It seems to me there are two problems with licensing programs for software engineers, one of which is theoretical and the other practical.
The practical one first: what does it take to get a license? If it's just passing an examination, then that proves nothing... except whether or not the engineer in question can pass the exam. It says nothing about whether or not the engineer uses safe coding practices, writes programs which are reliable, or is mentally stable (and therefore won't implant dangerous easter eggs). At best, all it is going to prove is that the engineer is familiar with a particular programming idiom and/or API... which is certainly desirable, but again, is far from sufficient --- especially when you consider that an idiom or an API, for an experienced programmer, is learnable; and it's the ability to learn that is unquantifiable, and mostly untestable.
Then the theoretical problem: one of the things that licensing schemes _since the middle ages_ have been used for is to restrict entry into the labor market. The midieval guilds set up criteria which made it next to impossible for newcomers to get into the market without years of what was essentially slave labor, not for the purpose of protecting the midieval consumer, but for the purpose of protecting the jobs of the guild-members. The modern AMA tends to do the same thing --- schools which license too many new doctors are threatened with having their license to be schools of medicine revoked --- with officially pure motives, of course. How long would it take for a licensing scheme for software engineers, however well motivated to begin with, to degenerate in such a direction?
One of the things that is cool about the software world is that there are next to no artificial barriers: if you have sufficient skill, you can pretty much do what you want. It would not be a good thing to sacrifice that, and build up new barriers to entry into the field, even for an admittably worthwhile goal: the cure would be more of a problem than the disease was.
I'm struck lately by how being afraid of things seems to stimulate exactly that which we fear; it's almost as if the cosmos has some sick sense of humor.
So middle-aged Americans, uncertain of what made the kids in Littleton snap, are afraid that it could happen at their children's school, and are looking for scapegoats because it's always easier to blame something external than to take a long hard look at the things you consider normal or natural...
And when they find the scapegoats, they single them out, and repress them, and apply subtle and not-so-subtle levers of harassment... thus intensifying the anger and rage that those scapegoats, already feeling outside of the system, feel... making it more likely that someone else will snap.
Out of fear that you'll harm me, i'll treat you like shit, and then you'll want to harm me.
*sigh*
Last paragraph: will they ever come to understand?
on
ISP Sues Spammer
·
· Score: 1
There's an issue here which goes beyond spam, though, that badly needs to be addressed:
most industrial countries have laws that regulate truth in advertising; if, for example, you advertise a product at price X in California, you are required to sell it at price X, even if the advertisement was in error. Similarly, you aren't allowed to call yourself "organic" produce unless you meet certain rules, etc, etc.
The internet blows these rules out of the water. If someone in Germany is advertising something as organic in a way which is legitimate under their laws but not under California's, and I buy something which is kinda-sorta-not-really organic from them, can I sue? Under California law I probably can; how does it get resolved?
More to the point are situations where the actual advertisement would be illegal in both countries, but because of jurisdictional issues it's impossible to prosecute --- as if California insisted that I had to sue in German court, but Germany insisted that I had to sue in California court.
Countries asking for the right to block advertisements and spam is a first step towards trying to resolve _this_ issue, not just the spamming issue. I'm not certain I like the direction the steps are going in --- but then, too, i'm not certain I know what the right solution is, either.
The problem with this article is that it reviews industry drug use in one area and attempts to make a generalization across the entire industry.
I'm a computer programmer in Santa Cruz. Surprising fact: about half of the programmers I know here smoke marijuana, use hallucinogens, or both. But that's not a good sample for the industry as a whole; it's too tied up in the side-effects of our local culture.
Same for the UK. It's not possible, yet, to make industry-wide generalizations --- we're too young an industry, and in some sense, too rooted in whatever area we call home, for that to work.
The argument for why this is bad, as seen by the claims that this is just like 1984, is an incarnation of the slippery-slope argument: once your privacy is violated in this manner, who will draw a line stopping further violations, where will the line be drawn, and how will it be drawable?
Are slippery slope arguments valid? This is essentially the same argument that was used to justify the Vietnam War; it's like we're replaying that old nursery rhyme about how, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. And yet...
We live in a world, now, where video cameras watch the public squares in many major cities (so the police can cut down on crime). Where parents log into the web to watch their children's day care center. Where televisions record their owner's viewing habits.
