I Developed a Competing System--and learned...
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High-Tech RepoMan
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· Score: 5, Informative
A few years ago I developed a GPS-based system for tracking vehicles. Long story, but the client's original business plan didn't work--but his sales manager cottoned on to the idea of installing the units in cars at buy-here, pay-here car lots.
I bitched and moaned, and eventually dropped the client--in part because of the liability exposure, and in part because of the general sleaze. But I learned a bunch along the way.
How buy-here, pay-here car lots can do this:
It's simple: when you "purchase" a car from a buy-here, pay-here car lot, you're not buying the car. What you're doing is technically signing a "lease-purchase" contract: you're leasing the car until the final payment is made. That means the car dealer doesn't have a secured interest in the car--he OWNS the car. If you miss a payment, he picks up the car--and you have nothing.
That's dramatically different from a typical car purchase. If you buy a car from a new car dealer--or a reputable used-car lot--you will almost always finance the car. If you finance the car at the dealer (generally not a good idea) you'll sign something that looks like a loan agreement, but is technically called a Retail Installment Sales Contract (RISC). It is a contract to pay for the car over a certain period of time. The dealer then sells that contract to a bank or finance company. Key point: you are buying the car, and signing a contract to pay a loan--securing the loan with the car's title. Suppose you buy a $25,000 car, and put down $5,000 in cash and trade-in on your old car. Suppose you lose your job two weeks later, and can't pay the loan. You tell the bank--they'll be perfectly willing to take the car, liquidate the loan (by selling the car at auction), and give you the difference between what they sell the car for, and the balance on your loan.
With a lease-purchase agreement, it doesn't work that way. The car belongs to the dealer, not to you. If the dealer suckers you into putting money down, you have only the contract language (if any) to guarantee that you'll get anything back if the car is repossessed.
Buy-here, pay-here is a very bad deal
Bottom line: if your credit is so bad that you have to agree to install any kind of automated device to track you or force you to pay, you shouldn't be buying a car. First, you clearly are going to have trouble affording the car. Second, the cars the buy-here, pay-here crooks sell are typically heaps of junk: the cars left over at the auction that nobody wants to buy. A 1992 Ford with 150,000 miles on it isn't just going to require a monthly (or weekly) payment to the dealer--it's going to require a steady stream of parts and repair bills to keep rolling. Your chances of keeping that heap rolling for the two or three years of the "loan" are slim: and if the heap dies, you're still stuck paying credit card interest rates, and you don't have wheels.
Re:So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitali
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The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 1
Um...
Standard electrical plugs: Edison, in North America; Phillips and others elsewhere.
Phone jacks: AT&T
POTS: AT&T
And in case you forgot, inter-exchange calling, long-distance calling, etc., etc., etc.,: AT&T
All of these were developed, and patented, by corporations that did (and still do) invest heavily in R&D, and profit from their extensive patent portfolios. Two of the three technologies you describe hale from the legendary Bell Labs, which is probably still the most prolific source of inventions in all of history, and was also the source of Unix, C, and C++.
"Software Transfer. The initial licensee of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may make a one-time permanent transfer of this EULA and SOFTWARE PRODUCT only directly to an end user. This transfer must include all of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA, and, if applicable, the Certificate of Authenticity). Such transfer may not be by way of consignment or any other indirect transfer. The transferee of such one-time transfer must agree to comply with the terms of this EULA, including the obligation not to further transfer this EULA and SOFTWARE PRODUCT."
Hi!
The Microsoft EULA that you mentioned--quoted above--is precisely the kind of language I was writing about when I raised the idea that the court decision will change EULAs. This example is written precisely to prevent a market in second-hand software: note that it stipulates a one-time transfer, and that the transfer must be made directly to an end user--it may not be an "indirect" transfer. In simple terms, if you install OpenOffice, you can't take your old copy of Microsoft Office down to the used CD shop and trade it for three or four Celine Dion albums.
The Doctrine of First Sale
One of the ways that the U.S. is not like Europe is something called the Doctrine of First Sale. In Europe you can sell a product with a series of restrictions--such as where it may be resold, in what condition, and at what price. If you've ever seen a disclaimer in a European book about how you cannot resell the book in any other cover than what you bought it in, and you cannot resell the book for anything other than the list price printed on the cover, you're seeing a restriction on further sale. In the U.S. that is simply, plainly, illegal (and European publishers typically preface those statements with words like "Except in the United States..."). In the U.S., under the Doctrine of First Sale, the purchaser of a product can do with that product what he will--with very few limitations. Some guy in Texas decided that his concept of art was digging holes in the ground and half-burying pink Cadillacs--G.M. was not amused, but the DoFS is pretty clear. The "artist" bought the Caddies fair and square, he can bury 'em in his front lawn if he wants to.
So do we own that copy of Microsoft Office, or not?
That's why this case is so huge: it provides a very, very simple test of ownership. An on-its-face reading makes it plain that I own several copies of Microsoft Office. That being the case, the established (and very, very stare decisis) Doctrine of First Sale would appear to invalidate Microsoft's restrictions on who, and how, and under what circumstances I can resell my copies of software.
Digression:
This is one of those times where I wish I had the time to do a graduate degree in economics. The way I see it, there's going to be a market blip in boat wax over this. Microsoft is going to get in a panic, which means they're going to bring in lawyers to review their EULAs and draft new! improved! versions. Which means the lawyers are going to have beaucoup billable hours in this quarter, which will translate in cash they'll have to "expense" before the end of the year to avoid paying taxes. Since they live near Lake Washington, they'll spend it on new boats. Which means they'll need to sell the old boat--and to spruce it up for sale, they'll buy a bottle of boat wax....
Which means it also invalidates the GPL, since that too, is a license.
Hi!
Um, no. Nothing is getting invalidated here. And this doesn't affect GPL'd software, precisely because you (generally) don't pay substantial sums of money for it. (Remember that paying substantial sums of money was one of the criteria for ownership.) Even if it does apply to GPL'd software, so what? Nothing's changed: the whole point of Open Source software, regardless of the license, is that you can examine the source code and make modifications. This decision simply puts commercial software on the same basis: if you paid substantial sums to buy it, can use it indefinitely, and have the ability to discard it if you choose, then for purposes of interpreting the statute you "own" a copy of the software.
Don't just RTFA--read the decision. In particular, note this conclusion on page 11:
We conclude in the absence of other evidence that Titleserv's right, for which it paid substantial sums, to possess and use a copy indefinitely without material restriction, as well as to 5
discard or destroy it at will, gave it sufficient incidents of ownership to make it the owner of the 6
copy for purposes of applying 117(a).4 7
This is the conclusion the court reached after some extensive discussion of what it means to "own" a copy of a piece of software. Key point: the court is ruling on a specific law referring to ownership of a copy of a program, NOT ownership of (or even access to) the source code. The court discusses at length what ownership means--and concludes with the paragraph above. In other words, if you...
paid substantial sums of money
have the right to possess and use it indefinitely without material restriction
may discard or destroy it at all
...then you--as a matter of law--own a copy of the software.
How huge is this?
The immediate impact of this is to legalize reverse-engineering projects of custom software where the original coder can't or won't produce the source. The more interesting question is whether this legalizes the reverse-engineering of commercially-"licensed" software. On the one hand, this ruling makes it clear that--Microsoft's EULA to the contrary--I own several copies of Microsoft Office. On the other hand, the letter of the law, and the text of this decision, would seem to only permit me to use a disassembler to examine the code and fix bugs. Nothing--repeat--nothing in this decision would permit me to re-distribute that code. That's still very much an issue of copyright infringement.
So can I reverse-engineer my Sony rootkit CD?
Frankly, you shouldn't bother. You should take that rootkit CD back to Wal-Mart and tell them (in as loud a voice as you can muster) that you read "on the Internet that Sony's new CDs install a virus on your computer." But I digress....
Where this is interesting is that it appears to overrule the software industry's assertion that you and I are licenseholders, not owners. This may force a wholesale change in EULAs--where it may become extremely interesting is in the question of the U.S. legal doctrine of First Sale. This says that if you buy something, you own it. And if you own it, you can do anything you want with it--including sell it to somebody else. The licensee/owner distinction that software companies have asserted is intended to prevent the creation of a used software market. EULAs typically include language that prohibits you from selling the software "license" to anyone else without getting permission from the vendor first, or otherwise jumping through hoops. Various vendor "authentication" programs that tie serialized CDs to the MAC addresses of your computer essentially do the same thing--you have to get permission from Microsoft to subsequently "unlock" that software and install it on a different PC. Under the doctrine of First Sale, that's blatantly illegal--IF you own the software.
The bottom line:
You may reasonably conclude that software industry lawyers are going to be working overtime on this.
Mail order (catalog or phone) items which cross state lines have never been subject to sales tax; only if the shipper and reveiver were in the same state was sales tax charged.
Actually, no. If the recipient lives in a state that charges sales tax, but orders from out of state, he or she is supposed to file a "use tax declaration" identifying all the items he or she purchased on which sales tax was not assessed. As you might expect, this form is practically never filed by your neighbor the EBay Princess. But every once in a while a state sales tax auditor will land on a business that is buying furniture or office supplies (both of which are typically taxable, even to businesses with sales tax licenses) through the mail or over the Internet. If your company was to buy $100,000 worth of networking gear from a dot-com-failure auction site, they'd technically be supposed to file a form with the state and pay sales tax.
This argument is misleading: people have been keeping track of which courts have what biases for decades. That you can identify a court that is more favorable to your arguments using computers isn't terribly new--but insurance companies were keeping track of this kind of information l-o-n-g before personal computers and the adoption of the Internet.
How do I know? Because I helped design a system doing more or less exactly what is described here for one of the largest insurance companies in the world--back in the early 1990s. We specifically tracked "history" with the court, the specific judge, the opposing counsel, our counsel (whether employed, retained, or hired for just this case), and a bunch of other factors. We were using data that the company had accumulated over a long period of time--the results of the system helped the company establish a financial reserve for potential settlement of any given lawsuit.
Okay, so what's changed?
The difference now is that you, the plaintiff, also have access to that kind of information. Which substantially levels the playing field. Insurance companies have been able to shop for jurisdictions with very detailed knowledge of how cases turn out--experienced trial lawyers do so as well. Easier, cheaper, simpler access to this same data enables Joe Schmo and his fresh-out-of-law-school lawyer to make the same decisions.
