But the thing is, his dream is theoretical and it is clearly evident that he does not take into regard evidence within the real world to support his theory.
Good point, except, I use the gnu development enviroment all the time and I regard them as the finest set of programming tools available on this planet. Doesn't seem that impractical or theoretical to me.
Several large finacial institutions I know of (including the one that pays my bills!) are in the process of implementing a PKI infastructure internally.
I thought it would interest to compare there views with those poor underpaid, underworked, underachaievers that you pay the bills ofr.
1. No-One has ever (yet) cracked PKI even by brute force or pure math, all cracks have been a result of people or poorly implemented technoligy.
And for those 0.0001% of documents that need a higher level of security you can still implement another system (un-networked PCs in locked rooms, with security guards etc. etc.)
2. "Costs are high", we are looking at about $200 dollars per user/employee which counts as "cheap" in this industry.
3."Need to create a policy framework" -- yes but you need to do this for issusing pencils!
4."training" -- you certainly need a highly qualified and skilled team to implement this, but, if it is implemented in a way that requires the users/employees to do anything that requires any training then your team is simply not skilled enough!
Interestingly though all these institutions have concluded that extending the PKI infrastructure to include third partys or the general public was just to complex.
Great idea except... the only thing which is measurable is page hits. So if you think popups and those incredibly irritating automated web rings are bad now, just wait until they get real money for every hit!
Just think of the all the irritating hassle involved. I mean somebody send you a link telling you to check out a "great website". You click the link and you get a "This site requires ACME payment server -- register at ACME now".
You then have to give ACME you credit card or billing details etc. etc.
The you can checkout the "great website" and find out it wasn't worth the effort. Next time you just won't bother. The practicaly only micro-payment system that exists in the "real" world is parking meters and they are annoying by design.
To just take one example of M$ business tactics. I do not see how you could call Borland failing to get market share for DBase II on Windows as incompetance on thier part when:-
"a" they were not given access to a working windows environment until it was generally available to the public. Where as the "access" developers had, well, access to a working windows development for nearly a year.
"b" the access developers had, hrmph, access to unpublished APIs within windows which in many cases were developed at the request of the "access" team.
and "c" microsoft gave access away for free. less than $100 dollars list price, and, no license checking.
Several years later if you want a desktop database running on windows your only choice is "access", and it costs several hundred dollars.
At last! Someone who appreciates the reason the DOJ brought the case.
Remember a few years back when Borland did databases, Lotus did spreadsheets, ? did WordPerfect.
What happended to all of these products and companies? They got zapped by Microsoft, the same has happened to Nescape, and Oracle is gradually being squeezed out of the database on Intel market. (Sybase is already a victim of "embrace and extend").
This is not a question of a company with a superior product out-selling the opposistion. It is a question of MicroSoft using its control of the operating system environment to force its "me too" products on its customers.
To say nothing of the wierd internal contadictions in thier own documentation.
I mean "Thou shalt not kill", "An eye for an eye", "turn the other cheek" and "smote thine enemies" are all valid biblical instructions.
And the begining of the propectus there is a lot of frankly racist harping on about "choosen people" no "miscegination" etc. etc. yet by the time we wade through to the later chapters "gods love is universal".
Maybe thats the great attraction, if you want to eat hot salami pizza everyday and marry a virgin every Sunday, then I am sure you can find some nifty bible quote to justify this a religious duty.
If it really was the word of God then hes not much of a technical writer.
Profesional musicians (excluding drummers!) have much higher than average IQs as well, but, having a high IQ does not imply you will be a great musician.
There is more to programing than being merely intelligent. Good programers have highly developed problem solving skills, pattern recognition skills, and, enormous short term memories among other attributes. In the stone age when I first started it was standard practice to give job applicants "aptitude" tests. These were a surprisingly accurate predictor of how well a person would perform as a programmer.
Until people admit that a large part of what makes a good programmer is simply not teachable, a lot of time, effort and money will be wasted producing "highly qualified profesionals" who are loosy programers.
It doesn't really matter whether these contracts are strictly enforceable under local law.
The position of an individual being sued by a large corporation is akin to someone at the wrong end of a mediaval with hunt.
Guilt, innicanece, fairness etc have nothing to do with the outcome.
The very fact that you are involved in employee/employer litigation will damage your future employment prospects.
It doesn't really matter if you win any individual hearing. A big bucks corperation will simply apeal and escalate the matter to the next (and even more expensive!) court until eventually you accept defeat ot go bankrupt!
