The Internet has moved from a research project to a part of mainstream life in less than a decade. Even the "Digital Divide" has turned out to be less of a problem than feared, with most schools and libraries (at least in the U.S.) providing access to anyone who wants it. Pretty impressive.
But what about the development of the Internet has disappointed you? Commercial dominance? Trivialization of the new resource? "Digital Divide"? Security problems? The Microsoft monoculture? The hype of the bubble circa 1999?
What do you see happening over the next few years in the battle between the Internet Protocol community (computing/telecom hardware manufacturers, service providers, users) and the Intellectual Property industry (RIAA/MPAA/etc.)?
I remember hearing Julia Child saying that the reason obesity is becoming such a problem is because of fat has become taboo in cooking.
And never use the "m-word"* to her. She's been known to say, "You don't have to use butter in this dish... [wink] you can use cream instead."
Generally, people who eat excusively low fat foods at their main meals are those who have the most trouble keeping from snacking between meals
I agree with Ms. Child and Mr. Brown that "fats satisfy.... they keep us fuller longer"; but I think the extent to which people "snack" has a lot to do with how they're wired, above the neck and below. It's not so much a matter of having enough will power, but more a matter of how much or how little will power you need to have in order to deal with what your body does.
Am I the only one who thinks this is just ass-backward from the way you'd expect things to be in an open market? So, HP/Compaq becomes MS's biggest customer. Back in the olden days, it would mean that *MS* would quake in fear and bend over backwards not to piss off their biggest client, lest they lose their business.
That's like saying the biggest cocaine addict should get respect from his dealer.
If Bill called Carly and said, "Sorry, seems there's a problem with our agreement with you to license Windows. We're very earger to work things out, but I'm afraid you're not going to be able to legally sell desktops, laptops, or servers running Windows until, oh, say, January. If you think Linux is so hot, why don't you try selling Linux systems at Best Buy?"... if that happened, HP stock would drop to $0.01 in about five minutes, and Carly would be out of a job in less time that than.
That's the exaggerated version (and would violate the terms of the proposed DoJ settlement); but subtler variations work, too. Microsoft controls HP's oxygen supply; and Dell's, and Gateway's, and ad infinitum. Only IBM has a committment to Windows plus a large line of non-Windows products to fall back on.
"Chapter 43: Voluntary Overtime: Too much overtime and schedule pressure can damage a development schedule, but a little overtime can increase the amount of work accomplished each week and improve motivation. An extra four to eight hours a week increases output by 10 to 20 percent or more. A light-handed request to work a little overtime emphasizes that a project is important. Developers, like other people, want to feel important, and they work harder when they do."
"Use a developer-pull approach rather than a leader-push approach.... Gerald Weinberg points out that one of the best known results of motivation research is that increasing the driving force first increases performance to a maximum, and then drives it to zero (Weinberg 1971). He says that the rapid fall-off in performance is especially observable in complex tasks like software development: 'Pressing the programmer for rapid elimination of a bug may turn out to be the worst possible strategy-but it is by far the most common.'"
"Don't use overtime to try to bring a project under control.... Ask for an amount of overtime that you can actually get.... Beware of too much overtime, regardless of the reason."
The original is lost, but I squirrelled away some choice quotes:
"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week getting coordinated with other programmers and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week)...."
"If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6:00 pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer...."
Greenspun said the following in the Slashdot discussion:
"Most of the people at ArsDigita are young. They have no families. They have no personal reputation. Find me a 35-year-old who has accomplished a lot IN ANY FIELD, who has changed the world in some positive way, and who has never worked long hours. The articles I put on my various Web sites are not intended to help people who just want to live a quiet comfortable life (I'm not an expert on this). They are intended to help young people turn into Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman or Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston (Visicalc)."
"At ArsDigita we do tend to get fairly young people who are very bright. They want to do something that will impress their classmates from MIT or UCLA or Caltech or wherever. The key to successful management is to provide an inspiring goal that these guys and gals can buy into and then a working environment that lets them achieve the goal. It does result in some long hours but [at ArsDigita, at Greenspun's insistence] they have 5 weeks/year to recover. If they get sick of it they can always join a slacker company and work 40 hours/week."
"Let me say that I did not intend "Managing Software Engineers" to be the last word on the subject.... I don't want to be remembered for advocating a long work week. There is a lot more to the article and I certainly wouldn't advocate long hours to anyone who didn't love his or her job and wasn't learning every day."
(The banner ad for this page says, "Find a better job, NOW!" I tend to agree.)
For more on Ted Taylor -- his work on fission bombs, his participation in Project Orion, his speculations on how small a nuclear bomb could topple the World Trade Center towers (decades ago), and his concerns about nuclear proliferation -- I strongly recommend John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (BN). McPhee(BN) is an excellent writer, and this is one of his books I enjoyed the most.
