It involves a very large-scale version of "human-component" computing. It is set in Australia in the far future, when there are orbiting satellites that destroy any electrical devices (the satellites are left over from some long-past world war). So to have a "computer", one is constructed of conscripts, each of whom does a small part of the large program.
The whole series is good, and full of interesting extrapolations on this idea- including a "battle calculor", which is a trainload of people to perform calculations on-the-go. A little more cumbersome than a pocket calculator...
I agree that standards for security and other aspects of IT are a good thing. However, in my case, we're a group of about 10 people in a company of 400. We maintain networks/servers/vendor apps/custom apps, as well as developing new apps. We were told by our auditors to ensure that our existing standards met extremely vague "Controls", many of which have nothing IT-specific in them. This meant we had to guess at how strict the new standards would need to be to pass an audit, create the standards, and then hope that they will be good enough.
Many controls that I thought were already "reasonable" were deemed insufficient. For example, we don't let all developers log in to production systems to release updates. Only certain qualified developers can do that for each project. This seems "reasonable" to me.
We were told that this violated the controls, and *no* developers were allowed to log on to production systems. This is insane, since there is no way anyone other than a developer for the systems is qualified to do a release. It would be a much bigger risk to have a non-developer do it, but that's what was suggested.
If we had a bigger group, maybe we could afford to have a qualified person around just to do releases. But we certainly can't afford that here. And, as I mentioned, our existing process seems "reasonable".
This is just one example, I have a bunch more.
Another major area of overhead is the cost of the paperwork and useless approvals for every change to a system, even when there is no way the person approving the change can possibly understand the ramifications of the change. Peer-reviewing a change is much safer and more effective, but not sufficient (I'm told) because it doesn't separate responsibilities appropriately. So it needs to be signed-off by a Business Owner who in many cases neither understands nor cares about the technical details.
In general, your assumptions a through e are fine. But they (like SOx) leave a lot of room for interpretation, and the people doing the interpretation are the auditors, who may know very little about most aspects of IT. There are specific problems with how SOx seems to be applied, especially to small companies which can't afford the overhead. There are companies which managed OK (pre-SOx) with only a single-digit IT staff, and run secure, reliable operations because they have limited needs. But imposing a layer of paperwork on them will rapidly kill their ability to do so, because their technical time is soaked up by paperwork. And I have no idea how a company with an IT staff smaller than ours could possibly segregate responsibilites in a SOx-compliant way.
I think the big problem is that in practice, "reasonable" varies a great deal from auditor to auditor, and the same overhead is being demanded of all organizations, without regard to size.
The problem here is that SOX is very very vague in how it impacts IT. So the advice you get from an auditor is that you should use "Best Practices" for IT (like those defined by COBIT [do a google search for it]). These cover a great many things that have nothing specifically to do with SOx, but which add an enormous amount of documentation, approval, and other overhead. This is a huge time-sink. And evaluating existing systems and creating the processes to audit them is an even bigger sink. If the auditor insists you need it, you better have it or you fail, even if you don't think it applies. And each auditor has different standards....
Actually, I'm scheduled to do a demo just like this on Friday for my son's 2nd-grade class. Except I'm using bagels, cream cheese, and jelly (due to a no-peanuts policy in the school because of allergy issues). I thought I was bright in coming up with this myself, but maybe I read about it somewhere long ago and just forgot. I think it should be quite a bit of fun. Kids find it funny when adults do goofy things, and this way they get to be in control, too. It should get across the idea of just how specific you need to be in programming, and will introduce the concepts of testing and debugging, too. It makes clear that you have to spend quite a bit of time on your program, but once you do, you can run it over and over again. And at the end, they can eat the "output".
I'm also going to bring in some old CPUs with the top lifted so you can see the actual chip inside, and some old hard drives in varying sizes to show how they work and how the information is getting more and more dense. Most kids like to see the guts of stuff, and hands-on is a lot more fun than just pictures or lecturing.