The precise, technical term of art for this is: fairness.
Bravo! Bravo! I applaud, with all my heart, the attitude you are taking. Bravo!
There are many people who went to the hospital, only to (in a commonly-used analogy) follow the rabbit down the hole and find themselves in Wonderland. And if, in the providence of God, you find yourself joining us in Wonderland, we will greet you with open arms. There are no people on the earth as huggy and snuggly and welcoming as Downs people--and the families of Downs people, well, it just kind of rubs off on us.
But...
Do not assume that you're going to have a baby with Down syndrome. If you don't have a genetic test, don't leap to conclusions. You may have a doctor making all kinds of gloomy statements (in our case the doctors pressured my wife to sign a waiver of liability when she refused amniocentesis at the age of 39)--but the parents in Wonderland have zillions of stories of utterly clueless things done and said by doctors once they suspect Down syndrome. In simple terms, the doctors will only give you the bad news. In all too many circumstances they tend to "pile on"--adding innuendo and outright scare tactics, followed by calm, reassuring advice about how "termination" is a "reasonable choice."
In simple terms, they are letting their fear of the unknown (most doctors have little experience with Down syndrome--obstetricians, more or less by definition, almost certainly have no experience with Down syndrome), and their fear of potential litigation, substitute for sound medical judgment.
Do not believe what you're hearing from the doctor--or, for that matter, from SlashDot....
The doctor pressuring your wife to dispose of your baby girl is giving you the bad news. And only the bad news. The world around you is using words and phrases like "difficult" and "trying" and "scary"--well, guess what? I have three daughters, aged 21, 18, and 13--and those statements are equally true about all of them. What they're not telling you is that Downs kids are genuinely magical. You'll discover facets of Down syndrome for years and years--and you'll discover other Downs parents and learn how much your child and theirs are alike, perhaps even more alike than they are to their siblings. For example: Downs kids have "loose ligaments"--they can bend and stretch in ways that you or I could never hope to. I routinely fuss at my daughter for biting her toenails--when she's cold at night, she crosses her legs Indian-style, then bends forward and puts her face on the pillow. She forms a tight, perfect little ball--if you or I did it we'd spend a month at the chiropractor trying to recover.
They're not perfect... ...but they've loveable little hobbits all the same. And while your neighbors are sweating bullets as their teenagers get drivers licenses and boyfriends, you'll still be thinking up costume ideas for Halloween, and walking through the grocery store holding hands.
I would not hope for a child with Down syndrome. But if, as I wrote above, if you end up in Wonderland, we'll greet you with open arms.
With respect and regard, you don't want a "novel education idea." You really want to focus on your brother's specific features, and try to find successful strategies that other people have used with similar disabilities. That's not a novel approach--and it doesn't involve any more technology than ordering a book or five from a good publisher's web site.
My youngest daughter has Down syndrome--and we've found that kids with Down syndrome learn to read in a radically different way than kids with, for example, ADHD. The strategies that work for the ADHD kids in the class probably won't be successful for Annie--the strategies that work for Annie won't do much for others in the class. That's part of the reason that--despite the best intentions in the world--special ed classes don't do as much for kids with disabilities as they should. They can't be everything to everyone.
Here's where you come in.
You have a major advantage over your brother's teachers: you do not have to be all things to all people. You already are his big brother--and he's your only student. Practically anything you do will succeed--to some extent. What you need to do is identify successful strategies to use with your brother--and learn a lot more about language and learning than you probably ever thought possible. While you learn about his particular disability and how to teach to him, you should also learn a LOT about English. You should learn about the "core" of 8000 Anglo-Saxon words that form the vast bulk of our daily conversation. You should learn the difference between the active and passive voices, the detailed specifics of each of the tenses, and you should learn how to identify reading materials that include the parts of language you want--and do not include the parts you don't. Focus on simple sentences of Anglo-Saxon words in the present tense and the active voice: I eat food. Sandy is my dog. I ride horses. You are my friend. I like you. My brother loves me.
For an example of the kind of thing to avoid, look at any memo that comes home from the administration of your brother's (or your) school.
What you'll need most...
This will come as no surprise, right? The most important thing you'll need is patience. Applaud his successes--give genuine praise for genuine accomplishment. Give encouragement when he has trouble--and be critical when he blows you off. Be "real"--don't be yet another I'm-so-proud-of-you syncophant.
And when he can read--know that you have probably done the most important thing you will do in your life.
No--we monitor and control life safety systems using Windows applications. The actual systems are special purpose computers running a custom OS written by our engineers. They are typically controlled by dedicated wallstations that communicate using protocols that we have developed. But we do give customers the ability to monitor--and control--their systems using a graphical user interface--that GUI runs on Windows. As a hard and fast rule, a bug in a Windows app--or the complete loss of the PC--will not cause the lights to go out. But as a normal matter of course, the users control their facilities using applications written for the web or for Windows.
For example: let's suppose that you're a college facilities administrator, and you're building a new stadium for football. You need to provide lighting for the stadium--after a lot of negotiation, you hire an electrical contractor and specify our equipment. The EC installs lighting equipment in the parking lots, around the exterior of the stadium, in the public areas of the stadium, in the locker rooms, offices, meeting area, theater (where game film is shown), luxury boxes, food service areas, weight room, and--of course--the high-intensity lights for the field. For a variety of reasons (including the fact that most of that equipment runs at 277vac, not 120vac) you wouldn't even think of using simple single-pole lightswitches like you have in your bathroom. You will want to dim some of those lights (especially the luxury boxes, theater, meeting areas, and press room), and you will want to distribute control of the rest of the lighting so you don't have to run additional miles of wiring to a central switching panel, and so you don't have to pay people to operate single-pole switches for the tens of thousands of circuits in your facility. You install our equipment instead.
In some circumstances every circuit is controlled by a wallstation somewhere--but that wallstation isn't a switch. It's a smart device with an embedded micro that signals the control hardware to do something--select a scene, toggle a switched circuit, or launch a conditional script that determines some other action. In many circumstances, particularly in public areas, you do not want a publicly accessible wallstation--you don't want somebody to accidentally lean against a wall and turn off the field lights (especially since they typically take 12 minutes to "strike"). You can control every circuit from the control equipment--but you use a "client application" (written on Windows or for the web) to simulate that wallstation button press. If you have parking space for 50,000 cars, that's a lot of lighting circuits in your parking lot--you can turn them all on or off with a single button on a visual representation of your facility.
Or you can do a lot more--scheduling events to occur at specific times, or at times relative to sunrise or sunset. Or you can integrate the lighting system with other building control systems like HVAC, security, fire alarms, etc.
If you go to a pro football game, attend a major convention, visit a large amusement park, or visit any of a number of government buildings in Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Berlin, or Beijing, chances are our equipment is controlling the lights.
Thanks for your reply. In your comment you mention using cheap mobile phones or Windows Mobile--while we are very interested in exposing control to handheld devices (and we do have an existing telephone interface), I've mostly been discussing our server products that configure, monitor, and control our lighting control processors. Think SQL Server, big disks, fast processors.
Your attitude supports, excuse me, Microsoft's (or any vendors by all means!) viral lock-in strategy.
You're correct. At present we are entirely locked into Microsoft's.Net and SQL Server platforms. We're committed to those tools consciously--but we have been careful to keep at least a theoretical door open to change if need be.
The single biggest benefit of getting sucked into the maw of the Microsoft Borg is, well--the stuff works. It is faster and simpler to develop with Microsoft's Visual Studio than any other development environment; it is brutally simple (although sometimes deeply frustrating) to use the integrated (bundled!) Visual SourceSafe; it is easy to deploy using Microsoft's (and third-party) tools for installation kits. Similarly, it is substantially easier to develop for SQL Server for a variety of reasons--including extensive third-party support for source control, CASE, and development tools.
That said, there is a strong antipathy in any engineering organization for single-vendor solutions. We identify single-vendor solutions as a significant risk issue: we have a single-vendor risk item with the micro-processors we use for our control systems. If we have a single-vendor issue with the software, our risk is multiplied--we are now beholden to both organizations remaining viable. The more single-vendor components in a system, the riskier it becomes--because you're dependent upon all of those vendors continuing in business. I get beat up about this periodically.
We have a theoretical hedge: we have consciously chosen to use C# for development, precisely because C# and the.Net CLR have been committed to ECMA as an open standard. I have tried to hire a co-op student for the past two years to spend a semester developing a port of some of our server applications to Mono--and potentially to Postgres SQL. I never seem to get the co-op; I think part of the reason why is that we have yet to have a single customer express interest in getting the software on any platform other than Windows.
All the rest should be left to standardized interfaces where the local admin (home user, business client) can impose it's choices according to it's whim (which could also be specific interoperability requirements with other important apps).
Unfortunately, in these litigious times, you simply can't leave choices to the local admin's whim. Because if the lights in Exhibit Hall A go out while 10,000 people are inside, a lawsuit is going to happen. And "the customer screwed up the system" is an argument that juries simply don't buy. We have to make the system as robust as possible--and that generally means preventing the local admin from making any choices at all. Oh, yeah--and we turn Automatic Update off as well. 8-)
WinAmp got in there for awhile, because neither Media Player nor RealPlayer could actually the bottleneck - especially for MP3 playback. When their inferior MP3 features finally arrived, they blew away WinAmp's lead, because of bundling.
I submit that a) WinAmp is still around (I'm listening to WMAs with WinAmp at the moment), and b) their business has failed to prosper not because of Microsoft, but because they never figured out how to charge money for it. If you make only one product, and give it away for free, you are going to have problems in the business world. The only reason WinAmp is still around is that AOL bought 'em, and hasn't yet shut 'em down.
By contrast, Real Media has figured out how to sell their players--despite WMP being bundled in the OS. Take a look, for instance, at ABC News. You can watch tonight's broadcast--if you subscribe to Real Media's paid-content service. That service benefits--big time--from Microsoft selling the Media Edition (or whatever they call it) of Windows XP. Microsoft is creating the market for them.
Internet Explorer
I shouldn't get into this--the topic can't be discussed reasonably in an online forum without starting a flame war. But I have the misfortune of having read the actual trial court decision, and of having read the briefs and decision of the appellate court. Let me quote an expert statement on the subject--yours: "Every OS includes one, even when there are alternatives." But that's a thread for another place and time....
