soft landing on the way.

The problem is in the Friedman-esque incentives that make it preferable for this to happen rather than to keep the jobs at home. I don't want to seem a wild booster of the US economy in this one - it's pretty much every country for itself out there - but the structural adjustment the article refers to hollows out the competence base of American IT. From there, I worry about the stock of high-value jobs and the follow-on impact that this will have on the US economy in strange places, like university tuition and social security funding.

No doubt it's coming, but it seems to me that the CIOs aren't operating with sufficient perspective to do anything about it. That's why the wider silence is disturbing to me. The CIO articles are definitely worth a read once the /. effect calms down.

I mean we let people from all over come here and work. Ummmmm, except we don't.

Um, YES we do!

The H-1 and L-1 Visa programs were invented specifically for this reason. In the US, we have no standard like those I've read about in Australia and elsewhere. Well, we have some regulations, but recently they've gone completely unenforced. If a company in this country can hire someone from overseas to do a job for which they're currently paying an American worker, and pay that worker half or less what the American makes, the company is under no pressure not to hire the foreign worker. It's happening for real. In the REAL world.

http://www.rescueamericanjobs.org/
http://www.local6.com/money/2381343/detail.html
http://www.thenetworkadministrator.com/LosingYou rJ ob.htm
http://www.house.gov/delauro/press/2003/L1_bill_7- 10-03.htm

Further, US jobs now are being sent TO other countries. By some estimates, 2 million plus jobs in the next few years. Than't a HUGE chunk of the IT sector.

http://www.cio.com/archive/090103/backlash.html (accoring to this article, the number is like 10% of IT jobs)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=14700325
http://www.msnbc.com/news/947478.asp?cp1=1
http://www.techsunite.org/news/techind/030722_ibm. cfm
http://comment.cio.com/comments/13404.html

The reason this is a story here, is because a good number of us work in the IT sector. This has HUGE implications for us.

Consider the fact that many colleges around the nation are scaling back IT programs (my stepmother teaches various IT classes at a local college) and thike about what that means for those of us who spent money on educations or who have been relying on our IT experience as means to acquire jobs.

The economy and job prospects have been bad enough just dealing with the economic slowdown without having to deal with the jobs that are still there going away from the US (I know, I was unemployed for the greater portion of 2002, and I'm only employed now because I new the guy who ran the IT department for the company I work for now).

In many countries in the EU and also in Australia, they cannot hire a non-citizen unless they CANNOT find a qualified candidate who IS a citizen. The US government needs to step up and implement some similar legislation. Even if you think about this from a lawmakers perspective, an American who makes $50,000 a year pays a whole lot more than an unemployed American and the foreigner who takes his job for $30,000. They'll see a WHOLE LOT less than that from the unemployed American and the job that's no longer in the US! Even the companies that do use outsourcing are killing their own market. How many computers or programs or Coke ayr you going to buy when you're unemployed, and can the foreigner who's making half of what you were making pick up the slack? I don't think so...

Anyway, I'm done...

As far as I know, American companies, led by American managers, controlled by American dhareholders, are relocatting your jobs to places where they can have the same service for less money. Go complain with them. Or with your Congress. The Indian workers do not need nor care to become a citizen of your country. The jobs are being offered in India...

Good point, lets look at this another way though -- these are two articles written in a language commonly spoken in the United States published by a magazine in the United States talking about the state of how the job market is in the United States.

That would imply that the target audience is the United States. One of them in peticular, CIO, which seems to be the focus of this discussion, is an acronym for Cheif Information Officer, a term coined to describe the person in charge of the IT area of a company. I believe that this is one of the groups that you explicitly mention as the correct group to be complaining to.

So by basis of the exact same anaylsis that you did, it seems quite obvious that the target audience for the articles is the parties in the United States who you were referring to -- not the Indians.

If anything it could be seen as a way to disgust the US companies that are outsourcing into not outsourcing because they will see that it helps them in no way beyond their bottom line (yeah like that may happen), or perhaps the target was to scare the legislators into action.