How's the eye surgery turning out?
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 2
You had a cornea transplant a few years ago (Google cache). How's it doing?
Maybe some straw will help break the camel's back?
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Shrinkwrapped licenses for books are clearly a violation of the doctrine of first sale (you do not own the rights to distribute the content of a book, but you completely own your copy of the the physical book, and may distribute that any way you please).
Each new insult is also one more bit of evidence that fair use is threatened. If this goes on -- and if we keep writing Congress, etc., every time it happens -- at some point, maybe things will be so visibly out of hand that there'll be serious public pressure to swing the pendulum back.
It won't happen by itself, but I cling to a shred of hope, no matter how thin. (Giving into despair doesn't help; think of hope as a modified Pascal's Wager.)
You got into cooking via a theater degree and television work; an unconventional path, but you're an unconventional guy.
How did that background lead to a geeky approach to cooking, with lots of molecular diagrams and discussions of physics?
(I use "unconventional" and "geeky" as compliments, and hope you take them that way. You and Nigella Dawson do the most distinctive, and most enjoyable, cooking shows I've seen, each in its own way.)
Your book covers searing, grilling, roasting, frying, boiling, braising, brining, and microwaving... but not baking. Did it not fit, or are you saving it for the next book, or what?
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
COBOL is for morons.
With respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
See if there's someone in your organization who can play the role of project manager: working with all four of you to break down the effort into pieces small enough to measure progress against (my rule of thumb: half a day to two days), who can track progress, who can be told about roadblocks and try to remove them.
"The role of project management" for a four person project is not a full time responsibility! Someone with project management experience ought to be able to do it in 30 to 60 minutes per work day.
Sell it to your management this way. There are three roles: development, technical leadership, and project management. You have time to do two. At this rate, if you do the last two and ignore the first, the project is doomed. The last one is the only one an outsider might possibly help with.
If that doesn't work, then you need to be the project manager. Try really hard to be empowering and helpful. On the other hand, negotiate the following with your boss: "If any of these three is contributing zero or negative progress, I want the power to get him or her out. Transferred to another project, laid off, whatever; but not in my way."
If neither works... I guess assign busy work to any developer or developers you can't count on, document why you did so, get as much done as you can, and look for a new job. None of which is easy.
In the U.S. (where the bill has been proposed), 2002 is an election year. All members of the House of Representatives, and one third of the members of the Sentate, are up for re-election. Every one of them has at least one opponent (both major parties have already held their local primary elections).
Sure, write your elected officials. But write the people running against them, too. We want to send a clear message, no matter who wins in November.
For extra credit, in addition to the letters to D.C., write one to each "committe to [re]elect" (a.k.a. "Friends of Blah Blah Blah"), and enclose a personal check to the committee. (Do not send cash!) It doesn't have to be big; ten or twenty dollars is enough to get a little attention. Our money talks, too!
Absolutely gVim. I've used Vim 5.8, 6.0, and 6.1 (the gVim executable, not the console versions) regularly on Windows 98SE, NT, and 2K (and Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux, too, both console and GUI versions). It's never so much as dropped a character.
I have plenty of RAM on all the relevant systems (no less than 96M). If you've got less, try downloading SiSoft Sandra Standard, and check "Windows Memory Information" to see if you're running low.
I also reboot my Windows 98SE system about once a day.-|
I saw it at Costco (yclept Price Club) the other day. Stores like these (e.g., BJ's, Sam's Club) often have books at a discount of 30% or more. (No shipping charge either.-)
The book looked like a hoot.
Friedl's book is a must read for Perl folks
on
Next Generation Regexp
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's not just a Perl book, but the language independent and Perl dependent parts are a godsend.
I was a full time Perl programmer (with a two hour commute by rail) when Friedl's book came out. I read it cover to cover, and then recommended it strongly to my co-workers.
Friedl shows how to write powerful, readable, efficient regular expressions that can do a lot of the work your program needs to do. It changed how my group wrote Perl (very much for the better). This is more than highly recommended; after the Blue Camel, and even before the Cookbook, this is a definitive book for all those who call themselves "Perl programmers."
(In the first edition of the book, Friedl discovered some problems with regular expressions in early versions of Perl 5. The very next release of Perl -- 5.003, I think -- immediately fixed these problems. When Larry & Co. pay attention to a Perl book, maybe you should, too?)
Beyond a certain degree of complexity, it really doesn't make much sense anymore to use regular expressions... Parser generator syntax allows comments, whitespace, with a simple, fairly standard syntax...
... and (as you'd certainly know if you'd read either edition of Friedl's book) that's also of Perl 5 "regular expressions"; and Friedl strongly encourages you (e.g., by example) to write complicated regular expressions that way.
