Yes this is going to be horrible to watch the petty abuses of power. One that I have long predicted would be that rich neighborhoods will not allow cars through them if you haven't set the neighborhood as the destination itself. What I am specifically referring to are neighbourhoods where people are presently driving their cars through legitimately. For instance to get to the nicest park in the city (and biggest) you presently have to drive down the most expensive street in the city for around 5 blocks. There are other ways to get to the park but I would imagine 80%+ go down this street. I can see these people dropping hints to their politician friends that they want the legal navigation parameters changed.
A simple example of this was when John Kerry apparently had a fire hydrant moved from infront of his Boston house. Apparently this is near impossible to get done (administratively).
But the other one that I see are some kind of priority driving for politicians. Traffic would be ordered to part like the red sea for them; soviet style. These sort of rules would be needed for things like firetrucks, ambulances, and even trams. So I can see the politicos thinking that they are just as important.
Yes I suspect for every 10,000 lives saved there will be one death. But a fantastic death; where the car will just drive a family off a cliff or something sensational that the media will be all over. Then for a while people will be, "I'm not getting into one of those death traps."
Plus there will be a huge number of special interest groups who will desperately try to keep drivers in cars: Taxi unions, truck driver unions, bus driver unions, classic car associations, the police (if the drivers are perfect then no more tickets), and even groups like MADD might find themselves without a mandate if there are no "Drivers". But then you get more subtle groups who will lose their minds: many small municipalities coffers will become empty if they can't be handing out fines. Even larger governments might discover serious drops in revenue without any ticket revenue coming in.
And even groups like the police will be ticked that they can't pull "suspicious" people over by just waiting for them to make a traffic mistake.
Then you get stores and other commercial areas that have made based their financial model on easy parking, but if you are using either your own robot car or more specifically a cheap robot taxi then you can get dropped off in the most dense parts of downtown and go to your specialty stores and when done get picked up at the push of a smartphone button. So if these groups realize the threat to their business models then they too will squeal.
But on a side note one of the biggest threats to life and limb posed by robot cars will be the potential for a drastic reduction in the average distance walked. I can see some people integrating a robot car so much into their movements that they step out their front door into a waiting car, it drops them off at the front door of destination one, picks them up at the front door when they are done, and this would continue until they are eventually dropped off at the front door of their house. Whereas right now they might have to walk from their parking, walk among a cluster of destinations, and then walk back to their car.
This whole lack of walking could turn out to be more deadly than the lives saved through car accidents. At least with no-walking deaths it will be people doing it to themselves vs car accidents often killing other innocent people.
Where this is going to get interesting is when nearly all the cars on the road are autonomous and the last remaining hold outs will be preventing many other cool solutions that only work when you have 100% autonomous such as eliminating traffic lights. Eliminating traffic signs such as one way, speed, stop, etc signs. Eliminating speed limits. Even eliminating things such as lanes.
Basically the last manually driven cars will be seen to be a homicidal menace and high cost nightmare.
Yes a key strategy when upgrading your servers is to have a retreat plan. Quite simply if you upgrade your servers regularly one of your upgrades is going to blow up. I know that I am nervous every time I push a new version and never push a new version and then run out for lunch.
I'm not joking when I say that procure number one when money is flying out of your servers is to Shut Them Down instantly. I would have pulled the cables out so fast the CPU might have been yanked out with the network cable. Or a good old shutdown -h now !!!!! (The exclamation marks speed up the shutdown)
And I wouldn't have done this one server at a time it would have been all the servers at the same time. I suspect they would lose money by not having the servers up but not at the firehose rate that they were losing money as they were.
The worst part is that the admins were probably following some procedure in their book and were refusing to just pull the plug in some vain attempt for 99.9 percent up time or other admin related metric instead of the clear "Don't Lose $48 Million a minute!!!!" metric. So probably another clear case of IT's priorities getting way out of sync with the company's actual priorities.
There are episode by episode breakdowns of crappy TV shows but then you will get some interesting scientist who's entry is deleted for some reason such as relevance.
Then you get admins who "own" an article. So the new census will come out and someone will update the population of a city to reflect the new census and even cite the new census; but 5 minutes later the old numbers are back and the citation gone.
Then you get excellent articles filled with excellent information but some OCD twerp is threatening to delete it due to formatting issues.
Lastly you get the show off types. This is at its worst in mathematics. There is almost zero educational value in many of the mathematics related articles. The mathematics are perfect but instead of making things clear they use the most esoteric terminology/symbology. So 2+2=4 will become something like:
Using a Yungra transform you can compute that the Dirac set of {1, 1} when concatenated with the set Ramublablajan set {1,1} (each of which represents the empty set {0}) will have a resultant set of the Miller-Shiefler Series {1, 1, {0}, 1}.
An example of a complicated thing being made simple would be the article on RSA. The example math they use could be done using a pen and paper. Most Wiki Admins and editors would seem to despise this sort of simplicity and instead would probably rewrite the entire (excellent) article as a single formula that concisely sums up RSA. I personally prefer the sing-along version that is there now.
You are correct Google docs has a way to go but the nice mix of cloud, real device, auto-updating folder etc is quite handy. A simple example that doing something different can be quite compelling. Now if they could just take it to the next level...
Now that tinfoil hats are in fashion the answer is quite simple. If he proves a weakness then the crypto system is crap. If he doesn't then regardless of his motives the system still can't be trusted.