I bought the Danny Dunn books on ebay (generally ex-library editions in pretty good shape) to read to my now 7-year-old son. I thought they held up pretty well, actually. There are some dated bits (the size of the computer in "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine"), but the science is generally accurate and most of them center on things that would be pretty cool even today (like a high-power portable laser, or a machine that can shrink you to the size of an ant).
Check out www.lasermyeye.com It was created by a friend of mine who had a bad experience with LASIK. She later found out that there were more tests her doctor should have done to determine if she was a good candidate for the procedure. The site is NOT a site that intends to scare you away from LASIK, it just informs you of less-commonly known info useful in makig a decision and preparing for LASIK if you decide to have it done.
The movie was direct-to-video, so there wouldn't be box-office numbers for it. The toy line was out for quite a while before the movie, and was popular enough that they decided to make the movie.
Actually, among the 6-year-and-up set in my son's school (in NJ), Bionicles are quite popular. And a few weeks ago we visited in Kentucky and they seemed to be quite popular there, too. I think the storyline and the fact that the sets are character-based make them popular. Plus the complex backstory and wide assortment of characters hits some of the same mental buttons as Pokemon, in that kids can develop a deep specialized knowledge area and be experts on it (even more than their parents).
Check out bzpower.com to see some of the Bionicle fan community.
By the way, even though Bionicle are built with quite a few specialized pieces, they are compatible with Lego Technic, and can be rebuilt to form as many different creatures as you can imagine (large numbers of which are currently populating my livingroom). They use quite a few technic pieces in their construction, especially in the larger Bionicle models, which are primarily standard technic pieces.
Maybe the huge licensing fees for Star Wars, Spiderman, and Harry Potter are part of the loss.
The difference is verification. With the current system, if I tell someone I will vote for their guy for $50, no one can verify whether I did or not, since I'm alone in the voting booth and don't get a receipt. If the system is changed so I can vote from home with someone sitting next to me, they can make sure I actually vote the way they want before they pay me.
This problem also exists with any system that gives you a decodable "receipt" for your vote.
Email guy- "Oh, how cute, they're saving all their spam! Maybe they're planning to donate it to needy people in Tunisia who don't get enough email?"
Internet guy- "Wow, they have Gator, Internet Optimizer, Cydoor, Aureate, *and* Comet Cursor, all on the same PC! Every 10 bytes of outbound data generates 20K of spyware logs!"
Security guy- "2 worms, 2 trojans, and 6 viruses. This disk shouldn't be reformatted, it should have a stake driven through it while immersed in silver-laden holy water, before being placed in a Chernobyl-class containment dome."
Hardware guy- "A Pentium 90 running Windows XP. That's only about, oh, 3 orders of magnitude below the recommended spec. I have a toaster that has more processing power, and all it needs to do is change the color of bread!"
I have no opinion on which is better, but at least Europeans get date formatting right. Who in their right mind would come up with the US format of mm/dd/yy? Heck, why not just intermix the digits, like mdmydy. Today is 014063...
with 1 Gb = 1000 Mb, if you max out the connection at the theoretical 100Mbps you'd hit the monthly 5Gb cap in 50 seconds. Of course, at actually achieveable rates, it would probably take a few minutes.
And after that, you could be paying $3 every few minutes. That sounds kind of pricey to me...
The book is a good survey of the very large.net world. It is not an in-depth view of any particular part, but gave me a very good overview of just what the parts *are*, so I could build a conceptual framework on which I could hang the detailed knowledge I got from other books. It was a quick read, too..net is a bunch of different things, including languages, language-independent libraries, a virtual machine, and standards for interoperability. The book covers all of that, walking the line between "too high-level to be useful" and "too detailed to grasp easily". It is trying to cover several different audiences, and succeeds pretty well, I think.
The book has "executive overview" summary sentences beside each paragraph, which are obviously aimed at, well, executives. But at the same time, the paragraphs themselves have good solid information about how the CLR works, how the libraries are structured, how VB.NET and C# are similar and where they differ, including actual code examples. It makes you aware of what pieces are out there, so when you need an encryption algorithm (for example), you know there are some standard library routines you can check out before coding one from scratch.
Don't get the book if all you want is a C# reference (get the O'Reilly book for that). As a matter of fact, don't get the book if you want a really in-depth discussion of any particular part.