It doesn't appear that anyone _is_ drawing a line, and so the slippery slope argument is getting stronger... because we're slipping down it. Each invasion of privacy is perfectly rationally justified, and even supported by many people; and yet, when you take them as a whole, it becomes something sinister and dark --- we are running the risk of turning into a modern-day Venice, where the authorities are watching us at every turn. And we're helping it along --- we allow our televisions to record our viewing habits, and then someday those records will get subpeanoad. (sp?) [Hey! look at him! he used to watch the playboy channel, the allegations that he's a child molester must be true!]
David Brin suggests in his book that the solution is to throw the floodgates open, and allow _anyone_ to violate your privacy, rather than just the authorities. I'm not sure I buy that... it scares me... but something has to be done, and soon.
This might be a case where we could take a lesson from history.
When CDs first became popular, it was evident that the production costs of CDs were _lower_ than the production costs of cassettes -- sure the production equipment was more expensive, but the production media was infinitely cheaper.
Yet today new CDs cost, usually, on the order of 1.5 times as much as new cassettes. Some of that is rationalized by the better sound quality, longer lifespan, what have you of CDs... but the fact remains that, while these facts increase the amount the customer is willing to pay, they don't increase the cost --- so the resultant profit margin is much, much higher.
Given that the recording industry was so successful getting us to pay ridiculous amounts for CDs, why wouldn't they try with online streams, too? They're just going on what they see as established fact, that music consumers are chumps willing to be screwed by a big corporation.
OK, so microsoft gained an enormous profit by doing illegal things, and as a result, the state has a right to take away their ability to do so. So far so good.
But isn't there a danger that by over-regulating microsoft, what would really be accomplished is a sort of affirmative action for microsoft competitors? In the end, how is requiring MS to not use software patents in the fashion that other companies are allowed to (for example) any different than Germany prohibiting neo-nazi parties, or some university establishing a quota for under-represented minorities?
Whatever happens to microsoft should be something which levels the playing field, not something that creates a situation where microsoft is the victim of legal discrimination just because we don't like them.
The problem with requiring MS to release documentation on its interfaces is that it assumes that said documentation exists in a meaningful form.
Now, I'm as anti-microsoft as the next guy. But I tend to believe in stupidity as a side effect of human effort rather than actual malice, in most cases; and I think it's more likely that MS releases undocumented and incompatible interfaces because the teams responsible for developing them didn't thoroughly document them --- they're incompatible because different teams within the company didn't know what each other were doing.
This creates an image of MS as being a massive bureaucracy --- like if the federal government were responsible for developing software, only it figured out it had to do it fast, so it decided to do the paperwork later, and never got around to it.
Fox allowing only 1 screen/theater?
on
Star Wars Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
Of course they'll be able to fill up to capacity. But they're corporations. They're afraid of the world. Risk is bad in the corporate mind-set. And anything you haven't done before appears risky, even if it isn't really.
One of the problems Linux has in the corporate world, at least in my experience, is somewhat self-reinforcing: lack of experience with it on the part of understaffed IS teams.
The company I work for hosts newsgroups (that are actually fairly successful). The first iteration of this was done using a web-based interface using Lotus Domino; it was, quite literally, a piece of crap, and that was abandoned after several months. It was replaced by a netscrape server --- which had constant problems with load balancing, and would go down erratically.
Attempts to convince IS to replace it with something more stable --- linux, say, running INews --- were shrugged off with "but we can get support from Netscape."
In recent months, this mantra has changed to: "but we don't have anyone here who has the time to learn how to do that, and we can't hire anyone new."
This suggests that, as more people learn, there will be a snowball effect --- at the very least, this particular excuse will go away.
The potential problem --- and I say potential because i'm far from convinced that filters will automagically lead to this --- is that, if everyone is filtering their news down to only what they want to hear, then (a) there will be little to no cross-exposure to new ideas. [this problem already exists in overly-specialized scientific fields.] (b) there will be no common information base; without a shared set of information, an established court (if you will), what basis is there for discussion of anything?
One of the problems in western society is that we became, with the coming of urbanization and the industrial revolution, significantly more atomized and disconnected from one another than _most_ people had been in the past. The modern consumer economy is accelerating that trend... and the net has the potential to be a partial antidote to it. But it can also be used to exacerbate it...
Similarly, i've been working for about a month on a large project where I need to graft a new feature into an existing code base (that I know nothing about). I've managed to add ~1000 lines in that time; the rest of the month i've had to spend analyzing how to manipulate the existing code to make it do what I want.
That sounds silly, I know, but consider: if NOW in our timeline, measured from the beginning of the universe, is about the average time it takes for intelligent life to develop and reach space-faring capability, then there are a bunch of races, scattered across the universe, just now developing the ability.... which will mean for one hell of a party when we all start meeting each other.:)
It's fairly common in Europe for movies to have ads before them --- what we have here pales in comparison to the endless cigarette ads in a German theatre.