Here is where we can even add a layer of lead to our tinfoil hats. What is to say that the NSA doesn't have working quantum computers? Thus almost any system that is susceptible to any sort of quantum math such as factoring is quite simply dead as far as the NSA is concerned.
This last is an important consideration. Because most of us have no data that the NSA could be even slightly interested in. Let's say a forum discussing shoe repair techniques. So in that case all we are concerned with would be that our cryptographic system will protect password hashes, CC encryption, and keep SSH server access secure. So most of the old systems are probably still quite nice.
But there is an edge case where the NSA couldn't give a crap but a large politically connected corporation would like to have a peek into your systems and then the NSA might give them access. So if you were say a huge conglomerate bidding on a massive infrastructure project, those who were bidding against you might be given access to your data due to "national interests". A simple reason why organizations like the NSA might want to help large corporations is that then those corporations will lobby on the NSA's behalf in times like the present. Can you imagine how many senators/congressmen are in districts where GE is a large employer? In that light it would be stupid for the NSA not to hand them interesting data.
Even here in Canada I could see our spy bunch giving stolen data from Canadian companies that weren't politically connected to those that are politically connected.
Oddly enough I think that document compatibility is not the solution; in that if you don't get it 100% perfect then you will tick people off. Whereas a product with little or no document compatibility might actually have a better chance. I should have mentioned in my examples, people were switching systems with none of their documents moving from one system to another.
There are two realities for most people. One is that they rarely open older documents. They create documents, massage them, and then fire and forget. So for these people they could click on.doc files and open their old office program while all new documents could be created using a new product. The other reality is that once people start sending you documents you can't open you will get your IT people to sort it out so that you can. A free Open Source product would be a low barrier to getting on board with a new document editing system. Microsoft themselves proved (and may have taken advantage of this) with their docx file format. Many people immediately started sending out docx files to everyone and those who could not order them to stop simply had to upgrade. At this point if you can't open a docx file then it is perceived as your fault. This was the same with the early days of pdf files; people just had to download the reader in order to read them. So abandoning compatibility is not the hurdle that most people think. Personally I think that if you have two products: one that is 100% compatible but not much better or another product that is 0% compatible but awesome; that the first product will fail and the second product has a serious chance of being the one.
One of the failings of all these free Office suites is that they try to be MS Office and basically if they can be distinguished as being not office then they have failed. So my suggestion is to pretend that there are no existing office suites; what do people want to do? Then you move forward from there. A good start in that direction would be a product that I use called Bean. It is a very simple Mac word writing tool. The focus is on just writing words. It is fast to load, clean of interface, and doesn't do much in the way of formatting. Another good product is Scrivener; this product focuses on what you need when writing a complicated document such as a book.
Google docs isn't too bad and brings the whole cloud thing to the table fairly well but I just don't see your average document generating office drone begging their IT department to help them with the switch.
Here is a simple set of examples. Years ago I worked in an office where the secretaries used Word Processors. That is they used machines with big 8 inch floppies that could only do simple 80 characters per line word processing and print it to a printer that was basically a modified typewriter. In the office there was a shiny new IBM machine with Word Perfect and a sort of good quality dot matrix printer. The secretaries were super happy when I got it working and almost immediately were fighting over it. A few years later I witnessed secretaries demanding to upgrade to windows and Word for windows because it could make the new laser printers dance. The key there was that Word Perfect 4.2 for DOS liked to display things in 80 monospaced characters. But a laser printer could do around 132 characters per line and thus a WYSIWYG interface was a huge leap. Keep in mind that all of the above secretaries were very very good at using their previous systems and thus these switches were painful but there was something they wanted so they demanded it and learned it.
So fast forward to the present and present your average Office user with Open Office. What is the win for them? For most people there is only a loss as things like the bad dictionary, and the slightly different interface will just be a pain. Maybe the CFO is happy with the lowered cost of operating but that is not how you win the hearts and minds of the average user.
So the key to getting people to switch over to Open Source non Office environments it to offer them something that they really want. The reality is that they will give up many office features and put up with other pain if they are getting something super cool. So matching MS Office feature for feature is not needed in the winning product.
This is where I come up empty. As I say the simple products like bean are good enough for me. Maybe the solution lay in a cool way to accomplish the work presently being done in the MS office suite using your mobile? Something where all the existing might of MS doesn't get them very far. Plus something truly innovative would no doubt be initially dismissed by MS as "missing the point".
I wasn't referring to the Obamacare project specifically. I was thinking more about many government (specifically medical) software projects that have gone into over-budget orbit. A great one is the British NHS IT disaster that hit £11 Billion before it was cancelled. That is over 17 Billion USD for nothing. I have a sneaking suspicion that if the source code and other project documents got out that we would all be shaking with anger over the terrible code and development/management process that went into generating it. Yet this happens over and over.
I am talking about consulting companies, not other commercial companies that produce products people want. I have worked with consulting companies and about the last thing they seem to be interested in is a solid delivery, on time, and on budget. The funny thing is that various managers run from one end of the hallway screaming that this milestone or that is being missed. But the salesmen are deeply upset if the milestones are met or the client is happy with the first version. In their world a crap version 1.0 translates to getting to sell version 2.0 in under a maintenance contract. Also another good strategy is to keep selling during development so that by continuously moving the goalposts there is no "Missed deadline".
