How do you figure that? He was given a task to do: format this data. I bet no where in his contract specified "You're not to leak this info out."
To the contrary--he was hired as a consultant. And being hired as a consultant carries with it an implicit assertion of expertise. He wasn't picked out of the line at the local unemployment office, taught how to use a keyboard, then told to do this as an assignment. He was hired as a consultant--which means he represented himself as having at least some professional skill.
Apart from the question of professional responsibility...
I was an independent consultant for 15 years--and am presently an engineering manager for an electronics company--and among my responsibilities I work with the company attorneys on software licenses and other contracts. Every consulting contract I've ever seen included language stipulating that no customer data of any kind could be revealed to anybody. And every consultant I've ever discussed it with regards that contract clause as a waste of paper--because no professional in his right mind would even think of doing something that dumb.
Sorry--I have absolutely no sympathy for this guy.
If you're an independent consultant, your insurance agent has probably mentioned "Software errors and omissions" insurance to you. Software E&O coverage is written to protect your ass(ets) in the event that you colossally screw up and do something that gets your client's client answering awkward questions from major news organizations. (A colleague once observed that, "if, when you walk in the door in the morning, your secretary says that a CBS producer is on the phone trying to schedule you for an interview with Mike Wallace, it's probably a bad day.")
Suffice it to say that if Mark Dennis doesn't have Software E&O coverage, he's going to wish he did. Because he's going to get so sued. Along with the community college, the government agency, and everybody else involved.
Getting sued, however, is the least of this bozo's worries
If he has insurance, it might cover his liability exposure. However, his real problem is the civil fines he is going to have to pay--and no insurance policy in the world will protect you from a criminal court sentence. He'll get a whopping fine--but I doubt he'll do jail time. Unless, that is, somebody can demonstrate that a child molester used the database to identify a victim and attacked him.
There's an important point here
The software community should make it ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that this dumb cluck should have the book thrown at him. We have absolutely zero sympathy--and when his attorney (with nothing else to argue) says "it was all a tragic mistake..." somebody needs to stand up and yell, "LIES! LIES! DAMNABLE LIES!" This was willful, deliberate, with knowledge aforethought stupidity. And this jerk deserves to get run up the (proverbial) yardarm for it.
So what do you have to say about the claim [gregpalast.com] that the republicans wrongly removed thousands of Florida voters from the registry shortly before the election on the false claim that they were felons?
In short, horse manure. The slightly longer answer is that Greg Palast is depending upon a key facet of American libel law: if the person being criticized is a "public figure," he or she bears the burden of proof to demonstrate that a) the story was false; b) the writer knew it to be false; and c) acted with malicious intent. If you were to parade in front of the White House with placards alleging that Dubya downloaded Spike Lee joint MPEGs from Kazaa there is zero chance Dubya would prevail in a libel action.
The longer answer:
There's no story there. Because the allegation isn't true. That's not just my opinion: among the clients I've had in the past is the Elections unit of ABC News. I don't have any direct knowledge of other media, but I'm absolutely certain that ABC has dozens of producers who would kill to be able to break a story about tens of thousands of voters in Florida getting booted from the roles because they were black. They haven't, because there's no story. It didn't happen.
Voter registration: how it works
Back before the implementation of "Motor Voter" laws (or the re-legalization of election theft, depending upon your perspective) voter registration was a relatively simple affair. Each county maintained a database of registered voters, and kept a record of how often each voter voted. Each state had a set of rules for when voters would be purged from the roles. I am intimately familiar with the rules in Pennsylvania, so I'll describe those.
Each voter's record includes an 8-character string, representing each of the last 8 elections (thus the primary and the general election in each of the past four years).
After each election the rolls are updated: the first character on the string is dropped, and a new character is added to the end of the string: an "X" if the person voted, or a "-" if the person did not.
The rolls are then purged: any voter who has not voted in the past eight elections is dropped from the rolls.
(Incidentally, this also made life easy for party workers: if you're managing a campaign for somebody running for an office in an "off" year, you just target those voters who vote in every election [a small minority]. You don't waste time and money trying to win the vote of people who only vote in the presidential general election.)
With the advent of "Motor Voter" the rules have changed--but only slightly. You will still get purged, eventually, if you don't bother to show up and vote. (And, I might add, "Motor Voters"--so-called because states now must seek to register new drivers to vote--generally do not bother to come to the polls.) The difference is that the time period to purge the no-show is longer, and some states require some kind of attempt at contacting the "voter", in hopes that a piece of junk mail might stimulate him into dragging his carcass down to the polls once in four years to participate.
But what is not kept, anywhere... ...is any record of a voter's race. So there's no way to determine that a particular voter is black, Hispanic, or Asian.
That said, there was, I recall, a purge of convicted felons from Florida's voter rolls. And there was a fuss about it, because the purged felons were, disproportionately, black. (A figure I have heard, although I can't tell you where, or how authoritative it might be, is that 25% of black men in America between the ages of 25 and 34 have a criminal record.) As I recall the circumstance, the previous governor's administration had not purged convicted felons from the rolls, so when Jeb Bush's administration did (as they were required to do, under Florida law) there was a big number. Another dimension to the fuss was that s
One of the things that really got me into politics was a school strike in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1972. I was a 9th-grader, and a friend and I spent the 13 weeks of the strike going to the Watergate hearings and working as volunteers for the McGovern national campaign. (Younger folks: George McGovern was the Democratic nominee in 1972, and was slaughtered at the polls by Richard Nixon.)
My point? You simply cannot cover anything up, particularly in Washington. Let's "game out" your example: Donald Rumsfeld tells somebody to fudge how overseas military personnel vote. Sorry: that "somebody" is a civil service employee who is essentially immune to getting fired. Sure--political appointees can make the sysadmin's life miserable, but they'd have to prove that he did something profoundly heinous--like raping a busload of cheerleaders (or downloaded a Metallica song)--in order to fire him. On the other hand, all he has to do is call any of dozens of publications in Washington, and Mr. Rumsfeld will be in front of a Congressional committee answering awkward questions before noon of the following day. The Achilles Heel of the conspiracy theorists is that they forget the press: secrets leak.
You don't steal elections at the top
Watergate more or less proved that: George Bush (or any of the Democratic candidates) can't decide to steal an election. Much as the Democrats would love to prove otherwise, the governor of Florida did not "steal" the election for his brother. The people who might have stolen the election were the judges who were evaluating all of those chads. The people who absolutely, positively, did their damndest to steal the election were the "community organizers" who were rounding up people on the streets, crowding them onto buses, and shipping them to the polling place. But that involved voter registration cards of dead people--and that's another subject.
Would you like to steal an election? Here's a quick survey of how to do it. I'm absolutely serious: I've been involved in political campaigns for years, and have held elected public office. And one of the reasons I'm no longer actively involved in party politics (per se) is that I caught one of my committee people doing some of the shenanigans I mention below.
First--don't waste your time trying to cheat inside the polling place.
You would think the obvious place to steal votes would be in the voting booth, right? After all, bank robbers rob banks--so election crooks would gravitate toward polling places. Right?
Wrong. The place to steal elections is in absentee ballots.
Absentee ballots: the mother lode of vote fraud
Let's suppose that you learn that you've been scheduled for a trip out of state that will keep you from voting. You can call your county courthouse and ask for an absentee ballot application. They'll send you a form, which you fill out and return, and then you'll get an absentee ballot in the mail. You fill out the ballot and send it back to the courthouse by the due date--congratulations! You have voted absentee, and your vote has made the nation stronger. In a perfect world, that's how absentee ballots are supposed to work.
Over the past twenty or twenty-five years the absentee ballot process has, um, changed. In a blowout absentee ballots are meaningless--but in a closely-contested race a handful of absentee ballots can be the difference between a "moral" victory and the real thing. (As a college student I functioned as an "absentee ballot captain"--identifying college students in the Philadelphia area who lived in the 10th congressional district in Illinois. I got them registered to vote at home, and made sure they voted absentee. I put in scores of hours of work--and turned in something like a dozen votes. In 1978 we lost the election by 6 votes--in a special election in 1979 we won by something like 120.) As the value of absentee ballots has become more apparent, people have started to cheat. (The rules for absentee ballots, and the opportunity to cheat, really expanded dramatically with the "Motor Voter" bills that got jammed through state legislatures in the early 1990s.)
How to steal absentee ballots
The simplest way to steal absentee votes is to work your way through nursing homes. The ideal method is to have a dedicated party worker who is a resident of the nursing home--but you can also send in a "volunteer." Nursing homes love volunteers who come to visit--so it's easy to plant somebody. However you do it, your party worker announces that she (or he) wants to help everybody participate in the election. Nothing wrong with that, right? So she distributes voter registration cards (perhaps with your party already checked), and promises to make sure that all the cards get turned in to the courthouse. When election time rolls around, she points out that senior citizens can get absentee ballots without question, and without anything like a doctor's note. All you have to do is ask. So Helpful Sally signs up everybody for absentee ballots. And since the absentee ballot is a bit confusing, Helpful Sally helps everybody fill out their ballot. As a general rule, Helpful Sally is going to get in trouble if she tries to buffalo people into voting for her candidate for governor--but practically nobody knows the names and/or positions of candidates for judge, for district magistrate, for local races--even for state legislative positions. All Helpful Sally has to do is say, "if you don't know the candidates, just leave the ballot blank." Oh, how helpful Sally really is. And to be really helpful, Helpful Sally offers to save the voter the cost of the stamp: she'll take the ballot to the courthouse herself, so your vote won't get lost in the mail.
Once the ballot is done, Helpful Sally can do two things. If the voter picked the wrong office, Helpful Sally can simply "lose" the ballot. Unless the senior citiz
I'm in rural America, and I've used a variety of methods for Internet access over the years: a 56K frame-relay circuit, ISDN, a fractional T-1 circuit, and now DirecWay. Some thoughts:
DirecWay ain't a T-1 circuit
There is little comparison. The "two-way" DirecWay service is high-speed download, and essentially 56K upload. If you're doing a lot of uploading (particularly of graphics) that's a bad thing. If you're uploading text, it isn't that noticeable. On the other hand, you definitely will notice the latency. It's annoying.
