Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Photographers from a Canadian company are going house to house, shooting pictures of every house in America, in hopes of building a giant database that can be sold to banks, insurance companies, and appraisal firms. While this activity is legal (as long as the photographers don't trespass on private property to get their shots), there are obviously concerns about security and privacy. Considering that an individual can be detained and questioned by the FBI for photographing a bridge in this country, why should this Canadian company get a free pass? Tinfoil hat aside, something seems very, very fishy here." From the Arizona Star article about the photographing of Tucson: "'The [handout given to people who complain] made it sound like they're doing it for law enforcement, when in reality they're doing it for sales and marketing,' said [a City Council aide], who received several calls about the company."

An anonymous reader writes "This article on Photo.Net describes a new type of imaging technique that finds depth discontinuities in real-world scenes with multiple flashes added to ordinary digital cameras. As depth discontinuities correspond to real 3D object boundaries, the resulting images look like line drawings. The same technique was used at this year's SIGGRAPH to create a live A-ha 'Take On Me' demo."

g8orade asks: "I belong to Photo.net, a community photography site that promotes exchange among 'serious-minded' (sometimes) photographers. A key facet is that members review and rank others' photos and can then search for the best, worst, most viewed, by topic, etc. There are plenty of other sites like this, Slashdot itself relies on users' contributions for its content. Is anyone a member of a community, database driven site like this that -also- acts as a catalog, allowing members to sell their digital content at prices set by them or the site, paid up front--not after the fact like shareware, with a cut of the transaction going to the site's hosters?"

"Compared to eBay, here are some key differences:

• It's your own content, or it must be content for which you own the copyright.
• The rankings apply to the content, not the reseller's karma.
• There's no limit on the product; it's digital.
• It might be fixed price per copy, not an auction."

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal

People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?

Phillip:

We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.

That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.

Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X

I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).

I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?

Phillip:

Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)

Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.

12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen

When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?

I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.

Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?

Phillip:

A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!

the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.

It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.

Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?

Phillip:

Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.

As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.

Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury

The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.

A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;

B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?

C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.

I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?

Phillip:

With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.

A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)

Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.

Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois

Philip:

I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.

Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

Phillip:

I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.

The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee

I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?

I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)

Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?

Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.

Phillip:

Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!

(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)

Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr

I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )

My question is this:

In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)

The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.

Phillip:

When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.

Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee

First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.

My Question is:

What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?

Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).

Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!

Phillip:

You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)

There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.

The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.

So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.

Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle

The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?

And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)

Phillip:

Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/

Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.

What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).

What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?

Phillip:

These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html

and

http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html

for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).

Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.

------------------

I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.

Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin

Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?

Phillip:

Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"

I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"

If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).

Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes

Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:

What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.

How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:

Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.

Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.

Phillip:

Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...

We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).

As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).

On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).

Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach

Dr. Greenspun,

Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.

What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?

Phillip:

First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.

Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.

-----------------

Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Philip Greenspun is (in no particular order) a photographer, writer, software engineer, Web designer, philosopher, and entrepreneur, and is now the "main man" behind the free Ars Digita University program. Years ago, a gentleman with Philip's wide range of interests and skills was called a "Rennaisance Man." Today -- especially in Philip's case -- the phrase "Internet Man" may be more apt, but the idea is the same. Post questions for Philip below; we'll select 10 of the highest-moderated and send them to him Tuesday afternoon (US EDT). His answers will appear, Open Source-like, "When they're ready."

General interview notes/updates: Richard Stallman has been putting plenty of thought into his answers; they should be along within the next day or two. The SCO Presidents have promised to have their answers to us in time for publication Thursday. The band Metallica has agreed, through their publicist, to do an interview about Napster and its effect on the music industry as soon as they finish the music video they're working on now, hopefully later this week. Next week's scheduled interview guest already knows the answer: 42. Yes, we're talking about Douglas Adams. So don't panic, okay?

- Robin "roblimo" Miller

Philip Greenspun, whose name you may recognize from photo.net or Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, is founding a tuition-free program in computer science that's intended to provide the equivalent of four years' worth of CompSci in a single, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day year. You heard it right: tuition-free. And they're accepting applications. There are a few catches: you'll need a bachelor's degree already, and you'll need to be so bright that people put on sunglasses when you walk into a room. But even the rest of us can eavesdrop with lectures and course notes to be made available online. See this column about the program, or visit ArsDigita University.

Philip Greenspun, whose name you may recognize from photo.net or Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, is founding a tuition-free program in computer science that's intended to provide the equivalent of four years' worth of CompSci in a single, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day year. You heard it right: tuition-free. And they're accepting applications. There are a few catches: you'll need a bachelor's degree already, and you'll need to be so bright that people put on sunglasses when you walk into a room. But even the rest of us can eavesdrop with lectures and course notes to be made available online. See this column about the program, or visit ArsDigita University.