You may also be enlightened by the about CIO.com statement on their site. Incase you don't feel like following the link, here is what it says:

Our primary audience is made up of CIOs in the United States, although we have readers from around the world. Different versions of CIO are now published in nine other countries/geographic areas (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan) with more planned in the coming months.

There are indeed.

"There is a horrible misconception that truckers are technologically incompetent people," says Robert P. May, PNV's CEO. "In truth, they are independent, smart people who like to figure things out." In fact, May says, close to 25 percent of the country's truck drivers have their own laptops and 50 percent have computers at home.

from Buddy for the Long Haul

July 1, 2000 Issue of CIO Magazine

and, a little more current

Based on 2001 data, about 20 percent of truckers carried laptops in their trucks and 54 percent of those who owned and operated their own trucks carried laptops.

from Company Trucks Along

Austin Business Journal, June 2, 2003

Try to place yourself in their position and try to identify problems with OSS and advantages of non-OSS.

This was a story earlier on /., and it's an article in the CIO magazine about OSS for large enterprises: Your Open Source Plan

The Information Technology Association of America. The same group that, in the midst of the dot-bomb bloodbath insisted that there was a shortage in available IT labor and lobied for raising caps in H-1B visa allowances. The same group maintaining that there is a current 500,000 worker shortage and expected to champion maintaining the current temporarily increased H-1B visa cap.

Now, I would certainly agree that Linux hasn't achieved Total World Domination. However, no one that's paying any attention at all to the server market can pretend that Linux isn't making a serious impact. You may not like that fact, but saying that it isn't so is just ridiculous.

I recently posted a short article on this subject on SYS-CON's SYS-CON's Linux Business and Technology (the publishers of Java Developer's Journal). I think an even better article on Corporate open source adoption is the one in the March 15th issue of CIO magazine.

Given that the cover of the March 15th issue of CIO magazine is titled "Your Open Source Plan", I'd have to say more IT managers are thinking about it than you are of. Worth a read, IMHO.

Given that the cover of the March 15th issue of CIO magazine is titled "Your Open Source Plan", I'd have to say more IT managers are thinking about it than you are of. Worth a read, IMHO.

The Case For OpenOffice

Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions (part 1 of 2)

Largo loves Linux more than ever (part 2 of 2)

How To Run a Microsoft-Free Shop

Reasons to Avoid Microsoft (summary and links)

Microsoft loses showdown in Houston

Making a Living Saving the Government Money

Those are just some of the articles I've saved. If you wade thru a /. search, you may find more. I found those particularly interesting because some of them give details of companies or goverment agencies who have moved to Linux (away from MS), and their difficulties and successes doing so.

here is an excerpt from an old press article: "one of the first companies to offer hacker insurance, has begun charging its clients 5 percent to 15 percent more if they use Microsoft's Windows NT software ... has been selling hacker insurance since 1998, based his decision on more than 400 security analyses [ ... ] system administrators working on open source systems tend to be better trained and stay with their employers longer than those at firms using Windows" read on: short (long)

I wrote the following on Dec. 20, 2002 about phenotropics. Jaron Lanier is mostly known for being the guy behind the expression "virtual reality." For its special issue "Big [and Not So Big] Ideas For 2003," CIO Magazine talked with him about a new concept -- at least for me -- phenotropics. "The thing I'm interested in now is a high-risk, speculative, fundamental new approach to computer science. I call it phenotropics," says the 42-year-old Lanier. By pheno, he means the physical appearance of something, and by tropics, he means interaction. Lanier's idea is to create a new way to tie two pieces of software together. He theorizes that two software objects should contact each other "like two objects in nature," instead of through specific modules or predetermined points of contact. Jason Lanier also talks about software diversity to enhance security. Check this column for a summary or the original article for more details."