Since you're a SW architect you should know that your apps should depend on whatever application is capable of rendering you standards compliant interface or data. If you need to display HTML your app should call the user's registered browser, not iexplore.exe and of course you shouldn't depend on some vendors' broken implementation. You don't want to get in your customer's way expecting them to install useless, broken and invasive programs just to get your thingie going don't you?
Um--yes, I do. The "thingie" in question is a life safety system. We don't want to get in the customer's way--but we absolutely do want to get in the way of the customer's employee who decides that he'd rather have Firefox installed on the box, and clobbers our real-time control interface. We're not out to create a mass-market application that can be installed anywhere--we're selling a suite of tools that are directly tied to dedicated special-purpose computers that control lighting equipment. My focus (and my budget) is oriented toward providing effective support for lighting control equipment--not supporting every browser in the world. If I get budget for two additional developers next week, I'm going to focus them on supporting additional functionality of our products--not worrying about whether our web-based interface functions on Lynx.
But Windows bundling competes unfairly with all those options. Consumers don't get manageable choices, competitors don't stand a chance....We deserve better, and we can get it.
I respectfully disagree--I think you are giving software vendors far too little credit for ingenuity. And I think, perhaps, that you're not recognizing the ways in which bundling helps putative competitors, and helps the consumer.
As I see it, there are three ways in which bundling affects the marketplace:
Creating a marketplace (defining standards, etc.)
Promoting third-party vendor tools (bundled crippleware versions like Windows Imaging)
Crushing the vendors of wildly overpriced tools that impede progress and deserve to be left on the ash heap of computer industry history.
Creating a marketplace
In simple terms, Microsoft isn't in business to sell any of the tools they bundle. They're in the business of selling the OS--and a key part of that is convincing ISVs (like me) to develop for their OS. To that end they want to provide tools that I know will be there. Case in point: Solitaire. Back when Windows 2.1 shipped (might have been 3.0) the Windows API included support fo a function called StretchBlt. A lot of video drivers claimed to support it--but didn't. A simple way to test the video on the box was to play a game of Solitaire--if the little animation with the cards at the end worked, you knew that the video driver correctly supported StretchBlt. (Windows Hearts did the same thing for Network DDE.) No game vendor lost a dime of revenue or a point of marketshare because of those games--to the contrary, the presence of those games drove support for GDI (Graphical Device Interface) features that essentially created the computer games industry.
Promoting third-party products
Back in the 1990s I had a terrific consulting gig with a database modeling tools vendor. Our most fervent hope was to get a limited version of our flagship tool bundled into Microsoft's Visual Studio tool. Sure--we'd essentially be giving hundreds of thousands of copies of a $4000 tool away--but we expected tens of thousands of new customers who recognized the benefits of the tool and wanted to upgrade to the real thing. Alas--we lost: a competitor paid Microsoft big bucks to get a competing tool included. They went on to fame, glory, and a big buyout from IBM. We never got our stock price above the options threshold, and ended up at the back of the CA catalog. My point? A lot of companies have had their fortunes made by getting bundled into Windows: Rational, Crystal Software, Kodak Imaging, Hilgraeve Software, and a bunch of others.
But you don't have to have your product bundled into Windows: lots of vendors compete directly with bundled Microsoft apps and do just fine, thank you. TextPad, Eudora, Opera, MusicMatch, Real (despite their whining), and oodles of other products directly compete--successfully--with applets that are bundled into Windows. The market for those products exists because Microsoft bundled the applets into the OS--and people thus discovered the tool and some of those people decided to look for something better.
Viciously crushing competitors who deserve what they get
Sometimes Microsoft has, plainly and willfully, wiped out small vendors by bundling something into the OS. Two examples spring to mind: IP stacks and ODBC drivers. Back before Windows 95 you had to buy a third-party IP stack--generally for about $100 per seat. You had to buy a third-party ODBC driver for each database to which you connected from that same seat. A client of mine, considering a PC-based client/server system for a major customer service project, was faced with paying over $500 per seat (for over 400 seats) for licensing of IP stacks and ODBC drivers. And the client was not guaranteed that the drivers would work with the next version of the OS. I had divided loyalties--I was also doing work for the vend
Most people get Windows without going through a process of evaluating alterantives, and most of them just use WMP because it "came free with it", and never consider changing. This forced unbundling gives competitors a chance to compete based on whether a user actually likes it. [Emphasis mine]
Unbundling isn't necessarily a good thing
One of the common fallacies of many software developers (and product designers of all types) is to assume that "everybody is just like me." "Allowing" someone to evaluate alternatives and make choices in order to use a tool they have purchased may not be a great idea. The consumer bought the computer and expects certain functionality--like the ability to play media. A stripped OS, to most consumers, isn't an opportunity to evaluate other alternatives and make the best choice--it's a broken OS. I'd be floored if European electronics stores don't start getting computers brought back because "it doesn't work"--because the consumer can't play MP3s. And when the poor stiff at the Customer Service desk explains that the consumer has to go online to find a suitable device and download it--instead of getting it in the box, for free, the consumer might just wonder what government bureaucrat thought this a better idea....
When unbundling is positively BAD
I've been working with computers for more than twenty years. In that time I've learned a few truths, and one of them is that 99% of the people who use computers are not the slightest bit interested in computer technology. They are interested in doing something, and use the computer to help them do it. A lot of people (I'd estimate more than 80%) have a certain amount of fear about that computer--they've heard all sorts of horror stories, and have all kinds of mental images of launching missiles or causing electrical blackouts if they "press the wrong button." (Digression: I'm also convinced that network admins routinely mention dire consequences like missile launches and urban catastrophes if their instructions are not followed to the letter.) My point: the typical user does not trust the computer. And that's a crucial issue for anybody interested in implementing technology solutions on any platform, anywhere.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression...
I'm a software architect--I design software for lighting control and building automation. As part of that my team needs to present information to the user: some of that information is presented as PDFs, some as HTML, some as JavaScript, some as text, and some as SVG. In order to seamlessly install systems on an end user's computer we depend upon specific applications being present. We don't depend upon Windows Media Player (memo to staff: write a jingle that plays "your lights are on!" Or not.) But we do depend upon having Notepad.exe there (text editor), and we depend upon Internet Explorer being there. They're crucial parts of our product--if they're not there, our app won't work. Take them out of the standard load of every Windows-based PC in the world, and I suddenly have a substantially harder (and more expensive) problem to solve. My customers are far more prone to see errors. My ability to deliver a seamless solution to customers who have an innate fear of the computer is compromised.
The consumer isn't the winner here...
The end result of forced "unbundling" is not that consumers get more choice. It is that consumers are forced to make choices that they have been perfectly content to ignore up till now. And they will be forced to pay higher prices for any technology that, heretofore, depended upon bundled technology to exist--because vendors will now have to write all kinds of additional code to deal with all the possible versions that might emerge.
The short answer to your question is, "yes." There are companies that want experience, leadership, and mentoring skills. There are companies that want experienced leadership to guide and direct younger minds (and younger wrists) in developing software. And no, Virginia, those companies are not all moving their jobs to India.
Focus on the technology, or on the business?
Programmers I've worked with over the years have tended to follow one of two tracks: focus on the technology, or focus on the business. If you focus on the technology, your skills are portable: the risk you take, however, is that your portable skills may be supplanted by a newer, better-marketed technology. (Case in point: Powersoft's PowerBuilder, which was all the rage ten years ago, and has all but disappeared from the marketplace.) To adopt a focus-on-the-technology view, you're committing to a permanent learning curve--and to constantly having to evaluate which of the new technologies are most likely to be worth pursuing.
Your question sounds to me like you're looking for the other tack: focusing on the business. In that role you're still working with the technology--but you're focused on how to improve the business. You're more technologically-agnostic: you know more about the specifics of the business than any particular tool.
The key: find a company that views you as an asset, not a cost
If you've been doing contract work, you're focused on the technology. And you've probably worked for a number of companies that view you as just another piece of meat to put in front of a computer to type code. To them, you're an expense. Far, far better is to find a company that views information technology as an asset--that says "if we do what we do better, smarter, faster, we have a competitive advantage." Those companies will, in turn, challenge you to do more, learn more, and offer more.
Where I work...
I work in Engineering, not in Information Systems--developing new products. The company very definitely wants me to do more, much more, of what I'm doing. From an accounting standpoint my work is booked as a depreciable asset--not as a line item on the expense ledger. I'm 46--while I still do quite a bit of coding (and I'm at work now, coding Transact-SQL for a big project), a lot of my day is spent teaching, coaching, and encouraging young programmers.
Want a gig like mine?
Some thoughts:
Avoid publicly-traded companies (#1): an executive suite change can turn a tech-focused corporation into yet another SAP zombie. Layoffs will soon follow.
Avoid publicly-traded companies (#2): If the executive suite geniuses make a mistake, stock analysts will demand a "rebound." Which means layoffs will soon follow.
Look for companies for whom the technology is central, not peripheral, to what they do: for example, this former client provides data services to small credit unions. Money they spend on programmers and technology is an investment in their product, not an expense to be avoided. And in the event that the company is acquired by somebody else, you're part of the product that they're acquiring.
Look for companies that are focused on growth. They will also always be focused on looking into future technologies--which makes it easy to stay focused on new technology as well.
Even if you focus on the business, focus on the technology! We live in a changing world, that changes at an ever-faster pace. Very few companies existing in 2005 will be here in 2025--and you're probably not going to retire until 2030 or later. Do not get so focused on the company that you lose sight of the technology--nothing is so agonizing as seeing senior IT guys from a now-bankrupt steel company begging for jobs; and having nothing to show on a resume except having coded in COBOL fifteen years ago.
Is this just a young man's game?
I think you'll see
Survey may be flawed, and rules have changed
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Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 1
Hi!
I have read the article in Slate, but have only read the precis of the original article in NBER. Based on the Slate article, and the NBER precis, I have some concerns about the quality of the research underlying this.
First, haven't the "C" jobs changed?
In 1981 very, very few corporations, if any, had a position with the title of Chief Information Officer or Chief Technical Officer. Or anything resembling the post. By 2001 practically every major corporation did--if only to satiate the demands of securities analysts who wanted to know if the company would weather the "Y2K Crisis." The CIO/CTO position, by its very nature, is a technical one. Even though experienced IT workers can tell all kinds of stories about some of the bozos we've seen (cf. the Dilbert Principle--engineers with no talent are moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management), the CIO/CTO almost always comes from a technical background.