Ellen Spertus has sent us a review of Phillip (and his dog!)'s Guide to Web Publishing. Known for being an outspoken prof at MIT, with interesting ideas, his web publishing manual is similarly interesting, focusing on collabrative web sites.Piotr has updated me. Neither the man, nor the dog is a prof at MIT, although they spend time there. Mea Culpa. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing author Philip Greenspun pages 608 publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann rating 9/10 reviewer Ellen Spertus with Keith Golden ISBN summary Entertaining and informative book on why and how to build collabrative web sites. The Scenario

Philip Greenspun - web guru, expert photographer, free software writer, and unique personality - has written an irreverent, informative, and visually attractive book on why and how to build collaborative database-backed web sites. (Alex, his photogenic co-author, is his dog.) The book is a rewrite of Greenspun's earlier Database-Backed Web Sites, whose history and flaws have been described in Greenspun's amusing Book behind the book behind the book. This time around, Greenspun got to do the book the way he wanted.

Greenspun's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

• Whenever possible, web sites should be designed to allow users to contribute material. (I think most of us at slashdot would agree.)
• Web views should be personalized for individual users. (Ditto.)
• A relational database is the best tool for accomplishing these goals. Greenspun even provides free space on his database server for people to use his collaboration tools on their own sites.
• The user interface should be optimized for the convenience of the user. This does not mean that aesthetics are unimportant, just that they should not interfere with the communication of information.

The book convincingly argues this philosophy by presenting numerous examples from high-level design to actual code. What's Bad?

The biggest negative is that parts of this book are repeats of his earlier book. While most of the material is new, reading through the old stuff can be annoying to people who have read the first.

What's Controversial?

Greenspun's sense of humor. There are many things he says that a reasonable person would find offensive or hilarious or both. (For an example of the last, see his Dating Game.) While it makes the book fun to read, I'd think twice before assigning the book to my students. Some people might be offended by the (artistic) nude pictures, although I was not.

I was at MIT at the same time as Greenspun, where he was known for always speaking his mind (to put it kindly). This same irreverance is evident throughout the book, where he is not shy about stating his dislikes. The following excerpt illustrates Greenspun's style:

Most of what I've said in this chapter goes against conventional wisdom as observed on big corporate sites and in books on Web page design. My theory is that graphic designers get interfaces so wrong because they never figured out that they aren't building CD-ROMs. With a CD-ROM, you can control the user's access to the content. Borrow a copy of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books 1997) and note that he urges you to have an "entry tunnel" of three pages with useless slow-to-load GIFs on them. Then there should be an "exit tunnel" with three more full-page GIFs. In between, there are a handful of "content" pages that constitute the site per se.

Siegel is making some implicit assumptions: that there are no users with text-only browsers; that users have a fast enough Net connection that they won't have to wait 45 seconds before getting to the content of a site; that there are no users who've turned off auto image loading; that there is some obvious place to put these tunnels on a site with thousands of pages. Even if all of those things are true, if the internal pages do indeed contain any content, AltaVista will roar through and wreck everything. People aren't going to enter the site by typing in "http://www.greedy.com" and then let themselves be led around by the nose by you. They will find the site by using a search engine and typing a query string that is of interest to them. The search engine will cough up a list of URLs that it thinks are of interest to them. AltaVista does not think a Dave Siegel "entry tunnel" is "killer". In fact, it might not even bother to index a page that is just one GIF. (chapter 5)

While most of his opinions are as well-supported as this one, some are more controversial, such as section headings "Java and Shockwave - The BLINK Tag Writ Large" and "CORBA: MiddleWare Meets VaporWare".

What's Good?

Greenspun is a real expert on web publishing and communicates a lot of interesting information. It is clear that his goal is evangelism, not making money: Greenspun makes his code freely available, and the entire book is available for free online (although many people will want to buy it for convenience and its stunning photographs).

So What's In It For Me?

Plenty. Reading this book (and downloading the code) makes it easy to create a database-backed web site. (I know because I did so.) You get not just the basics but real depth, such as how to create a high-performance site, capable of serving 20 or more database-backed requests per second.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com
2. So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
3. Scalable systems for on-line communities
4. Static site development
5. Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
6. Adding images to your site
7. Publicizing your site
8. So you want to run your own server
9. User tracking
10. Sites that are really programs
11. Sites that are really databases
12. Database management systems
13. Interfacing a relational database to the Web
14. ecommerce
15. Case studies
16. Better living through chemistry
17. A future so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses

Ellen Spertus has sent us a review of Phillip (and his dog!)'s Guide to Web Publishing. Known for being an outspoken prof at MIT, with interesting ideas, his web publishing manual is similarly interesting, focusing on collabrative web sites.Piotr has updated me. Neither the man, nor the dog is a prof at MIT, although they spend time there. Mea Culpa. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing author Philip Greenspun pages 608 publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann rating 9/10 reviewer Ellen Spertus with Keith Golden ISBN summary Entertaining and informative book on why and how to build collabrative web sites. The Scenario

Philip Greenspun - web guru, expert photographer, free software writer, and unique personality - has written an irreverent, informative, and visually attractive book on why and how to build collaborative database-backed web sites. (Alex, his photogenic co-author, is his dog.) The book is a rewrite of Greenspun's earlier Database-Backed Web Sites, whose history and flaws have been described in Greenspun's amusing Book behind the book behind the book. This time around, Greenspun got to do the book the way he wanted.

Greenspun's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

• Whenever possible, web sites should be designed to allow users to contribute material. (I think most of us at slashdot would agree.)
• Web views should be personalized for individual users. (Ditto.)
• A relational database is the best tool for accomplishing these goals. Greenspun even provides free space on his database server for people to use his collaboration tools on their own sites.
• The user interface should be optimized for the convenience of the user. This does not mean that aesthetics are unimportant, just that they should not interfere with the communication of information.

The book convincingly argues this philosophy by presenting numerous examples from high-level design to actual code. What's Bad?

The biggest negative is that parts of this book are repeats of his earlier book. While most of the material is new, reading through the old stuff can be annoying to people who have read the first.

What's Controversial?

Greenspun's sense of humor. There are many things he says that a reasonable person would find offensive or hilarious or both. (For an example of the last, see his Dating Game.) While it makes the book fun to read, I'd think twice before assigning the book to my students. Some people might be offended by the (artistic) nude pictures, although I was not.

I was at MIT at the same time as Greenspun, where he was known for always speaking his mind (to put it kindly). This same irreverance is evident throughout the book, where he is not shy about stating his dislikes. The following excerpt illustrates Greenspun's style:

Most of what I've said in this chapter goes against conventional wisdom as observed on big corporate sites and in books on Web page design. My theory is that graphic designers get interfaces so wrong because they never figured out that they aren't building CD-ROMs. With a CD-ROM, you can control the user's access to the content. Borrow a copy of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books 1997) and note that he urges you to have an "entry tunnel" of three pages with useless slow-to-load GIFs on them. Then there should be an "exit tunnel" with three more full-page GIFs. In between, there are a handful of "content" pages that constitute the site per se.

Siegel is making some implicit assumptions: that there are no users with text-only browsers; that users have a fast enough Net connection that they won't have to wait 45 seconds before getting to the content of a site; that there are no users who've turned off auto image loading; that there is some obvious place to put these tunnels on a site with thousands of pages. Even if all of those things are true, if the internal pages do indeed contain any content, AltaVista will roar through and wreck everything. People aren't going to enter the site by typing in "http://www.greedy.com" and then let themselves be led around by the nose by you. They will find the site by using a search engine and typing a query string that is of interest to them. The search engine will cough up a list of URLs that it thinks are of interest to them. AltaVista does not think a Dave Siegel "entry tunnel" is "killer". In fact, it might not even bother to index a page that is just one GIF. (chapter 5)

While most of his opinions are as well-supported as this one, some are more controversial, such as section headings "Java and Shockwave - The BLINK Tag Writ Large" and "CORBA: MiddleWare Meets VaporWare".

What's Good?

Greenspun is a real expert on web publishing and communicates a lot of interesting information. It is clear that his goal is evangelism, not making money: Greenspun makes his code freely available, and the entire book is available for free online (although many people will want to buy it for convenience and its stunning photographs).

So What's In It For Me?

Plenty. Reading this book (and downloading the code) makes it easy to create a database-backed web site. (I know because I did so.) You get not just the basics but real depth, such as how to create a high-performance site, capable of serving 20 or more database-backed requests per second.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com
2. So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
3. Scalable systems for on-line communities
4. Static site development
5. Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
6. Adding images to your site
7. Publicizing your site
8. So you want to run your own server
9. User tracking
10. Sites that are really programs
11. Sites that are really databases
12. Database management systems
13. Interfacing a relational database to the Web
14. ecommerce
15. Case studies
16. Better living through chemistry
17. A future so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses

Ellen Spertus has sent us a review of Phillip (and his dog!)'s Guide to Web Publishing. Known for being an outspoken prof at MIT, with interesting ideas, his web publishing manual is similarly interesting, focusing on collabrative web sites.Piotr has updated me. Neither the man, nor the dog is a prof at MIT, although they spend time there. Mea Culpa. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing author Philip Greenspun pages 608 publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann rating 9/10 reviewer Ellen Spertus with Keith Golden ISBN summary Entertaining and informative book on why and how to build collabrative web sites. The Scenario

Philip Greenspun - web guru, expert photographer, free software writer, and unique personality - has written an irreverent, informative, and visually attractive book on why and how to build collaborative database-backed web sites. (Alex, his photogenic co-author, is his dog.) The book is a rewrite of Greenspun's earlier Database-Backed Web Sites, whose history and flaws have been described in Greenspun's amusing Book behind the book behind the book. This time around, Greenspun got to do the book the way he wanted.