If you are being sued by the largest local employer you have no chance, the jury, any elected court officials, the local media all want that employer to stay. Check out what happened to Randall Schwartz (he of the Camel Book) vs. Intel when he ended up in a Redmond court on some dubious "hacking" charges.
The government the law and the courts are thier to protect corperate america, after all they bought and paid for all the polititions and the polititions delivered.
No its not fair.
What is fair is that your employer owns any code, algorithms, patents etc. which you "invented" at your employers specific behest.
e.g. If I "invented" a "though to code translator" while employed at the program development research lab at IBM, then, clearly it belongs to IBM because I was being instructed and paid to invent it (or something like them!).
If however I was working at an insurance company and invented a "thought to code translator" because, my employer wanted lots of reports generated and I got bored coding several almost identical programs, the invention should still be mine, I was not instructed to invent it, I was not paid to invent things. I was paid to write boring programs and this task was fulfilled.
Too late IBMs awful "ADF" language was entirly database based.
An automated implementation of James Martin's "Information Engineering" methodoligy was developed by Texas Instraments and sold for a while as "IEF", the ancestor of this product is now called "HPS" and sold by level-8 software.
And very nice it is too.
Everthing from high level design, systems requirements, data models , ddl, program logic, dialog definitions, data flows, screen designs etc. is held in an integrated "encyclopedia" stored in a database. Only the generated machine code is not stored in the database.
Certainly there are too many accademic theoretical languages. I think all that research money would be better spent on SETI or Ghostbuster type projects where the researchers could at least have some fun.
The three langauges I use regularly are:-
C, perl and Java. Plus I do like rexx, python and tcl.
The thing all these languages have in common is that they were written by experienced programmers who wanted a new langauge because they couldn't do what they wanted to do with the existing languages.
While both python and tcl were developed at academic institustions, the languages were not part of a research project they were developed to aid other research projects. ie they were written to get things done!
Its easier to do things in languages that were written to get things done!
Hmmm, the guy in the "column" seems to have a documentation fixation.
While I write a lot of documentation, I don't read very much of it.
While I find professionally written technical documetation useful, plus anything from 0'Rielly, I am always totally suspisous of anything written at a "project" type level. A typical project just does not have the people, skills or the budget to write good quality documentation.
Time spent trying to make sense of badly written, inaccurate and out of date documentation, is time wasted.
Here is a QDF of what you can expect around the world.
Backwoods USA low rates, low cost of living , medium taxes , nice lifestyle.
Metroploiton USA med rates, low cost of living, med taxes . phrenetic lifestyle.
London, England med rates, high taxes, high cost of living , cool lifestyle
Rest of UK, low rates, high taxes, med cost of living, dullsville.
Most European cities, high rates, high taxes, high cost of living , food and culture heaven.
Switzerland (I live here) very high rates, low taxes, very high cost of living, wierd but wonderful lifestyle.
(( Its conservative but dope is legal, foods not so hot but you can ski every weekend dec - april ))
Arab countries: rates high, taxes none, cost of living low (if somebody else picks up your accomidation!) , lifestyle wierd.
Singapore, Hong Kong etc: rates high, taxes low, cost of living is cheap but accomodation is not -- watch out , lifestyle sounds great!
The main gotcha about working a long way from home is to find out about the cost and availability of apartments, this will be your major expense and finding apartments in european cities can be a real grind. Also watch out for taxes, try to negotiate a deal that is tax efficient, depending on how the deal is structured you could be really well of or poor on the same basic rate.
I really have seen no marked improvement in generally available software over the last ten years.
There are a few exceptions: Internet Explorer is better than Netscape -- but then neihter is that much better than Mosiac.
My general experience of software is that the people who thought up the origonal idea generally write the best implementation. The imitators just add bells, whistles and bugs. So XEROX ViewPoint was better than windows. Lotus was better than Excel and DB2 was/is better than Oracle.
The marketplace however seems to reward the imitators rather than the inivators.
I think you made a mistake if you think Win98 is a games paltform. I cannot think of a single game which runs better on windoze than on a nintendo, or PS1. These are 1/5th the price of a standard PC. As for PS/2 - well the modular architecture of a general purpose OS will never compete with a machine that was designed solely for fast 3d graphics!
Little Johnny will be p*ss*d off if daddy bought one of these instead of a PS/2. But at these prices daddy can afford both.