Why would this have an impact on Ivy League graduates? Despite the fact that ENIAC was developed at Penn, and BASIC was developed at Dartmouth the Ivies are primarily liberal arts colleges. (Indeed, BASIC was developed at Dartmouth expressly to expose English majors to computer programming.) Technology workers with liberal arts degrees are a rarity, Ivy League degree or not. As the number of "C" jobs in Fortune 100 companies grows to include a tech-focused job category, it is natural that the percentage of graduates of liberal arts schools in those "C" jobs will decline.
Second, hasn't the nature of senior management changed?
Once upon a time a budding business executive would take a "well-rounded" college education (meaning a liberal arts degree) and join the management training program of a major corporation. Other budding big-biz big-wigs would study business before joining the management training program. They trained to be managers....
And those mid-level managers got laid off, by the thousands, in the 1980s and 1990s. In the "flattening" of American corporate management driven largely by the stock market's unyielding insistence on ever-increasing efficiency and ever-growing profits, lots of managers got downsized right out the door. The emphasis shifted to "operators"--generally meaning people with experience in sales, engineering, or manufacturing. Look at the ranks of corporate chiefs today--sales is still a good track for senior management, but engineering and manufacturing are far more common today than they were in the early 1980s. (I graduated from Penn in 1980--a number of my classmates went into management training programs at major corporations. To the best of my knowledge, none are still employed by the company they initially joined.)
The companies in the Fortune 100 reflect a similar kind of shift: engineering-driven companies have grown, while traditional corporate conglomerates (Litton, ITT, etc.) have faded from view. There are exceptions (Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola) but a number of technology companies have burst onto the stage in the past twenty years (Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, etc.) and none of them are hiring liberal arts majors to be trainees--in the Ivy League or elsewhere.
Does that make an Ivy League degree worthless?
Absolutely not. The statistic that is not given in the Slate article is the stat that is most significant: what is the percentage of GDP generated by those companies in the Fortune 100? That percentage has dwindled fairly substantially over the past 20 years--the size of companies in the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 have increased substantially. And many Ivy graduates don't go to work for corporate America--they go to law school (where they are wildly over-represented in the top spots), med school (where they are wildly over-represented in the top spots), or other graduate schools. Ivy League graduates are grossly over-represented in American politics: remember that John Kerry, John Dean, and George W. Bush were all contemporaries at Yale.
More than a football league
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Who Needs Harvard?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Of course, all this is meaningless drivel since they Ivy League is a *football* league, not some sort of academic standards association
While the Ivies do play football (of a sort), the Ivy League is much more than a football league. The eight Ivy League schools, with MIT, do cooperate on issues like admissions, financial aid, etc. In years past the cooperation was extensive--enough so that the Federal Trade Commission sued alleging restraint of trade (since the Ivies would coordinate financial aid offers to prevent "bidding wars" for students).
I'm not American , but I see America going the wrong way and cutting funding for the wrong things (ok, it's not a socialist state)... Education, Healthcare, Emergency services are things which have intangible returns on investment.
I think you're confusing the issue--and perhaps you've been spending too much time reading the European Left press. Somewhere, somehow, you have the impression that "tax cuts" have affected education, healthcare, and emergency services. Let's run down the list:
Emergency services John Kerry, in the waning days of his campaign, made as crass a political promise as Americans have heard in seventy years. He promised to "put another 100,000 firefighters on the job." Despite the fact that the rate at which fires happen has plummeted with the advent of things like the National Fire Code, National Electrical Code, etc. Simply put, municipalities are laying off firefighters and closing firehouses because there's nothing for them to do, not because they don't have federal funds. Firefighters are typically paid by municipalities, from funds collected by a tax on property insurance premiums, without any federal funding. (Most firefighters in the U.S. are actually volunteers.) There WAS a short-term federal program to fund additional police officers which did expire during W's first term. Letting federal funding expire isn't quite the same thing. (And if those municipalities needed the cops, they should be able to fund them locally. Four years of federal boodle is plenty.)
Education Federal funding for education is heavily focused on three areas: college tuition assistance (mostly federally-guaranteed student loans); special education funding for the emotionally, physically, or mentally disabled; and preschool funding for disadvantaged and "at risk" children (primarily through a program named Head Start and other programs targeted at providing free breakfast and/or lunch to poor children). Special Ed and Head Start/free breakfast/free lunch are all "entitlement" programs--which means that anyone meeting the criteria for assistance will get it, regardless of the federal or state budget issues. In other words, those programs are immune to budget politics: you cannot "cut" the budget, because the budget is, essentially "as much as it takes." There's a sigificant point to this, which I'll touch on below.
Health care Federal funding for health care in general has increased--but the total costs of health care are skyrocketing. Traditionally health care in the U.S. has been an employer-paid benefit--but the cost per family of a barely-humane insurance policy can be crushing to a small business (heading past $700 per month for a $5000/family deductible and 80% co-pay when I shut down my consulting firm). There are millions of Americans who do not have adequate health coverage today, and it is a significant problem. That does not, however, mean that a federally-funded single-payer system (the U.K.'s National Health, or the health systems of each Canadian province) is a good solution. Those systems (especially Canada's) exist because there are private pay systems to alleviate overcrowding and provide cutting-edge treatment. When 90% of the Canadian population lives with 100 miles of a U.S. hospital, it's easy to live with a state-run health system: you can always cross the border to get a second opinion, or to get a test done sooner. That's not to say that our system is perfect--far from it. I believe that there are dramatic inequities in how private insurance works--there is essentially a widespread practice of "collusion in restraint of trade" going on between doctors, hospitals, and a network of ostensibly not-for-profits insurors known as Blue Cross/Blue Shield. There is tremendous price-gouging going on in medical malpractice insurance. There are outrageous damage awards in lawsuits, fueled by the contingent-fee that rewards lawyers for bringing all
There's a joke which goes something like this, I'm not sure of it's origins, but I heard it as a local (russian) one, so it might not be only a USAF rule.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, my brother used to be a pilot in the USAF Strategic Air Command. Among the long flights contemplated by the Air Force were over-the-pole flights to attack the old Soviet Union. I'm sure the Soviet air force was concerned about sleep deprivation for the same reason.
In America, today is a day set aside to give thanks to God for the many blessings He has bestowed upon us. That we no longer maintain bombers and tankers on "alert status," with flight crews no more than 90 seconds away, is something to be very thankful for.
A long time ago I talked about this subject with my brother, at the time a pilot in the Strategic Air Command. I was working with a group of people who were acutely interested in precisely same question as the poster--is ther a point at which extra hours != additional useful code? As it happens, the question has been extensively studied, and answered, by the U.S. military.
There is a long-established relationship between the ability to handle abstraction (such as OOP) and the ability to do spatial reasoning. The U.S. Air Force, in the 1950s and 1960s, did a lot of research in the relationship between sleep deprivation and spatial reasoning--they were alarmed about the accident rate of aircrews after very long missions. If you're at the controls of a KC-10 tanker, a slight touch with your fingers will affect the rate at which the aircraft wheel bogies forty feet beneath you and a hundred feet back will descend to the ground. If you're sleepy and groggy, you're much more likely to misjudge your altitude or your rate of descent. Hit the runway a bit too hard, or a bit too early, and the landing gear can collapse--and you and your crew will disappear into a ball of flames.
The result? The Air Force instituted something called "mandatory crew rest"--you fly X hours, and you must get at least eight hours of sleep (in addition to debriefing, flight planning, etc.). No matter if there is a global crisis and you are rarin' to fly, if you haven't had your mandatory rest, you stay in your bunk until you do.
So what does that mean for us?
As I wrote above, there is a strong relationship between abstract reasoning and spatial reasoning. The U.S.A.F. has proved that sleep deprivation diminishes your ability to do spatial reasoning; ergo, sleep deprivation diminishes your ability to do abstract reasoning. Based on twenty-plus years in the business, that makes sense: time and again I've seen programmers try to pull all-nighters to finish up a project, only to fall further behind because they wrote gibberish all night long.
But wait, there's more...
Sleep deprivation isn't the only issue: dehydration will also affect your ability to do spatial reasoning (trivia fact: baseball batting averages are lower in the second half of a daytime doubleheader; because the players have been out in the hot sun, baking under dark-colored baseball caps. They get dehydrated, which limits their ability to hit a curveball.)
Bottom line:
Wanna be an effective project leader? Send people home at a reasonable time; provide bottled water or spring water; and discourage (or at least don't encourage) coffee or other caffeine-based sleep substitutes. Do not run a death march project in order to look macho; and be prepared to fend off the Guys in Ties who think a death march atmosphere is necessary.
Sigh--I'm drinking WAY too much coffee these days....
What liberal or progressive is saying that they actually think these Democratic representatives are 100% pure?
I was making two points:
The Clinton administration was reluctant to present the treaty to the Senate, having its own doubts about it, and
The entire Senate--every single senator from Strom Thurmond on the right to Paul Wellstone (and John Kerry) on the left--voted against it.
You or I might disagree with the politics of one senator or another--but none of them are stupid. And if all of them--every single one of them--vote against a treaty, it's a pretty good bet that there was something dramatically wrong with that treaty. There was--it effectively permits China, Russia, India, and Indonesia to pollute to their heart's content, while crippling the U.S. economy. That's not an implementation issue or something that "staying engaged" or not would influence--it was the core concept of the treaty.
In simple terms, this isn't an issue of a single president or a conservative point of view: our nation's entire political leadership, from every point on the (elected) political spectrum, agreed that this was a bad deal and voted "No." Blaming the then-governor of Texas for the collective wisdom of the U.S. Senate seems a bit, um, misguided.
You might be interested in looking at a U.N. history of the Kyoto Protocol (including the actual text). The groundwork for the treaty was laid in 1995, and continued through 1997. In 1998, despite significant misgivings about the treaty by the (then) Clinton administration, the administration presented the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification. It was rejected by the Senate on a vote of 98-0.
Hate Bush all you want--believe all the wacko conspiracy theories you like. But the U.S. rejected Kyoto while he was governor of Texas.
...or the current US administration is obsessed only with making themselves and their corporate backers grotesquely large short-term profits, and fuck everybody else.