Greenspun's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

• Whenever possible, web sites should be designed to allow users to contribute material. (I think most of us at slashdot would agree.)
• Web views should be personalized for individual users. (Ditto.)
• A relational database is the best tool for accomplishing these goals. Greenspun even provides free space on his database server for people to use his collaboration tools on their own sites.
• The user interface should be optimized for the convenience of the user. This does not mean that aesthetics are unimportant, just that they should not interfere with the communication of information.

The book convincingly argues this philosophy by presenting numerous examples from high-level design to actual code. What's Bad?

The biggest negative is that parts of this book are repeats of his earlier book. While most of the material is new, reading through the old stuff can be annoying to people who have read the first.

What's Controversial?

Greenspun's sense of humor. There are many things he says that a reasonable person would find offensive or hilarious or both. (For an example of the last, see his Dating Game.) While it makes the book fun to read, I'd think twice before assigning the book to my students. Some people might be offended by the (artistic) nude pictures, although I was not.

I was at MIT at the same time as Greenspun, where he was known for always speaking his mind (to put it kindly). This same irreverance is evident throughout the book, where he is not shy about stating his dislikes. The following excerpt illustrates Greenspun's style:

Most of what I've said in this chapter goes against conventional wisdom as observed on big corporate sites and in books on Web page design. My theory is that graphic designers get interfaces so wrong because they never figured out that they aren't building CD-ROMs. With a CD-ROM, you can control the user's access to the content. Borrow a copy of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books 1997) and note that he urges you to have an "entry tunnel" of three pages with useless slow-to-load GIFs on them. Then there should be an "exit tunnel" with three more full-page GIFs. In between, there are a handful of "content" pages that constitute the site per se.

Siegel is making some implicit assumptions: that there are no users with text-only browsers; that users have a fast enough Net connection that they won't have to wait 45 seconds before getting to the content of a site; that there are no users who've turned off auto image loading; that there is some obvious place to put these tunnels on a site with thousands of pages. Even if all of those things are true, if the internal pages do indeed contain any content, AltaVista will roar through and wreck everything. People aren't going to enter the site by typing in "http://www.greedy.com" and then let themselves be led around by the nose by you. They will find the site by using a search engine and typing a query string that is of interest to them. The search engine will cough up a list of URLs that it thinks are of interest to them. AltaVista does not think a Dave Siegel "entry tunnel" is "killer". In fact, it might not even bother to index a page that is just one GIF. (chapter 5)

While most of his opinions are as well-supported as this one, some are more controversial, such as section headings "Java and Shockwave - The BLINK Tag Writ Large" and "CORBA: MiddleWare Meets VaporWare".

What's Good?

Greenspun is a real expert on web publishing and communicates a lot of interesting information. It is clear that his goal is evangelism, not making money: Greenspun makes his code freely available, and the entire book is available for free online (although many people will want to buy it for convenience and its stunning photographs).

So What's In It For Me?

Plenty. Reading this book (and downloading the code) makes it easy to create a database-backed web site. (I know because I did so.) You get not just the basics but real depth, such as how to create a high-performance site, capable of serving 20 or more database-backed requests per second.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com
2. So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
3. Scalable systems for on-line communities
4. Static site development
5. Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
6. Adding images to your site
7. Publicizing your site
8. So you want to run your own server
9. User tracking
10. Sites that are really programs
11. Sites that are really databases
12. Database management systems
13. Interfacing a relational database to the Web
14. ecommerce
15. Case studies
16. Better living through chemistry
17. A future so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses

Ellen Spertus has sent us a review of Phillip (and his dog!)'s Guide to Web Publishing. Known for being an outspoken prof at MIT, with interesting ideas, his web publishing manual is similarly interesting, focusing on collabrative web sites.Piotr has updated me. Neither the man, nor the dog is a prof at MIT, although they spend time there. Mea Culpa. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing author Philip Greenspun pages 608 publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann rating 9/10 reviewer Ellen Spertus with Keith Golden ISBN summary Entertaining and informative book on why and how to build collabrative web sites. The Scenario

Philip Greenspun - web guru, expert photographer, free software writer, and unique personality - has written an irreverent, informative, and visually attractive book on why and how to build collaborative database-backed web sites. (Alex, his photogenic co-author, is his dog.) The book is a rewrite of Greenspun's earlier Database-Backed Web Sites, whose history and flaws have been described in Greenspun's amusing Book behind the book behind the book. This time around, Greenspun got to do the book the way he wanted.