On the other hand, DirecWay is dramatically cheaper. You can buy the "modem" up front and pay $59/month, or capitalize the "modem" over 15 months for a total charge of $99/month; after 15 months your rate drops to $59/month. I viewed the cost of the device as equivalent to buying a router--its a capital expense. I can tell you with a broad smile on my face that $59/month is a LOT cheaper than the $450/month I was paying for a fractional T-1. (I dropped the T because I'm no longer doing offsite development for clients--I took a full-time position, so I don't have as much need for the bandwidth.)
You will need two dishes
We learned this the hard way: DirecWay and DirecTV actually broadcast from different satellites. The way they provide service from both is to aim the dish at a compromise position. The result is poor signal strength from either TV or Internet. Our satellite guy came out last week, saying that DirecWay had emailed all of their installers to install a separate TV dish. It makes your roof more cluttered ("I heard you went to work for client," said a neighbor. "Was it the NSA?") but it will definitely settle the question of who is the biggest geek on the block.
Once you're past the latency, it rocks
Once you're past that initial latency hit, download speed is remarkable. While there were benefits to having the T-1 circuit, I'm 28,000 feet from the CO, so packet loss was a persistent problem. Internet radio is better, and watching broadband TV is MUCH better.
I'm an adjunct lecturer at a local university, and I've seen the growing problem of plagiarism at first hand. The Internet provides students with massive amounts of material--in many respects posing a real problem for the school library, which is inevitably hopelessly out of date on a lot of subjects. And, as many people have pointed out, the Internet provides students with lots of material to use in plagiarizing--turning in someone else's work as their own.
All of which has NOTHING to do with Turnitin.com.
There are a couple of different business models in the plagiarism-busting business. One model (best exemplified by EVE (Essay Verification Engine from Canexus Software) selects potential search hits from an essay and then hits search engines to see if the content can be found on the Web. Turnitin.com doesn't do this: instead, it compares submitted papers to an existing database.
The difference is business models is quite clear: the web-search tools (EVE) are focused on selling to the individual instructor who (like me) smells plagiarism but doesn't know where to look. If you get a paper whose English is simply too good to be believed, just fire up EVE, feed it the paper, and then have a heart-to-heart chat with the student and/or the dean. Turnitin.com, by contrast, really markets to an entire institution--it is squarely focused on dealing with a more serious academic problem: organized cheating. They're not busting you for copying two paragraphs from the CIA World Factbook: they don't compare your paragraphs with the web. But they can, and will, bust you for recycling a fraternity brother's A- essay for your Survey of European History class.
This is more than just nickel-and-dime copy-lifting
This isn't just lifting a paragraph from a good essay without using a footnote. This is out-and-out, undeniable cheating. Something that sends normally laid-back faculty members up the wall is to raise the notion of organized cheating: of groups of students (often fraternities) that maintain files of successful papers. (When I was an Ivy League college freshman, decades ago, the quality of a fraternity's essay files was a prominent feature mentioned when rushing a freshman.) The practice isn't just limited to fraternities--there are entrepreneurs around who will sell you a "guaranteed" grade on a paper; they can guarantee the grade because they know what grade the paper received a year ago. And, of course, there are the commercial paper mills that have turned cheating into a business. (And yes, Virginia, that "original" paper they sold you has been used for dozens of previous customers.)
How Turnitin.com works:
Turnitin.com works by comparing submitted papers against other papers that have previously been submitted. They stress that they don't just want papers that are suspected of plagiarism: they need every paper. That's because the original, appropriate, well-written, deserving-of-an-A paper you've just finished (and you have finished your homework, right?) might get submitted again next year in a different section of the same course. (And if you're wondering, it is not unheard-of for a teaching assistant to make a few bucks selling good papers.)
That poses a business problem, and probably the biggest marketing problem Turnitin.com faces: faculties don't like requiring every student to submit every paper to Turnitin.com. Small schools like to think they have a close relationship with their students, so they tend to doubt that their students cheat. Big schools with 100+ student sections have few illusions about cheating--but balk at the cost.
Cheating happens.
Plagiarism happens. It is a real threat to the academic process. It is a real threat to a student's education--and a real threat to that student's future. (If a doctor cheated on an essay in college, who's to say he actually attended that seminar on laser surgery? Do you want him using that laser on you?) My school doesn't see the need to sign up for Turnitin--but a number of faculty members do use it, and others use EVE or other similar tools. It's a real problem, and Turnitin is one legitimate solution.
Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait,and many others i'm forgetting by using multinational forces to defeat a common agressor enemy.
Um--this is something of a stretch. This point might be better phrased "has been used as political cover by the United States to save the countries of South Korea, Kuwait, and many others...." Military intervention by member countries with limited U.N. involvement (South Korea, Kuwait) has been very successful. Military intervention led by the U.N. by itself (particularly where the U.S./NATO has not been involved) has been generally disastrous. I give you Lebanon; the Ivory Coast, Somalia, and any number of other horrid conflicts in Africa; the list goes on and on. Dictators and despots diss the U.N. because they know the U.N. is there to be "peacekeepers." They respect the U.S. because they can watch CNN--and they are well aware that the U.S. doesn't do "peacekeeping" nearly as well as it does killing people. And the U.S. military has a centuries-long tradition of taking "head shots"--gunning for the guy giving the orders.
That doesn't mean the U.N. is a total bust
Not at all. It just hasn't been very credible as a military force. Where it has been extremely credible is in creating a forum for international discussion--both directly and through other forums like the WTO. The U.N. has made a major impact on international trade and the environment through the licensing and monitoring of hazardous materials, the development of international air rules, the development of international shipping rules, and all kinds of dull, dreary, drudgery that doesn't make the front page. The U.N. has played a big role as a forum for Third World countries to state their case--and to build their economies. (The biggest impact for the poorest nations is that they get essentially free trade representation in New York City--the biggest marketplace in the world.) Dozens of poor countries have staked their plans for development on the manufacture of cheap textiles--and the U.N. provides cheap access to the buyers in the biggest market in the world.
The U.N. is better at organizing meetings than it is as a functioning governing body
Where the U.N. has been the most successful is in bringing people together in a common forum. Where the U.N. has been the most laughable is when it attempts to assert authority over something in which it has played no part, has no existing role, and to which it can contribute nothing. It was a U.N. agency, you may recall, that proposed an email "tax"--demonstrating that it knew absolutely nothing about how email worked.
In short...
The U.N. should focus on trying to negotiate realistic limits on fisheries protection and related maritime law--and leave the Internet to the geeks who run it. Or failing that, to the people who actually fund it and own it.
Sorry: Most Hydrogen is produced from Petroleum
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hi!
While there is tremendous potential for hydrogen-based fuel cells, there's a little detail that seems to be overlooked. The vast majority of the world's production of liquid or gaseous hydrogen is produced from off-gases that are byproducts of oil refining.
The world's leading producer of liquid hydrogen is Air Products and Chemicals of Trexlertown, Pa. I've done a lot of work for them over the years--and their hydrogen business is based on "HYCO" plants that take refinery gases, extract the hydrogen and return carbon dioxide (and sometimes hydrogen) back "over the fence" to the refinery. Key point: no refinery, no hydrogen. There are other means of producing hydrogen--but HYCO plants are by far the cheapest.
A point of philosophy:
Immanual Kant's Categorical Imperative can be expressed like this: if your philosophy requires having sinners to do the sinning for you, your philosophy is bankrupt. Getting hydrogen as a byproduct of petroleum production--and then expecting hydrogen to free us from dependency on petroleum--won't work. If everybody stops using petroleum and switches to hydrogen, there won't be any petroleum refined--and thus there won't be any hydrogen. In order to have volume production of hydrogen, you need gas-guzzling petrol users to do the sinning for you.
As I wrote above, there are other sources of hydrogen. As the use of hydrogen increases (and let's not forget--liquid hydrogen is significantly more explosive than gasoline, and touching it will cause body parts to freeze and shatter) new sources of hydrogen will have to be developed, and new processes developed to extract the hydrogen cheaply. That will take time, ingenuity, and money. There's a lot of push behind the idea (if you're in high school, pursuing a college degree in chemical engineering with a focus on cryogenics and hydrogen in particular would be a VERY smart idea) but it will take time to appear. This will not be an overnight sensation.
And don't forget the Saudis
The Saudis are sitting on 2/3 of the world's oil. As they see their dominance dwindling, they will respond. The biggest challenge to the development of a replacement technology like LH will be economic: the Saudis and the rest of OPEC will simply slash prices. When gas costs $.30 per gallon (which still makes them billions) it will be difficult to justify the price per "gallon" of LH.
You can track vehicle positions. It's much harder to track which roads have been used. I've done a bunch of work with GPS-based vehicle tracking systems--and it is entirely feasible to track vehicle positions. However--it is something else entirely to track which roads a given vehicle has used. The problem isn't with GPS--the problem is with the accuracy of map data: sometimes there's a pretty substantial difference between where GPS reports are, and where the actual roadway is supposed to be. (A very common instance of this is service roads--the roads that typically parallel a limited-access highway in urban areas. Is the truck on I-78 or on the adjacent service road?
This is a ridiculously expensive way to charge tolls.
This problem has already been solved in the U.S.: you can travel from Massachusetts to Virginia using EZ-Pass. And the EZ-Pass system costs lots less to implement. For starters, the on-windshield transponders cost a few bucks; substantially less than even the lowest-cost GPS vehicle locators (which use cellular telephone control channels to report).
So why dream up such a boondoggle?
Oh...that's right. Because the Galileo system is just an out-of-this-world waste of money. So the European Space Agency needs to dream up problems for their solution to solve. And the Europeans wonder why their economies are stagnant.
(I'm also replying here to your comments on a post of mine, about the fallacy that declining IT employment is being caused by growth of the Indian IT market.)
The bleak American IT marketplace is not largely caused by outsourcing. While outsourcing is a phenomenon, Jerry Pournelle's analogy (originally about client/server computing) to teenage sex is apropos: a lot of people are talking about it, a lot of people claim to have done it, but in fact not many have, and a lot of those found it painful. Outsourcing down the road suffers from the intractable problem of communications that I spoke of in my earlier post: you simply can't communicate as well with a coder in Bangalore as you can with a fellow in the next cube.