Slashdot Mirror
The Internet has moved from a research project to a part of mainstream life in less than a decade. Even the "Digital Divide" has turned out to be less of a problem than feared, with most schools and libraries (at least in the U.S.) providing access to anyone who wants it. Pretty impressive.
But what about the development of the Internet has disappointed you? Commercial dominance? Trivialization of the new resource? "Digital Divide"? Security problems? The Microsoft monoculture? The hype of the bubble circa 1999?
What do you see happening over the next few years in the battle between the Internet Protocol community (computing/telecom hardware manufacturers, service providers, users) and the Intellectual Property industry (RIAA/MPAA/etc.)?
And never use the "m-word"* to her. She's been known to say, "You don't have to use butter in this dish ... [wink] you can use cream instead."
I agree with Ms. Child and Mr. Brown that "fats satisfy.... they keep us fuller longer"; but I think the extent to which people "snack" has a lot to do with how they're wired, above the neck and below. It's not so much a matter of having enough will power, but more a matter of how much or how little will power you need to have in order to deal with what your body does.
*Margarine.
If Bill called Carly and said, "Sorry, seems there's a problem with our agreement with you to license Windows. We're very earger to work things out, but I'm afraid you're not going to be able to legally sell desktops, laptops, or servers running Windows until, oh, say, January. If you think Linux is so hot, why don't you try selling Linux systems at Best Buy?"
That's the exaggerated version (and would violate the terms of the proposed DoJ settlement); but subtler variations work, too. Microsoft controls HP's oxygen supply; and Dell's, and Gateway's, and ad infinitum. Only IBM has a committment to Windows plus a large line of non-Windows products to fall back on.
And that is why Microsoft is a monopoly.
Chapter (cached) from Steve McConnell's book, Rapid Development
"Chapter 43: Voluntary Overtime: Too much overtime and schedule pressure can damage a development schedule, but a little overtime can increase the amount of work accomplished each week and improve motivation. An extra four to eight hours a week increases output by 10 to 20 percent or more. A light-handed request to work a little overtime emphasizes that a project is important. Developers, like other people, want to feel important, and they work harder when they do."
"Use a developer-pull approach rather than a leader-push approach.... Gerald Weinberg points out that one of the best known results of motivation research is that increasing the driving force first increases performance to a maximum, and then drives it to zero (Weinberg 1971). He says that the rapid fall-off in performance is especially observable in complex tasks like software development: 'Pressing the programmer for rapid elimination of a bug may turn out to be the worst possible strategy-but it is by far the most common.'"
"Don't use overtime to try to bring a project under control.... Ask for an amount of overtime that you can actually get.... Beware of too much overtime, regardless of the reason."
Slashdot discussion of [Philip] "Greenspun on Managing Software Engineers"
The original is lost, but I squirrelled away some choice quotes:
"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week getting coordinated with other programmers and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week)...."
"If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6:00 pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer...."
Greenspun said the following in the Slashdot discussion:
"Most of the people at ArsDigita are young. They have no families. They have no personal reputation. Find me a 35-year-old who has accomplished a lot IN ANY FIELD, who has changed the world in some positive way, and who has never worked long hours. The articles I put on my various Web sites are not intended to help people who just want to live a quiet comfortable life (I'm not an expert on this). They are intended to help young people turn into Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman or Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston (Visicalc)."
"At ArsDigita we do tend to get fairly young people who are very bright. They want to do something that will impress their classmates from MIT or UCLA or Caltech or wherever. The key to successful management is to provide an inspiring goal that these guys and gals can buy into and then a working environment that lets them achieve the goal. It does result in some long hours but [at ArsDigita, at Greenspun's insistence] they have 5 weeks/year to recover. If they get sick of it they can always join a slacker company and work 40 hours/week."
"Let me say that I did not intend "Managing Software Engineers" to be the last word on the subject.... I don't want to be remembered for advocating a long work week. There is a lot more to the article and I certainly wouldn't advocate long hours to anyone who didn't love his or her job and wasn't learning every day."
(The banner ad for this page says, "Find a better job, NOW!" I tend to agree.)
The NYT article didn't include a picture, but this page on the Shop 2000 web site does.
For more on Ted Taylor -- his work on fission bombs, his participation in Project Orion, his speculations on how small a nuclear bomb could topple the World Trade Center towers (decades ago), and his concerns about nuclear proliferation -- I strongly recommend John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (BN). McPhee (BN) is an excellent writer, and this is one of his books I enjoyed the most.
You had a cornea transplant a few years ago (Google cache). How's it doing?
Shrinkwrapped licenses for books are clearly a violation of the doctrine of first sale (you do not own the rights to distribute the content of a book, but you completely own your copy of the the physical book, and may distribute that any way you please).
