My school offers a degree taught largely through computer-mediation (called the executive or emba). Students (rather their employers) pay over $100K in tuition to participate in the program.
The students meet on campus once per month and then disperse for the remainder of the month's instruction. Computer-mediation comes into play in several ways:
1. The students receive canned lectures from professors on CD.
2. The students use collaboration environments such as e-rooms to share documents and interact with each other and the profs.
3. The students use teleconferencing.
Of these, the canned lectures are the most time consuming to produce and the least well received by students. It's like watching educational tv. Yes, you can get something out of it, but it is not necessarily very engaging.
The collaboration environments and teleconferencing work well. People like them and use them. These two technologies enable people to interact with each other and more easily share electronic artifacts. It's like IM on steroids. Note that on-line games seem to moving in this direction, enabling enhanced interaction between people vs. pure person-computer interaction.
I think the issue with improving the canned lectures on CD is that you would have to create something like a PC game to get it really interesting, and that is beyond the power of most academic institutions. Then, you still have the issue of people ultimately figuring out all of the machine's tricks and becoming bored.
In sum, my school's experience seems to suggest that enhancing and enabling interaction is a good role for computers in education.
The only real way to learn about some open source projects, unless you are on the inside, is by buying a $50 book. For instance, Ted Husted's Struts book (struts is a java-based web application framework), recently reviewed here, is the only place to learn about certain of that project's features without spending a week or two in generate and test mode, in constant contact with email groups. Other projects are also this way (e.g., Tomcat, a java-based web application server). Arguably, apache itself has been this way for a while without officially saying so, and sendmail has been this way *officially* for years now.
The point made by sendmail is that they need a way to support development. People who are not willing to develop should pay those who are. I suppose the question is: "where does it stop?" Should the product be unusable without the paid for help. Maybe that's a spot where it would be good to establish some open source standards of minimal usability that is expected without pay.
One thing that strikes me in this whole TCO debate is this quote from the article:
A recent Microsoft-sponsored study by researcher IDC concluded that servers based on Microsoft's Windows 2000 were cheaper to own and operate when used for networking, storing and sharing files, printing and security
In other words, TCO is higher when using open source to re-implement or ape standards often controlled by microsoft. This does not surprise me. Just look at the travails samba has gone through over the past 10 years. It's been a constant guessing game with Microsoft purposely changing standards to make it harder to use samba. Administrators are forced into maintenance beyond what is needed for windows systems, thereby bringing on higher TCO
What's interesting is that open source has the lower TCO for implementing open standards (e.g., web serving). In other words, by using open source to implement open standards both saves me money and gives me greater freedom.
Ultimately, there's a tipping point when enough hardware is running open source that it becomes worthwhile to move to non-microsoft standards. Then the game then becomes unfavorable to microsoft. The real TCO analysis should be done on companies that have implemented pure open source solutions without having to insert microsoft products in the mix. There are now examples out there in retail and the city of Largo, Fl. We should see analyses of those.
I think half the reason MS is so dominant is not the software but the books. Go to any bookstore. Somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the computer section is taken up with MS books from beginner to advanced. I often used MS books to learn programs like Excel and still do in teaching.
Lately, I have noticed open sourced projects almost leaving off documentation entirely. Look at the Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL) over at jakarta. They actually recommend books you can read, or if you are not willing to shell out, to look at the spec (which is actually somewhat accessible). The question is whether those books are as accessible as other books oriented at newbies or even intermediate users. Further, one might ask if an almost total lack of documentation in the extreme case (e.g., JSTL) is fair to the community.
I think the poster is ultimately correct. Open source is developed by the community for use by its own members. It is not unreasonable to expect people who want the fruits of that community to pay. Book publishing is one method for achieving that.
BTW, I do think packagers such as mozilla or redhat have a value-add, but others have already talked well about this.
Actually, I agree with the post just above this. Apple is giving away software, basically because it is *not* the value-added portion of the service. The value-added portion of their service is the provision of a back-up location and other niceties. This article is not how to steal those. Rather it is about how to use their value-less software to your own ends, while *still using their hardware*.
As you observe, I think your point 4 may have happened already to some degree. IBM and some other corporations are making OSS an integral part of their integration business.