Greenspun's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

• Whenever possible, web sites should be designed to allow users to contribute material. (I think most of us at slashdot would agree.)
• Web views should be personalized for individual users. (Ditto.)
• A relational database is the best tool for accomplishing these goals. Greenspun even provides free space on his database server for people to use his collaboration tools on their own sites.
• The user interface should be optimized for the convenience of the user. This does not mean that aesthetics are unimportant, just that they should not interfere with the communication of information.

The book convincingly argues this philosophy by presenting numerous examples from high-level design to actual code. What's Bad?

The biggest negative is that parts of this book are repeats of his earlier book. While most of the material is new, reading through the old stuff can be annoying to people who have read the first.

What's Controversial?

Greenspun's sense of humor. There are many things he says that a reasonable person would find offensive or hilarious or both. (For an example of the last, see his Dating Game.) While it makes the book fun to read, I'd think twice before assigning the book to my students. Some people might be offended by the (artistic) nude pictures, although I was not.

I was at MIT at the same time as Greenspun, where he was known for always speaking his mind (to put it kindly). This same irreverance is evident throughout the book, where he is not shy about stating his dislikes. The following excerpt illustrates Greenspun's style:

Most of what I've said in this chapter goes against conventional wisdom as observed on big corporate sites and in books on Web page design. My theory is that graphic designers get interfaces so wrong because they never figured out that they aren't building CD-ROMs. With a CD-ROM, you can control the user's access to the content. Borrow a copy of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books 1997) and note that he urges you to have an "entry tunnel" of three pages with useless slow-to-load GIFs on them. Then there should be an "exit tunnel" with three more full-page GIFs. In between, there are a handful of "content" pages that constitute the site per se.

Siegel is making some implicit assumptions: that there are no users with text-only browsers; that users have a fast enough Net connection that they won't have to wait 45 seconds before getting to the content of a site; that there are no users who've turned off auto image loading; that there is some obvious place to put these tunnels on a site with thousands of pages. Even if all of those things are true, if the internal pages do indeed contain any content, AltaVista will roar through and wreck everything. People aren't going to enter the site by typing in "http://www.greedy.com" and then let themselves be led around by the nose by you. They will find the site by using a search engine and typing a query string that is of interest to them. The search engine will cough up a list of URLs that it thinks are of interest to them. AltaVista does not think a Dave Siegel "entry tunnel" is "killer". In fact, it might not even bother to index a page that is just one GIF. (chapter 5)

While most of his opinions are as well-supported as this one, some are more controversial, such as section headings "Java and Shockwave - The BLINK Tag Writ Large" and "CORBA: MiddleWare Meets VaporWare".

What's Good?

Greenspun is a real expert on web publishing and communicates a lot of interesting information. It is clear that his goal is evangelism, not making money: Greenspun makes his code freely available, and the entire book is available for free online (although many people will want to buy it for convenience and its stunning photographs).

So What's In It For Me?

Plenty. Reading this book (and downloading the code) makes it easy to create a database-backed web site. (I know because I did so.) You get not just the basics but real depth, such as how to create a high-performance site, capable of serving 20 or more database-backed requests per second.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com
2. So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
3. Scalable systems for on-line communities
4. Static site development
5. Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
6. Adding images to your site
7. Publicizing your site
8. So you want to run your own server
9. User tracking
10. Sites that are really programs
11. Sites that are really databases
12. Database management systems
13. Interfacing a relational database to the Web
14. ecommerce
15. Case studies
16. Better living through chemistry
17. A future so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses

Jabbo posted this rather interesting website about how Bill Gates made it rich: his mother knew the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC... Interesting what happened in pre-computer times (like the first version of Unix in 1970 on a DEC PDP-7), unofficially of course. And did you know that Bill's house needs 50 NT servers to run?

Chris Blain recently went on an adventure that many of us will experience: Getting a cel phone. He has written up his experiences for those of you on the fence on the issue. It's an excellent piece if you've thought about it, but just didn't have the answers. He also compares various services in his area, which is probably at least a decent example of what it will be like near you. The following was written by Slashdot Reader Chris Blain Cellular Service Review
Chris A. Blain
kfm@ipinc.net
July 9,1998
"Do I really need A Cell Phone?" I'm not Gordon Gekko, so a cell phone seemed unnecessary. Then my friend Olli f rom Finland came to visit. He has owned a cell phone for over four years and uses it as his only phone. Hmm, he's not Gordon Gekko e ither. Why does he need one? So he doesn't have to wait around for phone calls. So people calling him don't have to worry about if he is at home or at a club or in Lapland. I've had a pager in the past and it always made me feel like I was on a leash. A cell phone sounded like it would have the opposite effect. I wouldn?t have to worry about staying close to a phone. I would be fre e! Add the fact I recently started work for a company where travel would be a regular occurrence and enough reasons to seriously star t considering joining the ranks of the wireless were in hand.

