Being a devious and un-trusting type with a world-view sadly twisted by experience, I tend to assume many others are the same way too, and that's way scary.
So... I prefer to entertain my full frontal paranoia by not using anything digital or on-line to actually store my keys to the things that matter.
Instead, I decided to keep my keys in a little black book, old fashioned, perhaps even quaint you exclaim!
True Squire! says I, but go ahead then, have a go.. lets see you hack that book.
Of course I do have nightmares about losing the book, however an occasional trip to a copier and a safe deposit box takes care of those, for a while. Of course if you did get to read it, you'd find yourself holding a bunch of keys... to what? aha!, thats the devious and twisted bit, remind me not to share that!
For hard passwords I choose random letters and numbers in groups of 2, at least 8, 16 or 32 chars in length, depending on the resources value. Otherwise, so I am told, the encryption becomes much easier to break.
For less significant sites, I (like many it seems)use a favorite quote,
condensed into a shorter string of the letters of each word.
Jumpline provides a virtual dedicated server, their uptime is excellent and the
application management system and accessibility is usable to good.
The site is way over engineered and quite slow, and its hard to find stuff.
Their customer service guys are helpful, mostly.
Their prices seem reasonable and response times acceptable.
I like em, and have used em for a couple of years, despite their dumb-ass website.
This appears to be yet another atroturfing attempt.
See Slashdot post: "How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?"
Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, @06:19PM http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/15/18 25230/
(please remove the silly extra space slash adds to the url above, just before 25230, it breaks the link)
Clearly we are going to be treated to this bogus bandwidth crises bullshit approximately once a week,
probably to collect some supportive comments for the need for more control/cost/etc.
Please don't feed the trolls, or help them lay more Astroturf for Net Neutrality.
Most of the time bozo's manufacture crises, cos thats the only thing they can think of to get some leverage they want. Don't be fooled again!
WMD and Terrorism so they can invade whatever country they want.
Oil crises, so they can up the gas price whenever they want.
Time crises by inventing silly deadlines, so they can feel in control of project scope.
And now Bandwidth, so they can find a way to charge for the net.
Next it will be cd plastic shortage crisis, so music goes up in price... Oh wait...
They Lie and Lie... and then Lie some more. I call Bullshit.
There's plenty of dark fibre around, it's dirt cheap to lay more, at least when you amortize it against its utility.
This is just a pathetic attempt to astroturf someones corporate or political genda.
I wouldn't piss on them, if they were on fire...
"The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough"
Mr Cresanti is probably right, but is that a reason to implement a policy to enslave engineers?
An ideal IT work force is one that can do anything technically, with zero cost of labor, and zero elapsed time. Thats the ideal state from a business viewpoint, but not from the point of view of hourly workers.
Yet... companies want engineers to get paid by the hour, which effectively removes our incentive to meet that ideal state. Why is that? Economic control... It allows companies to enslave engineers...
The 13th amendment:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Slavery: = control
the state of being under the control of another person
work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay
the practice of owning slaves
Jurisdiction: = control
the authority to apply the law
the power to exercise authority
Territory within which power can be exercised
Hypothesis: Any commercial activity will migrate to where power can be exercised and work completed under harsh conditions, for little or no pay. Call it, "virtual economic enslavement".
If a US company can offshore, they can exercise economic power there (contracts and wages) and so can arrange for work to be done under harsh conditions for little pay. So, a US company (registered under US jurisdiction) are allowed to use virtual slavery and realize economic benefits from that approach (again under US jurisdiction)
Question for the Commerce Department: Why should any student enter any field where virtual economic enslavement is already a real possibility?
Because Dad scraped a living on Massa's IT plantation, does not mean his children have to!
I would respond to Mr Cresanti that we are a nation of laws and men, because becoming an engineer is to volunteer for economic slavery. Frankly sir, potential engineers are not that stupid.
If you wish to encourage software engineering make it a profession with legal privilege (private law) like medicine, or accept the fact that the US will not be able to compete in software technologies much longer (an economic death sentence IMHO)
Economic slavery may never be solved, nor are its effects unique to IT. Millions of illegal immigrants work under harsh conditions for little pay in the US. Not because we don't notice them, its because they are economically controlled slaves and so our economy chooses not to notice them. Imagine if the slave owners had simply, gone and got fresh slaves and claimed that the 13th didn't apply because they were H1B's or "foreign workers" etc, does that make it ok? err... no... I don't think so.
Companies only exist to make a profit, an unfortunate truth. The successful companies have zero morality or ethics, they do have marketing and image and lawyers and politicians.
The successful companies approach a slavery based production process. Always have, always will, its simply the open market effect of the law of supply and demand.
Companies have figured out how to enslave engineers legally, (off-shoring, repeals the effects of the 13th). Our only practical political defense (and its a weak one) is to vote politicians out of office who support laws or efforts to enslave us. It's a weak tactic, because supply and demand is an inexorable economic force, it may be avoided temporarily, but it will win in the end.
A much better (and lower long term risk) strategy for software engineers is never to work as an employee, form your own companies and use your technical skills to compete against those that try to profit from your economic enslavement. Patent everything you do. Charge whatever the market will bear. Of course companies that want to just "use" mere IT people, hate that idea. Great, ya gotta love stick
I am often amazed by the real blind spot America has to the advantages of rail.
I put it down to the unbelievably negative effect of any Amtrak travel experience, I can understand anyone having a negative opinion if Amtrak is all you have had opportunity to experience. They are a freight network. Please do not judge modern commuter rail travel by their miserable example.
The second barrier of course is the political influence of the airlines and car/road makers.
The fact is there are three, not two, integrated forms of transport. High speed rail is a major utility between cities and towns in most modern nations, except the US.
The lack of rail in the USA, is in fact a big opportunity to do it right. For example, if we used Maglev, we could run fast (300 mph plus trains) between cities, bridging the transit gap between (gasoline dependent) short haul cars (good up to a few hundred miles) and security infested terror target aircraft (good for long haul). Fast trains neatly fill the 50 mile to 1000, mile middle range.
Imagine new york to washington in 40 minutes. Downtown to major airports in 10 minutes. Less traffic and city congestion. Less car pollution. Fast, smooth, safe, cheap. Whats not to like?
Trains themselves are also a low pollution option (Initially building a rail network, however, is not so green , a necessary trade off).
Electric surface level trains are an inherently poor terrorist target, if anyone hijacks one, just turn off the power and call SWAT. They have no-where to go. If we want to talk about strategic security, I imagine that a high speed transcontinental alternative to air travel just might be a national asset in a real war. Are the people who calmly veto this, really the patriots they claim to be?
The lack of a decent network of high speed rail in the US is, IMHO, a clear example of the negative effect of corrupt political lobbying preventing any form of purely public benefits in long term planning. It seems to me that if it doesn't benefit an existing power-bloc, it simply can't happen anymore. This defeats real progress and innovation. Not a good thing.
Train networks are certainly not perfect, they tend to break even at best and in most countries seem to oscillate between inneficient government operation and efficient but overpriced and fragmented private operation.
High political maintenance not-withstanding, I submit that having a good inter and intra city commuter rail network, is a major public benefit, its simply a huge advantage to have a third travel option.
It should be public policy to record all police activity, to protect officers against false claims of abuse, and also to protect the public against the possibility of such abuse. The same policy is needed in all other agencies with draconian powers of search seizure and arrest. In other words, any official with opportunity and motive for abuse of power should be monitored and recorded whenever they are on duty.
The technology exists and can become ubiquitous.