The real cause of the current malaise
The bleak IT job market at present is caused by the collapse of two bubbles: the dot-com bubble, and the Year 2000 "Crisis". 1998 and 1999 saw a hiring frenzy (and a consulting rate boom) that we will never see again: anybody who could spell "HTML" could get a big-ticket job with a dot-com startup. Stories abounded about college sophomores quitting school to take six-figure positions with high-tech firms. Lots of kids took computer courses in college to cash in on the feeding frenzy, and lots of adults in the working world decided to quit their jobs and join in the gold rush as well.
Meanwhile, there was this Y2K thing...
While the dot-com boom was starting, Business America was getting panicked about the Year 2000 problem. And there were entrepreneurs out there (Ed Yourdon, Gary North, and Mike Hyatt are three that spring to mind) that were consciously fanning the fires of panic, writing about the rioting and calamity that awaited us when the electricity went off and the banking system failed. Corporate CEOs got alarmed, stock market analysts started asking scary questions, the major media got wind of the issue, and the matter ended up in front of Congress. Who passed laws.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
One of those laws permitted corporations to expense the costs of Y2K preparedness, rather than depreciating those expenses out over 5 or 7 years. Depreciating PCs has always been stupid: they are essentially worthless after two years, but accounting rules required keeping them for five. The Y2K rule permitted any savvy CIO to replace essentially every PC on the premises, buy all sorts of new software, and start every project on his five-year wish list--and the corporate finance people would approve. (By expensing the projects and purchases, corporate profits would go down, but "trailing free cash flow" would remain the same. The effect for most corporations would be a significant reduction in taxes, but little or no impact on cash flow.)
In other words, the Y2K tax legislation engendered an IT spending spree. Every IT pro with any modicum of experience was hired on these projects (even thousands of COBOL guys were hauled back out of retirement)--there was essentially full employment in business programming. And while there was full employment in business programming in midtown Manhattan and down on Wall Street, a whole new industry of e-commerce was developing in Greenwich Village and SoHo. (I'm using New York as a metaphor here.) The city was crawling with programmers, and every programmer was making a fortune.
Then the money ran out.
The Y2K projects generally ended first, but they generally ended gradually. The retirees went back to retirement, and the contractors found that they were spending 2-3 weeks "on the bench" where before it had been 2-3 days. Business was still okay, but not great. By the end of 2000, and the beginning of 2001, the dot-coms started to run into trouble. FuckedCompany.com appeared, and the news stories seemed to stop focusing on big IPOs, and started to focus on collapsing dot-coms. Through the spring and summer of 2001 the dot-coms seemed to be collapsing left and right: and a lot of
This makes it a lot harder on the people trying to break into the industry by getting an entry level job. It's those kind of jobs that go overseas. Someone suggested moving overseas to get these jobs. You want someone that just got out of college, and probably has a good amount of debt racked up, to leave the country for an entry level job? Do you know how much it costs to move to another country?
Hi!
In my earlier post I wrote about the logical fallacy of pro causa non causa--the fallacy of false cause. Entry-level positions in the U.S. are scarce, and IT jobs in India are booming. Both statements are true--but it does not follow that IT jobs in India are booming, and therefore entry-level positions in the U.S. are scarce. They are two distinct phenomena.
Entry-level jobs in the U.S.
One of the remarkable things about the computer science curriculum in most colleges and universities is the utter lack of correlation between what is taught in school and what is used in the real world. I'm not just talking about the use of Eiffel and APL and other "teaching" languages, or the emphasis on subjects like compiler theory. At a much simpler level there is a subtle--but pernicious--emphasis on work habits and programming style that are not just beside the point; they are positively harmful to one's career as a programmer. The CS major may have had a class on UML--but he hasn't had to design a project in UML and present it for review; he may have had a class on databases, but has no sense of how a database can be used; he has heard about the importance of documentation, but has never been asked to make a change to a program written three years ago by a coder who cannot be found; he has heard (possibly) about the idea of designing for maintainability--but who cares about maintenance when the semester is only 90 days long?
An experienced programmer should understand the importance of design, documentation, and maintainability. Savvy employers these days don't just want experience--they want "full life-cycle" experience, meaning that you have worked on a project from inception through delivery and at least one subsequent revision. When you have done that, chances are you have a pretty good handle on what is necessary to deliver another successful project--that's valuable experience.
Which means...you're absolutely right
It is hard to break into the programming business these days, if all you have is a college degree. If you've already graduated, your best bet is to find a job--any job--and get your foot in the door. A young man I'm quite fond of was a hotshot C++ programmer in college--the best job he could find was a contract job writing HTML on an e-business project. He took the job, for peanuts, and devoted himself to becoming an expert in Javascript. He helped out--learning to write Transact-SQL queries, and writing useful "helper" applications that we needed from time to time. He grew--and eventually the company hired him full-time.
If you're still in school, look for internship opportunities. I worked with a couple of interns over the summer--they both wrote real projects, worked on real business problems, and gained some remarkable insight into the difference between programming in the real world vs. programming in the confines of Carnegie Mellon. If an internship doesn't work, look for a not-for-profit organization that can use your help. Find somebody, somewhere, that needs a program. Write HTML, write Javascript, write ASP--whatever you have to do, to build real-world projects. It will make a world of difference in your marketability--but it will also give you a dramatically different perspective on the remainder of your classes.
Bottom line: programming is maturing as a field of employment
The days of kids leaving school after their sophomore year to take six-figure salaries are gone. The kids who did are probably out of work, wondering if they could go back to school--a
That depends upon the state--in Pennsylvania you can't ticket a car. And even if you have the license number, you cannot legally compel the owner of the car to tell you who had the car at the time. Unless you have a photo of the driver on her way through the red light, you can't issue a ticket. (I'm not sure, but I don't think there are any red light cameras in Pennsylvania.)
Want to scare a lot of people? Or want to get a zillion page views to boost your website advertising sales? Post a red-meat story on SlashDot about IT jobs getting outsourced to India, and watch the fur fly. Toss in a statistic or two (in this article there were no statistics at all) about how EDS has thousands of jobs in India, and let's not forget about that tape recording of IBM's HR guy saying that they should be moving jobs offshore, too. By golly, we'll all be sitting on the curb selling pencils by Christmas!
Or maybe not...
Believe it or not, those offshore code factories aren't much of a job threat to American programmers. Companies have been trying to move programming work offshore for a good ten years--and yes, some programming work has moved offshore. But most of the offshore outsourcing that's been done is either code maintenance (hiring the cheapest person possible to maintain legacy COBOL applications that refuse to die) or help desk support jobs. Neither of those categories poses a big threat to an experienced C++ programmer with good communication skills and a good resume.
What is a threat to American programmers' jobs is a simple economic reality: a lot of us had high-paying jobs in the 1990s because of two different bubbles. The dot-com bubble and the Year 2000 "crisis" had the delightful effect of creating an unbelievable demand for programmers--with or without experience. When Congress passed "emergency" legislation to permit corporations to expense Y2K related expenditures (instead of depreciating them as usual) I joked to a friend that the bill should be called the "Full Employment for Programmers Act."
Those were terrific times. But they're gone.
The hard and simple reality:
The bubbles have burst. All of the Y2K coding has been done. Every Fortune 500 corporation that simply HAD TO HAVE A WEB PRESENCE BY THE NEXT STOCKHOLDERS MEETING is now hoping that the auditors won't compare the money spent on that Enterprise Web Portal with the amount of business generated by it. The insane levels of demand for programmers--and the insane pay rates that went with it--are gone.
That doesn't mean we're all going to lose our jobs to people in the Indian subcontinent. But it does mean that we have to adjust our expectations of the labor market to something a bit closer to reality. If we were newspaper reporters or insurance claims analysts or high school teachers or mechanical engineers we'd face certain realities: you have to look for a job; employers want experience before they'll hire you; sometimes you can't find a job in your area--so you may have to consider moving; and sometimes, well--sometimes you have to consider the possibility that you should look for another career. As information technology becomes a more mature business, a lot of those realities apply to us as well.
Programming doesn't move offshore well
It doesn't. Sure--if you're a SlashDot regular or devoted to a particular Open Source project, you can name talented programmers who live and work outside of the United States. Miguel de Icaza of Ximian, for instance, is an extremely capable programmer who lives in Mexico. Do I consider him a job threat? Not in the least--because programming is not as portable (at least not to India) as you might think.
It's about communication
Simply put, the essence of programming is communication. The vast bulk of programming jobs involve translating user requirements into functional computer code. And if you've been in the business more than, say, three weeks, you've no doubt learned that the customer's written requirements generally have little relationship to what the customer actually needs. Central to what we do is figuring out those little nuances of a customer's business that let us write an effective application--which inevitably involves asking questions the customer never even considered we'd ask.
If you live in the eastern United States, you have undoubtedly driven on a toll-financed highway (such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike) that issues a ticket when you enter the highway, and collects the ticket (and your toll) when you exit. You may have wondered whether or not the authorities ever examine those tickets, do the math, and might be inclined to write a ticket based on your elapsed time. Or perhaps you might have wondered why--as far as you know--they never seem to. If you have a toll transponder (EZPass) on your car, perhaps you've wondered the same thing: if the N.Y. Thruway knows when you paid the toll on I-87, and when you crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, they should be able to tell that you were speeding, right?
Obviously, they can tell that your car was speeding. What they can't tell is who was driving. And since you can't ticket a car--you can only ticket the driver--you can't use toll tickets, or electronic monitors, as a basis for issuing a citation.
How do I know this? Believe it or not, a couple of years ago the Pennsylvania State Police conducted marketing focus groups about their image, etc., and sent me an invitation. On a lark, I went--and after sitting through the usual ignore-all-those-people-behind-the-mirror discussion, we had a pretty frank Q&A session with a couple of state troopers. And when the question "do you ever compare times on the toll tickets?" came up, both cops grinned broadly. Apparently it is about the most-frequently asked of their FAQs. And, they explained, the answer is 'no.'