If you have any insights as to how to fix the duplicate bug reports problem, it might be worth posting it as a story. One thought I have. Imagine, like Mozilla, that a large part of the application's state could be described using a serialized XML representation. The bug reporting mechanism could send this XML representation in as part of the normal process. Now, each bug report has a uniform state description attached. We could develop an automated way to compare state descriptions, perhaps something like collaborative filtering (basically finding states that have the most variables in common). Then your duplicates suddenly become votes for the same bug because you can automatically classify them as relating to that bug. You might even find relationships between bugs by clustering them based on state commonality.
I think the big challenge in open source today is enabling the *easy* interaction between developers and users. The interaction right now is just too costly for both parties. My cut would be that there needs to be further development of automated system slike Mozilla's talkback and that this type of bug reporting should become a *fundamental* aspect of Open Source Development. The current problem with talkback is that it only works for crashes. It would be nice if you had some sort of built-in interaction recording functionality that would allow people to click a button to send a brief playback along with a description of what they did not like.
I have given up on submitting bugs through bugzilla (not just complaints, I give what it must be like for developers below):
1. You have to log in. Sometimes the registration process requires a lot of information or hand shaking emails. It's an impediment.
2. You have to search for your bug. How are you going to find it? It's not a google-like search engine. You have to count on people submitting the bug with a description that you will understand.
3. You have to spend a lot of time describing your bug. What if others don't understand it? What if the developer does not understand it?
From a developer's perspective:
1. They are only getting the perspective of the ardent few. Will that help them expand the user base and make the project a success? Possibly not, since the majority of people who have problems might just give up.
2. Will they understand what people have described?
3. Will they be able to reproduce the bug? Do they have the configuration to do so?
You needed to read my second paragraph. This evidence is compatible with the idea that focusing on anger only makes you more angry. *That* idea is in direct contradiction to what was stated in the post.
The original post reports no empirical data. I've merely presented an alternative hypothesis and made an argument for its plausibility. Now, we have something to test.
The idea is that venting provides a sort of release so that people will not have to take out their rage on others. However, recent evidence by Bushman (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 6, 2002; not available on-line for free) suggests that venting actually increases anger. He ran an experiment in which he angered subjects, then distracted them to think about something else or allowed them to hit a punching bag to "vent" their anger. The punching bag group became more, not less, angry.
Having them punch a bag may have kept the focus of their anger more fully in mind. It may have also raised their physical arousal level (a correlate of anger) allowing them to better maintain their anger level.
Well, mine went through a similar situation but he was basically about to retire, so he just went to partial retirement. Sparta really had its heyday in the 80's with SDI. I think it was nice for my Dad to see that some of their work had come to fruition.
This project has been in the making a long time now. There have been lots of ups and downs, and the people doing it had to switch companies a few times. My dad worked on it with Owen Hofer starting in the late 70's (!). There's a real tribute to perseverance in how this thing ended up. Here's a little of what my dad had to say when I sent him the post:
Good for Owen. He is thorough, organized, and persevering. The project nearly died several times but he kept pushing. Thanks for sending it. I have sent it to Charles Hayes and Gil Miller, who were at lockheed with him and me, before he went to Sparta. Later I went. He was not fully appreciated at Sparta at first, but he has brought them in a real winner.
My observation recently is that a number of open source projects are moving to "closed source" revenue models. By this, I mean they are essentially charging a licensing fee to use the software. For instance, Redhat has recently released its Advanced Server 2.1. One can obtain srpm's for Advanced Server from their mirror sites but not ISO images as is possible with their other products. Advanced Server is targeted at people and corporations who want to use enterprise software such as Oracle. My contention is that it is likely almost impossible (or at least very difficult) to get a version of Advanced Server derived from the SRPMs to work for this purpose because of the specialized knowledge required to make a working distro that will in fact work with Oracle. Suse has done a similar thing with Suse Linux Enterprise Server 7, although the source is not so readily apparent as with Redhat. Redhat is $1500 and Suse $600.
Currently, United Linux has talked about a per seat licensing fee. Thus, for anyone but the hobbyist, the free as in beer aspect of OSS is disappearing. So what is the value proposition of OSS? Why shouldn't I just go with Microsoft or Sun under their shared source plans? Is this not in effect what OSS is becoming?
OSS adopting the closed source revenue model
on
Open Source Limitations?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Recently Redhat issued Advanced Server 2.1 and Suse Suse Linux Enterprise Server 7. Both are presumptively open source. You can get the source RPMs for the redhat product at their mirror sites. But to actually get working versions of the products, you have to shell out $1500 and $600 respectively. I would argue that the complexity of actually getting either product to work precludes just compiling from the sources, except perhaps for an expert few with time on their hands.