There have been many examples where the fortuitous presence of a video camera, has revealed extremes of behavior in security personnel.
There's too much "Us", and "Them", in the security agency mindset. Lets make "evidence" (That which is seen) work both ways, its not "us" and "them", its "we the people".
Government and Companies are callously using information technology as a weapon against us, the people.
The same people that buy their products and elect them to govern us. They spy on us, bypass our liberties, deny us access to information, hide their own actions behind veils of secrecy and privilege (private laws).
What they forget, and we must never forget, is that they, work for us. We must always control them, it is a reasonable requirement and responsibility of citizenship.
Corrupt and openly evil methods are being employed to change our societies and lives, for the worse.
Our law makers are failing us, they seek to bypass our courts and forums for fair trial and debate.
They pour billions into the media to promote cynical and false rationales for war. They lie outrageously and are unapolagetic when caught. Their have no real justification for taking our liberties. Our opinions and votes are being bought and sold, we are manipluated during elections by sophisticated simulations and media campaigns.
I respectfully submit that all people must always remember, such methods and "weapons", can and must point both ways. The founding fathers protected the freedom of the press, now the press is the people, that freedom must be strengthened, extended and adapted to this brave new world.
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes (who will watch the watchers) was an age old philosophical conundrum,
that never has had a good answer. Or does it?
Imagine if we, "the people", use the (new technologies) to protect our freedoms from political erosion and abuse. Isnt that our right?, isn't that what what "freedom of the press" was about?, we simply need to bear newer, better arms, to protect freedom.
Right now media and technology is being used for the ethical equivalent of Arming Bears (not a typo).
Imagine for a moment:
All police stations, interview rooms, phones, police vehicles, all public administration offices and meeting rooms, any public space, any public employee, any publicly elected official was monitored (watched) 24/7/365
with the information feed stored and/or published to the internet and accessible to any interested citizen.
They wanted a public job didn't they? Lets make it really public.
Imagine that we, watch the watchers.
We do have the right, we employ them, its been well established that all employers have a right to monitor all employees.
Set up Mandatory video feeds, email traps, phone taps and random cameras
active 100% of the time in all agencies, and offices.
Invasive? certainly. Infringing of their liberties and privacies, nah, they are just employees.
And even if it is, why is that worse than the invasions commonly committed against yourself and myself.
Why shouldn't a public offical be continuously recorded and the data publicly "reviewed for quality and performance"?
Imagine how useful it would be for a court to "play back" a police officers interview with a complaining suspect. It should normally work in the officers favor... As they say, if they really have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear.
I am serious, no kidding folks.
We, the people, must always watch the watchers.
So lets do it! Lets use the public and the net, to monitor the agencies and officials, starting now!
These questions appear to be mal-formed and the sub-text obvious.
The interesting thing is why do this on Slashdot? I'm guessing the preparation of a future appeal to perceived authority, potentially coupled with a rush to judgement?
There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but be real careful... there is such a thing as an inquisitive idiot, so lets be sure that doesn't apply here...
* To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions.
Huh? Whatever do you mean? Its a process. A process is not necessarily instantiated in software. Or to put it another way, if your a real business guy, you do what it takes, not what you prefer to peruse.
* To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes.
This is trivially simple, whats the issue? Do you really need a consultant to hold your watch and tell you the time?
* To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later.
Why do you expect software errors, before you have even selected a package? If a business process has a genuine fault, and is broken, continuing the process and hoping to fix it somehow later sounds like a dumb business move to me. "yeah Boss we sent out the wrong orders, to the wrong addresses, I figured we'd fix the software issue later... ok?"
* To be able to integrate with our issue tracking system, billing system, and CRM software. We definitely will have to write some webservices here.
Aha! Isn't this what you really want to do? Come on, admit it... Your itching to find a reason to develop cool web-services and some fancy infrastructure. Ok, who cares!, but it is a side issue to the described problem. Webservices, are just protocols, methods, used to access a real service, that someone may "write". They are not important, nor do they inherently solve anything.
* To be able to give process managers in different departments the ability to tweak certain processes without giving them full access to all processes.
Well Duh. This must be obvious and trivial, RTFM.
Picking a package selection list, then trying to boiled it down using some simplistic check-box style assessment, coupled with an appeal to Slashdots perceived authority... That not a good idea.
Don't go there. Use some real business and systems expertise and analysis of the processes, with each item mapped onto a compelling business case and ROI. Yep, that's real work, it costs money and takes time, is it worth it... you bet. It's much better than screwing around with your business processes, using some checkbox selected packages, which will surely cost a lot more.
As another poster has already said, hire some business and systems analysis expertise.
Sharing a few of my personal rules for Software Development Projections and Estimates
Information has no valid size or complexity metric, not even in principle,
it simply doesn't exist. This means that deriving the basis of projections
by counting any artifact or thing to do with the software itself, is truly and
fundamentally meaningless.
Software development is the invention and then creation and deployment of new
methods to control behavior of an agent (usually computer hardware).
"new methods" requires that the problem, solution and invention be undefined at the start of the effort.
This has an inherent and unavoidable eureka factor, in that raw human intelligence must be applied
to discover a new insight that permits the solution.
Note: This excludes from the definition of "software development" vast areas of useful and productive work, that may in fact be estimable.
Configuration of an existing method, via a user agent, is not software development.
Example: IMHO, developing a spreadsheet does not require the eureka factor.
(Process Red Herring) Superficial simlarities between projects, such as personnel or architecture,
are irrelevant as they are orthogonal to premises (1) and (2).
(Process Red Herring) True repeatability, doesn't happen, by definition
as (2) requires the method be "new".
Performance on past projects provides no indication of future performance.
(Process Red Herring) As we are not dealing with physical effort, adding
more physical resources (personnel, machines, etc) does not make
the effort more predictable, or committment, more reasonable.
Political correctness be damned comment:
Yes, there really are stupid questions, and disengeneous people.
Grant me that the world contains many inquisitive idiots.
Further grant me that un-ethical management will use threats to deliberately force a developer into stating a date, they want someone to blame for their risky promises.
(Inquisitive Idiot questions that I have personally enjoyed)
I can't tell you anything about the foo project,
but I need to know if it will be done by the First of (insert bogus date here) ?"
"This is just like the snafu project, except we'll do it right this time!
so it can be done by (insert bogus date here), right?"
"I promised the customer that we would have it on (insert bogus date here), as otherwise
they wouldn't sign the deal. But we need it sooner, by (insert bogus date here),
when will it be released?"
"This is a simple little change on the screen, to give them
the weather forecast next month. Deliver it next tuesday, ok?"
Typical challenge to refusal to give a bogus estimate:
"We can't miss the deadline! what should we do! ?"
Candidate Answer: Start earlier next time.
"Ok, tell me how to speed the project up ? What do you need?"
Candidate Answer: Enough time to invent and deploy a solution. So minimize interruptions.
My conclusions:
Never (I mean that NEVER!) give any estimate for any true software invention work.
Never ask a developer to give an estimate for development work.
Understanding the difference between invention and configuration, is a project managers responsibility.
Failure to do so, is evidence of management incompetence or worse ethical issues.
Determining the risks of setting a public schedule, is a senior management responsibility.
Communicating a project schedule, however it was derived, is a project managers responsibility.
Unfortunately, the noun phrase "software development process" is both mal-formed and dangerous.
It causes many people to infer and believe that there is a process in play, that they can influence.
There really isn't, its just clever people inventing new things.
The fact that a business needs a schedule, "that development is committed to", is a business problem,
not a software invention problem.