I don't think this pheonominum is peuliar to computers. The computer (that is the stored program eclectronic computer) have been around for about forty years.
In 1940 aircraft had been around for about forty years and in 1940 an aircraft from 1935 would have looked postitively antique. I mean two wings! canvas covering! wooden framed! no supercharger! compared with an aluminium monoquoce monoplane with a four valves per cylender supercharged pressurised plane of the 40s.
I really think computer development is in for a big slowdown in the next ten years. The main reason being that in two years time we will have more computing power than we know what to do with. We would have reached this stage already if "modern" computers didn't spend most of thier time running a bloated operating system rather than doing useful work.
A "bit" ment the same then as it does now --
a binary digit. Bytes were not invented then and computers were dealt purely in numbers.
I am not sure what the word length was or if it did floating point, but I think it must have done as fixed point calculations are not much good for scientific problems!
So even with very short floats say 10 bits for the number and 6 bits for the power of you could only store a max 125 numbers, but, you would have to fit the program in there somewhere as well.
As far as programming goes it was probably about the same as one of those very early Texas Instraments programable calculators, which, could store a whole 16 numbers!
These benchmarks are conducted under a very strict set of rules and are a very good indication of comparitive performance.
The standard test scenarios are a little simplistic so do not be surprised when a system rated at 10000 transactions per minute strugles to do 1000 tpm in the real world!
http://www.tpc.org/new_result/tpcc_perf_results. as p
Also note the total lack of SUN hardware in the top ten!
Most hotels will still accept reservations by telex.
Oil and shipping companies use still use telex extensively.
Banks, wierdly use vast amounts of telex. I was involved in replacing a banks telex server with a Y2K compliant one last year!
All these have several things in common, they are geographically widespread, they have lots of small operations in strange out of the way places, there is MONEY involved.
To hook up telex you need little more than an Olde Worlde telephone line (Pulse dialing -- no problem!). The answerback protocol give you some sort of confirmation of reciept, and, there is an international standard/protocol which puts legal enforocable obligations on the sender, carrier and receiver.
They have been hacked. In a famous early eighties scam in london some unknown "diggers" as opposed to "hackers" dug up the road outside a bulleon dealer and hooked up thier telex machine directly to to the dealers. They sold the dealer several consignments of non existent gold, and , passed on the resulting bank trnafers to thier bank! As the deals were slightly dodgy anyway the dealer had no choice but to shut up and accept the loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, except, I use the gnu development enviroment all the time and I regard them as the finest set of programming tools available on this planet. Doesn't seem that impractical or theoretical to me.
Duh?
I don't think this qualifies as a troll, in fact it should be modded up as "informative".
Pornography has always been the driving force behind new media.
Several large finacial institutions I know of (including the one that pays my bills!) are in the process of implementing a PKI infastructure internally.
I thought it would interest to compare there views with those poor underpaid, underworked, underachaievers that you pay the bills ofr.
1. No-One has ever (yet) cracked PKI even by brute force or pure math, all cracks have been a result of people or poorly implemented technoligy. And for those 0.0001% of documents that need a higher level of security you can still implement another system (un-networked PCs in locked rooms, with security guards etc. etc.)
2. "Costs are high", we are looking at about $200 dollars per user/employee which counts as "cheap" in this industry.
3."Need to create a policy framework" -- yes but you need to do this for issusing pencils!
4."training" -- you certainly need a highly qualified and skilled team to implement this, but, if it is implemented in a way that requires the users/employees to do anything that requires any training then your team is simply not skilled enough!
Interestingly though all these institutions have concluded that extending the PKI infrastructure to include third partys or the general public was just to complex.
Well gee nobodies invented the warp drive yet so lets stop exploring space until someone builds the USS enterprise!
Great idea except... the only thing which is measurable is page hits. So if you think popups and those incredibly irritating automated web rings are bad now, just wait until they get real money for every hit!
Just think of the all the irritating hassle involved. I mean somebody send you a link telling you to check out a "great website". You click the link and you get a "This site requires ACME payment server -- register at ACME now".
You then have to give ACME you credit card or billing details etc. etc.
The you can checkout the "great website" and find out it wasn't worth the effort. Next time you just won't bother. The practicaly only micro-payment system that exists in the "real" world is parking meters and they are annoying by design.
"a" they were not given access to a working windows environment until it was generally available to the public. Where as the "access" developers had, well, access to a working windows development for nearly a year.