I wrote the following on Dec. 20, 2002 about phenotropics. Jaron Lanier is mostly known for being the guy behind the expression "virtual reality." For its special issue "Big [and Not So Big] Ideas For 2003," CIO Magazine talked with him about a new concept -- at least for me -- phenotropics. "The thing I'm interested in now is a high-risk, speculative, fundamental new approach to computer science. I call it phenotropics," says the 42-year-old Lanier. By pheno, he means the physical appearance of something, and by tropics, he means interaction. Lanier's idea is to create a new way to tie two pieces of software together. He theorizes that two software objects should contact each other "like two objects in nature," instead of through specific modules or predetermined points of contact. Jason Lanier also talks about software diversity to enhance security. Check this column for a summary or the original article for more details."

Entrust tried and failed to sell PKI to any one. Until 2000 PKI was Entrust's primary (only) focus. Unfortunately PKI is a solution looking for a problem. There are other problems as well. (Link curtosey of the July 15 2002 Cryptogram)

It is too bad really. Where PKI works, it works well. MS's Passport and Sun's thing are really PKIs waiting to happen.

America is quite like the fall of the Victorian Empire. She has become a nation afraid of progress and if something doesn't change she won't stay towards the top of the heap.

I've heard this kind of talk since the early 80's. We keep waiting for it to happen and it doesn't.

Answer this: how many of these technologies were concieved in the US? Probably most. Does Japan have any kind of software industry? Nope.

Why is the phrase "Japanese Innovation" nearly an oxymoron?

Here's an interesting article. Of course, you'll never see something like this in the mainstream media as they like to use "US falling behind" scare headlines to draw attention.

Story

Here's another statistic. Now imagine how Slate would forcasting doom for the US if Japan were at the top.

Another statistic that probably wouldn't make for good scare tactic headlines.

Why are there no Japanese Google's, Yahoo's, Mapquest's or Amazon's? (If there are any Japanese equivalents of these sites you can bet your cookies that they're just shallow copies of the originals) Just how much can you do online if you live in Japan?

America is quite like the fall of the Victorian Empire. She has become a nation afraid of progress and if something doesn't change she won't stay towards the top of the heap.

I've heard this kind of talk since the early 80's. We keep waiting for it to happen and it doesn't.

Answer this: how many of these technologies were concieved in the US? Probably most. Does Japan have any kind of software industry? Nope.

Why is the phrase "Japanese Innovation" nearly an oxymoron?

Here's an interesting article. Of course, you'll never see something like this in the mainstream media as they like to use "US falling behind" scare headlines to draw attention.

Story

Here's another statistic. Now imagine how Slate would forcasting doom for the US if Japan were at the top.

Another statistic that probably wouldn't make for good scare tactic headlines.

Why are there no Japanese Google's, Yahoo's, Mapquest's or Amazon's? (If there are any Japanese equivalents of these sites you can bet your cookies that they're just shallow copies of the originals) Just how much can you do online if you live in Japan?

killer handwriting recognition? Compared to what, a monkey? The Newton had notoriously bad handwriting recognition. A big part of what makes the Palm platform so popular is that graffiti is so much like ordinary block letter writing that it's easy to learn, but the computer has much less trouble recognizing it.

It's a very thorough overview of all the major steps (technical, mental, emotional, you name it) that an office must pass through in order to successfully dump Microsoft. It'll be very helpful to your cause.

It's a very thorough overview of all the major steps (technical, mental, emotional, you name it) that an office must pass through in order to successfully dump Microsoft. It'll be very helpful to your cause.

For some moral support, a few laughs, and generally practical wisdom, read this article from CIO magazine.

Migrating 50 users, while no walk in the park, shouldn't really be that hard. You can feasibly handle this project a few users at a time, especially if you handle it right. You'll want to start by understanding the needs and tasks of your various users. Make a note of the applications/features they use, and research alternatives in the Free Software world. You'll want to test these applications out, play around, and get comfortable with them, so you'll be able to install and configure them to be useable for your users, and help them out with simple problems as they make the transition.

As you go forward, you'll want to group people who work together or trade files a lot to upgrade them together or very close to each other, so you don't run into too much trouble with compatibility problems. You'll probably want to go with StarOffice, and keep with the Microsoft file formats for a while, at least until everyone is done.