The effects of that problem include: lost deals, invalid expectations, invali
Peter Sellers, in
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
IMHO, a classic and brilliant portrayal of a mad scientist. Definitive.
Other roles in the same movie
Group Captain (G/C) Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley
I visited the WIPP site a few years ago, part of a project I was running. Got a ride down in the tiny salt excavation shaft. Open sided cage, ya gotta wear lots of protective gear and be careful or you can lose skin as the strata zip past. Then I was given a fascinating tour of the underground tunnels and storage areas on a sort of golf buggy for WIPP DOE guys.
I still have a sealed packet of rock salt I chipped out of a tunnel wall
(well away from the areas with waste. Interestingly the web site URL printed on the handouts I got is now unreachable. So, yep, I guess even government stuff just gets lost over time.
WIPP is a fascinating place, a government salt mine, where they dont want the salt.
they can;t even sell it, The excavated permian age rock salt is piled up around the place.
The place operates pretty much as advertized, oh I am sure there's stuff they don't tell us about, but hey, its a government right!
The tunnels are quiet and cool, well ventilated, and extensive, the place is big.
The rock salt creeps under the pressure, its 2,150 feet down. The salt moves even as they fill areas in, the movement over several years is detectable. It messes up the structures, and is, well, creepy. I have no doubt that waste buried there will be crushed and sealed in tight.
I beleive the DOE made an excellent choice for disposal of TRU waste, the people that work there were freindly and had that south western laid back thang. Very cool.
I left with the impression that once sealed in, nothing will ever get back into the environment, accidentally at least.
But what if someone drills? Ok, here's a crazy thought.
One thing that gets to you if you go there, is how isolated and non-descript the area is. We don't bury waste in beautiful places. Its a 40 minute ride out from Carlsbad, to no-where, (at least to a city guy like me).
If you have never been out that way, its hard to believe just how much empty wasteland there is. It does have a bizarre desert beauty, but lets face it, there's a lot of boring scrub nothing too.
So... what, I wonder are the odds of anyone drilling there if we just hid it.
Yep, I mean the whole WIPP site, removed down to say 6 feet.
take it off the maps, make it a non - place.
Then... Sure, place a layer of hard concrete and warnings under the surface,
Icons decals, cartoons, large rectangular monoliths, whatever, but hidden
Then return the surface area to boring nondescript scrub desert.
Wouldnt it be forgotten eventually?
If its forgotten, and thus left alone, isn't that what we want anyway?
Sounds crazy, maybe, but there's a lot of boring looking places where no one ever digs, why not make this just one more patch of salty scrub?
Ok, yeah, fair point, the academics do wind me up sometimes, on re-reading this I was a bit too cynical with the student dude himself, so sorry for that guy, just ignore the grumpy geek effect.
That said, I really do think university academic faculty get away with way too little criticism for dumb stuff. How much has the software and computing industry been moved along by this kind of project. Not too much springs to mind huh...
Just seems to me that most of the deep and cool stuff is coming out of commercially led projects, where at best the "publish or die" crowd tag along to grab some kudos.
I reckon folks are way too accepting of this status quo, why should'nt
the ivory tower crowd get to know that some of the practitioners they are trying to diminish and replace, think that just maybe they have missed something critical, such as making an actual practical measurable contribution to our industry and society occasionally.
Why are the universities so focused on destroying programming as a profession, instead of making the creation of information systems into a respected career?
They do this stuff, then wonder why nobody is going into the career track, well duh!
Well!, I for one really enjoyed the naive mix of arrogance and ignorance scattered thru this post.
Apparently they are going to throw together a quick solution to a few of the most
intractable problems of CS and HCI, so a few so called "intelligent professionals" dont have to do anything
as mundane or boring as learning to control the worlds most complex information systems.
I am mildly concerend that these same "intelligent professionals" who have "neither the time nor interest in learning a computer language" are probably the ones we pay to teach some of our kids something about computer systems.
Just for fun, freind, your "requirements" have a few hidden complexities.
You want an idiotproof, multicultural, multilocale, extensible, IDE enabled, cross platform, multimedia script authoring tool, that can be integrated into a content creation system developed by a university "team:of CS students using Flash!?
Oh yeah..., I am sooo excited, this is really gonna work !.
Gimme a break will ya and go tell your academic sponsors to get some real professors and "intelligent professionals" onto the job of teaching what it really takes to solve these kind of problems.
Prediction: You and your team are going to spend a coupla semesters at most throwing together a fundamentally useless and unusable mish-mash of kludged scripts, spackle it with lame content and unreadable user-doc, then make an end of project presentation, publishes some articles, and scurry off to get a real job. Everyone in the faculty claims a victory and "progress" is deemed to have occurred.
Here's a hard but real lesson for free: Academics, professors, imho, typically know nothing about building real information systems. They may in fact be an example of negative information in this area.
A simple request: Learn to survive silly projects without bothering other people.
A couple of observation related to this running mars debate that bother me.
I have never seen NASA publications publicly reference the excellent work and results produced by ESA. I follow this discussion with considerable curiosity and have noticed this for a while now. NASA sources and publications seem to debate the topics as if other scientific sources of information were unavailable? This article subtly discusses the debate as if the theories had to be based solely on Mars Rover data, which is bogus. Take a look at the excellent info published openly here:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/index.htm l
The whole debate about standing surface water seems slightly off focus. ESA has lots of evidence now for subsurface water and even standing surface water ice. Lots of life on earth exists in the soil and subsurface, where life can survive hostile surface changes, which is true even on Earth. So thats where we should look... duh. Free standing but transient lakes of meltwater, seem like poor venues for life, given the mars atmosphere and general geological data. IANA Geologist or xenobiologist, but who needs to be, to see that one coming? The NASA spin doctors know that the Mars rovers run around on the surface, so thats where they think the scientific debate must be?
<Swift Wild Ass Speculation>
Nasa Mars articles are subtly and covertly constrained by NASA media censors because of the political and funding sensitivites ?
</SWAS>
If so, thats really bad, and should be stopped.
If they are not constrained, then the scientists themselves give the perception of ignoring ESA data or references, which I find impossible to believe.
Are my observations at fault? Is there a pragmatic and reasonable explanation why this debate seems so oddly limited in scope and reference to ESA etc?
Have your own company, keep it very simple.
Write a standard contract that your company uses to offer your services. Keep it short and minimalist, mine is under a page. Include the basic stuff clients typically want, NDA, etc.
Have a simple termination get-out clause for either party. Have it reviewed by your lawyer (once).
Make that part of the terms of your standard service offering (you are the one offering services, not them).
If they want changes, and you are willing to consider them ask them to pay for your lawyers review of their verbiage.
Be willing to say no and walk away if they are unreasonable. Never assume they will not try to enforce the deal, if its in writing its cos they want to be able to enforce it. Protect your right to maintain and develop your own IP. Never sign any contract that is unclear or harms your long term rights.
When in doubt, get legal advice.
This goes for deals with all the so-called agencies too. Any agent who tries to get you to sign a deal just to get introduced to a simple contracting assignment is not a good agent. Protect yourself, say no, walk away. Its best to avoid all agents anyway, they are all ethically lower than whaleshit...
Most real deals are clean and simple, if its not, then something smells, walk away...
No plan involving turnips as a critical component, will succeed.
Being a professional software developer has bugger-all to do with being a manager. It does mean you can fool yourself into believing you still understand the technology, for a while.
Traceability is your best freind. If you don't understand why, find out fast.