But then the explanation got interesting
But then one of the cops raised his eyebrows, and said, "on the other hand, the Turnpike Commission doesn't like to advertise that. Because a lot of people believe that they will get ticketed, so they stop for a meal at a rest area along the turnpike to make sure they don't arrive at the exit too soon--which means a lot of money for the turnpike."
Electronic monitoring of cars
First, there's a simple legal problem. Second, there's an enormous manufacturing/distribution problem (how do you produce all those transponders, and install them--with correct information--in every car?). Third, there's a corollary engineering problem (sensors along each lane of every road? Good luck). Fourth, there's a colossal database problem: speed limits and road striping change all the time. I've worked with the major geodata sets available for North America, and none of them even include fields for speed limit, because the data changes so often that it is pointless to try to maintain it on even a 3-month update cycle.
I used Microsoft Word 1.0 for the Mac, Word 1.0 for DOS, and Word for Windows 1.0 (which was released after Word 3.0 for DOS). I certainly have never heard of any such "feature", and I have installed updates on Word for Windows 1.0. I think this is probably a legend, rather than fact.
I've mentioned in an earlier reply that I have worked on publishing for a long time. As it happens, I have crossed paths with Michael Jackson's "people" and his music publishing venture.
Simply put: Michael Jackson may be "outraged" at the notion of jailing file-swappers--but that doesn't mean that Michael Jackson's staff isn't scrupulously guarding all of their considerable investment in a) his performances, and b) his music catalog. If you would care to find out, try selling photocopies of old Beatles music--and see how quickly Michael's lawyers drag you into court. (MJ owns the Beatles music catalog--the copyrights to all of the sheet music.)
Thanks for your comments. I'm quite familiar with copyright law, having been the business manager of one publishing house, the president of another, as well as a columnist for several magazines. A bit of explanation is in order.
There are a variety of copyrights that can be asserted on that CD. The one you're thinking of is a copyright on the design and artwork of the CD--the packaging, the type, etc. That is owned by the record label. The writer of the lyrics of each of the songs has a copyright on the words; the composer/songwriter of each of the tunes has a copyright. But the ultimate ownership for the performance--and it is the performance that is being pirated on that MP3--belongs to the artist.
That said, let me simply quote from a SlashDot interview from a few days ago, on this very point: the U.S. Justice Department attorneys state explicitly that the RIAA must have authority from the artists in order to get subpoenas--or they are in jeopardy of being held liable for perjury:
Quoting federal district Judge Bates in Verizon v. RIAA, The DMCA also requires a person seeking a subpoena to state, under penalty of perjury, that he is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner, 257 F. Supp.2d 244, at 262. In other words, the perjury clause may be violated if you seek a DMCA subpoena without the authorization of the copyright owner.
Bottom line: the RIAA is looking for these files because they have specific authorization to pursue the matter from these artists, or from the artist's management.
BTW--this shouldn't come as a surprise. The point of the article you linked to is that, surprise! the music business is a business. The musicians who stay in the music business realize that, and combine business acumen with creative talent. When Internet Radio was getting clobbered a number of well-known musicians essentially argued that Internet radio stations were a bunch of scheming thieves, and wanted to screw them all. Not every major musician, but Metallica isn't alone in hating MP3-swapping.
But since the music business is a business, it would be a foolish musician who ticks off his customer base. That's why an email campaign to the musicians would be quite effective.
One of the reasons the RIAA is targeting a specific group of files (in addition to target market, etc.) is that the RIAA is acting, legally, as the agent of the copyright owner. The RIAA doesn't own the copyrights to the music--generally, neither do the record labels. The "artists" (using the term very broadly in a few cases) own the copyrights, and the RIAA is acting on their behalf. They're looking for U2 files because U2 has given them permission to haul kids into court on a trumped-up infringement action.
Which might give you pause, next time you're in the record store looking to buy a CD.
Which brings me to an interesting idea:
If you see the name of an artist you admire--and perhaps support with your hard-earned dollar--why not drop an email to the artist asking why he or she is supporting the draconian actions of the RIAA? As always, it pays to be polite--screamers just get ignored (or reinforce the "they're all crooks" attitudes). But a few hundred polite, irenic notes might just change a few attitudes.
And a few hundred thousand polite irenic notes might just drum some sense into the musicians.
Nope. I'm a programmer these days, but I used to be the business manager of a publishing house, and subsequently ran my own publishing house for a few (disastrous) years. I've written for a number of programming magazines since then--so I'm pretty familiar with the rules. 8-)
Larry Niven might have used the term "flash crowd" in one of his novels--but the term "flash mob" has been in use since at least the 19th century. It was used to describe the loud and outre--"flash" in the sense of exploding powder ("a flash in the pan").
The term was certainly in use by the 1930s--Dorothy Sayers refers to the "flash mob" in one of her stories about Lord Peter Wimsey.
It seems strange that we, as a people, would allow laws to become so complex that even the attorneys (who have been specifically trained in the law) would have trouble giving a specific "bright line" definition of when something is Fair Use, or not. How can a layman ever know if he is breaking the law if an attorney can't even say when a "line has been crossed"?
It isn't because the law is needlessly complex--it is because humans are immensely complex. There is a seemingly infinite number of ways in which written/recorded material can be used--and because of that infinite number of ways, you'd be foolish to try to nail down "bright lines" to say absolutely, without equivocation, what is Fair Use and what isn't. Consider some examples:
You are in charge of a memorial service for an aged co-worker. You get spiffy paper and use a really nice printer to produce a folder to hand out to all the people who come--and because it has special meaning to the deceased's family, you include the text of the 23rd Psalm from a newly-translated (and thus newly-copyrighted) version of the Bible. You're copying the entire psalm, and you're doing this (at least arguably) as part of your job (thus no not-for-profit exclusion applies). Are you infringing?
The following week you are asked to organize a birthday party for another co-worker. At the party you display the words and music to "Happy Birthday" (all 16 words) on an overhead projector on the wall, and encourage everybody to sing along. Are you infringing?
You are taking a film class, and are assigned to produce and present a 15-minute videotape reviewing the most artistic and cinematically-significant works of Francois Truffault. You include two entire scenes from a movie, and you do a spectacular job. Such a great job, in fact, that your professor asks you to present it as part of a Truffault festival at a local art movie house. Which sells tickets, popcorn, etc. Obviously your work for class is not infringing (since it is part of an educational program). But now it's being "sold" by the theater. Are you infringing?
You are the also the social director for Tappa Kegga Day fraternity at Big State U. And for the "scholarship" of your frat brothers you produce a similar scholarly film study of the most cinematically-significant moments of the last twenty years of pr0n. All the juicy bits from Debbie Does Dallas, Deep Throat, etc. (Well, Deep Throat is more than 20 years old, but you get the point.) Are you infringing?
And the judges say...
No, yes, no, and yes. Copying the 23rd Psalm from a copyrighted translation would not be considered infringement because the 23rd Psalm, while a discrete chapter of the Bible, is still a small part of the work. Further, your distributing the 23rd Psalm in the new translation is unlikely to discourage sales of the translation--it is easy to argue that it might increase sales instead. (And it has been common practice for new Bible translations to distribute portions of the Psalms as marketing material.)
Singing "Happy Birthday" is infringement? Yup. And the copyright holders have successfully, and repeatedly, sued--and won. That's why every franchise restaurant chain in America has their own goofy variation on the song--nobody sings "Happy Birthday."
There is a second dimension to this: in general, singing any copyrighted song from an overhead projector has been found in the courts to be infringement. The Catholic diocese of Chicago got tagged for more than a million dollars back in the early 1980s for using "scripture songs" from an overhead projector to avoid buying printed music.
Reviewing Truffault
First, your video for class is a perfect case of Fair Use. It clearly falls under the category of "review, comment, or scholarship" (at least two out of the three, if you're like any of my students), it is done under the umbrella of a universit
1 megabyte of data transfer, in 90 ms, that would be 0.09 seconds, right ? That would be a sustained transfer rate of 88 meg/sec.
Thanks for your comment. You're right--if we were supporting 400 simultaneous users manipulating 1 MB SVG files we'd be toast. But please note that I said we're averaging 90 ms per message. We don't get anywhere near 90 ms with the really chubby SVG documents (and data transfer is only half the problem: they take eons to load and manipulate). The SVG messages are the extreme--the vast bulk of the traffic is much simpler string retrieval and other simple data requests.
Boring details:
I'm goofing off, perusing SlashDot at the end of a dinner break. We're shipping a big project to a customer on Monday--the project is written in.Net (mostly C#, some components in VB), including Windows forms and ASP.Net web pages. (Why both? The project incorporates multiple applications for different kinds of users.) As part of pre-shipment testing we're in the midst of extensive testing, including load testing.
The Windows applications communicate with the data tier using SOAP/XML, using synchronous messaging. Practically every message involves a database transaction with SQL Server 2000. Across a range of loads we are seeing round-trip message responses (from receipt of the inbound XML message to return from the web service) averaging less than 90 ms per message. That 90 ms average can be misleading--some of our messages involve extensive processing and/or lots of data. Some of the transaction work we're doing with SVG images involve SOAP messages with payloads greater than 1 MB, so the average gets dragged out.
Based on our testing, we anticipate supporting hundreds of simultaneous users--in a near-real-time environment--from a single web service. As we scale out on larger projects we may need to scale the number of web servers (although IIS on Windows 2003 is supposed to be substantially faster--YMMV), but we won't need to scale the database. Using a similar messaging architecture for a different client I have a project supporting 400+ users on a single SQL Server.
This is SlashDot, after all...
Obviously you're going to get a lot of "why not use...?" posts, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for having the temerity to admit to using.Net. And recommending it. But you asked, so I'll answer:.Net is scaleable in terms of the final application, and.Net is scaleable in terms of the size of the development team that is involved. This project involves 19 developers (a total of 60+ individual projects in the nightly build) and we're able to manage the entire thing remarkably well. Developing web service applications with.Net is remarkably easy to do; developing sockets apps is unbelievably simpler than using WinInet.dll. And the web developers are extremely happy working in ASP.Net--I don't know where you heard that ASP.Net is slower than ASP, but that's simply not true. ASP.Net is significantly faster.