Make sure your finance people understand that this won't be free, and will take time and expenditures, but work with them to try and manage this transition within what they would have otherwise considered a fair budget for the next upgrade cycle. Schedule a generous time-frame for yourself as well, and explain that on this particular round you'll probably consume the license savings in labor costs, but for future upgrades and maintenance, this won't be the case, and the license savings will be there.

Move carefully, but confidently. Help your users become confident with the alternatives. Encourage them to suggest that outside communications with the company be formatted in non Microsoft file types (for instance, ask the hiring manager(s) to request that resume submissions be in plain text, or RTF format, with a simple instruction on the job description of how to save in this format from most word processors (Click File, Save As, and choose the Plain Text option under file format)).

I highly suggest in a business environment you go with a distribution that supports automatic installation of a custom configuration (like Red Hat's kickstart). You can set up a system to meet the specifications you need, with all the software configured just the way you and your users want it, and then take a snapshot which can be easily installed on other systems, regardless of hardware configuration (bypassing the weaknesses of Ghost and the like), freeing you to devote your time to user orientation and training, as well as building a common sandbox environment that you'll be able to play in, and easily keep organized in the future.

If you're not too scared, and you schmooze the right way, you should be able to accomplish the migration in reasonable time and without (too much) trouble.

Good luck!

Have a look at this article, which explains that sabotage does happen, and denying it is part of the issue:

http://www.cio.com/archive/010102/security.html

From this article at CIO.com:

"At the film company DreamWorks, Ed Leonard has ported the entire graphics animation department to Linux; Shrek was created on a "renderfarm" (a powerful, refrigerator-size rack of servers) that had 800 processors running Linux. Leonard took the money he saved by not having maintenance contracts and used it to buy far more inexpensive Linux PCs. He says the money he has saved will allow DreamWorks to replace desktops and the renderfarm every two years instead of every five."

Am I missing something here?

What I thought was the most interesting is that this conclusion is quoted from one of the professional analyst companies, when this story in CIO (actually a link off another CIO article that appeared in Slashdot a couple of days ago) talks about how they a) often don't know what they're talking about and b) will have whatever conclusion they are paid to have.

The sample press release with names altered out from that vendor hype article actually belongs to TrueAdvantage
(see here... - thx google :)

The sample press release with names altered out from that vendor hype article actually belongs to TrueAdvantage
(see here... - thx google :)

Of course, everyone who adopts Seibel's software does this.

Wow, I gotta get me some of that!

The example press release with the company names changed:
http://www.cio.com/archive/010102/hype_sidebar_1.h tml

The real press release:
http://www.trueadvantage.com/press_04.htm

As far as I know is that they get the software and hardware at very discounted prices, particularly from SGI, Alias/Wavefront and Pixar. With Pixar it seems that one of the conditions for Lucas to sell it to Jobs was to have early access to Pixar's technology, mainly PRMan (and I could guess also RAT now). From SGI they get early access to hardware thanks to their JEDI agreement (Joint Environment for Digital Imaging), I think it's JEDI III at the moment. According to some rumors is that part of the agreement is that ILM doesn't mention other platforms. They get the gear and give feedback to SGI along braging rights. From Alias/Wavefront they are also among the beta testers for all new versions. But in the end they wouldn't give it away as an incentive. Even if it was free if it didn't fit their pipeline it would be pointless.

There are plenty of articles detailing Linux increasing use in VFX. Here are a some:

Linux Helps Bring Titanic to Life
The Little Engine That Could
Penguin Power
Linux Invades Hollywood
VESTECH 2000
Linux takes Hollywood by storm
Linux goes to the movies
Nixed for Linux
DreamWorks Feature Linux and Animation
Industry of Change: Linux Storms Hollywood

Experts are once again issuing a warning the newly released MS SettlemeNT contains a security flaw which could allow malicious coders to take over your Intellectual Property, delete files on your computer and gain control of your finances. MS denies these allegations though insiders say Microsoft is working on a patch. Back to you Neil.

Things have certainly changed, haven't they? The R&D guys at @stake (the remnants of the l0pht) are certainly brilliant coders and security analysts, but it's painful to see them going down a route that indemifies companies from the results of the very failings that they once attacked.