Three issues had kept me from even contemplating buying a cell phone before: co nfusing rate plans, "surprise charges" that you wouldn?t know about until your bill came, and security. The new One Rate Cellular plan f rom AT&T got my attention because it seemed to address these issues. The billing appeared simple and transparent and the new d igital phones are more secure than previous analog phones. I'm interested in telecom, so at a minimum the research into cellular service a nd technology would be interesting enough to warrant the effort.

The Technology The first and most important caveat to remember is that all cell phones are "ra dio phones". As such, the abilities and performance of the phone will be limited by the same factors that limit other radio transmissi ons. A good introduction to how the cellular system works will educate you regarding the general performanc e and limitations of the system. Right now, America has three digital systems in use: CDMA, GSM and TDMA. TDMA can be conf using because it can refer to a general method of dividing up a channel into different voice circuits and can also be used to refer to a specific standard (i.e., IS-54 or IS-136) which is then just called TDMA. That?s telecom for you though. It gets heavy in acronyms and low-level detail very quickly. I don?t know enough about the fine points of each to say which is superior. I made my c hoice based on balancing coverage with security.

Cellular service is expensive enough without criminals adding to the bill. Desp ite known security issues, this area has improved with the advent of digital phones. The increased security of the digital systems was one reason I didn't even consider plain analog service. However, the option to roam into an analog area if it means the difference between making a call or not is an option I wanted.

Conveniently for those comparing the three systems, most big providers each hav e a different standard. Sprint uses CDMA, AT&T uses a TDMA/AMPS hybrid and VoiceStream uses GSM. Deciding which standard will become the dominant stan dard in the future is more difficult. Depending on the source of the poll either GSM or CDMA is predicted to be the global standard within the next several years. Considering GSM is leading the race right now, the prediction might not be so hard.

Choosing a Provider and a Calling Plan Choosing a provider can be hard. Deciding which provider has the best coverage, best call quality, best phone and best customer service is a big job. While you are trying to maximize the above you are also trying to minimize the price. One thing that all cellular providers have in common is that none of them offers calling plans. They all offer *billi ng plans* :) (I heard this phrase somewhere but forgot the author. My apologies). A good technique for evaluating providers is to call the ir customer service numbers multiple times with different questions. By talking to the customer service reps, you can find out a lot of information that isn't in the brochures. Providers

Digital service areas are still mostly limited to major metropolitan areas and freeways. Coverage maps may look disappointing if you want to use digital service anywhere and everywhere. Also, remember that covera ge maps show the best guess of the actual coverage. AT&T, Sprint and VoiceStr eam all have nice looking coverage maps. They would probably be more accurate if they resemb led scatter graphs rather than area graphs. The coverage is not that bad, but changing position can make a difference in reception.

A lot of what I heard about Sprint PCS ser vice was mixed. On the one hand, I heard there were coverage problems. Other stories talked of good results. When Sprint introduced PCS service a year ago they couldn't get the phones to work right outside the big downtown "Sprint Store" where I live. Not encouraging. If I was going to get a phone, it better work wherever I was likely to go. But then, I d on't even really like the phone offered by Sprint. It doesn?t seem like it is worth the money. I?m also wary of Sony?s thinking th ey can build everything. I prefer a company that specializes in manufacturing the product.

AT&T has been d oing digital voice for three years. Other providers have been doing it for much less time and I think it shows. AT&T does not offer "as digital" a service compared to Sprint or VoiceStream. As best I can tell it is a digital extension of analog. Competitors describe it as a digital/analog hybrid that isn't "truly digital". AT&T says the system is totally digital and not digital "piggy-backed" on analog. I don't know enough about the details to know the technical reality. The system seems to have the benefits of both the analog and digital systems: the broad coverage of the anal og system with all the new features of the PCS systems. The AT&T service is not as secure as the other standards that provide better protection against eavesdropping but AT&T does offer authentication for call set-up and is working on encryption of the conversation.