The Kyoto Protocol was initially presented to the U.S. Senate for ratification by the Clinton Administration. The Senate, which must ratify all treaties, voted it down 98-0. That's Democrats and Republicans.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. A lot of the debate about Kyoto--echoed by a lot of the posts you see here on SlashDot--is that "we must do something about global warming!" At least some of those senators have significant relationships with environmental organizations, who are steadfast in their concern about global warming. Why, I wonder, did every single senator, regardless of political stripe, vote against Kyoto? I suggest that the senators are aware that the devil is in the details, and they got a good look at the details. The entire world might be concerned about global warming--but that doesn't mean that an international treaty focused on global warming is automatically a good idea. It could be chock full of "we all agree that you will pay us money" provisions--it would not be the first time that has occurred.
This just reeks of a consultant who is being way too clever....
There have been a number of proposals like this ever since GPS technology became widely available. And a lot of seemingly knowledgeable people have bought the concept, and thrown a lot of good money at consultants to study how to implement these sorts of schemes.
I should know. I was one of those consultants.
Executive summary: It won't work
Key point: GPS technology broadcasts from satellites in space to receivers on Earth. Given how far out in space the satellites are (and the problems of generating electricity in space) you won't be surprised to learn that the signal strength from the various satellites is extremely low. Lower, in fact, that ambient background radiation. GPS receivers have to use digital signal processing (DSP) chips to dig the GPS signals out of the ether.
As a consequence, it is extremely easy to lose "lock" on a particular satellite--or on any satellite. Drive under a gas station canopy--lose lock. Drive into a tunnel--lose lock. Drive into your garage--lose lock. Because you lose lock all the time, GPS chipsets all store your last known good position, and will continue to report that until lock is regained.
So....
Let's pretend that this silly scheme is enacted. Drive your vehicle to your local gas station where you always buy gas. Buy gas. Wrap a piece of aluminum foil around your GPS receiver. Drive all you want to. Your GPS unit will never detect that you have moved.
The really, really sad story behind this....
I had a client, back in the late 1990s, who had a brilliant idea: use GPS technology and the cellular telephone system to develop and sell a low-cost vehicle tracking system. I was at a luncheon in a neighboring county, and talked about the project to some people at my table who seemed interested. One older man, in particular, got more and more enthusiastic as the conversation went on. After lunch he spelled out the reason for his enthusiasm: he didn't want to track trucks, he wanted to track people. In particular, he wanted to track people who had Protection From Abuse (PFA) orders preventing them from having any contact with an ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, etc. He was one of the county commissioners (which in Pennsylvania means, among other things, that he was involved in supervising the county prison system). They had an in-home monitoring system, which monitors convicts who are not permitted to leave their homes. What he wanted was a system that let the subject go anywhere--except within N feet of some specific points (her home, her workplace, etc).
How big a deal would this be? He said, and I've subsequently heard other people confirm the number, that 40% of homicide victims have an outstanding PFA order against their attacker. The vision my acquaintance had--right before his eyes--was being able to almost instantly cut the murder rate by forty percent. He could barely contain his excitement. I was getting pretty excited, too.
The client gave us the bad news--the GPS signal strength (as I mentioned above) was far, far too low. All the guy would have to do is wrap a piece of aluminum foil around the attacker, and his monitor would never know the difference. And worse--his monitor would continue to report that he was at home, while he was across town beating his ex-wife to death. Our oh-so-cool system would not only not prevent the killing--we'd also be providing the killer with a terrific alibi ("...how can the district attorney accuse my client, when the county's own computer system shows that my client was safely within his home at the time, the very time your honor, that the crime was committed?").
It was an exhilarating few days--and I can still remember the crashing disappointment when we learned it wouldn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago I developed a GPS-based system for tracking vehicles. Long story, but the client's original business plan didn't work--but his sales manager cottoned on to the idea of installing the units in cars at buy-here, pay-here car lots.
I bitched and moaned, and eventually dropped the client--in part because of the liability exposure, and in part because of the general sleaze. But I learned a bunch along the way.
How buy-here, pay-here car lots can do this:
It's simple: when you "purchase" a car from a buy-here, pay-here car lot, you're not buying the car. What you're doing is technically signing a "lease-purchase" contract: you're leasing the car until the final payment is made. That means the car dealer doesn't have a secured interest in the car--he OWNS the car. If you miss a payment, he picks up the car--and you have nothing.
That's dramatically different from a typical car purchase. If you buy a car from a new car dealer--or a reputable used-car lot--you will almost always finance the car. If you finance the car at the dealer (generally not a good idea) you'll sign something that looks like a loan agreement, but is technically called a Retail Installment Sales Contract (RISC). It is a contract to pay for the car over a certain period of time. The dealer then sells that contract to a bank or finance company. Key point: you are buying the car, and signing a contract to pay a loan--securing the loan with the car's title. Suppose you buy a $25,000 car, and put down $5,000 in cash and trade-in on your old car. Suppose you lose your job two weeks later, and can't pay the loan. You tell the bank--they'll be perfectly willing to take the car, liquidate the loan (by selling the car at auction), and give you the difference between what they sell the car for, and the balance on your loan.
With a lease-purchase agreement, it doesn't work that way. The car belongs to the dealer, not to you. If the dealer suckers you into putting money down, you have only the contract language (if any) to guarantee that you'll get anything back if the car is repossessed.
Buy-here, pay-here is a very bad deal
Bottom line: if your credit is so bad that you have to agree to install any kind of automated device to track you or force you to pay, you shouldn't be buying a car. First, you clearly are going to have trouble affording the car. Second, the cars the buy-here, pay-here crooks sell are typically heaps of junk: the cars left over at the auction that nobody wants to buy. A 1992 Ford with 150,000 miles on it isn't just going to require a monthly (or weekly) payment to the dealer--it's going to require a steady stream of parts and repair bills to keep rolling. Your chances of keeping that heap rolling for the two or three years of the "loan" are slim: and if the heap dies, you're still stuck paying credit card interest rates, and you don't have wheels.
Um...
All of these were developed, and patented, by corporations that did (and still do) invest heavily in R&D, and profit from their extensive patent portfolios. Two of the three technologies you describe hale from the legendary Bell Labs, which is probably still the most prolific source of inventions in all of history, and was also the source of Unix, C, and C++.
Hi!
The Microsoft EULA that you mentioned--quoted above--is precisely the kind of language I was writing about when I raised the idea that the court decision will change EULAs. This example is written precisely to prevent a market in second-hand software: note that it stipulates a one-time transfer, and that the transfer must be made directly to an end user--it may not be an "indirect" transfer. In simple terms, if you install OpenOffice, you can't take your old copy of Microsoft Office down to the used CD shop and trade it for three or four Celine Dion albums.
The Doctrine of First Sale
One of the ways that the U.S. is not like Europe is something called the Doctrine of First Sale. In Europe you can sell a product with a series of restrictions--such as where it may be resold, in what condition, and at what price. If you've ever seen a disclaimer in a European book about how you cannot resell the book in any other cover than what you bought it in, and you cannot resell the book for anything other than the list price printed on the cover, you're seeing a restriction on further sale. In the U.S. that is simply, plainly, illegal (and European publishers typically preface those statements with words like "Except in the United States..."). In the U.S., under the Doctrine of First Sale, the purchaser of a product can do with that product what he will--with very few limitations. Some guy in Texas decided that his concept of art was digging holes in the ground and half-burying pink Cadillacs--G.M. was not amused, but the DoFS is pretty clear. The "artist" bought the Caddies fair and square, he can bury 'em in his front lawn if he wants to.
So do we own that copy of Microsoft Office, or not?
That's why this case is so huge: it provides a very, very simple test of ownership. An on-its-face reading makes it plain that I own several copies of Microsoft Office. That being the case, the established (and very, very stare decisis) Doctrine of First Sale would appear to invalidate Microsoft's restrictions on who, and how, and under what circumstances I can resell my copies of software.
Digression:
This is one of those times where I wish I had the time to do a graduate degree in economics. The way I see it, there's going to be a market blip in boat wax over this. Microsoft is going to get in a panic, which means they're going to bring in lawyers to review their EULAs and draft new! improved! versions. Which means the lawyers are going to have beaucoup billable hours in this quarter, which will translate in cash they'll have to "expense" before the end of the year to avoid paying taxes. Since they live near Lake Washington, they'll spend it on new boats. Which means they'll need to sell the old boat--and to spruce it up for sale, they'll buy a bottle of boat wax....
Hi!
Um, no. Nothing is getting invalidated here. And this doesn't affect GPL'd software, precisely because you (generally) don't pay substantial sums of money for it. (Remember that paying substantial sums of money was one of the criteria for ownership.) Even if it does apply to GPL'd software, so what? Nothing's changed: the whole point of Open Source software, regardless of the license, is that you can examine the source code and make modifications. This decision simply puts commercial software on the same basis: if you paid substantial sums to buy it, can use it indefinitely, and have the ability to discard it if you choose, then for purposes of interpreting the statute you "own" a copy of the software.
Don't just RTFA--read the decision. In particular, note this conclusion on page 11:
This is the conclusion the court reached after some extensive discussion of what it means to "own" a copy of a piece of software. Key point: the court is ruling on a specific law referring to ownership of a copy of a program, NOT ownership of (or even access to) the source code. The court discusses at length what ownership means--and concludes with the paragraph above. In other words, if you...
...then you--as a matter of law--own a copy of the software.
How huge is this?
The immediate impact of this is to legalize reverse-engineering projects of custom software where the original coder can't or won't produce the source. The more interesting question is whether this legalizes the reverse-engineering of commercially-"licensed" software. On the one hand, this ruling makes it clear that--Microsoft's EULA to the contrary--I own several copies of Microsoft Office. On the other hand, the letter of the law, and the text of this decision, would seem to only permit me to use a disassembler to examine the code and fix bugs. Nothing--repeat--nothing in this decision would permit me to re-distribute that code. That's still very much an issue of copyright infringement.
So can I reverse-engineer my Sony rootkit CD?
Frankly, you shouldn't bother. You should take that rootkit CD back to Wal-Mart and tell them (in as loud a voice as you can muster) that you read "on the Internet that Sony's new CDs install a virus on your computer." But I digress....