It's amusing to look a current pictures of Mudge, as well - it really points out the changes that have occured with the former l0pht: Current "Mudge" versus the Mudge that was.

.NET (+ C# & CLR), dead on arrival with CIOs, my consulting customers and smart developers everywhere. Besides, Borland beat them out the gate with web services, which is a good implementation to boot (as always with Borland development tools). And Java's slant on web services is ramping fast with the help of IBM and other players.

Very interesting link in the article : Let's stop wasting $78 billions a year

From the article :

"We didn't pay Oracle. We owed maintenance of $300,000 to $400,000, and we just didn't pay it. We said, 'We're holding on to the money until you get this thing up and running.'"
--BILL CROWELL, CIO, MEREDITH CORP.

"If CIOs could say, 'You'll get 10 percent now and 10 percent after each quarter if the software works, it would give vendors a financial incentive to make sure the product works."
--GREG SEYK, CIO, VISIONQUEST

"Those folks involved in the open-source movement are very knowledgeable at what they do, and they're producing really great code."
--RAYMOND DURY, CO-CIO OF AMERITRADE

Are these guys my personal heros or what?

Pass this link around and make sure that your CIO (and CTO, and CEO...) gets it. You never know, he might want to be part of that club these guys are forming : The Cluefull CIOs Club.

There's a CIO magazine article with their own "What's coming up list" that includes voice recognition with a twist.

They see voice recognition starting to really make an appearance in large call centres rather than for the fellow in the street with his (or her) home PC.

It makes sense to me. That's where (a) there is a significant possible $$ impact and (b) people are already using a device designed for voice input.

Everyone should take a peek at this article just to stare at these self-important CIO blowhards and their goofy pictures. Is this guy a jackass or what?

The current CIO (no longer co- for the moment) of Ameritrade seems to have very positive view of Linux and open-source in general according to this article. The CIO who resigned recently was NOT the one bullish on open-source and Linux. Hmmm....

Not only is this feasible, it's reality. (Search for Anchorage in the document)

Here is another proof of concept.

Now, "feasible" and "cost-effective" are not synonymous, but at least this is a start.

Note that the UCITA and DCMA make it even more difficult - actually almost impossible - to sue your software vendor.

So WHY does everyone keep repeating this mantra that you can "at least sue your vendor" with proprietary software? YOU CAN'T. And how is a contract with a closed source vendor any more legitimate than a contract with an open source one?

From the San Mercury News article:

I made this offer not because the government can't afford to pay for the software, but because I shut up the critics who were saying, `Gee, Larry Ellison wants to build a national database because he wants to sell more databases,' which is pretty cynical and bizarre.

A little higher up in the article is this little tidbit:

Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades won't be free.

Anyone who buys from Orcales knows that most of the cost of software is the maintenance and upgrades. [www.cio.com] Which kind of negates any benefit from the initial donation. In other words, Larry Ellison is doing this to sell more databases. Around $3 billion's worth, if the numbers stated in the article are correct. That's one sweet gov't contract.

We cannot fight terrorists by making more rules, restrictions and regulation. It just won't work. They don't play by the rules. They never will.

And, might I remind Mr. Ashcroft, you cannot preserve freedom by eliminating it.

--

Piracy: "One in every three pieces of software used by businesses worldwide in 1999 was illegal, costing software makers $12.2 billion for the year"

Bugs: "Faulty software costs businesses $78 billion per year"

hmmm... so pirates have $66 Billion to catch up?

I am also a manager, and when I received the directive from management to bring in another PL/SQL contract programmer to help out on our project, I wanted to scream. This caused two problems:

1. According to Rapid Development (which every DEV manager, director and executive needs to read), one of the classic mistakes of development is to add a new developer in the middle of the project in the hopes that it will speed development time, and

2. We would have to find a single qualified person that could learn our design and approach quickly...and who was not currently working or who was ready to leave his/her current position.

We were also hampered by the fact that our $#@! company has an exclusive contract with one of the body shops. What this means is that they would push their own people first no matter how incompetent, before they brought in anyone else from other body shops.