Contrast this scheme with the base version of each vendors product where you can get ISO images basically for free.
Enternprise Software Vendors are starting to support only the for-pay versions of Suse's and Redhat's products. For instance, Oracle 9i release 2 only has plans to support SLES 7 and AS 2.1, whereas before they supported the (basically available for free) stock distribution of Redhat and Suse. So what's the difference between open and closed source? Well with open source, you can look under the hood, and the licensing model does seem lower cost. But, the free lunch of just a year ago (when I installed Oracle 8i on RH 6.2) has gone away.
So, basically you have let me off the "moral" hook of having had to repost to prove my courage in the face of the DMCA. I am American, so you do not expect me to lie. Only a non-American (you are very Euro-centric in your response) could have taken the courageous role you propose.
Actually, it was not fear of the DMCA, but no desire to go to the trouble of hosting a mirror. However, had I obtained the changelog through the publically available site, wouldn't I have had to have lied?
There is another angle on this story provided by the register in this article that talks about UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) currently under consideration by a number of states. It would add a notion of implied warranty to all software including open source. The point of view taken by the the Register is that these warranties would discourage volunteer contributions to open source projects because possible legal penalties (independent of whether the software was sold for money) would fall back on the developers. Of course, it is hard to imagine that closed-source companies would be in favor of implied warranties, but the Register's perspective is thought provoking for open source.
Is your only direct source of information concerning this your boss? Be careful. It is not unheard of for bosses to distort information to their own ends. Would these "terrible" other jobs report to your boss or to someone else?
You sound like you are in a vulnerable situation and likely very stressed with the new baby on the way. Also, by demographic characteristics, you seem a bit of an outlier in your organization. This will initially cause social distance once people realize it.
Don't let these things stop you from building your network within the organization to include a large number of people who can both mentor and support you. Organizations are like microcosms of the external job market. You need to have other people who know you, appreciate you, and understand your value. There need to be alot of those for you to do well.
Try to think of ways to overcome any distance you may sense others feel. Find ways to join in with them socially, to perceive you not as a threat but a help. Participate in softball or after-hours drinks. The baby constrains things, but it is important not to drop out of sight.
Figure out how to get to know other bosses so that they will want you on their team. Find some way to chitchat with them. For instance, discuss their projects with them focusing on some aspect where you are knowledgeable and might show some insight.
What I fear from your message is that you are relying on your boss for too much of your connection at work. It also sounds like you are having pre-first baby anxiety adding to how bad the problem seems. Getting better social connections at work will help with both of these.
In this special issue (membership required beyond TOC) Science magazine has named nano-circuits the breakthrough of the year. Nano-circuits should allow circuits several orders of magnitude smaller than what we currently achieve with the best chip technologies today. However, the editors note that commercial fabrication is still along ways off, and we don't even know what a nano-fab plant will look like. The interesting point is that this breakthrough appears to push forward the standard boolean logic design used by current computing machinery. Although quantum computing is not ruled out (I suppose), it is not a pre-requisite.
This comment is not as obvious as it seems. The market will not accept the price performance trade-off it has been presented with on the desktop. Further, because of this price performance trade-off, no critical mass of users has built up to make it really worth it.
The handheld market could change an important part of this equation by increasing the base of other users I could interact with. Further, if it is sufficiently low cost, people might not mind low image quality or slow frame rates. I hold up as my example jpeg photography which is used a lot on the net. The quality is not photographic, but because of convenvience, it is finding alot of uses. Alot of people have them; everyone can read them.
Computer science is already like this. You are not taken seriously unless you can produce code. For instance, in his autobiography, "Models of My Life", Herb Simon of Carnegie-Mellon recounts the first AI conference. He and Al Newell won the right to edit the proceedings of the conference because they were the only ones with actually working code. Dave Touretzky, also of Carnegie-Mellon, is even more adamant on this point, and his web-site has been cited frequently in this forum as regards the DECSS. Dave is very respected in CS, see his views at:
This article from the register points up that there is much more to being anonymous than using an anonymizer. It's really a change in web lifestyle and a move back from credit to cash along with judicious use of third-party proxies and cutting off alot of convenience features in your browser. Even then, you have just made people go through a few more layers of indirection to get to you. This might insulate you (for a time) from annoying marketers, but it will not insulate you from the federal government.