There are no technical reasons projects fail, ever, with no exceptions. Read this one again, its true and I mean it. Failure is always a management failure. However, managers are by definition too arrogant and defensive to admit this. Plus, they are in a great position to lie about failures. Trust me on this one.
Jump into the sh*t, its only up to your neck most days, and the devil doesn't go skiing till high noon.
Develop a cynical, dry, in your face wit, you need a bullet proof, reliable, sense of humor, its not an option, its a survival mechanism.
You are a fully qualified software development project manager after you grok where you screwed up your first, second and third major project. The apprenticeship usually costs several companies, many millions and many years. Tough. Software projects are like poker games, its never free, they did ask you to play for them didn't they?, and they gave you the table stakes. So go ahead and deal.
Technical folks will constantly present pet ideas, gizmos, design and methods or languages as solutions to management, communication, legal and cultural problems, etc. No one knows why, but they do. They mean well. Please listen politely, smile sweetly, thank them profusely, and then ignore them completely or you are doomed.
Make sure you will enjoy the ride.
Never, ever give a Date, whatever the provocation, whatever they promise, for anything other than the next phase of a project, where you have full specification, component list, dedicated resourcing, identified dependencies, and an obscenely large, hidden, fudge factor.
No date is ever "off the record" If you mumble dates in your sleep, sleep alone. This is the only way to be a hero.
No one ever knows how long any software project will take.
Software projects never finish, some are simply gracefully abandoned and success declared.
No responsibility without authority. Ever. No exceptions.
Charge a lot for your services, no mercy, client pays.
There are many, many, more critical items you will certainly need to know, but thats all for free (please see prior point)
The GAO has been saying this problem exists in many ways, in many reports, for many years.
Here is a recent example: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04702.pdf
They caused the Darpa/SEI institute to try and improve things, a decent effort
with the CMMI etc, and have been reporting some measure of success, but the effect is limited,
because they cannot address the root cause.
There are some confusing red-herrings:
There is no significant technical or process problem in evidence, thats always just
convenient misdirection.
The US government contract selection process is arcane, byzantine, corruptible,
obscure and broken. It is skewed in bizarre directions by the curse of political correctness.
The security contracting areas are often much worse as they can hide behind a veil of secrecy,
failures need never be known.
Both these factors, while arguably true, are just confusing misdirection.
IMHO, the root cause is that there is a negative selection effect in play.
Contractors that complete on time, on budget, or to spec, will make significantly less money
from the contract than those that don't. Ultimately, natural selection, causes the wealthier
contractor to absorb the smaller ones. Simply put, its survival of the least efficient.
So long as a contract firm can reasonably claim changes in requirements caused the delay, they can extend projects indefinitely, until it is so outdated it gets scrapped (and a new one arises, to replace it). There is never any internal criticism or consequences within an agency for staff changing (or omitting to state) requirements, no one gets fired or even given a poor performance rating, its just accepted. Everyone knows change will mean more jobs for more years, so this unofficial strategy of never ending changes is chronic, the agency will play along.
The real motivation is keeping agencies and services charitably engaged employing people. It has nothing to do with IT, or technology failure, We geeks are merely the public scapegoats, convenient doormats, we usually dont care, cos guess who is gonna get hired by the contractor.
Many RFQ or RFC do not appear to specify any actual requirements or specific objectives, thats usually left to the successful bidder to define and discover. Crazy but true.
They may claim to specify stuff, but in my experience the acquisition documents usually do not include these basic items of information. Its hard to discover this as you have to dig through reams of deliberate obfuscation, missing references, and changed links, but in my small sample it seems to be true.
Fixing this situation is effectively impossible.
It requires removal of the economic drivers causing this un-virtuous circle. There appears to be no real political motivation to change the basic economics, no politician seems to be influenced by wasted taxpayer money anymore. Or, put another way, the taxpayers can be manipulated so they dont care that the politicians dont care.
So, I conclude that this situation is effectively permanent, it will never get fixed.
One thing arguably wrong with Unix, is that it is not really commonly used.
It is still a niche species, mostly restricted to server rooms, requiring specialized resources,
and is clearly not preferred by "normal" end users, lets call them... Alice and Bob.
There are many reasons for this, many clever debates and holy wars. You can argue with every word in my statement, but is that worth anything?. Lets skip all that for once as irrelevant and ducking the real issue at hand.
I suspect its a side effect, a blind spot, because we are code builders.
Anyone deep enough to build code can no longer see the installation use case. For most of us, installation is easy, even fun. There is no fear.
its who we are and what we do. We easily forget that this is not so for Alice and Bob. This stuff scares them,
because..., well for many reasons... who knows?, thats not our business, lets just accept that it does.
Marketing and Sales folks understand that this a barrier for Alice and Bob.
Certain OS's and Apps focussed on that, and there, it has clearly been acceptably solved,
at least as needed by Alice and Bob.
I understand and agree with most of the unix design philosophy.
However, we seem to have leaked parts of that design intent,
(especially the bit separating policy from mechanism)
into the installation process as experienced by Alice and Bob.
We lost that one, for a while, so get over it and move on.
It can be done, the Firefox/Mozilla crowd just proved that, a truly impressive clean install,
delivering a great piece of open source software, kudos to that project.
Alice and Bob just want *x to work out of the box. Perfectly.
First Time. Zero Learning Curve. No Excuses. No technobabble. No Make files.
No Command Lines. No Root. They will use those things, if ever,
when they are good and ready, which is clearly Not On Day One.
Thats why OEM OS licences are accepted, because it avoids the whole install problem by
pre-installing the OS and necessary application goodies. It Just Works.
Unix and its Open Source Variants will no longer be broken,
when the *x and Open Source crowd can see past this blindspot.
When any and all *x OS or App installs clean in a standard easy way for Alice and Bob.
So, duh, what would I do to start repairing this?
Run an Open Source project to nail the use case
and provide a common protocol, baseline logic, and any standards needed
by all open source projects, oems, device driver manufacturers,
and ultimately, transparently, the end users Alice and Bob.
A standards and communication type effort to benefit all Open Source projects.
Maybe study the FireFox model as the baseline for Apps.
Yeah I know that there have been many excellent efforts, the question did not stipulate
picking an easy problem.
Its not directly a technical item, its really a standardization and simplification issue.
I would contend the *x is Not Broken technically, apart from some nit picking details.
Yep there is a lot of needed improvements... So whats new?
The Alice and Bob install use case is an open ended problem, as its addressing a key issue
enshrined and entangled in uber geek b*llshit for many years.
Solve the install use case and we can all have
a truly open future, on whatever *x OS variant the future may hold.
If anyone is interested in doing something practical with this, please contact me.
Regards and a Happy New Year to all on Slashdot.
sd@acm.org
PS: Please urgently consider contributing to the relief funds for the victims of the Asian Quake and Tsunami.
The most excellent Falcon 4, an awesome F16 combat flight sim, had the replay feature. It allowed the selective storage and replay of complex combat missions, as a 3d wire frame display of relative positions and vectors, as a learning tool so you could figure out how you got killed.
The current Free Falcon software is also truly excellent. I am fairly sure the replay feature is still there.
An unkind cynic might conclude that drug companies and drug pushers are comparable, at least from a simple economic viewpoint.
I would like to suggest that this opinion of drug companies is, in some ways too generous; Its not their fault, its the economics and laws which we set up to drive pharmaceutical research and profits.
Similar outcomes different goals?: Illegal Drug dealers induce a dependency by pushing a prohibited substance, targeting any easy mark. Drug companies discover dependecies by hiring "researchers" to find substances which alleviate or "manage" pre-existing common diseases, targeting any sick person.