Where this is interesting is that it appears to overrule the software industry's assertion that you and I are licenseholders, not owners. This may force a wholesale change in EULAs--where it may become extremely interesting is in the question of the U.S. legal doctrine of First Sale. This says that if you buy something, you own it. And if you own it, you can do anything you want with it--including sell it to somebody else. The licensee/owner distinction that software companies have asserted is intended to prevent the creation of a used software market. EULAs typically include language that prohibits you from selling the software "license" to anyone else without getting permission from the vendor first, or otherwise jumping through hoops. Various vendor "authentication" programs that tie serialized CDs to the MAC addresses of your computer essentially do the same thing--you have to get permission from Microsoft to subsequently "unlock" that software and install it on a different PC. Under the doctrine of First Sale, that's blatantly illegal--IF you own the software.
The bottom line:
You may reasonably conclude that software industry lawyers are going to be working overtime on this.
Actually, no. If the recipient lives in a state that charges sales tax, but orders from out of state, he or she is supposed to file a "use tax declaration" identifying all the items he or she purchased on which sales tax was not assessed. As you might expect, this form is practically never filed by your neighbor the EBay Princess. But every once in a while a state sales tax auditor will land on a business that is buying furniture or office supplies (both of which are typically taxable, even to businesses with sales tax licenses) through the mail or over the Internet. If your company was to buy $100,000 worth of networking gear from a dot-com-failure auction site, they'd technically be supposed to file a form with the state and pay sales tax.
This argument is misleading: people have been keeping track of which courts have what biases for decades. That you can identify a court that is more favorable to your arguments using computers isn't terribly new--but insurance companies were keeping track of this kind of information l-o-n-g before personal computers and the adoption of the Internet.
How do I know? Because I helped design a system doing more or less exactly what is described here for one of the largest insurance companies in the world--back in the early 1990s. We specifically tracked "history" with the court, the specific judge, the opposing counsel, our counsel (whether employed, retained, or hired for just this case), and a bunch of other factors. We were using data that the company had accumulated over a long period of time--the results of the system helped the company establish a financial reserve for potential settlement of any given lawsuit.
Okay, so what's changed?
The difference now is that you, the plaintiff, also have access to that kind of information. Which substantially levels the playing field. Insurance companies have been able to shop for jurisdictions with very detailed knowledge of how cases turn out--experienced trial lawyers do so as well. Easier, cheaper, simpler access to this same data enables Joe Schmo and his fresh-out-of-law-school lawyer to make the same decisions.
The precise, technical term of art for this is: fairness.
Hi!
Bravo! Bravo! I applaud, with all my heart, the attitude you are taking. Bravo!
There are many people who went to the hospital, only to (in a commonly-used analogy) follow the rabbit down the hole and find themselves in Wonderland. And if, in the providence of God, you find yourself joining us in Wonderland, we will greet you with open arms. There are no people on the earth as huggy and snuggly and welcoming as Downs people--and the families of Downs people, well, it just kind of rubs off on us.
But...
Do not assume that you're going to have a baby with Down syndrome. If you don't have a genetic test, don't leap to conclusions. You may have a doctor making all kinds of gloomy statements (in our case the doctors pressured my wife to sign a waiver of liability when she refused amniocentesis at the age of 39)--but the parents in Wonderland have zillions of stories of utterly clueless things done and said by doctors once they suspect Down syndrome. In simple terms, the doctors will only give you the bad news. In all too many circumstances they tend to "pile on"--adding innuendo and outright scare tactics, followed by calm, reassuring advice about how "termination" is a "reasonable choice."
In simple terms, they are letting their fear of the unknown (most doctors have little experience with Down syndrome--obstetricians, more or less by definition, almost certainly have no experience with Down syndrome), and their fear of potential litigation, substitute for sound medical judgment.
Do not believe what you're hearing from the doctor--or, for that matter, from SlashDot....
The doctor pressuring your wife to dispose of your baby girl is giving you the bad news. And only the bad news. The world around you is using words and phrases like "difficult" and "trying" and "scary"--well, guess what? I have three daughters, aged 21, 18, and 13--and those statements are equally true about all of them. What they're not telling you is that Downs kids are genuinely magical. You'll discover facets of Down syndrome for years and years--and you'll discover other Downs parents and learn how much your child and theirs are alike, perhaps even more alike than they are to their siblings. For example: Downs kids have "loose ligaments"--they can bend and stretch in ways that you or I could never hope to. I routinely fuss at my daughter for biting her toenails--when she's cold at night, she crosses her legs Indian-style, then bends forward and puts her face on the pillow. She forms a tight, perfect little ball--if you or I did it we'd spend a month at the chiropractor trying to recover.
They're not perfect...
...but they've loveable little hobbits all the same. And while your neighbors are sweating bullets as their teenagers get drivers licenses and boyfriends, you'll still be thinking up costume ideas for Halloween, and walking through the grocery store holding hands.
I would not hope for a child with Down syndrome. But if, as I wrote above, if you end up in Wonderland, we'll greet you with open arms.
Hi!
With respect and regard, you don't want a "novel education idea." You really want to focus on your brother's specific features, and try to find successful strategies that other people have used with similar disabilities. That's not a novel approach--and it doesn't involve any more technology than ordering a book or five from a good publisher's web site.
My youngest daughter has Down syndrome--and we've found that kids with Down syndrome learn to read in a radically different way than kids with, for example, ADHD. The strategies that work for the ADHD kids in the class probably won't be successful for Annie--the strategies that work for Annie won't do much for others in the class. That's part of the reason that--despite the best intentions in the world--special ed classes don't do as much for kids with disabilities as they should. They can't be everything to everyone.
Here's where you come in.
You have a major advantage over your brother's teachers: you do not have to be all things to all people. You already are his big brother--and he's your only student. Practically anything you do will succeed--to some extent. What you need to do is identify successful strategies to use with your brother--and learn a lot more about language and learning than you probably ever thought possible. While you learn about his particular disability and how to teach to him, you should also learn a LOT about English. You should learn about the "core" of 8000 Anglo-Saxon words that form the vast bulk of our daily conversation. You should learn the difference between the active and passive voices, the detailed specifics of each of the tenses, and you should learn how to identify reading materials that include the parts of language you want--and do not include the parts you don't. Focus on simple sentences of Anglo-Saxon words in the present tense and the active voice: I eat food. Sandy is my dog. I ride horses. You are my friend. I like you. My brother loves me.
For an example of the kind of thing to avoid, look at any memo that comes home from the administration of your brother's (or your) school.
What you'll need most...
This will come as no surprise, right? The most important thing you'll need is patience. Applaud his successes--give genuine praise for genuine accomplishment. Give encouragement when he has trouble--and be critical when he blows you off. Be "real"--don't be yet another I'm-so-proud-of-you syncophant.
And when he can read--know that you have probably done the most important thing you will do in your life.
No--we monitor and control life safety systems using Windows applications. The actual systems are special purpose computers running a custom OS written by our engineers. They are typically controlled by dedicated wallstations that communicate using protocols that we have developed. But we do give customers the ability to monitor--and control--their systems using a graphical user interface--that GUI runs on Windows. As a hard and fast rule, a bug in a Windows app--or the complete loss of the PC--will not cause the lights to go out. But as a normal matter of course, the users control their facilities using applications written for the web or for Windows.
For example: let's suppose that you're a college facilities administrator, and you're building a new stadium for football. You need to provide lighting for the stadium--after a lot of negotiation, you hire an electrical contractor and specify our equipment. The EC installs lighting equipment in the parking lots, around the exterior of the stadium, in the public areas of the stadium, in the locker rooms, offices, meeting area, theater (where game film is shown), luxury boxes, food service areas, weight room, and--of course--the high-intensity lights for the field. For a variety of reasons (including the fact that most of that equipment runs at 277vac, not 120vac) you wouldn't even think of using simple single-pole lightswitches like you have in your bathroom. You will want to dim some of those lights (especially the luxury boxes, theater, meeting areas, and press room), and you will want to distribute control of the rest of the lighting so you don't have to run additional miles of wiring to a central switching panel, and so you don't have to pay people to operate single-pole switches for the tens of thousands of circuits in your facility. You install our equipment instead.
In some circumstances every circuit is controlled by a wallstation somewhere--but that wallstation isn't a switch. It's a smart device with an embedded micro that signals the control hardware to do something--select a scene, toggle a switched circuit, or launch a conditional script that determines some other action. In many circumstances, particularly in public areas, you do not want a publicly accessible wallstation--you don't want somebody to accidentally lean against a wall and turn off the field lights (especially since they typically take 12 minutes to "strike"). You can control every circuit from the control equipment--but you use a "client application" (written on Windows or for the web) to simulate that wallstation button press. If you have parking space for 50,000 cars, that's a lot of lighting circuits in your parking lot--you can turn them all on or off with a single button on a visual representation of your facility.
Or you can do a lot more--scheduling events to occur at specific times, or at times relative to sunrise or sunset. Or you can integrate the lighting system with other building control systems like HVAC, security, fire alarms, etc.
If you go to a pro football game, attend a major convention, visit a large amusement park, or visit any of a number of government buildings in Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Berlin, or Beijing, chances are our equipment is controlling the lights.
Hi!
Thanks for your reply. In your comment you mention using cheap mobile phones or Windows Mobile--while we are very interested in exposing control to handheld devices (and we do have an existing telephone interface), I've mostly been discussing our server products that configure, monitor, and control our lighting control processors. Think SQL Server, big disks, fast processors.
Your attitude supports, excuse me, Microsoft's (or any vendors by all means!) viral lock-in strategy.
You're correct. At present we are entirely locked into Microsoft's .Net and SQL Server platforms. We're committed to those tools consciously--but we have been careful to keep at least a theoretical door open to change if need be.
The single biggest benefit of getting sucked into the maw of the Microsoft Borg is, well--the stuff works. It is faster and simpler to develop with Microsoft's Visual Studio than any other development environment; it is brutally simple (although sometimes deeply frustrating) to use the integrated (bundled!) Visual SourceSafe; it is easy to deploy using Microsoft's (and third-party) tools for installation kits. Similarly, it is substantially easier to develop for SQL Server for a variety of reasons--including extensive third-party support for source control, CASE, and development tools.
That said, there is a strong antipathy in any engineering organization for single-vendor solutions. We identify single-vendor solutions as a significant risk issue: we have a single-vendor risk item with the micro-processors we use for our control systems. If we have a single-vendor issue with the software, our risk is multiplied--we are now beholden to both organizations remaining viable. The more single-vendor components in a system, the riskier it becomes--because you're dependent upon all of those vendors continuing in business. I get beat up about this periodically.