In design, the logical construction of the program and its data structures should be relatively independent of the physical implementation of said.
Basically, as I read your question, you are using a logical design that is hierarchical (an object structure experessed in XML) and wondering if it would not make more sense to store it in a hierarchical database. Maybe.
However, relational databases form the current state of the art and have been highly optimized such that any theoretical performance gains from better matching of logical structure to physical lay-out in the database are likely outweighed. More generally, by insisting on a match between logical and physical lay-out, you would potentially be limiting yourself to a specific physical implementation, one that may not provide good performance relative to others.
A better solution to your problem might be something referred to as a persistence layer. This adds another layer of abstraction to your application, in the form of a mapping, between your logical design and your actual physical mode of storage. There now exist publically available free (as in beer, and in some cases open-source) tools that will automate this mapping. Generally, any performance hit from the abstraction should be made up in the speed of the superior physical implementation, and the freedom to switch later is also important.
Two that exist for java are castor available from exolab and a pilot implementation for Sun's emerging Java Data Objects standard (see http://java.sun.com for that tool).
As I see it, Linux is open-source and a community project. Does the DMCA keep developers within an organization from communicating with each other? No. Therefore, it should not keep Mr. Cox from communicating errata to the organization that develops Linux, which happens to be the open-source community.
Now, having said that, it seems that some sticky points may come up when you consider that there are commercial entities that profit from reselling linux or, if you will, conveniently packaging it. Could they claim commercial wrong by revealing possible exploits? Hmmm?
Perhaps the most pragmatic approach would be to alter the license that the code is distributed under to say that the user/repackager recognizes the right of individuals to specify the existence of security holes and how to fix them. That these specifications do not diminish the commercial value but rather enhance them.
Mind you, this is not the comprehensive solution that Mr. Cox seeks. However, it is a solution that may be better suited to the community to which Mr. Cox belongs...and more feasible to boot. The DMCA is something we in the US have been saddled with. We should not let it disrupt the open source process.
Why is this marked a troll? It's right on target, merely directly critical.
I went to the site listed in the post. That site was comical in its outraged critical tone toward Mr. Cox. However, the ftp site for non-Americans to view the changelog was correctly indicated. Frankly, it was a slap in the face to have to say you were not an American citizen to view the changelog.
Who would file a complaint to prosecute Mr. Cox under the DMCA? No one. Therefore, Mr. Cox's actions can only be viewed as themselves a troll, an unjustified insult.
Slashdot Mirror
My school offers a degree taught largely through computer-mediation (called the executive or emba). Students (rather their employers) pay over $100K in tuition to participate in the program.
The students meet on campus once per month and then disperse for the remainder of the month's instruction. Computer-mediation comes into play in several ways:
1. The students receive canned lectures from professors on CD.
2. The students use collaboration environments such as e-rooms to share documents and interact with each other and the profs.
3. The students use teleconferencing.
Of these, the canned lectures are the most time consuming to produce and the least well received by students. It's like watching educational tv. Yes, you can get something out of it, but it is not necessarily very engaging.
The collaboration environments and teleconferencing work well. People like them and use them. These two technologies enable people to interact with each other and more easily share electronic artifacts. It's like IM on steroids. Note that on-line games seem to moving in this direction, enabling enhanced interaction between people vs. pure person-computer interaction.
I think the issue with improving the canned lectures on CD is that you would have to create something like a PC game to get it really interesting, and that is beyond the power of most academic institutions. Then, you still have the issue of people ultimately figuring out all of the machine's tricks and becoming bored.
In sum, my school's experience seems to suggest that enhancing and enabling interaction is a good role for computers in education.
The only real way to learn about some open source projects, unless you are on the inside, is by buying a $50 book. For instance, Ted Husted's Struts book (struts is a java-based web application framework), recently reviewed here, is the only place to learn about certain of that project's features without spending a week or two in generate and test mode, in constant contact with email groups. Other projects are also this way (e.g., Tomcat, a java-based web application server). Arguably, apache itself has been this way for a while without officially saying so, and sendmail has been this way *officially* for years now.
The point made by sendmail is that they need a way to support development. People who are not willing to develop should pay those who are. I suppose the question is: "where does it stop?" Should the product be unusable without the paid for help. Maybe that's a spot where it would be good to establish some open source standards of minimal usability that is expected without pay.