Now, there are a lot of database people out there. A lot. I looked at more resumes than I can count. My ear was sore from phone interviews.

From the article, the author gives this advice to developers:

The answer is, sad to say, that you should engage in frequent job-hopping. Note that the timing is very delicate, with the windows of opportunity usually being very narrow, as seen below.

I couldn't agree more. Since most companies are no longer willing to train lesser-competent folks and age them into the positions needed (thus indirectly lowering turnover, duh), then it is up to us to train ourselves, then leave when we can get a better/different job. Someone I used to work for told me that I needed to switch jobs every 3 years, because I'd fall behind in the pay raise schedule. He figured about a 20% pay rate increase was acceptable. With HR mandating 3-6% merit increases (maybe <g>), one will fall behind after three years. I also read in one of the trade rags that the average lifespan of an IT worker ranged from 2.5 to 5 years, which matches my experience. That is a LOT of turnover, which companies pay for by the knowledge/skill loss and the cost to replace.

Never mind that the knowledge and experience is lost forever. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again because we keep forgetting things we did in the past. "If we implement this function at the end of the accounting batch run without notifying Ms. Somebody in accounting exactly 4 days prior and Mr. Whomever on the web team exactly 2 weeks prior, but not via email--only in person, then the process will need to be reset manually," et cetera. Well, Coder Bob figured that out by being burned once, and now he left to another company to do KDE extensions; no one knows what he did in that area, just that he coded report statements.

If companies would treat their workers better (by actually acting like "Employees are [their] most valuable asset") then we will see a decrease of H1Bs, of any skilled talent shortage and of this constant ri-goddamn-diculous job hopping.

Until then, let them whine while we job-hop, learning what we can and taking our knowledge and experience with us to the next gig.

One politician who deserves to be recognized is Russ Feingold, the idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin. Best known for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill (and one of the few politicians to refuse PAC money in a campaign for national office), Feingold has also long been one of the few tech-savvy people in a notoriously over-age, anti-tech government body. His finest hour in this regard was the Leahy-Feingold bill to overturn the Communications Decency Act, which was left to the courts to litigate; but he's often spoken out on issues near and dear to the EFF, with support for encryption freedoms and online privacy.

The only Senator who really outstrips him in this area is Patrick Leahy, D-VT, who takes the lead on more tech issues (Feingold often being a co-sponsor), especially since Feingold has put so much effort into the campaign finance issue.

But especially in those early days around 1995, when hardly anyone really knew what the internet was, Feingold said on the Senate floor,

Guaranteeing the Internet is free of speech restrictions, other than the statutory restrictions on obscenity and pornography which already exist, should be of concern to all Americans who want to be able to freely discuss issues of importance to them regardless of whether others might view those statements as offensive or distasteful. Shifting political views about what types of speech are unsuitable should not be allowed to determine what is or is not an appropriate use of electronic communications. While the current target of our political climate is indecent speech (the so-called "seven dirty words"), a weakening of First Amendment protections could lead to the censorship of other crucial types of speech, including religious expression and political dissent. I believe the censorship of the Internet is a perilous road for the Congress to walk down. It sets a dangerous precedent for First Amendment protections and it is unclear where that road will end.

Very impressive. Remember, this was nineteen-ninety-five, TIME magazine was running cover stories suggesting the internet was some sinister force creeping into our homes, and most people still had to have the word explained to them. In those days, it was difficult to find anyone who would stand up for the rights of internet users, who were seen as a fringe group of suspicious characters, hackers, pornographers, terrorists and worse -- rather than today's view that the internet is a basic utility to be enjoyed by all citizens. Fortunately, shortly after this I attended a Rotary Club meeting where he spoke (we are from the same home town), and in the Q&A time I stood up and let him know that a lot of people online considered him a hero.
----
lake effect weblog

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Have a look at What's the difference between a CIO and a CTO? There is a lot at this site that can help you figure things out...

there's also interesting stuff at http://www.cio.com/

rr

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.