*DO* get the book (or borrow it from the library, like I did) if you want to know more about the whole.net system and how it all fits together, and have a good base for the rest of the knowledge you need to collect.
1) Plain old IDE hard drive. I think a 60-hour TiVo has a 30-Gig HD in it.
2) Yes, most TiVos have a single drive in them, and have two IDE connectors available. So if you open them, you can drop in another drive. You have to first "Bless" it, using software that various smart folks have put together. "Dylan's Boot Disk" is the easiest way. You hook the drive to be added to your PC, boot off of the Dylan's floppy. It boots a tiny linux kernel. You then run blesstivo, and you are done. Take out the drive, pop it into your tivo, and turn it on and you are set. I don't know if anything is different for Series 2 TiVos, but you can find out way more than you want to know at: http://www.tivocommunity.com Click on "Tivo Underground" to see the message board discussing all sorts of tivo modifications and upgrades.
http://www.9thtee.com sells upgrade kits and also sells brackets, torx drivers, and other handy things if you want to do an upgrade.
The Tivo always tries to fill up "unused" space with programming matching your profile (called "Suggestions" in TiVo-speak). However, it will never delete a show that you explicitly recorded in order to make room for a Suggestion. So it will only use up any space that is not used by explicitly-requested shows.
It will remove older Suggestions to make room for newer suggestions, on the theory that if you were to want to watch a suggested program, you'd rather watch a more recent episode of The Simpsons than an older episode.
I think there is an option to turn off Suggestions altogether, although I don't really see what the point would be, unless you are like the weirdos in the article that care what their TiVo "thinks" of them. I wonder if they worry about the opinion that their coffeemaker holds of them?
A very good and easy-to-read book is "Don't Make Me Think", by Steve Krug. The book itself is an excellent example of how to communicate information clearly and concisely. As a result, it is quick and entertaining to read, while still imparting lots of useful info. It is not aimed specifically at software people, but that's a feature, not a bug.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an excellent SF novel (first in a series, actually), by Sean McMullen, called "Souls in the Great Machine"5 344572
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/076
It involves a very large-scale version of "human-component" computing. It is set in Australia in the far future, when there are orbiting satellites that destroy any electrical devices (the satellites are left over from some long-past world war). So to have a "computer", one is constructed of conscripts, each of whom does a small part of the large program.
The whole series is good, and full of interesting extrapolations on this idea- including a "battle calculor", which is a trainload of people to perform calculations on-the-go. A little more cumbersome than a pocket calculator...
I agree that standards for security and other aspects of IT are a good thing. However, in my case, we're a group of about 10 people in a company of 400. We maintain networks/servers/vendor apps/custom apps, as well as developing new apps. We were told by our auditors to ensure that our existing standards met extremely vague "Controls", many of which have nothing IT-specific in them. This meant we had to guess at how strict the new standards would need to be to pass an audit, create the standards, and then hope that they will be good enough.
Many controls that I thought were already "reasonable" were deemed insufficient. For example, we don't let all developers log in to production systems to release updates. Only certain qualified developers can do that for each project. This seems "reasonable" to me.
We were told that this violated the controls, and *no* developers were allowed to log on to production systems. This is insane, since there is no way anyone other than a developer for the systems is qualified to do a release. It would be a much bigger risk to have a non-developer do it, but that's what was suggested.
If we had a bigger group, maybe we could afford to have a qualified person around just to do releases. But we certainly can't afford that here. And, as I mentioned, our existing process seems "reasonable".
This is just one example, I have a bunch more.
Another major area of overhead is the cost of the paperwork and useless approvals for every change to a system, even when there is no way the person approving the change can possibly understand the ramifications of the change. Peer-reviewing a change is much safer and more effective, but not sufficient (I'm told) because it doesn't separate responsibilities appropriately. So it needs to be signed-off by a Business Owner who in many cases neither understands nor cares about the technical details.
In general, your assumptions a through e are fine. But they (like SOx) leave a lot of room for interpretation, and the people doing the interpretation are the auditors, who may know very little about most aspects of IT.