We have a theoretical hedge: we have consciously chosen to use C# for development, precisely because C# and the .Net CLR have been committed to ECMA as an open standard. I have tried to hire a co-op student for the past two years to spend a semester developing a port of some of our server applications to Mono--and potentially to Postgres SQL. I never seem to get the co-op; I think part of the reason why is that we have yet to have a single customer express interest in getting the software on any platform other than Windows.
All the rest should be left to standardized interfaces where the local admin (home user, business client) can impose it's choices according to it's whim (which could also be specific interoperability requirements with other important apps).
Unfortunately, in these litigious times, you simply can't leave choices to the local admin's whim. Because if the lights in Exhibit Hall A go out while 10,000 people are inside, a lawsuit is going to happen. And "the customer screwed up the system" is an argument that juries simply don't buy. We have to make the system as robust as possible--and that generally means preventing the local admin from making any choices at all. Oh, yeah--and we turn Automatic Update off as well. 8-)
I submit that a) WinAmp is still around (I'm listening to WMAs with WinAmp at the moment), and b) their business has failed to prosper not because of Microsoft, but because they never figured out how to charge money for it. If you make only one product, and give it away for free, you are going to have problems in the business world. The only reason WinAmp is still around is that AOL bought 'em, and hasn't yet shut 'em down.
By contrast, Real Media has figured out how to sell their players--despite WMP being bundled in the OS. Take a look, for instance, at ABC News. You can watch tonight's broadcast--if you subscribe to Real Media's paid-content service. That service benefits--big time--from Microsoft selling the Media Edition (or whatever they call it) of Windows XP. Microsoft is creating the market for them.
Internet Explorer
I shouldn't get into this--the topic can't be discussed reasonably in an online forum without starting a flame war. But I have the misfortune of having read the actual trial court decision, and of having read the briefs and decision of the appellate court. Let me quote an expert statement on the subject--yours: "Every OS includes one, even when there are alternatives." But that's a thread for another place and time....
Um--yes, I do. The "thingie" in question is a life safety system. We don't want to get in the customer's way--but we absolutely do want to get in the way of the customer's employee who decides that he'd rather have Firefox installed on the box, and clobbers our real-time control interface. We're not out to create a mass-market application that can be installed anywhere--we're selling a suite of tools that are directly tied to dedicated special-purpose computers that control lighting equipment. My focus (and my budget) is oriented toward providing effective support for lighting control equipment--not supporting every browser in the world. If I get budget for two additional developers next week, I'm going to focus them on supporting additional functionality of our products--not worrying about whether our web-based interface functions on Lynx.
I respectfully disagree--I think you are giving software vendors far too little credit for ingenuity. And I think, perhaps, that you're not recognizing the ways in which bundling helps putative competitors, and helps the consumer.
As I see it, there are three ways in which bundling affects the marketplace:
Creating a marketplace
In simple terms, Microsoft isn't in business to sell any of the tools they bundle. They're in the business of selling the OS--and a key part of that is convincing ISVs (like me) to develop for their OS. To that end they want to provide tools that I know will be there. Case in point: Solitaire. Back when Windows 2.1 shipped (might have been 3.0) the Windows API included support fo a function called StretchBlt. A lot of video drivers claimed to support it--but didn't. A simple way to test the video on the box was to play a game of Solitaire--if the little animation with the cards at the end worked, you knew that the video driver correctly supported StretchBlt. (Windows Hearts did the same thing for Network DDE.) No game vendor lost a dime of revenue or a point of marketshare because of those games--to the contrary, the presence of those games drove support for GDI (Graphical Device Interface) features that essentially created the computer games industry.
Promoting third-party products
Back in the 1990s I had a terrific consulting gig with a database modeling tools vendor. Our most fervent hope was to get a limited version of our flagship tool bundled into Microsoft's Visual Studio tool. Sure--we'd essentially be giving hundreds of thousands of copies of a $4000 tool away--but we expected tens of thousands of new customers who recognized the benefits of the tool and wanted to upgrade to the real thing. Alas--we lost: a competitor paid Microsoft big bucks to get a competing tool included. They went on to fame, glory, and a big buyout from IBM. We never got our stock price above the options threshold, and ended up at the back of the CA catalog. My point? A lot of companies have had their fortunes made by getting bundled into Windows: Rational, Crystal Software, Kodak Imaging, Hilgraeve Software, and a bunch of others.
But you don't have to have your product bundled into Windows: lots of vendors compete directly with bundled Microsoft apps and do just fine, thank you. TextPad, Eudora, Opera, MusicMatch, Real (despite their whining), and oodles of other products directly compete--successfully--with applets that are bundled into Windows. The market for those products exists because Microsoft bundled the applets into the OS--and people thus discovered the tool and some of those people decided to look for something better.
Viciously crushing competitors who deserve what they get
Sometimes Microsoft has, plainly and willfully, wiped out small vendors by bundling something into the OS. Two examples spring to mind: IP stacks and ODBC drivers. Back before Windows 95 you had to buy a third-party IP stack--generally for about $100 per seat. You had to buy a third-party ODBC driver for each database to which you connected from that same seat. A client of mine, considering a PC-based client/server system for a major customer service project, was faced with paying over $500 per seat (for over 400 seats) for licensing of IP stacks and ODBC drivers. And the client was not guaranteed that the drivers would work with the next version of the OS. I had divided loyalties--I was also doing work for the vend
Unbundling isn't necessarily a good thing
One of the common fallacies of many software developers (and product designers of all types) is to assume that "everybody is just like me." "Allowing" someone to evaluate alternatives and make choices in order to use a tool they have purchased may not be a great idea. The consumer bought the computer and expects certain functionality--like the ability to play media. A stripped OS, to most consumers, isn't an opportunity to evaluate other alternatives and make the best choice--it's a broken OS. I'd be floored if European electronics stores don't start getting computers brought back because "it doesn't work"--because the consumer can't play MP3s. And when the poor stiff at the Customer Service desk explains that the consumer has to go online to find a suitable device and download it--instead of getting it in the box, for free, the consumer might just wonder what government bureaucrat thought this a better idea....
When unbundling is positively BAD
I've been working with computers for more than twenty years. In that time I've learned a few truths, and one of them is that 99% of the people who use computers are not the slightest bit interested in computer technology. They are interested in doing something, and use the computer to help them do it. A lot of people (I'd estimate more than 80%) have a certain amount of fear about that computer--they've heard all sorts of horror stories, and have all kinds of mental images of launching missiles or causing electrical blackouts if they "press the wrong button." (Digression: I'm also convinced that network admins routinely mention dire consequences like missile launches and urban catastrophes if their instructions are not followed to the letter.) My point: the typical user does not trust the computer. And that's a crucial issue for anybody interested in implementing technology solutions on any platform, anywhere.
You only get one chance to make a good first impression...
I'm a software architect--I design software for lighting control and building automation. As part of that my team needs to present information to the user: some of that information is presented as PDFs, some as HTML, some as JavaScript, some as text, and some as SVG. In order to seamlessly install systems on an end user's computer we depend upon specific applications being present. We don't depend upon Windows Media Player (memo to staff: write a jingle that plays "your lights are on!" Or not.) But we do depend upon having Notepad.exe there (text editor), and we depend upon Internet Explorer being there. They're crucial parts of our product--if they're not there, our app won't work. Take them out of the standard load of every Windows-based PC in the world, and I suddenly have a substantially harder (and more expensive) problem to solve. My customers are far more prone to see errors. My ability to deliver a seamless solution to customers who have an innate fear of the computer is compromised.
The consumer isn't the winner here...
The end result of forced "unbundling" is not that consumers get more choice. It is that consumers are forced to make choices that they have been perfectly content to ignore up till now. And they will be forced to pay higher prices for any technology that, heretofore, depended upon bundled technology to exist--because vendors will now have to write all kinds of additional code to deal with all the possible versions that might emerge.
The short answer to your question is, "yes." There are companies that want experience, leadership, and mentoring skills. There are companies that want experienced leadership to guide and direct younger minds (and younger wrists) in developing software. And no, Virginia, those companies are not all moving their jobs to India.
Focus on the technology, or on the business?
Programmers I've worked with over the years have tended to follow one of two tracks: focus on the technology, or focus on the business. If you focus on the technology, your skills are portable: the risk you take, however, is that your portable skills may be supplanted by a newer, better-marketed technology. (Case in point: Powersoft's PowerBuilder, which was all the rage ten years ago, and has all but disappeared from the marketplace.) To adopt a focus-on-the-technology view, you're committing to a permanent learning curve--and to constantly having to evaluate which of the new technologies are most likely to be worth pursuing.
Your question sounds to me like you're looking for the other tack: focusing on the business. In that role you're still working with the technology--but you're focused on how to improve the business. You're more technologically-agnostic: you know more about the specifics of the business than any particular tool.
The key: find a company that views you as an asset, not a cost
If you've been doing contract work, you're focused on the technology. And you've probably worked for a number of companies that view you as just another piece of meat to put in front of a computer to type code. To them, you're an expense. Far, far better is to find a company that views information technology as an asset--that says "if we do what we do better, smarter, faster, we have a competitive advantage." Those companies will, in turn, challenge you to do more, learn more, and offer more.
Where I work...
I work in Engineering, not in Information Systems--developing new products. The company very definitely wants me to do more, much more, of what I'm doing. From an accounting standpoint my work is booked as a depreciable asset--not as a line item on the expense ledger. I'm 46--while I still do quite a bit of coding (and I'm at work now, coding Transact-SQL for a big project), a lot of my day is spent teaching, coaching, and encouraging young programmers.
Want a gig like mine?
Some thoughts:
Is this just a young man's game?
I think you'll see
Hi!
I have read the article in Slate, but have only read the precis of the original article in NBER. Based on the Slate article, and the NBER precis, I have some concerns about the quality of the research underlying this.
First, haven't the "C" jobs changed?
In 1981 very, very few corporations, if any, had a position with the title of Chief Information Officer or Chief Technical Officer. Or anything resembling the post. By 2001 practically every major corporation did--if only to satiate the demands of securities analysts who wanted to know if the company would weather the "Y2K Crisis." The CIO/CTO position, by its very nature, is a technical one. Even though experienced IT workers can tell all kinds of stories about some of the bozos we've seen (cf. the Dilbert Principle--engineers with no talent are moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management), the CIO/CTO almost always comes from a technical background.