In other words, TCO is higher when using open source to re-implement or ape standards often controlled by microsoft. This does not surprise me. Just look at the travails samba has gone through over the past 10 years. It's been a constant guessing game with Microsoft purposely changing standards to make it harder to use samba. Administrators are forced into maintenance beyond what is needed for windows systems, thereby bringing on higher TCO
What's interesting is that open source has the lower TCO for implementing open standards (e.g., web serving). In other words, by using open source to implement open standards both saves me money and gives me greater freedom.
Ultimately, there's a tipping point when enough hardware is running open source that it becomes worthwhile to move to non-microsoft standards. Then the game then becomes unfavorable to microsoft. The real TCO analysis should be done on companies that have implemented pure open source solutions without having to insert microsoft products in the mix. There are now examples out there in retail and the city of
Largo, Fl. We should see analyses of those.
I think half the reason MS is so dominant is not the software but the books. Go to any bookstore. Somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the computer section is taken up with MS books from beginner to advanced. I often used MS books to learn programs like Excel and still do in teaching.
Lately, I have noticed open sourced projects almost leaving off documentation entirely. Look at the Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL) over at jakarta. They actually recommend books you can read, or if you are not willing to shell out, to look at the spec (which is actually somewhat accessible). The question is whether those books are as accessible as other books oriented at newbies or even intermediate users. Further, one might ask if an almost total lack of documentation in the extreme case (e.g., JSTL) is fair to the community.
I think the poster is ultimately correct. Open source is developed by the community for use by its own members. It is not unreasonable to expect people who want the fruits of that community to pay. Book publishing is one method for achieving that.
BTW, I do think packagers such as mozilla or redhat have a value-add, but others have already talked well about this.
Actually, I agree with the post just above this. Apple is giving away software, basically because it is *not* the value-added portion of the service. The value-added portion of their service is the provision of a back-up location and other niceties. This article is not how to steal those. Rather it is about how to use their value-less software to your own ends, while *still using their hardware*.
As you observe, I think your point 4 may have happened already to some degree. IBM and some other corporations are making OSS an integral part of their integration business.
If you have any insights as to how to fix the duplicate bug reports problem, it might be worth posting it as a story. One thought I have. Imagine, like Mozilla, that a large part of the application's state could be described using a serialized XML representation. The bug reporting mechanism could send this XML representation in as part of the normal process. Now, each bug report has a uniform state description attached. We could develop an automated way to compare state descriptions, perhaps something like collaborative filtering (basically finding states that have the most variables in common). Then your duplicates suddenly become votes for the same bug because you can automatically classify them as relating to that bug. You might even find relationships between bugs by clustering them based on state commonality.
I think the big challenge in open source today is enabling the *easy* interaction between developers and users. The interaction right now is just too costly for both parties. My cut would be that there needs to be further development of automated system slike Mozilla's talkback and that this type of bug reporting should become a *fundamental* aspect of Open Source Development. The current problem with talkback is that it only works for crashes. It would be nice if you had some sort of built-in interaction recording functionality that would allow people to click a button to send a brief playback along with a description of what they did not like.
I have given up on submitting bugs through bugzilla (not just complaints, I give what it must be like for developers below):
1. You have to log in. Sometimes the registration process requires a lot of information or hand shaking emails. It's an impediment.
2. You have to search for your bug. How are you going to find it? It's not a google-like search engine. You have to count on people submitting the bug with a description that you will understand.
3. You have to spend a lot of time describing your bug. What if others don't understand it? What if the developer does not understand it?
From a developer's perspective:
1. They are only getting the perspective of the ardent few. Will that help them expand the user base and make the project a success? Possibly not, since the majority of people who have problems might just give up.
2. Will they understand what people have described?
3. Will they be able to reproduce the bug? Do they have the configuration to do so?
Just my two cents,
Bud
You needed to read my second paragraph. This evidence is compatible with the idea that focusing on anger only makes you more angry. *That* idea is in direct contradiction to what was stated in the post.
The original post reports no empirical data. I've merely presented an alternative hypothesis and made an argument for its plausibility. Now, we have something to test.
The idea is that venting provides a sort of release so that people will not have to take out their rage on others. However, recent evidence by Bushman (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 6, 2002; not available on-line for free) suggests that venting actually increases anger. He ran an experiment in which he angered subjects, then distracted them to think about something else or allowed them to hit a punching bag to "vent" their anger. The punching bag group became more, not less, angry.