There are specific problems with how SOx seems to be applied, especially to small companies which can't afford the overhead. There are companies which managed OK (pre-SOx) with only a single-digit IT staff, and run secure, reliable operations because they have limited needs. But imposing a layer of paperwork on them will rapidly kill their ability to do so, because their technical time is soaked up by paperwork. And I have no idea how a company with an IT staff smaller than ours could possibly segregate responsibilites in a SOx-compliant way.
I think the big problem is that in practice, "reasonable" varies a great deal from auditor to auditor, and the same overhead is being demanded of all organizations, without regard to size.
The problem here is that SOX is very very vague in how it impacts IT. So the advice you get from an auditor is that you should use "Best Practices" for IT (like those defined by COBIT [do a google search for it]). These cover a great many things that have nothing specifically to do with SOx, but which add an enormous amount of documentation, approval, and other overhead.
This is a huge time-sink. And evaluating existing systems and creating the processes to audit them is an even bigger sink.
If the auditor insists you need it, you better have it or you fail, even if you don't think it applies. And each auditor has different standards....
Actually, I'm scheduled to do a demo just like this on Friday for my son's 2nd-grade class. Except I'm using bagels, cream cheese, and jelly (due to a no-peanuts policy in the school because of allergy issues).
I thought I was bright in coming up with this myself, but maybe I read about it somewhere long ago and just forgot.
I think it should be quite a bit of fun. Kids find it funny when adults do goofy things, and this way they get to be in control, too. It should get across the idea of just how specific you need to be in programming, and will introduce the concepts of testing and debugging, too. It makes clear that you have to spend quite a bit of time on your program, but once you do, you can run it over and over again. And at the end, they can eat the "output".
I'm also going to bring in some old CPUs with the top lifted so you can see the actual chip inside, and some old hard drives in varying sizes to show how they work and how the information is getting more and more dense. Most kids like to see the guts of stuff, and hands-on is a lot more fun than just pictures or lecturing.
I bought the Danny Dunn books on ebay (generally ex-library editions in pretty good shape) to read to my now 7-year-old son. I thought they held up pretty well, actually. There are some dated bits (the size of the computer in "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine"), but the science is generally accurate and most of them center on things that would be pretty cool even today (like a high-power portable laser, or a machine that can shrink you to the size of an ant).
Check out www.lasermyeye.com
It was created by a friend of mine who had a bad experience with LASIK. She later found out that there were more tests her doctor should have done to determine if she was a good candidate for the procedure.
The site is NOT a site that intends to scare you away from LASIK, it just informs you of less-commonly known info useful in makig a decision and preparing for LASIK if you decide to have it done.
Actually, among the 6-year-and-up set in my son's school (in NJ), Bionicles are quite popular. And a few weeks ago we visited in Kentucky and they seemed to be quite popular there, too. I think the storyline and the fact that the sets are character-based make them popular. Plus the complex backstory and wide assortment of characters hits some of the same mental buttons as Pokemon, in that kids can develop a deep specialized knowledge area and be experts on it (even more than their parents).
Check out bzpower.com to see some of the Bionicle fan community.
By the way, even though Bionicle are built with quite a few specialized pieces, they are compatible with Lego Technic, and can be rebuilt to form as many different creatures as you can imagine (large numbers of which are currently populating my livingroom). They use quite a few technic pieces in their construction, especially in the larger Bionicle models, which are primarily standard technic pieces.
Maybe the huge licensing fees for Star Wars, Spiderman, and Harry Potter are part of the loss.
The difference is verification. With the current system, if I tell someone I will vote for their guy for $50, no one can verify whether I did or not, since I'm alone in the voting booth and don't get a receipt.
If the system is changed so I can vote from home with someone sitting next to me, they can make sure I actually vote the way they want before they pay me.
This problem also exists with any system that gives you a decodable "receipt" for your vote.
Email guy- "Oh, how cute, they're saving all their spam! Maybe they're planning to donate it to needy people in Tunisia who don't get enough email?"