Salesmen work on commission; so even if the commission was 0.05% on a billion dollar project that is a 5 million dollar commission. Thus a project with 1,000 plodding developers is way way way better than the same project developed by 10 great developers.
The other half of a big commission is to make a smallish project a big project. A great example of this was the 2 billion dollar Canadian gun registry. If you work out how many guns were registered it turns out it would have been cheaper to (literally) carve the records into stone tablets. How did something that small become so vastly huge?
So if all government projects were to be truly opensourced and all development and developer communications made open to the public we would quickly see if some project was a huge rip off.
I think many slashdot'rs will read this as "Your next network will use electricity." I am pretty sure most people around here have networks that are close to 100% Linux. Maybe the occasional switch or whatnot is running something proprietary.
It has become painfully obvious to me that government IT contracts exist solely to give well connected contracting companies billions of dollars of taxpayer's money since these same large creatively dead companies can't actually come up with products that real consumers would want. My guess is that if you contracted these companies to build an iPad that it would be 1 inch thick and have a 640 x 400 resolution and have an owner's manual that came in a set of binders.
So these companies are going to fight opensource as hard as they can seeing that it destroys all kinds of things they had going for them. Open source means that other companies can come in and scoop their contracts. Open source means that people like slashdoter and the DailyWTF will go through the code highlighting crap that came from 3rd rate 3rd world outsourced coders. Open source could even mean horror upon horrors that if good code is generated that other governments will copy it and simply modify it to their own needs.
But the worst horror is that if they charge 50 billion dollars for a few thousand lines of modifications to an existing system people like us will be willing to testify at the fraud trial.
Actually there is one worse horror: that people like us contribute free functionality, upgrades, and fixes.
Preventing a steady rain of feature requests that vastly exceed the development capacity. Often these features will take longer in programming time than the time they will save.
Another hard one is to use an older programming technology when you have been using a far newer one for some time.
I think in the early days Ubuntu was very good for linux. It showed that you could have a linux install that was fairly user friendly. Then it got better and better. But then suddenly it seemed to become Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu. Now it seemed to be a Red Hat envying I want to become a tech billionaire Ubuntu. Next it was an iPhone envying I want to be Steve Jobs Ubuntu. The key symptom of this being that it was both trying to appease the Linux crowd all the while annoying them to death all the while making sure their PR department was working overtime.
Then along came the Linux Mints, they saw what Ubuntu had been and focused on that. As someone who is asked by many people "What kind of computer should I get?" I will only be advising Linux mint for those people where Linux is a good fit; that is those people who surf the web, send gmails, watch YouTube, and type the occasional document.
The worst part of this for Ubuntu is that with all the hype hype hype they could make Ubuntu pretty awesome and I still wouldn't believe it and ever go back.
But yes you should get the bulk (or entirety) of what makes an MBA under your belt; just don't drink the kool-aid. I really don't like people who only have an MBA. But having a real skill plus an MBA is pretty powerful stuff. Quite simply I have seen a zillion people build awesome stuff (me included) and just not market it very well or at all. And then I have seen people with complete dog poo for a product market the product into being set for life. Guess which skillset the later had and the former didn't have? This is not just marketing but being able to communicate with those moneyed types such as investors and banks.
At the same time financial training is not a magic bullet. I have seen highly educated CFOs get completely hosed by well concocted financial set-ups.
As I said, don't drink the kool-aid. The worst symptom of a useless MBA is that they are able to manipulate reality through very convincing reports and excellent spread sheets. A recent example of this behavior would be the MS Windows phone OS. MS made every effort to make it look like it was gaining real traction; I even remember one article where they were breathlessly predicting that it would have over 50% of the smart phone market by about 2014. Even when sales were abysmal they started quoting numbers like units shipped or quoting the first day sales as a comparison to other phones.
With good business training you will learn to bend the market into accepting your awesome product. With the same training you might even fool the market into buying your worthless product. But with only technical training you should be prepared to be the only user of your awesome product.
Often it is how a project is initially managed that results in an unmaintainable system. A few simple mistakes can send a project straight to hell from the very beginning. A simple one would be to allow the senior management to firehose new features at the project far faster than the developers can build them. Another would be to allow the wrong people to pick the core components. That is how bad databases/languages/operating systems can be chosen. Then you get the next layer of wrong when people simply code and architect badly.
An example from my past was a company that I interviewed with (and was offered a job at) that was using Lotus notes to build a huge educational system. They had a PhD as the head of development and they were keeping the details secret until they made their offer. When they told me Lotus Notes I just laughed; I thought they were joking. I told them that building their system out of Lotus Notes was like building a car out of sand and white glue. At first you will quickly have the broad outline of a car but that as you start to work on the hard bits that you will never finish; Ever! A couple of years later the company imploded with no real product just a bunch of sales demos.
Dubious; there are 3 possibilities, 1 it was almost entirely sponsored and encouraged by the security service and the losers who were arrested were just that losers. 2 that they are real attackers who might have pulled something nasty off. or 3 that this is a huge disproportionate response to what, in reality, were just some angry guys drunk talking.