Each new insult is also one more bit of evidence that fair use is threatened. If this goes on -- and if we keep writing Congress, etc., every time it happens -- at some point, maybe things will be so visibly out of hand that there'll be serious public pressure to swing the pendulum back.
It won't happen by itself, but I cling to a shred of hope, no matter how thin. (Giving into despair doesn't help; think of hope as a modified Pascal's Wager.)
I look forward to this season's forthcoming episode on homebrewing. (Beer, guys, not electronics.)
Can you please say a few things about how you feel about beer: drinking it, cooking with it, brewing it yourself?
("Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew.")
You got into cooking via a theater degree and television work; an unconventional path, but you're an unconventional guy.
How did that background lead to a geeky approach to cooking, with lots of molecular diagrams and discussions of physics?
(I use "unconventional" and "geeky" as compliments, and hope you take them that way. You and Nigella Dawson do the most distinctive, and most enjoyable, cooking shows I've seen, each in its own way.)
Your book covers searing, grilling, roasting, frying, boiling, braising, brining, and microwaving ... but not baking. Did it not fit, or are you saving it for the next book, or what?
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
COBOL is for morons.
With respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
There are three classes of programmers out there:
First, those who say, "Dijkstra was a genius; if only every programmer followed his dictates."
Second, those who say, "Dijkstra was a complete iconoclast; he had a lot of good ideas, but his approach wasn't practical in the real world."
Third, those who say, "Dijkstra who?"
Sadly, there are a lot of third class programmers out there.
As a quote: "venting my ever-growing fury!"
As a paraphrase: The whole computer scene just stinks.
See if there's someone in your organization who can play the role of project manager: working with all four of you to break down the effort into pieces small enough to measure progress against (my rule of thumb: half a day to two days), who can track progress, who can be told about roadblocks and try to remove them.
... I guess assign busy work to any developer or developers you can't count on, document why you did so, get as much done as you can, and look for a new job. None of which is easy.
"The role of project management" for a four person project is not a full time responsibility! Someone with project management experience ought to be able to do it in 30 to 60 minutes per work day.
Sell it to your management this way. There are three roles: development, technical leadership, and project management. You have time to do two. At this rate, if you do the last two and ignore the first, the project is doomed. The last one is the only one an outsider might possibly help with.
If that doesn't work, then you need to be the project manager. Try really hard to be empowering and helpful. On the other hand, negotiate the following with your boss: "If any of these three is contributing zero or negative progress, I want the power to get him or her out. Transferred to another project, laid off, whatever; but not in my way."
If neither works
Good luck!
In the U.S. (where the bill has been proposed), 2002 is an election year. All members of the House of Representatives, and one third of the members of the Sentate, are up for re-election. Every one of them has at least one opponent (both major parties have already held their local primary elections).
Sure, write your elected officials. But write the people running against them, too. We want to send a clear message, no matter who wins in November.
For extra credit, in addition to the letters to D.C., write one to each "committe to [re]elect" (a.k.a. "Friends of Blah Blah Blah"), and enclose a personal check to the committee. (Do not send cash!) It doesn't have to be big; ten or twenty dollars is enough to get a little attention. Our money talks, too!
Absolutely gVim. I've used Vim 5.8, 6.0, and 6.1 (the gVim executable, not the console versions) regularly on Windows 98SE, NT, and 2K (and Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux, too, both console and GUI versions). It's never so much as dropped a character.
I have plenty of RAM on all the relevant systems (no less than 96M). If you've got less, try downloading SiSoft Sandra Standard, and check "Windows Memory Information" to see if you're running low.
I also reboot my Windows 98SE system about once a day.-|
What do you think of efforts to "create" AI by collecting huge amounts of information, such as the Mindpixel and Cyc projects?
I saw it at Costco (yclept Price Club) the other day. Stores like these (e.g., BJ's, Sam's Club) often have books at a discount of 30% or more. (No shipping charge either.-)
The book looked like a hoot.
It's not just a Perl book, but the language independent and Perl dependent parts are a godsend.
I was a full time Perl programmer (with a two hour commute by rail) when Friedl's book came out. I read it cover to cover, and then recommended it strongly to my co-workers.
Friedl shows how to write powerful, readable, efficient regular expressions that can do a lot of the work your program needs to do. It changed how my group wrote Perl (very much for the better). This is more than highly recommended; after the Blue Camel, and even before the Cookbook, this is a definitive book for all those who call themselves "Perl programmers."
(In the first edition of the book, Friedl discovered some problems with regular expressions in early versions of Perl 5. The very next release of Perl -- 5.003, I think -- immediately fixed these problems. When Larry & Co. pay attention to a Perl book, maybe you should, too?)