AT&T offers the new Nokia 6160 phone. The research I did indicated Nokia to be the current leader in digital phones. I like the features and interface of this pho ne. The large screen makes navigating the numerous menus easy and quick. The phone is also very compact so I would be a less conspicuous cellular phone user. This phone can easily fit in a shirt pocket. There are also four built in games. It seems to have a lot of hacker potential. You have to assume that a phone with a Swedish drinking song as one of the custom ringing tones was built by people who like to have fun. There is an infrared port at th e top of the phone that allows you to play "death-match" games against someone else who has the same phone. In addition, software allows you to enter your phone book entries into your computer and then transfer them to the phone. The manual doesn?t mention this, but Olli says its true for the phon es he?s seen in Finland.

VoiceStream (or your local GSM networ k member) was the third choice. As mentioned above, GSM is arguably the current global standard. It has been offering features just introduced in A merica with PCS service for years. GSM, in a statement from the PacBell site, handles encryption in this way: " Before the connection is completed, the call is digitally encrypted to prevent scanners from eavesdropping on the conversation or stealing and cloning your telephone number." This sounds se cure.

There is a choice of four phones from VoiceStream but the Nokia 6190 (same as t he 6160 ascetically and functionally save for being GSM) is the best one to choose. Of the phones that VoiceStream offers, the 6190 is the only one with an analog roaming capability. This is accomplished by placing a surfboard shaped "dual-mode sleeve" between the phone and the battery. In this configuration, th e phone feels twice as large. However, you have a lot of versatility. Due to the fact the 6190 is not a dual mode phone it is much cheaper than the 6160. For $149, you get the phone and the Li-Ion battery standard. The 6160 in this configuration would cost over $200.

Calling Plans Now comes the hard part. Not only do you have to decide how much you are going to use the phone but also where. Will you roam? How much long distance will you use? Will you call more during peak or off-peak hours? All of these qu estions and more may enter into your decision. You won't really know how much you will use the service until you ?well?use the service. You might use th e phone for all the calls you make now. You might also use it for all the calls you can't or don't make now.

Advice on calling plans is difficult to give other than broad recommendations. If you are going to use the phone a modest amount or use it constantly, your choices are easy. Most providers offer very reasonable plans for those usi ng the phone less than 100 minutes a month or more than 600 minutes a month. Also, providers sometimes run unadvertised specials, so you should be su re and ask what is available in your area.

All of the providers give you the basic PCS features: caller-id, call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling. Generally, voicemail and text messaging are extra, although all the providers offer plans that include voicem ail. I haven't made up my mind about text messaging yet. It seems cool but I'm not sure it is really useful. Voicemail is a must have. It allows you t o decide if you want to use airtime or not. Therefore, while it costs extra, it is very helpful as a tool to control your airtime usage in addition t o is primary purpose.

VoiceStream has very simple plans that can be quite economical depending on you r usage. For example, VoiceStream has a special for college students or employees of Chamber of Commerce member companies where you get 70 minutes a mo nth for $14.99. A bonus to the VoiceStream plans in my area is there is no long distance charges in the home area, which in my case is considered to be the northwest. Another special they are running is 300 free long distance minutes a month for 6 months to anywhere in the contiguous 48 states. That could be a big saving for you depending on your usage. However, if I was to roam out of the home area I would be charged $0.49/minute for roaming plus $0.20/minute long distance.

AT&T has simple plans but depending on which you choose you might be using a lo t of long distance. Your home area is considered the area code of your phone. If you are out of your home area and someone calls you, they will be cha rged long distance of course. But so will you! Out of your home area and you want to check voice mail? That will be a long distance call. This can get t o be very expensive. It isn't mentioned in the brochure. A consolation is that AT&T offers the lowest long distance rates on average. I can roam n ine western states or the whole U.S. (depending on the choice of plan) without being charged any roaming fees. Roaming fees savings could balance long distance charges depending on your usage and plan choice. With the One Rate plan there is no roaming or long distance charges, just a flat $0.15 - $0.11/minute rate (the rate depending on the number of minutes you buy) for "everything".

The calling plans offered by Sprint are more complicated than those by AT&T or VoiceStream. This is due to the notion of peak and off-peak usage that is not a part of the other providers plans. With Sprint you may have to wo rry about where you are calling from and when you are calling, Sprint does have a "Home Rate USA" feature that lets you roam the Sprint PCS national network. Long distance, however, is extra and the rate can vary depending where you are calling from. Sprint does have a northwest home area that is toll -free. Sprint seems most likely to cost the most to use.