A simple example would be that I know 2 guys who have long been planning the perfect kidnapping. Not that they ever would kidnap anyone it is just a thought experiment in that doing the exchange would be fantastically difficult. But if you were to have a wiretap of any of their conversations you would think that they were two sociopathic nasties just days away from the snatching someone. Seeing that they have been having the same discussion for over 20 years it might be the slowest conspiracy in history. Seeing that the context of the conversation was set 20 years ago then any conversation since does not need to begin with "hypothetically" if anything their conversations would be something more along the lines of the exacting details of the use of helicopters, spaceships, submarines or whatever has recently popped into either of their heads. The worst is that if someone from a security service were to join into their debate(with the goal of an arrest) they would probably even accept the use of say a helicopter or whatever to stage some scenario that they were debating. But again neither of these two would ever even think about actually doing a crime so horrible. But a series of recordings played to the jury would be pretty damning.
By adult I assume that she means to demean all those who are calling for the rational elimination of this abomination along with the criminal prosicution of every one of the evil doers in this situation.
This is ripe coming from a woman who spends at least half of every day figuring out how to control all information relating to her family and misplaced hope of being the next president.
I actually feel for the Xerox people working on this. I know what it is like to have a system with intense and broad functionality and you are frozen in fear every time you make the slightest change. Testing ahead of time is great but can you be 100% certain that you have 100% test coverage? If you are then you are a fool.
If I had to point any fingers it would be that they should have a multi-layered deployment system where they deploy to the test center, a small random group, a larger group, and then nationally. It sounds like they might be halfway there with this outage only affecting 17 states. Ideally it would only be affecting a few counties in a couple of states.
Plus you want to keep the domain of your test area down to the point where you can fix crap manually.
I can't imagine the number of careers being destroyed with each leak. I suspect that in the healthier democracies the very organizations doing this spying will be largely dismantled. The real question, that should not be answered by anyone in the spying business, is whether these revelations are resulting in a greater good?
Quite simply the people behind the curtain have long had an attitude of the end justifies the means, so now in exposing them they are getting a taste of their own medicine. The other core pillar of the spying business is that information is power; well by exposing the spies themselves we give power back to the people of the various democracies in question.
But what really boils my butt is that any foreign spy or "actor" who was using any electronic system without assuming that they were being monitored is a fool. And anyone that foolish probably didn't pose much of a threat. From what I gather Osama was found as they tracked the couriers who physically carried messages, which means that he was off the grid as far as his trail was concerned. But the people who do still use electronic communications were people like you and me, combined with organizations and governments who trusted the rest of the world.
So how many trade negotiations were done while the US listened in on the other side figuring out their negotiating positions, how many companies like Siemens might have had business deals or trade secrets handed over to us contractors?
But then it gets potentially worse: How many times did say a Canadian go to negotiate a trade agreement only to find that they had a recording of him and his mistress? How many times did a politician who was causing problems have a tipped off reporter show up for a rendezvous with his mistress? Or even to have the troublesome politician's election strategy handed over to his opponent? Or to have his secret PAC supporters suddenly withdraw their support?
If they are willing to lean on a company that "buys its ink by the barrel" how little reluctance would they have to twist democracy to their needs?
So my guess is that it is not the real baddies who have gone silent but the diplomats, politicians(both domestic and foreign, and large international businesses that are going silent. Personally if I ran a company like Siemens I would be locking up the communications and computer system tighter than a drum.
I have generally seen the MBAs eat up middle management, especially in big bloated companies such as the power company. So yes not the best jobs but the worst is that most of those jobs are just parasitical to the company. The engineering nerds did pretty well, the science nerds are either on the long slog to becoming a professor, gave up, or work in private industry and have pay scales all over the place. The smarter jocks (who often did business) went into sales and are doing OK. The dumb jocks are failed bar-tenders, cops, or work construction. The arts people mostly cry themselves to sleep. The CS people are generally all over the place in pay and success.
But where I see the most destructive behavior in business comes from the worst Type-A MBAs. They are the ones who learned enough business to make a solid case for blowing their companies up in order to get their options to vest a week before it blows. In their case the M stands for Machiavellian. I have a great example of that. Vague to protect the guilty.
There was a large boring company with a strong technology wing. In this boring company there were some 30 year old MBAs who realized that it was the late 90s and tech was booming. But the large boring company was to large and boring to pretend to be a tech start-up. This was the sort of company that paid a VP maybe $100,000 (probably less) so they convinced the board of directors that they could spin off the tech division into a separate company, sell it or IPO it, and make lots of money for the parent company. Their case was that it was a no lose for the parent company as they would sign a contract that would keep all the systems running as they were before for the same costs. The company was created and the 30 something MBAs were put in charge.
Well at a drunken BBQ I heard that the top two guys had a magic number that the company would sell for over $300 million and that through options and contractually set retention bonuses they would get over $10 million each.
But then 2000 came along and the IPO/Buyout boat sailed. But now the parent company realized something else, now that the internal tech people were external outsourcing them was really easy. That is outsourcing to much hungrier larger consulting companies so this spin off started to dry up. In the end around 95% of these people who had joined the big boring company found themselves spun off and then out of a job with nothing to show for it.
But I am willing to be that somehow those MBA douches managed to gold plate their pensions and get some kind of magic severance.
It will continue until someone loses an eye. Basically it will have to take down the entire market and be properly blamed for doing so. It might even have to do this more than once. I know a super smart MIT math whiz who just joined the HFT cult. The world might have just lost a Feynman or whatnot.