Having them punch a bag may have kept the focus of their anger more fully in mind. It may have also raised their physical arousal level (a correlate of anger) allowing them to better maintain their anger level.
Well, mine went through a similar situation but he was basically about to retire, so he just went to partial retirement. Sparta really had its heyday in the 80's with SDI. I think it was nice for my Dad to see that some of their work had come to fruition.
My observation recently is that a number of open source projects are moving to "closed source" revenue models. By this, I mean they are essentially charging a licensing fee to use the software. For instance, Redhat has recently released its Advanced Server 2.1. One can obtain srpm's for Advanced Server from their mirror sites but not ISO images as is possible with their other products. Advanced Server is targeted at people and corporations who want to use enterprise software such as Oracle. My contention is that it is likely almost impossible (or at least very difficult) to get a version of Advanced Server derived from the SRPMs to work for this purpose because of the specialized knowledge required to make a working distro that will in fact work with Oracle. Suse has done a similar thing with Suse Linux Enterprise Server 7, although the source is not so readily apparent as with Redhat. Redhat is $1500 and Suse $600.
Currently, United Linux has talked about a per seat licensing fee. Thus, for anyone but the hobbyist, the free as in beer aspect of OSS is disappearing. So what is the value proposition of OSS? Why shouldn't I just go with Microsoft or Sun under their shared source plans? Is this not in effect what OSS is becoming?
Recently Redhat issued Advanced Server 2.1 and Suse Suse Linux Enterprise Server 7. Both are presumptively open source. You can get the source RPMs for the redhat product at their mirror sites. But to actually get working versions of the products, you have to shell out $1500 and $600 respectively. I would argue that the complexity of actually getting either product to work precludes just compiling from the sources, except perhaps for an expert few with time on their hands.
Contrast this scheme with the base version of each vendors product where you can get ISO images basically for free.
Enternprise Software Vendors are starting to support only the for-pay versions of Suse's and Redhat's products. For instance, Oracle 9i release 2 only has plans to support SLES 7 and AS 2.1, whereas before they supported the (basically available for free) stock distribution of Redhat and Suse. So what's the difference between open and closed source? Well with open source, you can look under the hood, and the licensing model does seem lower cost. But, the free lunch of just a year ago (when I installed Oracle 8i on RH 6.2) has gone away.
So, basically you have let me off the "moral" hook of having had to repost to prove my courage in the face of the DMCA. I am American, so you do not expect me to lie. Only a non-American (you are very Euro-centric in your response) could have taken the courageous role you propose.
Actually, it was not fear of the DMCA, but no desire to go to the trouble of hosting a mirror. However, had I obtained the changelog through the publically available site, wouldn't I have had to have lied?
Well, after the highly offensive campaign to force Americans to say they were not Americans before they could see the kernel changelog for security issues, should we turn about and do the same to Europeans?
There is another angle on this story provided by the register in this article that talks about UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) currently under consideration by a number of states. It would add a notion of implied warranty to all software including open source. The point of view taken by the the Register is that these warranties would discourage volunteer contributions to open source projects because possible legal penalties (independent of whether the software was sold for money) would fall back on the developers. Of course, it is hard to imagine that closed-source companies would be in favor of implied warranties, but the Register's perspective is thought provoking for open source.
Is your only direct source of information concerning this your boss? Be careful. It is not unheard of for bosses to distort information to their own ends. Would these "terrible" other jobs report to your boss or to someone else?
You sound like you are in a vulnerable situation and likely very stressed with the new baby on the way. Also, by demographic characteristics, you seem a bit of an outlier in your organization. This will initially cause social distance once people realize it.
Don't let these things stop you from building your network within the organization to include a large number of people who can both mentor and support you. Organizations are like microcosms of the external job market. You need to have other people who know you, appreciate you, and understand your value. There need to be alot of those for you to do well.
Try to think of ways to overcome any distance you may sense others feel. Find ways to join in with them socially, to perceive you not as a threat but a help. Participate in softball or after-hours drinks. The baby constrains things, but it is important not to drop out of sight.
Figure out how to get to know other bosses so that they will want you on their team. Find some way to chitchat with them. For instance, discuss their projects with them focusing on some aspect where you are knowledgeable and might show some insight.