These "no-cure" drugs temporarily alleviate the symptoms of the diseases, and even extend the patients life (and thus profits),
while, "unfortunately", rarely managing to fundamentally cure anything. When was a drug as useful as penicillin last discovered?
The really clever people are in marketing, its carefully created to spin the
appearance of dedicated people attempting to find cures. I find that laughably naive, clearly the economic pressure precludes that from happening.
However, I suspect many of the scientists and 'caring professionals'
in the field prefer to believe that comfortable fallacy and self image.
To me this focus on researching pushable drugs, versus practical cures,
is a natural outcome of allowing the humanitarian medical sciences to be solely driven by
raw capitalism and simple greed.
The pharmaceutical companies, will grow wealthier,
and the poignant marketing campaigns, and "real soon now cures", will be glossy, slick and convincing, for as long as the hypocrisy continues.
Note: Where there are funds for any cure oriented research,
it will typically be in areas where there is a huge
PR payback in company image and good will factors.
We, the public, are the addicts, we pay the taxes, fund the basic research, and then have to drink their coolaid and swallow the bitter and expensive pills, just so we can feel better... for a while.
IMHO, there is no cure for this chronic disease of legalized "no-cure" drug pushing,
except by radical surgery on the NIH and our health research laws.
Open speech!, Hip Hip Hooray, but spensive free beer, Oh! wait duh... , hah! free as in an IBM speekeasy speech, IBM fee free beer?, hic, wait its nother speech by free IBM, Yay! FUDless open free the beer speech! hic hic, M'speechless!
IBM wobble servlessis! rules, ko, Speech! More beeer, Hic free!.. No one gets fried for buying IBM beer!
There a cultural humor depth in good old Blighty that the US culture lacks, and will never produce the way its going.
The US has zero capability to develop the level of advanced humor technology displayed by the BBC, especially Radio 4.
American humor is dying or dead of starvation and inbreeding. It has a "whelks chance in a supernova" of surviving the primitive US Sirious cybernetic corp wannabees. Humor here is increasingly tired sitcoms, tedious movie slapstick, or election trail newsbits, the only ray of hope is political cartoons, and they are weakening.
The high energy dangerous critical humor research conducted by the BBC, especially the skunk works of Radio 4, is wonderful. The best on this obscure planet. (Especially the bits about Cricket which is a complete mystery over here...)
I just hope the USA Vogon style government, don't hear of it and issue a demolition order. Fortunately they ignore England completely, except when they want to convince idiots in Parliament of the "special relationship", which is entirely fictional except when they want something.
PS, advice to potential European tourists, The current Bush election campaign is like living thru an indefinite Vogon poetry recital... Soon, for addded amusement, you will be photographed and fingerprinted just before they strap you into the poetry enhancement chair. You may have the privilige of throttling yourself, before they throw you out of the airlock again... now don't you feel special...
Slashdot Mirror
So... I prefer to entertain my full frontal paranoia by not using anything digital or on-line to actually store my keys to the things that matter.
Instead, I decided to keep my keys in a little black book, old fashioned, perhaps even quaint you exclaim!
True Squire! says I, but go ahead then, have a go.. lets see you hack that book.
Of course I do have nightmares about losing the book, however an occasional trip to a copier and a safe deposit box takes care of those, for a while. Of course if you did get to read it, you'd find yourself holding a bunch of keys... to what? aha!, thats the devious and twisted bit, remind me not to share that!
For hard passwords I choose random letters and numbers in groups of 2, at least 8, 16 or 32 chars in length, depending on the resources value. Otherwise, so I am told, the encryption becomes much easier to break.
For less significant sites, I (like many it seems)use a favorite quote, condensed into a shorter string of the letters of each word.
Jumpline provides a virtual dedicated server, their uptime is excellent and the application management system and accessibility is usable to good. The site is way over engineered and quite slow, and its hard to find stuff. Their customer service guys are helpful, mostly.
Their prices seem reasonable and response times acceptable.
I like em, and have used em for a couple of years, despite their dumb-ass website.
This appears to be yet another atroturfing attempt.8 25230/
See Slashdot post: "How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?" Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, @06:19PM
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/15/1
(please remove the silly extra space slash adds to the url above, just before 25230, it breaks the link)
Clearly we are going to be treated to this bogus bandwidth crises bullshit approximately once a week, probably to collect some supportive comments for the need for more control/cost/etc.
Please don't feed the trolls, or help them lay more Astroturf for Net Neutrality.
WMD and Terrorism so they can invade whatever country they want.
Oil crises, so they can up the gas price whenever they want.
Time crises by inventing silly deadlines, so they can feel in control of project scope.
And now Bandwidth, so they can find a way to charge for the net.
Next it will be cd plastic shortage crisis, so music goes up in price... Oh wait...
They Lie and Lie... and then Lie some more. I call Bullshit.
There's plenty of dark fibre around, it's dirt cheap to lay more, at least when you amortize it against its utility.
This is just a pathetic attempt to astroturf someones corporate or political genda.
I wouldn't piss on them, if they were on fire...
do foolish process and management
while abort retry fail >>>
An ideal IT work force is one that can do anything technically, with zero cost of labor, and zero elapsed time. Thats the ideal state from a business viewpoint, but not from the point of view of hourly workers.
Yet... companies want engineers to get paid by the hour, which effectively removes our incentive to meet that ideal state. Why is that? Economic control... It allows companies to enslave engineers...
The 13th amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Slavery: = control
the state of being under the control of another person
work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay
the practice of owning slaves
Jurisdiction: = control
the authority to apply the law
the power to exercise authority
Territory within which power can be exercised
Hypothesis: Any commercial activity will migrate to where power can be exercised and work completed under harsh conditions, for little or no pay. Call it, "virtual economic enslavement".
If a US company can offshore, they can exercise economic power there (contracts and wages) and so can arrange for work to be done under harsh conditions for little pay. So, a US company (registered under US jurisdiction) are allowed to use virtual slavery and realize economic benefits from that approach (again under US jurisdiction)
Question for the Commerce Department: Why should any student enter any field where virtual economic enslavement is already a real possibility?
Because Dad scraped a living on Massa's IT plantation, does not mean his children have to!
I would respond to Mr Cresanti that we are a nation of laws and men, because becoming an engineer is to volunteer for economic slavery. Frankly sir, potential engineers are not that stupid.
If you wish to encourage software engineering make it a profession with legal privilege (private law) like medicine, or accept the fact that the US will not be able to compete in software technologies much longer (an economic death sentence IMHO)
Economic slavery may never be solved, nor are its effects unique to IT. Millions of illegal immigrants work under harsh conditions for little pay in the US. Not because we don't notice them, its because they are economically controlled slaves and so our economy chooses not to notice them. Imagine if the slave owners had simply, gone and got fresh slaves and claimed that the 13th didn't apply because they were H1B's or "foreign workers" etc, does that make it ok? err... no... I don't think so.
Companies only exist to make a profit, an unfortunate truth. The successful companies have zero morality or ethics, they do have marketing and image and lawyers and politicians. The successful companies approach a slavery based production process. Always have, always will, its simply the open market effect of the law of supply and demand.
Companies have figured out how to enslave engineers legally, (off-shoring, repeals the effects of the 13th). Our only practical political defense (and its a weak one) is to vote politicians out of office who support laws or efforts to enslave us. It's a weak tactic, because supply and demand is an inexorable economic force, it may be avoided temporarily, but it will win in the end.