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Yes this is going to be horrible to watch the petty abuses of power. One that I have long predicted would be that rich neighborhoods will not allow cars through them if you haven't set the neighborhood as the destination itself. What I am specifically referring to are neighbourhoods where people are presently driving their cars through legitimately. For instance to get to the nicest park in the city (and biggest) you presently have to drive down the most expensive street in the city for around 5 blocks. There are other ways to get to the park but I would imagine 80%+ go down this street. I can see these people dropping hints to their politician friends that they want the legal navigation parameters changed.
A simple example of this was when John Kerry apparently had a fire hydrant moved from infront of his Boston house. Apparently this is near impossible to get done (administratively).
But the other one that I see are some kind of priority driving for politicians. Traffic would be ordered to part like the red sea for them; soviet style. These sort of rules would be needed for things like firetrucks, ambulances, and even trams. So I can see the politicos thinking that they are just as important.
Yes I suspect for every 10,000 lives saved there will be one death. But a fantastic death; where the car will just drive a family off a cliff or something sensational that the media will be all over. Then for a while people will be, "I'm not getting into one of those death traps."
Plus there will be a huge number of special interest groups who will desperately try to keep drivers in cars: Taxi unions, truck driver unions, bus driver unions, classic car associations, the police (if the drivers are perfect then no more tickets), and even groups like MADD might find themselves without a mandate if there are no "Drivers". But then you get more subtle groups who will lose their minds: many small municipalities coffers will become empty if they can't be handing out fines. Even larger governments might discover serious drops in revenue without any ticket revenue coming in.
And even groups like the police will be ticked that they can't pull "suspicious" people over by just waiting for them to make a traffic mistake.
Then you get stores and other commercial areas that have made based their financial model on easy parking, but if you are using either your own robot car or more specifically a cheap robot taxi then you can get dropped off in the most dense parts of downtown and go to your specialty stores and when done get picked up at the push of a smartphone button. So if these groups realize the threat to their business models then they too will squeal.
But on a side note one of the biggest threats to life and limb posed by robot cars will be the potential for a drastic reduction in the average distance walked. I can see some people integrating a robot car so much into their movements that they step out their front door into a waiting car, it drops them off at the front door of destination one, picks them up at the front door when they are done, and this would continue until they are eventually dropped off at the front door of their house. Whereas right now they might have to walk from their parking, walk among a cluster of destinations, and then walk back to their car.
This whole lack of walking could turn out to be more deadly than the lives saved through car accidents. At least with no-walking deaths it will be people doing it to themselves vs car accidents often killing other innocent people.
Where this is going to get interesting is when nearly all the cars on the road are autonomous and the last remaining hold outs will be preventing many other cool solutions that only work when you have 100% autonomous such as eliminating traffic lights. Eliminating traffic signs such as one way, speed, stop, etc signs. Eliminating speed limits. Even eliminating things such as lanes.
Basically the last manually driven cars will be seen to be a homicidal menace and high cost nightmare.
Yes a key strategy when upgrading your servers is to have a retreat plan. Quite simply if you upgrade your servers regularly one of your upgrades is going to blow up. I know that I am nervous every time I push a new version and never push a new version and then run out for lunch.
I'm not joking when I say that procure number one when money is flying out of your servers is to Shut Them Down instantly. I would have pulled the cables out so fast the CPU might have been yanked out with the network cable. Or a good old shutdown -h now !!!!! (The exclamation marks speed up the shutdown)
And I wouldn't have done this one server at a time it would have been all the servers at the same time. I suspect they would lose money by not having the servers up but not at the firehose rate that they were losing money as they were.
The worst part is that the admins were probably following some procedure in their book and were refusing to just pull the plug in some vain attempt for 99.9 percent up time or other admin related metric instead of the clear "Don't Lose $48 Million a minute!!!!" metric. So probably another clear case of IT's priorities getting way out of sync with the company's actual priorities.
There are episode by episode breakdowns of crappy TV shows but then you will get some interesting scientist who's entry is deleted for some reason such as relevance.
Then you get admins who "own" an article. So the new census will come out and someone will update the population of a city to reflect the new census and even cite the new census; but 5 minutes later the old numbers are back and the citation gone.
Then you get excellent articles filled with excellent information but some OCD twerp is threatening to delete it due to formatting issues.
Lastly you get the show off types. This is at its worst in mathematics. There is almost zero educational value in many of the mathematics related articles. The mathematics are perfect but instead of making things clear they use the most esoteric terminology/symbology. So 2+2=4 will become something like:
Using a Yungra transform you can compute that the Dirac set of {1, 1} when concatenated with the set Ramublablajan set {1,1} (each of which represents the empty set {0}) will have a resultant set of the Miller-Shiefler Series {1, 1, {0}, 1}.
An example of a complicated thing being made simple would be the article on RSA. The example math they use could be done using a pen and paper. Most Wiki Admins and editors would seem to despise this sort of simplicity and instead would probably rewrite the entire (excellent) article as a single formula that concisely sums up RSA. I personally prefer the sing-along version that is there now.
I have tried so hard to love LaTeX. Tried but failed.
You are correct Google docs has a way to go but the nice mix of cloud, real device, auto-updating folder etc is quite handy. A simple example that doing something different can be quite compelling. Now if they could just take it to the next level...