With regard to other comments
I'm the data/messaging architect on the project: I can speak to the comments about messaging, reflection, and SQL Server. As with any Microsoft-based development project, you have to think carefully, and think critically, about how to design your application. Microsoft will always give you a quick! easy! fun! way to rapidly produce a prototype. You have to dig deeper, and think harder, to produce a scaleable application. The quick! easy! fun! technology du jour is.Net Remoting. Quick to prototype, barks in production. Like OLE, it's a great way to make a Pentium 4 box emulate an original 8086 IBM PC. (Far smarter to manage communication with XML-based messaging. It just takes more coding.)
That SQL Server doesn't permit triggers to be written in C#--so? Transact-SQL is suitable for database development. We could ask for more (such as integrating stored procedures and other database code into Visual SourceSafe). There is talk that the next version of SQL Server will permit coding in.Net languages--that'd be cool, but I'll wait and see.
The single most compelling argument for.Net Mono--an Open Source implementation of the.Net Framework. You might look into this particularly for clients that are choking on server pricing--but you might also pay careful attention, because a robust Mono project will encourage/force Microsoft to compete on features and functionality, instead of a take-what-we-give-you mentality. That's a Very Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi!
To the contrary--he was hired as a consultant. And being hired as a consultant carries with it an implicit assertion of expertise. He wasn't picked out of the line at the local unemployment office, taught how to use a keyboard, then told to do this as an assignment. He was hired as a consultant--which means he represented himself as having at least some professional skill.
Apart from the question of professional responsibility...
I was an independent consultant for 15 years--and am presently an engineering manager for an electronics company--and among my responsibilities I work with the company attorneys on software licenses and other contracts. Every consulting contract I've ever seen included language stipulating that no customer data of any kind could be revealed to anybody. And every consultant I've ever discussed it with regards that contract clause as a waste of paper--because no professional in his right mind would even think of doing something that dumb.
Sorry--I have absolutely no sympathy for this guy.
If you're an independent consultant, your insurance agent has probably mentioned "Software errors and omissions" insurance to you. Software E&O coverage is written to protect your ass(ets) in the event that you colossally screw up and do something that gets your client's client answering awkward questions from major news organizations. (A colleague once observed that, "if, when you walk in the door in the morning, your secretary says that a CBS producer is on the phone trying to schedule you for an interview with Mike Wallace, it's probably a bad day.")
Suffice it to say that if Mark Dennis doesn't have Software E&O coverage, he's going to wish he did. Because he's going to get so sued. Along with the community college, the government agency, and everybody else involved.
Getting sued, however, is the least of this bozo's worries
If he has insurance, it might cover his liability exposure. However, his real problem is the civil fines he is going to have to pay--and no insurance policy in the world will protect you from a criminal court sentence. He'll get a whopping fine--but I doubt he'll do jail time. Unless, that is, somebody can demonstrate that a child molester used the database to identify a victim and attacked him.
There's an important point here
The software community should make it ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that this dumb cluck should have the book thrown at him. We have absolutely zero sympathy--and when his attorney (with nothing else to argue) says "it was all a tragic mistake..." somebody needs to stand up and yell, "LIES! LIES! DAMNABLE LIES!" This was willful, deliberate, with knowledge aforethought stupidity. And this jerk deserves to get run up the (proverbial) yardarm for it.
Hi!
In short, horse manure. The slightly longer answer is that Greg Palast is depending upon a key facet of American libel law: if the person being criticized is a "public figure," he or she bears the burden of proof to demonstrate that a) the story was false; b) the writer knew it to be false; and c) acted with malicious intent. If you were to parade in front of the White House with placards alleging that Dubya downloaded Spike Lee joint MPEGs from Kazaa there is zero chance Dubya would prevail in a libel action.
The longer answer:
There's no story there. Because the allegation isn't true. That's not just my opinion: among the clients I've had in the past is the Elections unit of ABC News. I don't have any direct knowledge of other media, but I'm absolutely certain that ABC has dozens of producers who would kill to be able to break a story about tens of thousands of voters in Florida getting booted from the roles because they were black. They haven't, because there's no story. It didn't happen.
Voter registration: how it works
Back before the implementation of "Motor Voter" laws (or the re-legalization of election theft, depending upon your perspective) voter registration was a relatively simple affair. Each county maintained a database of registered voters, and kept a record of how often each voter voted. Each state had a set of rules for when voters would be purged from the roles. I am intimately familiar with the rules in Pennsylvania, so I'll describe those.
(Incidentally, this also made life easy for party workers: if you're managing a campaign for somebody running for an office in an "off" year, you just target those voters who vote in every election [a small minority]. You don't waste time and money trying to win the vote of people who only vote in the presidential general election.)
With the advent of "Motor Voter" the rules have changed--but only slightly. You will still get purged, eventually, if you don't bother to show up and vote. (And, I might add, "Motor Voters"--so-called because states now must seek to register new drivers to vote--generally do not bother to come to the polls.) The difference is that the time period to purge the no-show is longer, and some states require some kind of attempt at contacting the "voter", in hopes that a piece of junk mail might stimulate him into dragging his carcass down to the polls once in four years to participate.
But what is not kept, anywhere...
...is any record of a voter's race. So there's no way to determine that a particular voter is black, Hispanic, or Asian.
That said, there was, I recall, a purge of convicted felons from Florida's voter rolls. And there was a fuss about it, because the purged felons were, disproportionately, black. (A figure I have heard, although I can't tell you where, or how authoritative it might be, is that 25% of black men in America between the ages of 25 and 34 have a criminal record.) As I recall the circumstance, the previous governor's administration had not purged convicted felons from the rolls, so when Jeb Bush's administration did (as they were required to do, under Florida law) there was a big number. Another dimension to the fuss was that s
Nice idea--but it wouldn't work.
One of the things that really got me into politics was a school strike in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1972. I was a 9th-grader, and a friend and I spent the 13 weeks of the strike going to the Watergate hearings and working as volunteers for the McGovern national campaign. (Younger folks: George McGovern was the Democratic nominee in 1972, and was slaughtered at the polls by Richard Nixon.)
My point? You simply cannot cover anything up, particularly in Washington. Let's "game out" your example: Donald Rumsfeld tells somebody to fudge how overseas military personnel vote. Sorry: that "somebody" is a civil service employee who is essentially immune to getting fired. Sure--political appointees can make the sysadmin's life miserable, but they'd have to prove that he did something profoundly heinous--like raping a busload of cheerleaders (or downloaded a Metallica song)--in order to fire him. On the other hand, all he has to do is call any of dozens of publications in Washington, and Mr. Rumsfeld will be in front of a Congressional committee answering awkward questions before noon of the following day. The Achilles Heel of the conspiracy theorists is that they forget the press: secrets leak.
You don't steal elections at the top
Watergate more or less proved that: George Bush (or any of the Democratic candidates) can't decide to steal an election. Much as the Democrats would love to prove otherwise, the governor of Florida did not "steal" the election for his brother. The people who might have stolen the election were the judges who were evaluating all of those chads. The people who absolutely, positively, did their damndest to steal the election were the "community organizers" who were rounding up people on the streets, crowding them onto buses, and shipping them to the polling place. But that involved voter registration cards of dead people--and that's another subject.
Would you like to steal an election? Here's a quick survey of how to do it. I'm absolutely serious: I've been involved in political campaigns for years, and have held elected public office. And one of the reasons I'm no longer actively involved in party politics (per se) is that I caught one of my committee people doing some of the shenanigans I mention below.
First--don't waste your time trying to cheat inside the polling place.
You would think the obvious place to steal votes would be in the voting booth, right? After all, bank robbers rob banks--so election crooks would gravitate toward polling places. Right?
Wrong. The place to steal elections is in absentee ballots.
Absentee ballots: the mother lode of vote fraud
Let's suppose that you learn that you've been scheduled for a trip out of state that will keep you from voting. You can call your county courthouse and ask for an absentee ballot application. They'll send you a form, which you fill out and return, and then you'll get an absentee ballot in the mail. You fill out the ballot and send it back to the courthouse by the due date--congratulations! You have voted absentee, and your vote has made the nation stronger. In a perfect world, that's how absentee ballots are supposed to work.
Over the past twenty or twenty-five years the absentee ballot process has, um, changed. In a blowout absentee ballots are meaningless--but in a closely-contested race a handful of absentee ballots can be the difference between a "moral" victory and the real thing. (As a college student I functioned as an "absentee ballot captain"--identifying college students in the Philadelphia area who lived in the 10th congressional district in Illinois. I got them registered to vote at home, and made sure they voted absentee. I put in scores of hours of work--and turned in something like a dozen votes. In 1978 we lost the election by 6 votes--in a special election in 1979 we won by something like 120.) As the value of absentee ballots has become more apparent, people have started to cheat. (The rules for absentee ballots, and the opportunity to cheat, really expanded dramatically with the "Motor Voter" bills that got jammed through state legislatures in the early 1990s.)
How to steal absentee ballots
The simplest way to steal absentee votes is to work your way through nursing homes. The ideal method is to have a dedicated party worker who is a resident of the nursing home--but you can also send in a "volunteer." Nursing homes love volunteers who come to visit--so it's easy to plant somebody. However you do it, your party worker announces that she (or he) wants to help everybody participate in the election. Nothing wrong with that, right? So she distributes voter registration cards (perhaps with your party already checked), and promises to make sure that all the cards get turned in to the courthouse. When election time rolls around, she points out that senior citizens can get absentee ballots without question, and without anything like a doctor's note. All you have to do is ask. So Helpful Sally signs up everybody for absentee ballots. And since the absentee ballot is a bit confusing, Helpful Sally helps everybody fill out their ballot. As a general rule, Helpful Sally is going to get in trouble if she tries to buffalo people into voting for her candidate for governor--but practically nobody knows the names and/or positions of candidates for judge, for district magistrate, for local races--even for state legislative positions. All Helpful Sally has to do is say, "if you don't know the candidates, just leave the ballot blank." Oh, how helpful Sally really is. And to be really helpful, Helpful Sally offers to save the voter the cost of the stamp: she'll take the ballot to the courthouse herself, so your vote won't get lost in the mail.