My Choice A friend who has had analog cellular service for many years told me go with AT& amp;T because of the customer service. AT&T had taken care of problems quickly and to his satisfaction. My friend is demanding as to customer service so I didn't take the recommendation lightly. This isn't to say the others offered inferior customer service -- I just didn't know anyone who has dealt wi th them. In my "test calls" to AT&T customer service, I found them very helpful. They also had the most technical knowledge at their fingertips or could quickly access a technical rep. VoiceStream was also very good in this area. Sprint was the most difficult to get technical information from. I was transferred a half dozen times to different departments and when I finally did get a technical support rep, they just read from a spec sheet to answer my question. They were busy when I called so this might not have been their best showing. AT&T customer support was very busy when I first called (sometimes 5 -10 minutes+ waits) but recently the call times have improved and the wait is nominal.

In my area, there is another option to the One Rate plan: standard AT&T PCS ser vice plans. The One Rate plan didn't appeal to me because I don't think I will need 600 minutes (the plan minimum) a month and I didn't want to p ay $89.99 a month for service. A plan with 300 to 400 minutes costing $30 - $40 a month would be a better fit. I would be traveling so I needed a plan that inclu ded roaming or offered cheap roaming as part of the package. One of the standard plans allows for roaming nine western states with 200 minutes a month for $39.99. A bonus was a special that added 100 minutes to the 200-minute plan for the same price. I chose this. It seemed like an affordable way to try out the s ervice with enough freedom for me to discover how much call time I would need. AT&T doesn't charge for switching plans. If my usage increased dramatical ly, I could switch to the One Rate plan.

Using the Service I bought the phone on a Sunday. The electronics store I went to had an ample su pply of Nokia 6160 phones plus a surprise: the Nokia 6162. This phone differs f rom the 6160 in that it is a flip phone. You can answer and end a call by opening or cl osing the flip. This technology belongs to Motorola so Nokia had to license it from them. This added to the price of the phone according to my salesman. The two ph ones are nearly identical save for the flip feature and slightly different butt ons on the 6162. Despite a $50 price difference between the two phones, I was tempted to g et the 6162. Then visions of the flip breaking started to sour me on the idea. The streamlined 6160 seemed the way to go. I went.

But not before the salesman sold me a belt holder and an extended warranty. For some reason, a belt holder seemed to suck all of the "cool" out of a cell phone. I might just as well get a pocket protector to go with it. The belt holder serves a dual purpose: it gives you a place to put your phone when you don't want to hold it and protects the phone from the elements. The co ol was sucked back into the phone when I spilled water all over my desk and my cell phone was protected from the flood. The extended warranty was a har der sell. In general, these are a rip-off and I avoid them. The plan the salesman was offering was two years protection for $19.99. The first year of co verage was offered by AT&T and the store extended the coverage for a second year. If anything other than theft or intentional damage happened to the phone, a replacement would be overnighted to me wherever I happened to be. Thi s would also serve as "obsolesce protection". If my phone broke at a point where it was no longer "current", I would most likely be sent the new and improved version. I got a deal on the belt holder and the activation fee was wa ived (note: this was due to my choice of plans. If I had chosen the One Rate Plan, there would have been a $25 activation fee.)

Activation was simple. Charge up the phone (it has to be charged for 24 hours i nitially) and call the activation center. In about a half-hour I was live Activation was simple. Charge up the phone (it has to be charged for 24 hours i nitially) and call the activation center. In about a half-hour I was live on the air. The signal is strong most everywhere I've tried the phone in my cit y. I even have a decent signal in the underground parking garage in my building. The call quality is between that of a cordless phone and a corded pho ne. Better than I had expected. Now to take it on the road.

Wednesday morning I left for the Bay Area on a business trip. This would be an excellent test for the phone. I knew of capacity problems in the Bay Area so I could also test the service in a high traffic area. I flew into the San Jo se airport where the service was available but marginal. The phone has a four-segment signal strength indicator. At the airport, the indicator had two s egments lit. If only one is lit you can?t make a call. I tried a call and got the low end of the quality spectrum. I hoped for better elsewhere.

In the rest of the South Bay, the quality was better, averaging three to four s egments lit. There was one notable exception: the offices of my company in Cupertino: ( I couldn?t get any of the indicators to light. This might have bee n due to problems related to a large amount of electronic equipment in the building. I've had pagers fail due to this. Once I went outside it was better. I also had no problems making calls in San Francisco. People who tried to call me did have problems on a few occasions. They received a "there are not en ough available circuits to connect your call?" type of message. Was this much of a problem? No, I had voicemail so they just left a message and I called them back later. All in all a good showing.

"Is it worth it?" Yes. After having used the phone for three weeks I would have trouble going wit hout it. It has saved me time and I?ve had fun using it. I have yet to get my first bill, so some of the fun might be lessened when I do . Deciding on service was hard. The exact plans and specials will most likely vary in your area, so you still have a lot of work to do inorder to deci de on service for yourself. The time will be well spent because service is too expensive not to have it work the way you want.

The next thing I really need is global coverage. I'll have to start looking in to those satellite phones... :)