Now that tinfoil hats are in fashion the answer is quite simple. If he proves a weakness then the crypto system is crap. If he doesn't then regardless of his motives the system still can't be trusted.
Here is where we can even add a layer of lead to our tinfoil hats. What is to say that the NSA doesn't have working quantum computers? Thus almost any system that is susceptible to any sort of quantum math such as factoring is quite simply dead as far as the NSA is concerned.
This last is an important consideration. Because most of us have no data that the NSA could be even slightly interested in. Let's say a forum discussing shoe repair techniques. So in that case all we are concerned with would be that our cryptographic system will protect password hashes, CC encryption, and keep SSH server access secure. So most of the old systems are probably still quite nice.
But there is an edge case where the NSA couldn't give a crap but a large politically connected corporation would like to have a peek into your systems and then the NSA might give them access. So if you were say a huge conglomerate bidding on a massive infrastructure project, those who were bidding against you might be given access to your data due to "national interests". A simple reason why organizations like the NSA might want to help large corporations is that then those corporations will lobby on the NSA's behalf in times like the present. Can you imagine how many senators/congressmen are in districts where GE is a large employer? In that light it would be stupid for the NSA not to hand them interesting data.
Even here in Canada I could see our spy bunch giving stolen data from Canadian companies that weren't politically connected to those that are politically connected.
Oddly enough I think that document compatibility is not the solution; in that if you don't get it 100% perfect then you will tick people off. Whereas a product with little or no document compatibility might actually have a better chance. I should have mentioned in my examples, people were switching systems with none of their documents moving from one system to another.
.doc files and open their old office program while all new documents could be created using a new product. The other reality is that once people start sending you documents you can't open you will get your IT people to sort it out so that you can. A free Open Source product would be a low barrier to getting on board with a new document editing system. Microsoft themselves proved (and may have taken advantage of this) with their docx file format. Many people immediately started sending out docx files to everyone and those who could not order them to stop simply had to upgrade. At this point if you can't open a docx file then it is perceived as your fault. This was the same with the early days of pdf files; people just had to download the reader in order to read them. So abandoning compatibility is not the hurdle that most people think. Personally I think that if you have two products: one that is 100% compatible but not much better or another product that is 0% compatible but awesome; that the first product will fail and the second product has a serious chance of being the one.
There are two realities for most people. One is that they rarely open older documents. They create documents, massage them, and then fire and forget. So for these people they could click on
One of the failings of all these free Office suites is that they try to be MS Office and basically if they can be distinguished as being not office then they have failed. So my suggestion is to pretend that there are no existing office suites; what do people want to do? Then you move forward from there. A good start in that direction would be a product that I use called Bean. It is a very simple Mac word writing tool. The focus is on just writing words. It is fast to load, clean of interface, and doesn't do much in the way of formatting. Another good product is Scrivener; this product focuses on what you need when writing a complicated document such as a book.
Google docs isn't too bad and brings the whole cloud thing to the table fairly well but I just don't see your average document generating office drone begging their IT department to help them with the switch.
Here is a simple set of examples. Years ago I worked in an office where the secretaries used Word Processors. That is they used machines with big 8 inch floppies that could only do simple 80 characters per line word processing and print it to a printer that was basically a modified typewriter. In the office there was a shiny new IBM machine with Word Perfect and a sort of good quality dot matrix printer. The secretaries were super happy when I got it working and almost immediately were fighting over it. A few years later I witnessed secretaries demanding to upgrade to windows and Word for windows because it could make the new laser printers dance. The key there was that Word Perfect 4.2 for DOS liked to display things in 80 monospaced characters. But a laser printer could do around 132 characters per line and thus a WYSIWYG interface was a huge leap. Keep in mind that all of the above secretaries were very very good at using their previous systems and thus these switches were painful but there was something they wanted so they demanded it and learned it.
So fast forward to the present and present your average Office user with Open Office. What is the win for them? For most people there is only a loss as things like the bad dictionary, and the slightly different interface will just be a pain. Maybe the CFO is happy with the lowered cost of operating but that is not how you win the hearts and minds of the average user.
So the key to getting people to switch over to Open Source non Office environments it to offer them something that they really want. The reality is that they will give up many office features and put up with other pain if they are getting something super cool. So matching MS Office feature for feature is not needed in the winning product.
This is where I come up empty. As I say the simple products like bean are good enough for me. Maybe the solution lay in a cool way to accomplish the work presently being done in the MS office suite using your mobile? Something where all the existing might of MS doesn't get them very far. Plus something truly innovative would no doubt be initially dismissed by MS as "missing the point".
I wasn't referring to the Obamacare project specifically. I was thinking more about many government (specifically medical) software projects that have gone into over-budget orbit. A great one is the British NHS IT disaster that hit £11 Billion before it was cancelled. That is over 17 Billion USD for nothing. I have a sneaking suspicion that if the source code and other project documents got out that we would all be shaking with anger over the terrible code and development/management process that went into generating it. Yet this happens over and over.
I am talking about consulting companies, not other commercial companies that produce products people want. I have worked with consulting companies and about the last thing they seem to be interested in is a solid delivery, on time, and on budget. The funny thing is that various managers run from one end of the hallway screaming that this milestone or that is being missed. But the salesmen are deeply upset if the milestones are met or the client is happy with the first version. In their world a crap version 1.0 translates to getting to sell version 2.0 in under a maintenance contract. Also another good strategy is to keep selling during development so that by continuously moving the goalposts there is no "Missed deadline".