"b" the access developers had, hrmph, access to unpublished APIs within windows which in many cases were developed at the request of the "access" team.
and "c" microsoft gave access away for free. less than $100 dollars list price, and, no license checking.
Several years later if you want a desktop database running on windows your only choice is "access", and it costs several hundred dollars.
What happended to all of these products and companies? They got zapped by Microsoft, the same has happened to Nescape, and Oracle is gradually being squeezed out of the database on Intel market. (Sybase is already a victim of "embrace and extend").
This is not a question of a company with a superior product out-selling the opposistion. It is a question of MicroSoft using its control of the operating system environment to force its "me too" products on its customers.
To say nothing of the wierd internal contadictions in thier own documentation.
I mean "Thou shalt not kill", "An eye for an eye", "turn the other cheek" and "smote thine enemies" are all valid biblical instructions.
And the begining of the propectus there is a lot of frankly racist harping on about "choosen people" no "miscegination" etc. etc. yet by the time we wade through to the later chapters "gods love is universal".
Maybe thats the great attraction, if you want to eat hot salami pizza everyday and marry a virgin every Sunday, then I am sure you can find some nifty bible quote to justify this a religious duty.
If it really was the word of God then hes not much of a technical writer.
Profesional musicians (excluding drummers!) have much higher than average IQs as well, but, having a high IQ does not imply you will be a great musician.
There is more to programing than being merely intelligent. Good programers have highly developed problem solving skills, pattern recognition skills, and, enormous short term memories among other attributes. In the stone age when I first started it was standard practice to give job applicants "aptitude" tests. These were a surprisingly accurate predictor of how well a person would perform as a programmer.
Until people admit that a large part of what makes a good programmer is simply not teachable, a lot of time, effort and money will be wasted producing "highly qualified profesionals" who are loosy programers.
It doesn't really matter whether these contracts are strictly enforceable under local law.
The position of an individual being sued by a large corporation is akin to someone at the wrong end of a mediaval with hunt.
Guilt, innicanece, fairness etc have nothing to do with the outcome.
The very fact that you are involved in employee/employer litigation will damage your future employment prospects.
It doesn't really matter if you win any individual hearing. A big bucks corperation will simply apeal and escalate the matter to the next (and even more expensive!) court until eventually you accept defeat ot go bankrupt!
If you are being sued by the largest local employer you have no chance, the jury, any elected court officials, the local media all want that employer to stay. Check out what happened to Randall Schwartz (he of the Camel Book) vs. Intel when he ended up in a Redmond court on some dubious "hacking" charges.
The government the law and the courts are thier to protect corperate america, after all they bought and paid for all the polititions and the polititions delivered.
e.g. If I "invented" a "though to code translator" while employed at the program development research lab at IBM, then, clearly it belongs to IBM because I was being instructed and paid to invent it (or something like them!).
If however I was working at an insurance company and invented a "thought to code translator" because, my employer wanted lots of reports generated and I got bored coding several almost identical programs, the invention should still be mine, I was not instructed to invent it, I was not paid to invent things. I was paid to write boring programs and this task was fulfilled.
Like to see you try!
Too late IBMs awful "ADF" language was entirly database based.
An automated implementation of James Martin's "Information Engineering" methodoligy was developed by Texas Instraments and sold for a while as "IEF", the ancestor of this product is now called "HPS" and sold by level-8 software.
And very nice it is too.
Everthing from high level design, systems requirements, data models , ddl, program logic, dialog definitions, data flows, screen designs etc. is held in an integrated "encyclopedia" stored in a database. Only the generated machine code is not stored in the database.
Its expensive!
The three langauges I use regularly are:- C, perl and Java. Plus I do like rexx, python and tcl.
The thing all these languages have in common is that they were written by experienced programmers who wanted a new langauge because they couldn't do what they wanted to do with the existing languages.
While both python and tcl were developed at academic institustions, the languages were not part of a research project they were developed to aid other research projects. ie they were written to get things done!
Its easier to do things in languages that were written to get things done!
Hmmm, the guy in the "column" seems to have a documentation fixation.
While I write a lot of documentation, I don't read very much of it.
While I find professionally written technical documetation useful, plus anything from 0'Rielly, I am always totally suspisous of anything written at a "project" type level. A typical project just does not have the people, skills or the budget to write good quality documentation.
Time spent trying to make sense of badly written, inaccurate and out of date documentation, is time wasted.
Time spent reading the code is never wasted.