A much better (and lower long term risk) strategy for software engineers is never to work as an employee, form your own companies and use your technical skills to compete against those that try to profit from your economic enslavement. Patent everything you do. Charge whatever the market will bear. Of course companies that want to just "use" mere IT people, hate that idea. Great, ya gotta love stick
I am often amazed by the real blind spot America has to the advantages of rail.
I put it down to the unbelievably negative effect of any Amtrak travel experience, I can understand anyone having a negative opinion if Amtrak is all you have had opportunity to experience. They are a freight network. Please do not judge modern commuter rail travel by their miserable example.
The second barrier of course is the political influence of the airlines and car/road makers.
The fact is there are three, not two, integrated forms of transport. High speed rail is a major utility between cities and towns in most modern nations, except the US.
The lack of rail in the USA, is in fact a big opportunity to do it right. For example, if we used Maglev, we could run fast (300 mph plus trains) between cities, bridging the transit gap between (gasoline dependent) short haul cars (good up to a few hundred miles) and security infested terror target aircraft (good for long haul). Fast trains neatly fill the 50 mile to 1000, mile middle range. Imagine new york to washington in 40 minutes. Downtown to major airports in 10 minutes. Less traffic and city congestion. Less car pollution. Fast, smooth, safe, cheap. Whats not to like? Trains themselves are also a low pollution option (Initially building a rail network, however, is not so green , a necessary trade off).
Electric surface level trains are an inherently poor terrorist target, if anyone hijacks one, just turn off the power and call SWAT. They have no-where to go. If we want to talk about strategic security, I imagine that a high speed transcontinental alternative to air travel just might be a national asset in a real war. Are the people who calmly veto this, really the patriots they claim to be?
The lack of a decent network of high speed rail in the US is, IMHO, a clear example of the negative effect of corrupt political lobbying preventing any form of purely public benefits in long term planning. It seems to me that if it doesn't benefit an existing power-bloc, it simply can't happen anymore. This defeats real progress and innovation. Not a good thing.
Train networks are certainly not perfect, they tend to break even at best and in most countries seem to oscillate between inneficient government operation and efficient but overpriced and fragmented private operation.
High political maintenance not-withstanding, I submit that having a good inter and intra city commuter rail network, is a major public benefit, its simply a huge advantage to have a third travel option.
The technology exists and can become ubiquitous.
There have been many examples where the fortuitous presence of a video camera, has revealed extremes of behavior in security personnel.
There's too much "Us", and "Them", in the security agency mindset. Lets make "evidence" (That which is seen) work both ways, its not "us" and "them", its "we the people".
The people must watch the watchers.
What they forget, and we must never forget, is that they, work for us. We must always control them, it is a reasonable requirement and responsibility of citizenship.
Corrupt and openly evil methods are being employed to change our societies and lives, for the worse. Our law makers are failing us, they seek to bypass our courts and forums for fair trial and debate.
They pour billions into the media to promote cynical and false rationales for war. They lie outrageously and are unapolagetic when caught. Their have no real justification for taking our liberties. Our opinions and votes are being bought and sold, we are manipluated during elections by sophisticated simulations and media campaigns.
I respectfully submit that all people must always remember, such methods and "weapons", can and must point both ways. The founding fathers protected the freedom of the press, now the press is the people, that freedom must be strengthened, extended and adapted to this brave new world.
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes (who will watch the watchers) was an age old philosophical conundrum, that never has had a good answer. Or does it?
Imagine if we, "the people", use the (new technologies) to protect our freedoms from political erosion and abuse. Isnt that our right?, isn't that what what "freedom of the press" was about?, we simply need to bear newer, better arms, to protect freedom.
Right now media and technology is being used for the ethical equivalent of Arming Bears (not a typo).
Imagine for a moment:
All police stations, interview rooms, phones, police vehicles, all public administration offices and meeting rooms, any public space, any public employee, any publicly elected official was monitored (watched) 24/7/365 with the information feed stored and/or published to the internet and accessible to any interested citizen. They wanted a public job didn't they? Lets make it really public.
Imagine that we, watch the watchers.
We do have the right, we employ them, its been well established that all employers have a right to monitor all employees. Set up Mandatory video feeds, email traps, phone taps and random cameras active 100% of the time in all agencies, and offices.
Invasive? certainly. Infringing of their liberties and privacies, nah, they are just employees. And even if it is, why is that worse than the invasions commonly committed against yourself and myself.
Why shouldn't a public offical be continuously recorded and the data publicly "reviewed for quality and performance"?
Imagine how useful it would be for a court to "play back" a police officers interview with a complaining suspect. It should normally work in the officers favor... As they say, if they really have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear.
I am serious, no kidding folks. We, the people, must always watch the watchers.
So lets do it! Lets use the public and the net, to monitor the agencies and officials, starting now!
There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but be real careful... there is such a thing as an inquisitive idiot, so lets be sure that doesn't apply here...
* To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions. Huh? Whatever do you mean? Its a process. A process is not necessarily instantiated in software. Or to put it another way, if your a real business guy, you do what it takes, not what you prefer to peruse.
* To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes. This is trivially simple, whats the issue? Do you really need a consultant to hold your watch and tell you the time?
* To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later.
Why do you expect software errors, before you have even selected a package? If a business process has a genuine fault, and is broken, continuing the process and hoping to fix it somehow later sounds like a dumb business move to me. "yeah Boss we sent out the wrong orders, to the wrong addresses, I figured we'd fix the software issue later... ok?"
* To be able to integrate with our issue tracking system, billing system, and CRM software. We definitely will have to write some webservices here.
Aha! Isn't this what you really want to do? Come on, admit it... Your itching to find a reason to develop cool web-services and some fancy infrastructure. Ok, who cares!, but it is a side issue to the described problem. Webservices, are just protocols, methods, used to access a real service, that someone may "write". They are not important, nor do they inherently solve anything.
* To be able to give process managers in different departments the ability to tweak certain processes without giving them full access to all processes. Well Duh. This must be obvious and trivial, RTFM.
Picking a package selection list, then trying to boiled it down using some simplistic check-box style assessment, coupled with an appeal to Slashdots perceived authority... That not a good idea.
Don't go there. Use some real business and systems expertise and analysis of the processes, with each item mapped onto a compelling business case and ROI. Yep, that's real work, it costs money and takes time, is it worth it... you bet. It's much better than screwing around with your business processes, using some checkbox selected packages, which will surely cost a lot more.
As another poster has already said, hire some business and systems analysis expertise.
Note: This excludes from the definition of "software development" vast areas of useful and productive work, that may in fact be estimable. Configuration of an existing method, via a user agent, is not software development. Example: IMHO, developing a spreadsheet does not require the eureka factor.
(Process Red Herring) Superficial simlarities between projects, such as personnel or architecture, are irrelevant as they are orthogonal to premises (1) and (2).
(Process Red Herring) True repeatability, doesn't happen, by definition as (2) requires the method be "new". Performance on past projects provides no indication of future performance.
(Process Red Herring) As we are not dealing with physical effort, adding more physical resources (personnel, machines, etc) does not make the effort more predictable, or committment, more reasonable.
Political correctness be damned comment:
Yes, there really are stupid questions, and disengeneous people. Grant me that the world contains many inquisitive idiots. Further grant me that un-ethical management will use threats to deliberately force a developer into stating a date, they want someone to blame for their risky promises.
(Inquisitive Idiot questions that I have personally enjoyed)
I can't tell you anything about the foo project, but I need to know if it will be done by the First of (insert bogus date here) ?"
"This is just like the snafu project, except we'll do it right this time! so it can be done by (insert bogus date here), right?"