Salesmen work on commission; so even if the commission was 0.05% on a billion dollar project that is a 5 million dollar commission. Thus a project with 1,000 plodding developers is way way way better than the same project developed by 10 great developers.
The other half of a big commission is to make a smallish project a big project. A great example of this was the 2 billion dollar Canadian gun registry. If you work out how many guns were registered it turns out it would have been cheaper to (literally) carve the records into stone tablets. How did something that small become so vastly huge?
So if all government projects were to be truly opensourced and all development and developer communications made open to the public we would quickly see if some project was a huge rip off.
I think many slashdot'rs will read this as "Your next network will use electricity." I am pretty sure most people around here have networks that are close to 100% Linux. Maybe the occasional switch or whatnot is running something proprietary.
It has become painfully obvious to me that government IT contracts exist solely to give well connected contracting companies billions of dollars of taxpayer's money since these same large creatively dead companies can't actually come up with products that real consumers would want. My guess is that if you contracted these companies to build an iPad that it would be 1 inch thick and have a 640 x 400 resolution and have an owner's manual that came in a set of binders.
So these companies are going to fight opensource as hard as they can seeing that it destroys all kinds of things they had going for them. Open source means that other companies can come in and scoop their contracts. Open source means that people like slashdoter and the DailyWTF will go through the code highlighting crap that came from 3rd rate 3rd world outsourced coders. Open source could even mean horror upon horrors that if good code is generated that other governments will copy it and simply modify it to their own needs.
But the worst horror is that if they charge 50 billion dollars for a few thousand lines of modifications to an existing system people like us will be willing to testify at the fraud trial.
Actually there is one worse horror: that people like us contribute free functionality, upgrades, and fixes.
Preventing a steady rain of feature requests that vastly exceed the development capacity. Often these features will take longer in programming time than the time they will save.
Another hard one is to use an older programming technology when you have been using a far newer one for some time.
I think in the early days Ubuntu was very good for linux. It showed that you could have a linux install that was fairly user friendly. Then it got better and better. But then suddenly it seemed to become Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu. Now it seemed to be a Red Hat envying I want to become a tech billionaire Ubuntu. Next it was an iPhone envying I want to be Steve Jobs Ubuntu. The key symptom of this being that it was both trying to appease the Linux crowd all the while annoying them to death all the while making sure their PR department was working overtime.
Then along came the Linux Mints, they saw what Ubuntu had been and focused on that. As someone who is asked by many people "What kind of computer should I get?" I will only be advising Linux mint for those people where Linux is a good fit; that is those people who surf the web, send gmails, watch YouTube, and type the occasional document.
The worst part of this for Ubuntu is that with all the hype hype hype they could make Ubuntu pretty awesome and I still wouldn't believe it and ever go back.
But yes you should get the bulk (or entirety) of what makes an MBA under your belt; just don't drink the kool-aid. I really don't like people who only have an MBA. But having a real skill plus an MBA is pretty powerful stuff. Quite simply I have seen a zillion people build awesome stuff (me included) and just not market it very well or at all. And then I have seen people with complete dog poo for a product market the product into being set for life. Guess which skillset the later had and the former didn't have? This is not just marketing but being able to communicate with those moneyed types such as investors and banks.
At the same time financial training is not a magic bullet. I have seen highly educated CFOs get completely hosed by well concocted financial set-ups.
As I said, don't drink the kool-aid. The worst symptom of a useless MBA is that they are able to manipulate reality through very convincing reports and excellent spread sheets. A recent example of this behavior would be the MS Windows phone OS. MS made every effort to make it look like it was gaining real traction; I even remember one article where they were breathlessly predicting that it would have over 50% of the smart phone market by about 2014. Even when sales were abysmal they started quoting numbers like units shipped or quoting the first day sales as a comparison to other phones.
With good business training you will learn to bend the market into accepting your awesome product. With the same training you might even fool the market into buying your worthless product. But with only technical training you should be prepared to be the only user of your awesome product.
Often it is how a project is initially managed that results in an unmaintainable system. A few simple mistakes can send a project straight to hell from the very beginning. A simple one would be to allow the senior management to firehose new features at the project far faster than the developers can build them. Another would be to allow the wrong people to pick the core components. That is how bad databases/languages/operating systems can be chosen. Then you get the next layer of wrong when people simply code and architect badly.
An example from my past was a company that I interviewed with (and was offered a job at) that was using Lotus notes to build a huge educational system. They had a PhD as the head of development and they were keeping the details secret until they made their offer. When they told me Lotus Notes I just laughed; I thought they were joking. I told them that building their system out of Lotus Notes was like building a car out of sand and white glue. At first you will quickly have the broad outline of a car but that as you start to work on the hard bits that you will never finish; Ever! A couple of years later the company imploded with no real product just a bunch of sales demos.
Dubious; there are 3 possibilities, 1 it was almost entirely sponsored and encouraged by the security service and the losers who were arrested were just that losers. 2 that they are real attackers who might have pulled something nasty off. or 3 that this is a huge disproportionate response to what, in reality, were just some angry guys drunk talking.