Why would this have an impact on Ivy League graduates? Despite the fact that ENIAC was developed at Penn, and BASIC was developed at Dartmouth the Ivies are primarily liberal arts colleges. (Indeed, BASIC was developed at Dartmouth expressly to expose English majors to computer programming.) Technology workers with liberal arts degrees are a rarity, Ivy League degree or not. As the number of "C" jobs in Fortune 100 companies grows to include a tech-focused job category, it is natural that the percentage of graduates of liberal arts schools in those "C" jobs will decline.
Second, hasn't the nature of senior management changed?
Once upon a time a budding business executive would take a "well-rounded" college education (meaning a liberal arts degree) and join the management training program of a major corporation. Other budding big-biz big-wigs would study business before joining the management training program. They trained to be managers....
And those mid-level managers got laid off, by the thousands, in the 1980s and 1990s. In the "flattening" of American corporate management driven largely by the stock market's unyielding insistence on ever-increasing efficiency and ever-growing profits, lots of managers got downsized right out the door. The emphasis shifted to "operators"--generally meaning people with experience in sales, engineering, or manufacturing. Look at the ranks of corporate chiefs today--sales is still a good track for senior management, but engineering and manufacturing are far more common today than they were in the early 1980s. (I graduated from Penn in 1980--a number of my classmates went into management training programs at major corporations. To the best of my knowledge, none are still employed by the company they initially joined.)
The companies in the Fortune 100 reflect a similar kind of shift: engineering-driven companies have grown, while traditional corporate conglomerates (Litton, ITT, etc.) have faded from view. There are exceptions (Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola) but a number of technology companies have burst onto the stage in the past twenty years (Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, etc.) and none of them are hiring liberal arts majors to be trainees--in the Ivy League or elsewhere.
Does that make an Ivy League degree worthless?
Absolutely not. The statistic that is not given in the Slate article is the stat that is most significant: what is the percentage of GDP generated by those companies in the Fortune 100? That percentage has dwindled fairly substantially over the past 20 years--the size of companies in the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 have increased substantially. And many Ivy graduates don't go to work for corporate America--they go to law school (where they are wildly over-represented in the top spots), med school (where they are wildly over-represented in the top spots), or other graduate schools. Ivy League graduates are grossly over-represented in American politics: remember that John Kerry, John Dean, and George W. Bush were all contemporaries at Yale.
While the Ivies do play football (of a sort), the Ivy League is much more than a football league. The eight Ivy League schools, with MIT, do cooperate on issues like admissions, financial aid, etc. In years past the cooperation was extensive--enough so that the Federal Trade Commission sued alleging restraint of trade (since the Ivies would coordinate financial aid offers to prevent "bidding wars" for students).
I think you're confusing the issue--and perhaps you've been spending too much time reading the European Left press. Somewhere, somehow, you have the impression that "tax cuts" have affected education, healthcare, and emergency services. Let's run down the list:
As I mentioned in my earlier post, my brother used to be a pilot in the USAF Strategic Air Command. Among the long flights contemplated by the Air Force were over-the-pole flights to attack the old Soviet Union. I'm sure the Soviet air force was concerned about sleep deprivation for the same reason.
In America, today is a day set aside to give thanks to God for the many blessings He has bestowed upon us. That we no longer maintain bombers and tankers on "alert status," with flight crews no more than 90 seconds away, is something to be very thankful for.
Peace, friend.
A long time ago I talked about this subject with my brother, at the time a pilot in the Strategic Air Command. I was working with a group of people who were acutely interested in precisely same question as the poster--is ther a point at which extra hours != additional useful code? As it happens, the question has been extensively studied, and answered, by the U.S. military.
There is a long-established relationship between the ability to handle abstraction (such as OOP) and the ability to do spatial reasoning. The U.S. Air Force, in the 1950s and 1960s, did a lot of research in the relationship between sleep deprivation and spatial reasoning--they were alarmed about the accident rate of aircrews after very long missions. If you're at the controls of a KC-10 tanker, a slight touch with your fingers will affect the rate at which the aircraft wheel bogies forty feet beneath you and a hundred feet back will descend to the ground. If you're sleepy and groggy, you're much more likely to misjudge your altitude or your rate of descent. Hit the runway a bit too hard, or a bit too early, and the landing gear can collapse--and you and your crew will disappear into a ball of flames.
The result? The Air Force instituted something called "mandatory crew rest"--you fly X hours, and you must get at least eight hours of sleep (in addition to debriefing, flight planning, etc.). No matter if there is a global crisis and you are rarin' to fly, if you haven't had your mandatory rest, you stay in your bunk until you do.
So what does that mean for us?
As I wrote above, there is a strong relationship between abstract reasoning and spatial reasoning. The U.S.A.F. has proved that sleep deprivation diminishes your ability to do spatial reasoning; ergo, sleep deprivation diminishes your ability to do abstract reasoning. Based on twenty-plus years in the business, that makes sense: time and again I've seen programmers try to pull all-nighters to finish up a project, only to fall further behind because they wrote gibberish all night long.
But wait, there's more...
Sleep deprivation isn't the only issue: dehydration will also affect your ability to do spatial reasoning (trivia fact: baseball batting averages are lower in the second half of a daytime doubleheader; because the players have been out in the hot sun, baking under dark-colored baseball caps. They get dehydrated, which limits their ability to hit a curveball.)
Bottom line:
Wanna be an effective project leader? Send people home at a reasonable time; provide bottled water or spring water; and discourage (or at least don't encourage) coffee or other caffeine-based sleep substitutes. Do not run a death march project in order to look macho; and be prepared to fend off the Guys in Ties who think a death march atmosphere is necessary.
Sigh--I'm drinking WAY too much coffee these days....
I was making two points:
You or I might disagree with the politics of one senator or another--but none of them are stupid. And if all of them--every single one of them--vote against a treaty, it's a pretty good bet that there was something dramatically wrong with that treaty. There was--it effectively permits China, Russia, India, and Indonesia to pollute to their heart's content, while crippling the U.S. economy. That's not an implementation issue or something that "staying engaged" or not would influence--it was the core concept of the treaty.
In simple terms, this isn't an issue of a single president or a conservative point of view: our nation's entire political leadership, from every point on the (elected) political spectrum, agreed that this was a bad deal and voted "No." Blaming the then-governor of Texas for the collective wisdom of the U.S. Senate seems a bit, um, misguided.
You might be interested in looking at a U.N. history of the Kyoto Protocol (including the actual text). The groundwork for the treaty was laid in 1995, and continued through 1997. In 1998, despite significant misgivings about the treaty by the (then) Clinton administration, the administration presented the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification. It was rejected by the Senate on a vote of 98-0.
Hate Bush all you want--believe all the wacko conspiracy theories you like. But the U.S. rejected Kyoto while he was governor of Texas.
The Kyoto Protocol was initially presented to the U.S. Senate for ratification by the Clinton Administration. The Senate, which must ratify all treaties, voted it down 98-0. That's Democrats and Republicans.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. A lot of the debate about Kyoto--echoed by a lot of the posts you see here on SlashDot--is that "we must do something about global warming!" At least some of those senators have significant relationships with environmental organizations, who are steadfast in their concern about global warming. Why, I wonder, did every single senator, regardless of political stripe, vote against Kyoto? I suggest that the senators are aware that the devil is in the details, and they got a good look at the details. The entire world might be concerned about global warming--but that doesn't mean that an international treaty focused on global warming is automatically a good idea. It could be chock full of "we all agree that you will pay us money" provisions--it would not be the first time that has occurred.
This just reeks of a consultant who is being way too clever....
There have been a number of proposals like this ever since GPS technology became widely available. And a lot of seemingly knowledgeable people have bought the concept, and thrown a lot of good money at consultants to study how to implement these sorts of schemes.
I should know. I was one of those consultants.
Executive summary: It won't work
Key point: GPS technology broadcasts from satellites in space to receivers on Earth. Given how far out in space the satellites are (and the problems of generating electricity in space) you won't be surprised to learn that the signal strength from the various satellites is extremely low. Lower, in fact, that ambient background radiation. GPS receivers have to use digital signal processing (DSP) chips to dig the GPS signals out of the ether.
As a consequence, it is extremely easy to lose "lock" on a particular satellite--or on any satellite. Drive under a gas station canopy--lose lock. Drive into a tunnel--lose lock. Drive into your garage--lose lock. Because you lose lock all the time, GPS chipsets all store your last known good position, and will continue to report that until lock is regained.
So....
Let's pretend that this silly scheme is enacted. Drive your vehicle to your local gas station where you always buy gas. Buy gas. Wrap a piece of aluminum foil around your GPS receiver. Drive all you want to. Your GPS unit will never detect that you have moved.
The really, really sad story behind this....
I had a client, back in the late 1990s, who had a brilliant idea: use GPS technology and the cellular telephone system to develop and sell a low-cost vehicle tracking system. I was at a luncheon in a neighboring county, and talked about the project to some people at my table who seemed interested. One older man, in particular, got more and more enthusiastic as the conversation went on. After lunch he spelled out the reason for his enthusiasm: he didn't want to track trucks, he wanted to track people. In particular, he wanted to track people who had Protection From Abuse (PFA) orders preventing them from having any contact with an ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, etc. He was one of the county commissioners (which in Pennsylvania means, among other things, that he was involved in supervising the county prison system). They had an in-home monitoring system, which monitors convicts who are not permitted to leave their homes. What he wanted was a system that let the subject go anywhere--except within N feet of some specific points (her home, her workplace, etc).
How big a deal would this be? He said, and I've subsequently heard other people confirm the number, that 40% of homicide victims have an outstanding PFA order against their attacker. The vision my acquaintance had--right before his eyes--was being able to almost instantly cut the murder rate by forty percent. He could barely contain his excitement. I was getting pretty excited, too.
The client gave us the bad news--the GPS signal strength (as I mentioned above) was far, far too low. All the guy would have to do is wrap a piece of aluminum foil around the attacker, and his monitor would never know the difference. And worse--his monitor would continue to report that he was at home, while he was across town beating his ex-wife to death. Our oh-so-cool system would not only not prevent the killing--we'd also be providing the killer with a terrific alibi ("...how can the district attorney accuse my client, when the county's own computer system shows that my client was safely within his home at the time, the very time your honor, that the crime was committed?").
It was an exhilarating few days--and I can still remember the crashing disappointment when we learned it wouldn't work.
Sigh.....