"I promised the customer that we would have it on (insert bogus date here), as otherwise they wouldn't sign the deal. But we need it sooner, by (insert bogus date here), when will it be released?"
"This is a simple little change on the screen, to give them the weather forecast next month. Deliver it next tuesday, ok?"
Typical challenge to refusal to give a bogus estimate:
"We can't miss the deadline! what should we do! ?" Candidate Answer: Start earlier next time.
"Ok, tell me how to speed the project up ? What do you need?" Candidate Answer: Enough time to invent and deploy a solution. So minimize interruptions.
My conclusions:
Unfortunately, the noun phrase "software development process" is both mal-formed and dangerous. It causes many people to infer and believe that there is a process in play, that they can influence. There really isn't, its just clever people inventing new things.
The fact that a business needs a schedule, "that development is committed to", is a business problem, not a software invention problem. The effects of that problem include: lost deals, invalid expectations, invali
Peter Sellers, in
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
IMHO, a classic and brilliant portrayal of a mad scientist. Definitive.
Other roles in the same movie
Group Captain (G/C) Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley
Check out: http://www.nsc.org/ehc/wipp/manage.htm
I visited the WIPP site a few years ago, part of a project I was running. Got a ride down in the tiny salt excavation shaft. Open sided cage, ya gotta wear lots of protective gear and be careful or you can lose skin as the strata zip past. Then I was given a fascinating tour of the underground tunnels and storage areas on a sort of golf buggy for WIPP DOE guys.
I still have a sealed packet of rock salt I chipped out of a tunnel wall (well away from the areas with waste. Interestingly the web site URL printed on the handouts I got is now unreachable. So, yep, I guess even government stuff just gets lost over time.
WIPP is a fascinating place, a government salt mine, where they dont want the salt. they can;t even sell it, The excavated permian age rock salt is piled up around the place.
The place operates pretty much as advertized, oh I am sure there's stuff they don't tell us about, but hey, its a government right!
The tunnels are quiet and cool, well ventilated, and extensive, the place is big. The rock salt creeps under the pressure, its 2,150 feet down. The salt moves even as they fill areas in, the movement over several years is detectable. It messes up the structures, and is, well, creepy. I have no doubt that waste buried there will be crushed and sealed in tight.
I beleive the DOE made an excellent choice for disposal of TRU waste, the people that work there were freindly and had that south western laid back thang. Very cool.
I left with the impression that once sealed in, nothing will ever get back into the environment, accidentally at least.
But what if someone drills? Ok, here's a crazy thought.
One thing that gets to you if you go there, is how isolated and non-descript the area is. We don't bury waste in beautiful places. Its a 40 minute ride out from Carlsbad, to no-where, (at least to a city guy like me).
If you have never been out that way, its hard to believe just how much empty wasteland there is. It does have a bizarre desert beauty, but lets face it, there's a lot of boring scrub nothing too. So... what, I wonder are the odds of anyone drilling there if we just hid it. Yep, I mean the whole WIPP site, removed down to say 6 feet. take it off the maps, make it a non - place.
Then... Sure, place a layer of hard concrete and warnings under the surface, Icons decals, cartoons, large rectangular monoliths, whatever, but hidden Then return the surface area to boring nondescript scrub desert.
Wouldnt it be forgotten eventually? If its forgotten, and thus left alone, isn't that what we want anyway? Sounds crazy, maybe, but there's a lot of boring looking places where no one ever digs, why not make this just one more patch of salty scrub?
That said, I really do think university academic faculty get away with way too little criticism for dumb stuff. How much has the software and computing industry been moved along by this kind of project. Not too much springs to mind huh...
Just seems to me that most of the deep and cool stuff is coming out of commercially led projects, where at best the "publish or die" crowd tag along to grab some kudos.
I reckon folks are way too accepting of this status quo, why should'nt the ivory tower crowd get to know that some of the practitioners they are trying to diminish and replace, think that just maybe they have missed something critical, such as making an actual practical measurable contribution to our industry and society occasionally.
Why are the universities so focused on destroying programming as a profession, instead of making the creation of information systems into a respected career? They do this stuff, then wonder why nobody is going into the career track, well duh!
I am mildly concerend that these same "intelligent professionals" who have "neither the time nor interest in learning a computer language" are probably the ones we pay to teach some of our kids something about computer systems.
Just for fun, freind, your "requirements" have a few hidden complexities.
You want an idiotproof, multicultural, multilocale, extensible, IDE enabled, cross platform, multimedia script authoring tool, that can be integrated into a content creation system developed by a university "team:of CS students using Flash!?
Basic acquisition method : "Lets ask slashdot!" Target Architecture: Anything anywhere. Deployment Architecture: Undefined. Development team: Deprecated, poorly led, students.
Oh yeah..., I am sooo excited, this is really gonna work !.
Gimme a break will ya and go tell your academic sponsors to get some real professors and "intelligent professionals" onto the job of teaching what it really takes to solve these kind of problems.
Prediction: You and your team are going to spend a coupla semesters at most throwing together a fundamentally useless and unusable mish-mash of kludged scripts, spackle it with lame content and unreadable user-doc, then make an end of project presentation, publishes some articles, and scurry off to get a real job. Everyone in the faculty claims a victory and "progress" is deemed to have occurred.
Here's a hard but real lesson for free: Academics, professors, imho, typically know nothing about building real information systems. They may in fact be an example of negative information in this area. A simple request: Learn to survive silly projects without bothering other people.
Nasa Mars articles are subtly and covertly constrained by NASA media censors because of the political and funding sensitivites ?
If so, thats really bad, and should be stopped.If they are not constrained, then the scientists themselves give the perception of ignoring ESA data or references, which I find impossible to believe.
Are my observations at fault? Is there a pragmatic and reasonable explanation why this debate seems so oddly limited in scope and reference to ESA etc?
Have your own company, keep it very simple. Write a standard contract that your company uses to offer your services. Keep it short and minimalist, mine is under a page. Include the basic stuff clients typically want, NDA, etc. Have a simple termination get-out clause for either party. Have it reviewed by your lawyer (once).
Make that part of the terms of your standard service offering (you are the one offering services, not them). If they want changes, and you are willing to consider them ask them to pay for your lawyers review of their verbiage. Be willing to say no and walk away if they are unreasonable. Never assume they will not try to enforce the deal, if its in writing its cos they want to be able to enforce it. Protect your right to maintain and develop your own IP. Never sign any contract that is unclear or harms your long term rights.
When in doubt, get legal advice.
This goes for deals with all the so-called agencies too. Any agent who tries to get you to sign a deal just to get introduced to a simple contracting assignment is not a good agent. Protect yourself, say no, walk away. Its best to avoid all agents anyway, they are all ethically lower than whaleshit...
Most real deals are clean and simple, if its not, then something smells, walk away...
Good luck, you will need it.
They caused the Darpa/SEI institute to try and improve things, a decent effort with the CMMI etc, and have been reporting some measure of success, but the effect is limited, because they cannot address the root cause.
There are some confusing red-herrings:
Both these factors, while arguably true, are just confusing misdirection. IMHO, the root cause is that there is a negative selection effect in play.
Contractors that complete on time, on budget, or to spec, will make significantly less money from the contract than those that don't. Ultimately, natural selection, causes the wealthier contractor to absorb the smaller ones. Simply put, its survival of the least efficient.
So long as a contract firm can reasonably claim changes in requirements caused the delay, they can extend projects indefinitely, until it is so outdated it gets scrapped (and a new one arises, to replace it). There is never any internal criticism or consequences within an agency for staff changing (or omitting to state) requirements, no one gets fired or even given a poor performance rating, its just accepted. Everyone knows change will mean more jobs for more years, so this unofficial strategy of never ending changes is chronic, the agency will play along.