A simple example would be that I know 2 guys who have long been planning the perfect kidnapping. Not that they ever would kidnap anyone it is just a thought experiment in that doing the exchange would be fantastically difficult. But if you were to have a wiretap of any of their conversations you would think that they were two sociopathic nasties just days away from the snatching someone. Seeing that they have been having the same discussion for over 20 years it might be the slowest conspiracy in history. Seeing that the context of the conversation was set 20 years ago then any conversation since does not need to begin with "hypothetically" if anything their conversations would be something more along the lines of the exacting details of the use of helicopters, spaceships, submarines or whatever has recently popped into either of their heads. The worst is that if someone from a security service were to join into their debate(with the goal of an arrest) they would probably even accept the use of say a helicopter or whatever to stage some scenario that they were debating. But again neither of these two would ever even think about actually doing a crime so horrible. But a series of recordings played to the jury would be pretty damning.
By adult I assume that she means to demean all those who are calling for the rational elimination of this abomination along with the criminal prosicution of every one of the evil doers in this situation.
This is ripe coming from a woman who spends at least half of every day figuring out how to control all information relating to her family and misplaced hope of being the next president.
I actually feel for the Xerox people working on this. I know what it is like to have a system with intense and broad functionality and you are frozen in fear every time you make the slightest change. Testing ahead of time is great but can you be 100% certain that you have 100% test coverage? If you are then you are a fool.
If I had to point any fingers it would be that they should have a multi-layered deployment system where they deploy to the test center, a small random group, a larger group, and then nationally. It sounds like they might be halfway there with this outage only affecting 17 states. Ideally it would only be affecting a few counties in a couple of states.
Plus you want to keep the domain of your test area down to the point where you can fix crap manually.
I can't imagine the number of careers being destroyed with each leak. I suspect that in the healthier democracies the very organizations doing this spying will be largely dismantled. The real question, that should not be answered by anyone in the spying business, is whether these revelations are resulting in a greater good?
Quite simply the people behind the curtain have long had an attitude of the end justifies the means, so now in exposing them they are getting a taste of their own medicine. The other core pillar of the spying business is that information is power; well by exposing the spies themselves we give power back to the people of the various democracies in question.
But what really boils my butt is that any foreign spy or "actor" who was using any electronic system without assuming that they were being monitored is a fool. And anyone that foolish probably didn't pose much of a threat. From what I gather Osama was found as they tracked the couriers who physically carried messages, which means that he was off the grid as far as his trail was concerned. But the people who do still use electronic communications were people like you and me, combined with organizations and governments who trusted the rest of the world.
So how many trade negotiations were done while the US listened in on the other side figuring out their negotiating positions, how many companies like Siemens might have had business deals or trade secrets handed over to us contractors?
But then it gets potentially worse: How many times did say a Canadian go to negotiate a trade agreement only to find that they had a recording of him and his mistress? How many times did a politician who was causing problems have a tipped off reporter show up for a rendezvous with his mistress? Or even to have the troublesome politician's election strategy handed over to his opponent? Or to have his secret PAC supporters suddenly withdraw their support?
If they are willing to lean on a company that "buys its ink by the barrel" how little reluctance would they have to twist democracy to their needs?
So my guess is that it is not the real baddies who have gone silent but the diplomats, politicians(both domestic and foreign, and large international businesses that are going silent. Personally if I ran a company like Siemens I would be locking up the communications and computer system tighter than a drum.
I have generally seen the MBAs eat up middle management, especially in big bloated companies such as the power company. So yes not the best jobs but the worst is that most of those jobs are just parasitical to the company. The engineering nerds did pretty well, the science nerds are either on the long slog to becoming a professor, gave up, or work in private industry and have pay scales all over the place. The smarter jocks (who often did business) went into sales and are doing OK. The dumb jocks are failed bar-tenders, cops, or work construction. The arts people mostly cry themselves to sleep. The CS people are generally all over the place in pay and success.
But where I see the most destructive behavior in business comes from the worst Type-A MBAs. They are the ones who learned enough business to make a solid case for blowing their companies up in order to get their options to vest a week before it blows. In their case the M stands for Machiavellian. I have a great example of that. Vague to protect the guilty.
There was a large boring company with a strong technology wing. In this boring company there were some 30 year old MBAs who realized that it was the late 90s and tech was booming. But the large boring company was to large and boring to pretend to be a tech start-up. This was the sort of company that paid a VP maybe $100,000 (probably less) so they convinced the board of directors that they could spin off the tech division into a separate company, sell it or IPO it, and make lots of money for the parent company. Their case was that it was a no lose for the parent company as they would sign a contract that would keep all the systems running as they were before for the same costs. The company was created and the 30 something MBAs were put in charge.
Well at a drunken BBQ I heard that the top two guys had a magic number that the company would sell for over $300 million and that through options and contractually set retention bonuses they would get over $10 million each.
But then 2000 came along and the IPO/Buyout boat sailed. But now the parent company realized something else, now that the internal tech people were external outsourcing them was really easy. That is outsourcing to much hungrier larger consulting companies so this spin off started to dry up. In the end around 95% of these people who had joined the big boring company found themselves spun off and then out of a job with nothing to show for it.
But I am willing to be that somehow those MBA douches managed to gold plate their pensions and get some kind of magic severance.
It will continue until someone loses an eye. Basically it will have to take down the entire market and be properly blamed for doing so. It might even have to do this more than once. I know a super smart MIT math whiz who just joined the HFT cult. The world might have just lost a Feynman or whatnot.