Backwoods USA low rates, low cost of living , medium taxes , nice lifestyle.
Metroploiton USA med rates, low cost of living, med taxes . phrenetic lifestyle.
London, England med rates, high taxes, high cost of living , cool lifestyle
Rest of UK, low rates, high taxes, med cost of living, dullsville.
Most European cities, high rates, high taxes, high cost of living , food and culture heaven.
Switzerland (I live here) very high rates, low taxes, very high cost of living, wierd but wonderful lifestyle.
(( Its conservative but dope is legal, foods not so hot but you can ski every weekend dec - april ))
Arab countries: rates high, taxes none, cost of living low (if somebody else picks up your accomidation!) , lifestyle wierd.
Singapore, Hong Kong etc: rates high, taxes low, cost of living is cheap but accomodation is not -- watch out , lifestyle sounds great!
The main gotcha about working a long way from home is to find out about the cost and availability of apartments, this will be your major expense and finding apartments in european cities can be a real grind. Also watch out for taxes, try to negotiate a deal that is tax efficient, depending on how the deal is structured you could be really well of or poor on the same basic rate.
Its going to get better!
Sound like a victory of optimism over experience.
I really have seen no marked improvement in generally available software over the last ten years.
There are a few exceptions: Internet Explorer is better than Netscape -- but then neihter is that much better than Mosiac.
My general experience of software is that the people who thought up the origonal idea generally write the best implementation. The imitators just add bells, whistles and bugs. So XEROX ViewPoint was better than windows. Lotus was better than Excel and DB2 was/is better than Oracle.
The marketplace however seems to reward the imitators rather than the inivators.
Little Johnny will be p*ss*d off if daddy bought one of these instead of a PS/2. But at these prices daddy can afford both.
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
http://browserwatch.internet.com/stats/stats.htm l
IE has about 75% of the browser market so he, or any other site with an MS only policy, is turning away 25% of potential punters.
Turning away "lynx" users is just plain mean, as this is the browser of choice for blind and otherwise disabled people.
I don't think this pheonominum is peuliar to computers. The computer (that is the stored program eclectronic computer) have been around for about forty years.
In 1940 aircraft had been around for about forty years and in 1940 an aircraft from 1935 would have looked postitively antique. I mean two wings! canvas covering! wooden framed! no supercharger! compared with an aluminium monoquoce monoplane with a four valves per cylender supercharged pressurised plane of the 40s.
I really think computer development is in for a big slowdown in the next ten years. The main reason being that in two years time we will have more computing power than we know what to do with. We would have reached this stage already if "modern" computers didn't spend most of thier time running a bloated operating system rather than doing useful work.
A "bit" ment the same then as it does now -- a binary digit. Bytes were not invented then and computers were dealt purely in numbers.
I am not sure what the word length was or if it did floating point, but I think it must have done as fixed point calculations are not much good for scientific problems!
So even with very short floats say 10 bits for the number and 6 bits for the power of you could only store a max 125 numbers, but, you would have to fit the program in there somewhere as well.
As far as programming goes it was probably about the same as one of those very early Texas Instraments programable calculators, which, could store a whole 16 numbers!
These benchmarks are conducted under a very strict set of rules and are a very good indication of comparitive performance.
The standard test scenarios are a little simplistic so do not be surprised when a system rated at 10000 transactions per minute strugles to do 1000 tpm in the real world!
http://www.tpc.org/new_result/tpcc_perf_results. as p
Also note the total lack of SUN hardware in the top ten!
Telex is still wodely ised in several industries.
Most hotels will still accept reservations by telex.
Oil and shipping companies use still use telex extensively.
Banks, wierdly use vast amounts of telex. I was involved in replacing a banks telex server with a Y2K compliant one last year!
All these have several things in common, they are geographically widespread, they have lots of small operations in strange out of the way places, there is MONEY involved.
To hook up telex you need little more than an Olde Worlde telephone line (Pulse dialing -- no problem!). The answerback protocol give you some sort of confirmation of reciept, and, there is an international standard/protocol which puts legal enforocable obligations on the sender, carrier and receiver.
They have been hacked. In a famous early eighties scam in london some unknown "diggers" as opposed to "hackers" dug up the road outside a bulleon dealer and hooked up thier telex machine directly to to the dealers. They sold the dealer several consignments of non existent gold, and , passed on the resulting bank trnafers to thier bank! As the deals were slightly dodgy anyway the dealer had no choice but to shut up and accept the loss.