What I fear from your message is that you are relying on your boss for too much of your connection at work. It also sounds like you are having pre-first baby anxiety adding to how bad the problem seems. Getting better social connections at work will help with both of these.
Good luck.
In this special issue (membership required beyond TOC) Science magazine has named nano-circuits the breakthrough of the year. Nano-circuits should allow circuits several orders of magnitude smaller than what we currently achieve with the best chip technologies today. However, the editors note that commercial fabrication is still along ways off, and we don't even know what a nano-fab plant will look like. The interesting point is that this breakthrough appears to push forward the standard boolean logic design used by current computing machinery. Although quantum computing is not ruled out (I suppose), it is not a pre-requisite.
This comment is not as obvious as it seems. The market will not accept the price performance trade-off it has been presented with on the desktop. Further, because of this price performance trade-off, no critical mass of users has built up to make it really worth it.
The handheld market could change an important part of this equation by increasing the base of other users I could interact with. Further, if it is sufficiently low cost, people might not mind low image quality or slow frame rates. I hold up as my example jpeg photography which is used a lot on the net. The quality is not photographic, but because of convenvience, it is finding alot of uses. Alot of people have them; everyone can read them.
Computer science is already like this. You are not taken seriously unless you can produce code. For instance, in his autobiography, "Models of My Life", Herb Simon of Carnegie-Mellon recounts the first AI conference. He and Al Newell won the right to edit the proceedings of the conference because they were the only ones with actually working code. Dave Touretzky, also of Carnegie-Mellon, is even more adamant on this point, and his web-site has been cited frequently in this forum as regards the DECSS. Dave is very respected in CS, see his views at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst
This article from the register points up that there is much more to being anonymous than using an anonymizer. It's really a change in web lifestyle and a move back from credit to cash along with judicious use of third-party proxies and cutting off alot of convenience features in your browser. Even then, you have just made people go through a few more layers of indirection to get to you. This might insulate you (for a time) from annoying marketers, but it will not insulate you from the federal government.
In design, the logical construction of the program and its data structures should be relatively independent of the physical implementation of said.
Basically, as I read your question, you are using a logical design that is hierarchical (an object structure experessed in XML) and wondering if it would not make more sense to store it in a hierarchical database. Maybe.
However, relational databases form the current state of the art and have been highly optimized such that any theoretical performance gains from better matching of logical structure to physical lay-out in the database are likely outweighed. More generally, by insisting on a match between logical and physical lay-out, you would potentially be limiting yourself to a specific physical implementation, one that may not provide good performance relative to others.
A better solution to your problem might be something referred to as a persistence layer. This adds another layer of abstraction to your application, in the form of a mapping, between your logical design and your actual physical mode of storage. There now exist publically available free (as in beer, and in some cases open-source) tools that will automate this mapping. Generally, any performance hit from the abstraction should be made up in the speed of the superior physical implementation, and the freedom to switch later is also important.
Two that exist for java are castor available from exolab and a pilot implementation for Sun's emerging Java Data Objects standard (see http://java.sun.com for that tool).
As I see it, Linux is open-source and a community project. Does the DMCA keep developers within an organization from communicating with each other? No. Therefore, it should not keep Mr. Cox from communicating errata to the organization that develops Linux, which happens to be the open-source community.
Now, having said that, it seems that some sticky points may come up when you consider that there are commercial entities that profit from reselling linux or, if you will, conveniently packaging it. Could they claim commercial wrong by revealing possible exploits? Hmmm?
Perhaps the most pragmatic approach would be to alter the license that the code is distributed under to say that the user/repackager recognizes the right of individuals to specify the existence of security holes and how to fix them. That these specifications do not diminish the commercial value but rather enhance them.
Mind you, this is not the comprehensive solution that Mr. Cox seeks. However, it is a solution that may be better suited to the community to which Mr. Cox belongs...and more feasible to boot. The DMCA is something we in the US have been saddled with. We should not let it disrupt the open source process.
Why is this marked a troll? It's right on target, merely directly critical.
I went to the site listed in the post. That site was comical in its outraged critical tone toward Mr. Cox. However, the ftp site for non-Americans to view the changelog was correctly indicated. Frankly, it was a slap in the face to have to say you were not an American citizen to view the changelog.
Who would file a complaint to prosecute Mr. Cox under the DMCA? No one. Therefore, Mr. Cox's actions can only be viewed as themselves a troll, an unjustified insult.