The real motivation is keeping agencies and services charitably engaged employing people. It has nothing to do with IT, or technology failure, We geeks are merely the public scapegoats, convenient doormats, we usually dont care, cos guess who is gonna get hired by the contractor.
Many RFQ or RFC do not appear to specify any actual requirements or specific objectives, thats usually left to the successful bidder to define and discover. Crazy but true. They may claim to specify stuff, but in my experience the acquisition documents usually do not include these basic items of information. Its hard to discover this as you have to dig through reams of deliberate obfuscation, missing references, and changed links, but in my small sample it seems to be true.
Fixing this situation is effectively impossible. It requires removal of the economic drivers causing this un-virtuous circle. There appears to be no real political motivation to change the basic economics, no politician seems to be influenced by wasted taxpayer money anymore. Or, put another way, the taxpayers can be manipulated so they dont care that the politicians dont care.
So, I conclude that this situation is effectively permanent, it will never get fixed.
If you can't beat em, join em?
It is still a niche species, mostly restricted to server rooms, requiring specialized resources, and is clearly not preferred by "normal" end users, lets call them... Alice and Bob.
There are many reasons for this, many clever debates and holy wars. You can argue with every word in my statement, but is that worth anything?. Lets skip all that for once as irrelevant and ducking the real issue at hand.
I suspect its a side effect, a blind spot, because we are code builders. Anyone deep enough to build code can no longer see the installation use case. For most of us, installation is easy, even fun. There is no fear. its who we are and what we do. We easily forget that this is not so for Alice and Bob. This stuff scares them, because..., well for many reasons... who knows?, thats not our business, lets just accept that it does.
Marketing and Sales folks understand that this a barrier for Alice and Bob. Certain OS's and Apps focussed on that, and there, it has clearly been acceptably solved, at least as needed by Alice and Bob.
I understand and agree with most of the unix design philosophy. However, we seem to have leaked parts of that design intent, (especially the bit separating policy from mechanism) into the installation process as experienced by Alice and Bob. We lost that one, for a while, so get over it and move on.
It can be done, the Firefox/Mozilla crowd just proved that, a truly impressive clean install, delivering a great piece of open source software, kudos to that project.
Alice and Bob just want *x to work out of the box. Perfectly. First Time. Zero Learning Curve. No Excuses. No technobabble. No Make files. No Command Lines. No Root. They will use those things, if ever, when they are good and ready, which is clearly Not On Day One. Thats why OEM OS licences are accepted, because it avoids the whole install problem by pre-installing the OS and necessary application goodies. It Just Works.
Unix and its Open Source Variants will no longer be broken, when the *x and Open Source crowd can see past this blindspot. When any and all *x OS or App installs clean in a standard easy way for Alice and Bob.
So, duh, what would I do to start repairing this? Run an Open Source project to nail the use case and provide a common protocol, baseline logic, and any standards needed by all open source projects, oems, device driver manufacturers, and ultimately, transparently, the end users Alice and Bob. A standards and communication type effort to benefit all Open Source projects. Maybe study the FireFox model as the baseline for Apps.
Yeah I know that there have been many excellent efforts, the question did not stipulate picking an easy problem. Its not directly a technical item, its really a standardization and simplification issue. I would contend the *x is Not Broken technically, apart from some nit picking details. Yep there is a lot of needed improvements... So whats new?
The Alice and Bob install use case is an open ended problem, as its addressing a key issue enshrined and entangled in uber geek b*llshit for many years.
Solve the install use case and we can all have a truly open future, on whatever *x OS variant the future may hold.
If anyone is interested in doing something practical with this, please contact me.
Regards and a Happy New Year to all on Slashdot. sd@acm.org
PS: Please urgently consider contributing to the relief funds for the victims of the Asian Quake and Tsunami.
The most excellent Falcon 4, an awesome F16 combat flight sim, had the replay feature. It allowed the selective storage and replay of complex combat missions, as a 3d wire frame display of relative positions and vectors, as a learning tool so you could figure out how you got killed.
The current Free Falcon software is also truly excellent. I am fairly sure the replay feature is still there.
I would like to suggest that this opinion of drug companies is, in some ways too generous; Its not their fault, its the economics and laws which we set up to drive pharmaceutical research and profits.
Similar outcomes different goals?: Illegal Drug dealers induce a dependency by pushing a prohibited substance, targeting any easy mark. Drug companies discover dependecies by hiring "researchers" to find substances which alleviate or "manage" pre-existing common diseases, targeting any sick person.
These "no-cure" drugs temporarily alleviate the symptoms of the diseases, and even extend the patients life (and thus profits), while, "unfortunately", rarely managing to fundamentally cure anything. When was a drug as useful as penicillin last discovered?
The really clever people are in marketing, its carefully created to spin the appearance of dedicated people attempting to find cures. I find that laughably naive, clearly the economic pressure precludes that from happening. However, I suspect many of the scientists and 'caring professionals' in the field prefer to believe that comfortable fallacy and self image.
To me this focus on researching pushable drugs, versus practical cures, is a natural outcome of allowing the humanitarian medical sciences to be solely driven by raw capitalism and simple greed.
The pharmaceutical companies, will grow wealthier, and the poignant marketing campaigns, and "real soon now cures", will be glossy, slick and convincing, for as long as the hypocrisy continues.
Note: Where there are funds for any cure oriented research, it will typically be in areas where there is a huge PR payback in company image and good will factors.
We, the public, are the addicts, we pay the taxes, fund the basic research, and then have to drink their coolaid and swallow the bitter and expensive pills, just so we can feel better... for a while.
IMHO, there is no cure for this chronic disease of legalized "no-cure" drug pushing, except by radical surgery on the NIH and our health research laws.
- Garbage IN : Amazing budget mistake justifies launching it
- Garbage IN : Romanticized support for Buck Rogers in space, despite silly risks
- Garbage IN : Lethal transport system to get up there, and back, sometimes
- Garbage IN : Bogus and hokum soap bubble science, to justify "being up there"
- Garbage IN : Deadly Boring media coverage, to fade out the public attention
- Garbage Out : None. Zip. Zilch.
Great flaming balls of space poo Captain!Its GIGO, but not as we know it!
No Beer Was Harmed In The Making Of This Drivel.
There a cultural humor depth in good old Blighty that the US culture lacks, and will never produce the way its going.
The US has zero capability to develop the level of advanced humor technology displayed by the BBC, especially Radio 4.
American humor is dying or dead of starvation and inbreeding. It has a "whelks chance in a supernova" of surviving the primitive US Sirious cybernetic corp wannabees. Humor here is increasingly tired sitcoms, tedious movie slapstick, or election trail newsbits, the only ray of hope is political cartoons, and they are weakening.
The high energy dangerous critical humor research conducted by the BBC, especially the skunk works of Radio 4, is wonderful. The best on this obscure planet. (Especially the bits about Cricket which is a complete mystery over here...)
I just hope the USA Vogon style government, don't hear of it and issue a demolition order. Fortunately they ignore England completely, except when they want to convince idiots in Parliament of the "special relationship", which is entirely fictional except when they want something.
PS, advice to potential European tourists, The current Bush election campaign is like living thru an indefinite Vogon poetry recital... Soon, for addded amusement, you will be photographed and fingerprinted just before they strap you into the poetry enhancement chair. You may have the privilige of throttling yourself, before they throw you out of the airlock again... now don't you feel special...