Internet guy- "Wow, they have Gator, Internet Optimizer, Cydoor, Aureate, *and* Comet Cursor, all on the same PC! Every 10 bytes of outbound data generates 20K of spyware logs!"
Security guy- "2 worms, 2 trojans, and 6 viruses. This disk shouldn't be reformatted, it should have a stake driven through it while immersed in silver-laden holy water, before being placed in a Chernobyl-class containment dome."
Hardware guy- "A Pentium 90 running Windows XP. That's only about, oh, 3 orders of magnitude below the recommended spec. I have a toaster that has more processing power, and all it needs to do is change the color of bread!"
I have no opinion on which is better, but at least Europeans get date formatting right. Who in their right mind would come up with the US format of mm/dd/yy? Heck, why not just intermix the digits, like mdmydy. Today is 014063...
Yes
Depends. Are your reproductive organs CompactFlash or GameBoy ROM compatible?
with 1 Gb = 1000 Mb, if you max out the connection at the theoretical 100Mbps you'd hit the monthly 5Gb cap in 50 seconds. Of course, at actually achieveable rates, it would probably take a few minutes.
And after that, you could be paying $3 every few minutes. That sounds kind of pricey to me...
The book is a good survey of the very large .net world. It is not an in-depth view of any particular part, but gave me a very good overview of just what the parts *are*, so I could build a conceptual framework on which I could hang the detailed knowledge I got from other books. It was a quick read, too. .net is a bunch of different things, including languages, language-independent libraries, a virtual machine, and standards for interoperability. The book covers all of that, walking the line between "too high-level to be useful" and "too detailed to grasp easily". It is trying to cover several different audiences, and succeeds pretty well, I think.
.net system and how it all fits together, and have a good base for the rest of the knowledge you need to collect.
The book has "executive overview" summary sentences beside each paragraph, which are obviously aimed at, well, executives. But at the same time, the paragraphs themselves have good solid information about how the CLR works, how the libraries are structured, how VB.NET and C# are similar and where they differ, including actual code examples. It makes you aware of what pieces are out there, so when you need an encryption algorithm (for example), you know there are some standard library routines you can check out before coding one from scratch.
Don't get the book if all you want is a C# reference (get the O'Reilly book for that). As a matter of fact, don't get the book if you want a really in-depth discussion of any particular part.
*DO* get the book (or borrow it from the library, like I did) if you want to know more about the whole
1) Plain old IDE hard drive. I think a 60-hour TiVo has a 30-Gig HD in it.
2) Yes, most TiVos have a single drive in them, and have two IDE connectors available. So if you open them, you can drop in another drive. You have to first "Bless" it, using software that various smart folks have put together. "Dylan's Boot Disk" is the easiest way. You hook the drive to be added to your PC, boot off of the Dylan's floppy. It boots a tiny linux kernel. You then run blesstivo, and you are done. Take out the drive, pop it into your tivo, and turn it on and you are set.
I don't know if anything is different for Series 2 TiVos, but you can find out way more than you want to know at:
http://www.tivocommunity.com
Click on "Tivo Underground" to see the message board discussing all sorts of tivo modifications and upgrades.
http://www.9thtee.com sells upgrade kits and also sells brackets, torx drivers, and other handy things if you want to do an upgrade.
The Tivo always tries to fill up "unused" space with programming matching your profile (called "Suggestions" in TiVo-speak). However, it will never delete a show that you explicitly recorded in order to make room for a Suggestion. So it will only use up any space that is not used by explicitly-requested shows.
It will remove older Suggestions to make room for newer suggestions, on the theory that if you were to want to watch a suggested program, you'd rather watch a more recent episode of The Simpsons than an older episode.
I think there is an option to turn off Suggestions altogether, although I don't really see what the point would be, unless you are like the weirdos in the article that care what their TiVo "thinks" of them. I wonder if they worry about the opinion that their coffeemaker holds of them?
A very good and easy-to-read book is "Don't Make Me Think", by Steve Krug. The book itself is an excellent example of how to communicate information clearly and concisely. As a result, it is quick and entertaining to read, while still imparting lots of useful info.
It is not aimed specifically at software people, but that's a feature, not a bug.