Once the ballot is done, Helpful Sally can do two things. If the voter picked the wrong office, Helpful Sally can simply "lose" the ballot. Unless the senior citiz
I don't subscribe to a paid service like RealOne--I look at different news sites.
Hi!
I'm in rural America, and I've used a variety of methods for Internet access over the years: a 56K frame-relay circuit, ISDN, a fractional T-1 circuit, and now DirecWay. Some thoughts:
There is little comparison. The "two-way" DirecWay service is high-speed download, and essentially 56K upload. If you're doing a lot of uploading (particularly of graphics) that's a bad thing. If you're uploading text, it isn't that noticeable. On the other hand, you definitely will notice the latency. It's annoying.
On the other hand, DirecWay is dramatically cheaper. You can buy the "modem" up front and pay $59/month, or capitalize the "modem" over 15 months for a total charge of $99/month; after 15 months your rate drops to $59/month. I viewed the cost of the device as equivalent to buying a router--its a capital expense. I can tell you with a broad smile on my face that $59/month is a LOT cheaper than the $450/month I was paying for a fractional T-1. (I dropped the T because I'm no longer doing offsite development for clients--I took a full-time position, so I don't have as much need for the bandwidth.)
We learned this the hard way: DirecWay and DirecTV actually broadcast from different satellites. The way they provide service from both is to aim the dish at a compromise position. The result is poor signal strength from either TV or Internet. Our satellite guy came out last week, saying that DirecWay had emailed all of their installers to install a separate TV dish. It makes your roof more cluttered ("I heard you went to work for client," said a neighbor. "Was it the NSA?") but it will definitely settle the question of who is the biggest geek on the block.
Once you're past that initial latency hit, download speed is remarkable. While there were benefits to having the T-1 circuit, I'm 28,000 feet from the CO, so packet loss was a persistent problem. Internet radio is better, and watching broadband TV is MUCH better.
Overall, we're very happy with it.
Hi!
I'm an adjunct lecturer at a local university, and I've seen the growing problem of plagiarism at first hand. The Internet provides students with massive amounts of material--in many respects posing a real problem for the school library, which is inevitably hopelessly out of date on a lot of subjects. And, as many people have pointed out, the Internet provides students with lots of material to use in plagiarizing--turning in someone else's work as their own.
All of which has NOTHING to do with Turnitin.com.
There are a couple of different business models in the plagiarism-busting business. One model (best exemplified by EVE (Essay Verification Engine from Canexus Software) selects potential search hits from an essay and then hits search engines to see if the content can be found on the Web. Turnitin.com doesn't do this: instead, it compares submitted papers to an existing database.
The difference is business models is quite clear: the web-search tools (EVE) are focused on selling to the individual instructor who (like me) smells plagiarism but doesn't know where to look. If you get a paper whose English is simply too good to be believed, just fire up EVE, feed it the paper, and then have a heart-to-heart chat with the student and/or the dean. Turnitin.com, by contrast, really markets to an entire institution--it is squarely focused on dealing with a more serious academic problem: organized cheating. They're not busting you for copying two paragraphs from the CIA World Factbook: they don't compare your paragraphs with the web. But they can, and will, bust you for recycling a fraternity brother's A- essay for your Survey of European History class.
This is more than just nickel-and-dime copy-lifting
This isn't just lifting a paragraph from a good essay without using a footnote. This is out-and-out, undeniable cheating. Something that sends normally laid-back faculty members up the wall is to raise the notion of organized cheating: of groups of students (often fraternities) that maintain files of successful papers. (When I was an Ivy League college freshman, decades ago, the quality of a fraternity's essay files was a prominent feature mentioned when rushing a freshman.) The practice isn't just limited to fraternities--there are entrepreneurs around who will sell you a "guaranteed" grade on a paper; they can guarantee the grade because they know what grade the paper received a year ago. And, of course, there are the commercial paper mills that have turned cheating into a business. (And yes, Virginia, that "original" paper they sold you has been used for dozens of previous customers.)
How Turnitin.com works:
Turnitin.com works by comparing submitted papers against other papers that have previously been submitted. They stress that they don't just want papers that are suspected of plagiarism: they need every paper. That's because the original, appropriate, well-written, deserving-of-an-A paper you've just finished (and you have finished your homework, right?) might get submitted again next year in a different section of the same course. (And if you're wondering, it is not unheard-of for a teaching assistant to make a few bucks selling good papers.)
That poses a business problem, and probably the biggest marketing problem Turnitin.com faces: faculties don't like requiring every student to submit every paper to Turnitin.com. Small schools like to think they have a close relationship with their students, so they tend to doubt that their students cheat. Big schools with 100+ student sections have few illusions about cheating--but balk at the cost.
Cheating happens.
Plagiarism happens. It is a real threat to the academic process. It is a real threat to a student's education--and a real threat to that student's future. (If a doctor cheated on an essay in college, who's to say he actually attended that seminar on laser surgery? Do you want him using that laser on you?) My school doesn't see the need to sign up for Turnitin--but a number of faculty members do use it, and others use EVE or other similar tools. It's a real problem, and Turnitin is one legitimate solution.
Hi!
Um--this is something of a stretch. This point might be better phrased "has been used as political cover by the United States to save the countries of South Korea, Kuwait, and many others...." Military intervention by member countries with limited U.N. involvement (South Korea, Kuwait) has been very successful. Military intervention led by the U.N. by itself (particularly where the U.S./NATO has not been involved) has been generally disastrous. I give you Lebanon; the Ivory Coast, Somalia, and any number of other horrid conflicts in Africa; the list goes on and on. Dictators and despots diss the U.N. because they know the U.N. is there to be "peacekeepers." They respect the U.S. because they can watch CNN--and they are well aware that the U.S. doesn't do "peacekeeping" nearly as well as it does killing people. And the U.S. military has a centuries-long tradition of taking "head shots"--gunning for the guy giving the orders.
That doesn't mean the U.N. is a total bust
Not at all. It just hasn't been very credible as a military force. Where it has been extremely credible is in creating a forum for international discussion--both directly and through other forums like the WTO. The U.N. has made a major impact on international trade and the environment through the licensing and monitoring of hazardous materials, the development of international air rules, the development of international shipping rules, and all kinds of dull, dreary, drudgery that doesn't make the front page. The U.N. has played a big role as a forum for Third World countries to state their case--and to build their economies. (The biggest impact for the poorest nations is that they get essentially free trade representation in New York City--the biggest marketplace in the world.) Dozens of poor countries have staked their plans for development on the manufacture of cheap textiles--and the U.N. provides cheap access to the buyers in the biggest market in the world.
The U.N. is better at organizing meetings than it is as a functioning governing body
Where the U.N. has been the most successful is in bringing people together in a common forum. Where the U.N. has been the most laughable is when it attempts to assert authority over something in which it has played no part, has no existing role, and to which it can contribute nothing. It was a U.N. agency, you may recall, that proposed an email "tax"--demonstrating that it knew absolutely nothing about how email worked.
In short...
The U.N. should focus on trying to negotiate realistic limits on fisheries protection and related maritime law--and leave the Internet to the geeks who run it. Or failing that, to the people who actually fund it and own it.
Hi!
While there is tremendous potential for hydrogen-based fuel cells, there's a little detail that seems to be overlooked. The vast majority of the world's production of liquid or gaseous hydrogen is produced from off-gases that are byproducts of oil refining.
The world's leading producer of liquid hydrogen is Air Products and Chemicals of Trexlertown, Pa. I've done a lot of work for them over the years--and their hydrogen business is based on "HYCO" plants that take refinery gases, extract the hydrogen and return carbon dioxide (and sometimes hydrogen) back "over the fence" to the refinery. Key point: no refinery, no hydrogen. There are other means of producing hydrogen--but HYCO plants are by far the cheapest.
A point of philosophy:
Immanual Kant's Categorical Imperative can be expressed like this: if your philosophy requires having sinners to do the sinning for you, your philosophy is bankrupt. Getting hydrogen as a byproduct of petroleum production--and then expecting hydrogen to free us from dependency on petroleum--won't work. If everybody stops using petroleum and switches to hydrogen, there won't be any petroleum refined--and thus there won't be any hydrogen. In order to have volume production of hydrogen, you need gas-guzzling petrol users to do the sinning for you.
As I wrote above, there are other sources of hydrogen. As the use of hydrogen increases (and let's not forget--liquid hydrogen is significantly more explosive than gasoline, and touching it will cause body parts to freeze and shatter) new sources of hydrogen will have to be developed, and new processes developed to extract the hydrogen cheaply. That will take time, ingenuity, and money. There's a lot of push behind the idea (if you're in high school, pursuing a college degree in chemical engineering with a focus on cryogenics and hydrogen in particular would be a VERY smart idea) but it will take time to appear. This will not be an overnight sensation.
And don't forget the Saudis
The Saudis are sitting on 2/3 of the world's oil. As they see their dominance dwindling, they will respond. The biggest challenge to the development of a replacement technology like LH will be economic: the Saudis and the rest of OPEC will simply slash prices. When gas costs $.30 per gallon (which still makes them billions) it will be difficult to justify the price per "gallon" of LH.
You can track vehicle positions. It's much harder to track which roads have been used.
I've done a bunch of work with GPS-based vehicle tracking systems--and it is entirely feasible to track vehicle positions. However--it is something else entirely to track which roads a given vehicle has used. The problem isn't with GPS--the problem is with the accuracy of map data: sometimes there's a pretty substantial difference between where GPS reports are, and where the actual roadway is supposed to be. (A very common instance of this is service roads--the roads that typically parallel a limited-access highway in urban areas. Is the truck on I-78 or on the adjacent service road?
This is a ridiculously expensive way to charge tolls.
This problem has already been solved in the U.S.: you can travel from Massachusetts to Virginia using EZ-Pass. And the EZ-Pass system costs lots less to implement. For starters, the on-windshield transponders cost a few bucks; substantially less than even the lowest-cost GPS vehicle locators (which use cellular telephone control channels to report).
So why dream up such a boondoggle?
Oh...that's right. Because the Galileo system is just an out-of-this-world waste of money. So the European Space Agency needs to dream up problems for their solution to solve. And the Europeans wonder why their economies are stagnant.
Hi Bill!
(I'm also replying here to your comments on a post of mine, about the fallacy that declining IT employment is being caused by growth of the Indian IT market.)
The bleak American IT marketplace is not largely caused by outsourcing. While outsourcing is a phenomenon, Jerry Pournelle's analogy (originally about client/server computing) to teenage sex is apropos: a lot of people are talking about it, a lot of people claim to have done it, but in fact not many have, and a lot of those found it painful. Outsourcing down the road suffers from the intractable problem of communications that I spoke of in my earlier post: you simply can't communicate as well with a coder in Bangalore as you can with a fellow in the next cube.
The real cause of the current malaise
The bleak IT job market at present is caused by the collapse of two bubbles: the dot-com bubble, and the Year 2000 "Crisis". 1998 and 1999 saw a hiring frenzy (and a consulting rate boom) that we will never see again: anybody who could spell "HTML" could get a big-ticket job with a dot-com startup. Stories abounded about college sophomores quitting school to take six-figure positions with high-tech firms. Lots of kids took computer courses in college to cash in on the feeding frenzy, and lots of adults in the working world decided to quit their jobs and join in the gold rush as well.
Meanwhile, there was this Y2K thing...
While the dot-com boom was starting, Business America was getting panicked about the Year 2000 problem. And there were entrepreneurs out there (Ed Yourdon, Gary North, and Mike Hyatt are three that spring to mind) that were consciously fanning the fires of panic, writing about the rioting and calamity that awaited us when the electricity went off and the banking system failed. Corporate CEOs got alarmed, stock market analysts started asking scary questions, the major media got wind of the issue, and the matter ended up in front of Congress. Who passed laws.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
One of those laws permitted corporations to expense the costs of Y2K preparedness, rather than depreciating those expenses out over 5 or 7 years. Depreciating PCs has always been stupid: they are essentially worthless after two years, but accounting rules required keeping them for five. The Y2K rule permitted any savvy CIO to replace essentially every PC on the premises, buy all sorts of new software, and start every project on his five-year wish list--and the corporate finance people would approve. (By expensing the projects and purchases, corporate profits would go down, but "trailing free cash flow" would remain the same. The effect for most corporations would be a significant reduction in taxes, but little or no impact on cash flow.)
In other words, the Y2K tax legislation engendered an IT spending spree. Every IT pro with any modicum of experience was hired on these projects (even thousands of COBOL guys were hauled back out of retirement)--there was essentially full employment in business programming. And while there was full employment in business programming in midtown Manhattan and down on Wall Street, a whole new industry of e-commerce was developing in Greenwich Village and SoHo. (I'm using New York as a metaphor here.) The city was crawling with programmers, and every programmer was making a fortune.
Then the money ran out.
The Y2K projects generally ended first, but they generally ended gradually. The retirees went back to retirement, and the contractors found that they were spending 2-3 weeks "on the bench" where before it had been 2-3 days. Business was still okay, but not great. By the end of 2000, and the beginning of 2001, the dot-coms started to run into trouble. FuckedCompany.com appeared, and the news stories seemed to stop focusing on big IPOs, and started to focus on collapsing dot-coms. Through the spring and summer of 2001 the dot-coms seemed to be collapsing left and right: and a lot of
Hi!
In my earlier post I wrote about the logical fallacy of pro causa non causa--the fallacy of false cause. Entry-level positions in the U.S. are scarce, and IT jobs in India are booming. Both statements are true--but it does not follow that IT jobs in India are booming, and therefore entry-level positions in the U.S. are scarce. They are two distinct phenomena.
Entry-level jobs in the U.S.
One of the remarkable things about the computer science curriculum in most colleges and universities is the utter lack of correlation between what is taught in school and what is used in the real world. I'm not just talking about the use of Eiffel and APL and other "teaching" languages, or the emphasis on subjects like compiler theory. At a much simpler level there is a subtle--but pernicious--emphasis on work habits and programming style that are not just beside the point; they are positively harmful to one's career as a programmer. The CS major may have had a class on UML--but he hasn't had to design a project in UML and present it for review; he may have had a class on databases, but has no sense of how a database can be used; he has heard about the importance of documentation, but has never been asked to make a change to a program written three years ago by a coder who cannot be found; he has heard (possibly) about the idea of designing for maintainability--but who cares about maintenance when the semester is only 90 days long?
An experienced programmer should understand the importance of design, documentation, and maintainability. Savvy employers these days don't just want experience--they want "full life-cycle" experience, meaning that you have worked on a project from inception through delivery and at least one subsequent revision. When you have done that, chances are you have a pretty good handle on what is necessary to deliver another successful project--that's valuable experience.
Which means...you're absolutely right
It is hard to break into the programming business these days, if all you have is a college degree. If you've already graduated, your best bet is to find a job--any job--and get your foot in the door. A young man I'm quite fond of was a hotshot C++ programmer in college--the best job he could find was a contract job writing HTML on an e-business project. He took the job, for peanuts, and devoted himself to becoming an expert in Javascript. He helped out--learning to write Transact-SQL queries, and writing useful "helper" applications that we needed from time to time. He grew--and eventually the company hired him full-time.
If you're still in school, look for internship opportunities. I worked with a couple of interns over the summer--they both wrote real projects, worked on real business problems, and gained some remarkable insight into the difference between programming in the real world vs. programming in the confines of Carnegie Mellon. If an internship doesn't work, look for a not-for-profit organization that can use your help. Find somebody, somewhere, that needs a program. Write HTML, write Javascript, write ASP--whatever you have to do, to build real-world projects. It will make a world of difference in your marketability--but it will also give you a dramatically different perspective on the remainder of your classes.
Bottom line: programming is maturing as a field of employment The days of kids leaving school after their sophomore year to take six-figure salaries are gone. The kids who did are probably out of work, wondering if they could go back to school--a
Hi!
That depends upon the state--in Pennsylvania you can't ticket a car. And even if you have the license number, you cannot legally compel the owner of the car to tell you who had the car at the time. Unless you have a photo of the driver on her way through the red light, you can't issue a ticket. (I'm not sure, but I don't think there are any red light cameras in Pennsylvania.)
Hi!
Want to scare a lot of people? Or want to get a zillion page views to boost your website advertising sales? Post a red-meat story on SlashDot about IT jobs getting outsourced to India, and watch the fur fly. Toss in a statistic or two (in this article there were no statistics at all) about how EDS has thousands of jobs in India, and let's not forget about that tape recording of IBM's HR guy saying that they should be moving jobs offshore, too. By golly, we'll all be sitting on the curb selling pencils by Christmas!
Or maybe not...
Believe it or not, those offshore code factories aren't much of a job threat to American programmers. Companies have been trying to move programming work offshore for a good ten years--and yes, some programming work has moved offshore. But most of the offshore outsourcing that's been done is either code maintenance (hiring the cheapest person possible to maintain legacy COBOL applications that refuse to die) or help desk support jobs. Neither of those categories poses a big threat to an experienced C++ programmer with good communication skills and a good resume.
What is a threat to American programmers' jobs is a simple economic reality: a lot of us had high-paying jobs in the 1990s because of two different bubbles. The dot-com bubble and the Year 2000 "crisis" had the delightful effect of creating an unbelievable demand for programmers--with or without experience. When Congress passed "emergency" legislation to permit corporations to expense Y2K related expenditures (instead of depreciating them as usual) I joked to a friend that the bill should be called the "Full Employment for Programmers Act."
Those were terrific times. But they're gone.
The hard and simple reality:
The bubbles have burst. All of the Y2K coding has been done. Every Fortune 500 corporation that simply HAD TO HAVE A WEB PRESENCE BY THE NEXT STOCKHOLDERS MEETING is now hoping that the auditors won't compare the money spent on that Enterprise Web Portal with the amount of business generated by it. The insane levels of demand for programmers--and the insane pay rates that went with it--are gone.
That doesn't mean we're all going to lose our jobs to people in the Indian subcontinent. But it does mean that we have to adjust our expectations of the labor market to something a bit closer to reality. If we were newspaper reporters or insurance claims analysts or high school teachers or mechanical engineers we'd face certain realities: you have to look for a job; employers want experience before they'll hire you; sometimes you can't find a job in your area--so you may have to consider moving; and sometimes, well--sometimes you have to consider the possibility that you should look for another career. As information technology becomes a more mature business, a lot of those realities apply to us as well.
Programming doesn't move offshore well
It doesn't. Sure--if you're a SlashDot regular or devoted to a particular Open Source project, you can name talented programmers who live and work outside of the United States. Miguel de Icaza of Ximian, for instance, is an extremely capable programmer who lives in Mexico. Do I consider him a job threat? Not in the least--because programming is not as portable (at least not to India) as you might think.
It's about communication
Simply put, the essence of programming is communication. The vast bulk of programming jobs involve translating user requirements into functional computer code. And if you've been in the business more than, say, three weeks, you've no doubt learned that the customer's written requirements generally have little relationship to what the customer actually needs. Central to what we do is figuring out those little nuances of a customer's business that let us write an effective application--which inevitably involves asking questions the customer never even considered we'd ask.
For example: I'm presently wor
...drivers do.
If you live in the eastern United States, you have undoubtedly driven on a toll-financed highway (such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike) that issues a ticket when you enter the highway, and collects the ticket (and your toll) when you exit. You may have wondered whether or not the authorities ever examine those tickets, do the math, and might be inclined to write a ticket based on your elapsed time. Or perhaps you might have wondered why--as far as you know--they never seem to. If you have a toll transponder (EZPass) on your car, perhaps you've wondered the same thing: if the N.Y. Thruway knows when you paid the toll on I-87, and when you crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, they should be able to tell that you were speeding, right?
Obviously, they can tell that your car was speeding. What they can't tell is who was driving. And since you can't ticket a car--you can only ticket the driver--you can't use toll tickets, or electronic monitors, as a basis for issuing a citation.
How do I know this? Believe it or not, a couple of years ago the Pennsylvania State Police conducted marketing focus groups about their image, etc., and sent me an invitation. On a lark, I went--and after sitting through the usual ignore-all-those-people-behind-the-mirror discussion, we had a pretty frank Q&A session with a couple of state troopers. And when the question "do you ever compare times on the toll tickets?" came up, both cops grinned broadly. Apparently it is about the most-frequently asked of their FAQs. And, they explained, the answer is 'no.'
But then the explanation got interesting
But then one of the cops raised his eyebrows, and said, "on the other hand, the Turnpike Commission doesn't like to advertise that. Because a lot of people believe that they will get ticketed, so they stop for a meal at a rest area along the turnpike to make sure they don't arrive at the exit too soon--which means a lot of money for the turnpike."
Electronic monitoring of cars
First, there's a simple legal problem. Second, there's an enormous manufacturing/distribution problem (how do you produce all those transponders, and install them--with correct information--in every car?). Third, there's a corollary engineering problem (sensors along each lane of every road? Good luck). Fourth, there's a colossal database problem: speed limits and road striping change all the time. I've worked with the major geodata sets available for North America, and none of them even include fields for speed limit, because the data changes so often that it is pointless to try to maintain it on even a 3-month update cycle.
In short, this is nonsense.
Hi!
I used Microsoft Word 1.0 for the Mac, Word 1.0 for DOS, and Word for Windows 1.0 (which was released after Word 3.0 for DOS). I certainly have never heard of any such "feature", and I have installed updates on Word for Windows 1.0. I think this is probably a legend, rather than fact.
John Murdoch
Hi!
I've mentioned in an earlier reply that I have worked on publishing for a long time. As it happens, I have crossed paths with Michael Jackson's "people" and his music publishing venture.
Simply put: Michael Jackson may be "outraged" at the notion of jailing file-swappers--but that doesn't mean that Michael Jackson's staff isn't scrupulously guarding all of their considerable investment in a) his performances, and b) his music catalog. If you would care to find out, try selling photocopies of old Beatles music--and see how quickly Michael's lawyers drag you into court. (MJ owns the Beatles music catalog--the copyrights to all of the sheet music.)
Hi!
Thanks for your comments. I'm quite familiar with copyright law, having been the business manager of one publishing house, the president of another, as well as a columnist for several magazines. A bit of explanation is in order.
There are a variety of copyrights that can be asserted on that CD. The one you're thinking of is a copyright on the design and artwork of the CD--the packaging, the type, etc. That is owned by the record label. The writer of the lyrics of each of the songs has a copyright on the words; the composer/songwriter of each of the tunes has a copyright. But the ultimate ownership for the performance--and it is the performance that is being pirated on that MP3--belongs to the artist.
That said, let me simply quote from a SlashDot interview from a few days ago, on this very point: the U.S. Justice Department attorneys state explicitly that the RIAA must have authority from the artists in order to get subpoenas--or they are in jeopardy of being held liable for perjury:
Bottom line: the RIAA is looking for these files because they have specific authorization to pursue the matter from these artists, or from the artist's management.
BTW--this shouldn't come as a surprise. The point of the article you linked to is that, surprise! the music business is a business. The musicians who stay in the music business realize that, and combine business acumen with creative talent. When Internet Radio was getting clobbered a number of well-known musicians essentially argued that Internet radio stations were a bunch of scheming thieves, and wanted to screw them all. Not every major musician, but Metallica isn't alone in hating MP3-swapping.
But since the music business is a business, it would be a foolish musician who ticks off his customer base. That's why an email campaign to the musicians would be quite effective.
Hi!
One of the reasons the RIAA is targeting a specific group of files (in addition to target market, etc.) is that the RIAA is acting, legally, as the agent of the copyright owner. The RIAA doesn't own the copyrights to the music--generally, neither do the record labels. The "artists" (using the term very broadly in a few cases) own the copyrights, and the RIAA is acting on their behalf. They're looking for U2 files because U2 has given them permission to haul kids into court on a trumped-up infringement action.
Which might give you pause, next time you're in the record store looking to buy a CD.
Which brings me to an interesting idea:
If you see the name of an artist you admire--and perhaps support with your hard-earned dollar--why not drop an email to the artist asking why he or she is supporting the draconian actions of the RIAA? As always, it pays to be polite--screamers just get ignored (or reinforce the "they're all crooks" attitudes). But a few hundred polite, irenic notes might just change a few attitudes.
And a few hundred thousand polite irenic notes might just drum some sense into the musicians.
Hi!
Nope. I'm a programmer these days, but I used to be the business manager of a publishing house, and subsequently ran my own publishing house for a few (disastrous) years. I've written for a number of programming magazines since then--so I'm pretty familiar with the rules. 8-)
Hi!
Larry Niven might have used the term "flash crowd" in one of his novels--but the term "flash mob" has been in use since at least the 19th century. It was used to describe the loud and outre--"flash" in the sense of exploding powder ("a flash in the pan").
The term was certainly in use by the 1930s--Dorothy Sayers refers to the "flash mob" in one of her stories about Lord Peter Wimsey.
Hi!
It isn't because the law is needlessly complex--it is because humans are immensely complex. There is a seemingly infinite number of ways in which written/recorded material can be used--and because of that infinite number of ways, you'd be foolish to try to nail down "bright lines" to say absolutely, without equivocation, what is Fair Use and what isn't. Consider some examples:
And the judges say...
No, yes, no, and yes. Copying the 23rd Psalm from a copyrighted translation would not be considered infringement because the 23rd Psalm, while a discrete chapter of the Bible, is still a small part of the work. Further, your distributing the 23rd Psalm in the new translation is unlikely to discourage sales of the translation--it is easy to argue that it might increase sales instead. (And it has been common practice for new Bible translations to distribute portions of the Psalms as marketing material.)
Singing "Happy Birthday" is infringement?
Yup. And the copyright holders have successfully, and repeatedly, sued--and won. That's why every franchise restaurant chain in America has their own goofy variation on the song--nobody sings "Happy Birthday."
There is a second dimension to this: in general, singing any copyrighted song from an overhead projector has been found in the courts to be infringement. The Catholic diocese of Chicago got tagged for more than a million dollars back in the early 1980s for using "scripture songs" from an overhead projector to avoid buying printed music.
Reviewing Truffault
First, your video for class is a perfect case of Fair Use. It clearly falls under the category of "review, comment, or scholarship" (at least two out of the three, if you're like any of my students), it is done under the umbrella of a universit
Hi!
Thanks for your comment. You're right--if we were supporting 400 simultaneous users manipulating 1 MB SVG files we'd be toast. But please note that I said we're averaging 90 ms per message. We don't get anywhere near 90 ms with the really chubby SVG documents (and data transfer is only half the problem: they take eons to load and manipulate). The SVG messages are the extreme--the vast bulk of the traffic is much simpler string retrieval and other simple data requests.
Hi!
Executive summary:
Yes.
Boring details: .Net (mostly C#, some components in VB), including Windows forms and ASP.Net web pages. (Why both? The project incorporates multiple applications for different kinds of users.) As part of pre-shipment testing we're in the midst of extensive testing, including load testing.
I'm goofing off, perusing SlashDot at the end of a dinner break. We're shipping a big project to a customer on Monday--the project is written in
The Windows applications communicate with the data tier using SOAP/XML, using synchronous messaging. Practically every message involves a database transaction with SQL Server 2000. Across a range of loads we are seeing round-trip message responses (from receipt of the inbound XML message to return from the web service) averaging less than 90 ms per message. That 90 ms average can be misleading--some of our messages involve extensive processing and/or lots of data. Some of the transaction work we're doing with SVG images involve SOAP messages with payloads greater than 1 MB, so the average gets dragged out.
Based on our testing, we anticipate supporting hundreds of simultaneous users--in a near-real-time environment--from a single web service. As we scale out on larger projects we may need to scale the number of web servers (although IIS on Windows 2003 is supposed to be substantially faster--YMMV), but we won't need to scale the database. Using a similar messaging architecture for a different client I have a project supporting 400+ users on a single SQL Server.
This is SlashDot, after all... .Net. And recommending it. But you asked, so I'll answer: .Net is scaleable in terms of the final application, and .Net is scaleable in terms of the size of the development team that is involved. This project involves 19 developers (a total of 60+ individual projects in the nightly build) and we're able to manage the entire thing remarkably well. Developing web service applications with .Net is remarkably easy to do; developing sockets apps is unbelievably simpler than using WinInet.dll. And the web developers are extremely happy working in ASP.Net--I don't know where you heard that ASP.Net is slower than ASP, but that's simply not true. ASP.Net is significantly faster.
Obviously you're going to get a lot of "why not use...?" posts, and I'm sure I'll get flamed for having the temerity to admit to using
With regard to other comments .Net Remoting. Quick to prototype, barks in production. Like OLE, it's a great way to make a Pentium 4 box emulate an original 8086 IBM PC. (Far smarter to manage communication with XML-based messaging. It just takes more coding.)
I'm the data/messaging architect on the project: I can speak to the comments about messaging, reflection, and SQL Server. As with any Microsoft-based development project, you have to think carefully, and think critically, about how to design your application. Microsoft will always give you a quick! easy! fun! way to rapidly produce a prototype. You have to dig deeper, and think harder, to produce a scaleable application. The quick! easy! fun! technology du jour is
That SQL Server doesn't permit triggers to be written in C#--so? Transact-SQL is suitable for database development. We could ask for more (such as integrating stored procedures and other database code into Visual SourceSafe). There is talk that the next version of SQL Server will permit coding in .Net languages--that'd be cool, but I'll wait and see.
The single most compelling argument for .Net .Net Framework. You might look into this particularly for clients that are choking on server pricing--but you might also pay careful attention, because a robust Mono project will encourage/force Microsoft to compete on features and functionality, instead of a take-what-we-give-you mentality. That's a Very Good Thing.
Mono--an Open Source implementation of the