Fox allowing only 1 screen/theater?
on
Star Wars Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
What I saw --- at www.scific.com, which may or may not be reliable --- is that lucas has said: (1) one print per theatre. sharing prints among multiple theatres degrades quality. (2) multiplexes must show in largest theatre. (3) theatres can get multiple prints, but they have to agree to show each print for a full 8-week run.
Requirement #2 doesn't seem too difficult --- of _course_ they're going to put it in the biggest theatre.
#3 might be tougher: multiplexes have to commit, and that's something all corporates hate doing.
The biggest problem with AC is the lack of information about the technology --- there's no Civilopedia equivalent, so the terminology takes on this wierd sort of not-real flavor, and it makes the commitment to the game a lot smaller.
CTP does not suffer from this flaw. It's UI is annoying, and a bunch of people have been whining in the activision forum about how their pet Civ strategies don't work any more, bu t it's a really cool game.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me there are two problems with licensing programs for software engineers, one of which is theoretical and the other practical.
... except whether or not the engineer in question can pass the exam. It says nothing about whether or not the engineer uses safe coding practices, writes programs which are reliable, or is mentally stable (and therefore won't implant dangerous easter eggs). At best, all it is going to prove is that the engineer is familiar with a particular programming idiom and/or API ... which is certainly desirable, but again, is far from sufficient --- especially when you consider that an idiom or an API, for an experienced programmer, is learnable; and it's the ability to learn that is unquantifiable, and mostly untestable.
The practical one first: what does it take to get a license? If it's just passing an examination, then that proves nothing
Then the theoretical problem: one of the things that licensing schemes _since the middle ages_ have been used for is to restrict entry into the labor market. The midieval guilds set up criteria which made it next to impossible for newcomers to get into the market without years of what was essentially slave labor, not for the purpose of protecting the midieval consumer, but for the purpose of protecting the jobs of the guild-members. The modern AMA tends to do the same thing --- schools which license too many new doctors are threatened with having their license to be schools of medicine revoked --- with officially pure motives, of course. How long would it take for a licensing scheme for software engineers, however well motivated to begin with, to degenerate in such a direction?
One of the things that is cool about the software world is that there are next to no artificial barriers: if you have sufficient skill, you can pretty much do what you want. It would not be a good thing to sacrifice that, and build up new barriers to entry into the field, even for an admittably worthwhile goal: the cure would be more of a problem than the disease was.
I'm struck lately by how being afraid of things seems to stimulate exactly that which we fear; it's almost as if the cosmos has some sick sense of humor.
...
... thus intensifying the anger and rage that those scapegoats, already feeling outside of the system, feel ... making it more likely that someone else will snap.
So middle-aged Americans, uncertain of what made the kids in Littleton snap, are afraid that it could happen at their children's school, and are looking for scapegoats because it's always easier to blame something external than to take a long hard look at the things you consider normal or natural
And when they find the scapegoats, they single them out, and repress them, and apply subtle and not-so-subtle levers of harassment
Out of fear that you'll harm me, i'll treat you like shit, and then you'll want to harm me.
*sigh*
There's an issue here which goes beyond spam, though, that badly needs to be addressed:
most industrial countries have laws that regulate truth in advertising; if, for example, you advertise a product at price X in California, you are required to sell it at price X, even if the advertisement was in error. Similarly, you aren't allowed to call yourself "organic" produce unless you meet certain rules, etc, etc.
The internet blows these rules out of the water. If someone in Germany is advertising something as organic in a way which is legitimate under their laws but not under California's, and I buy something which is kinda-sorta-not-really organic from them, can I sue? Under California law I probably can; how does it get resolved?
More to the point are situations where the actual advertisement would be illegal in both countries, but because of jurisdictional issues it's impossible to prosecute --- as if California insisted that I had to sue in German court, but Germany insisted that I had to sue in California court.
Countries asking for the right to block advertisements and spam is a first step towards trying to resolve _this_ issue, not just the spamming issue. I'm not certain I like the direction the steps are going in --- but then, too, i'm not certain I know what the right solution is, either.
The problem with this article is that it reviews industry drug use in one area and attempts to make a generalization across the entire industry.
I'm a computer programmer in Santa Cruz. Surprising fact: about half of the programmers I know here smoke marijuana, use hallucinogens, or both. But that's not a good sample for the industry as a whole; it's too tied up in the side-effects of our local culture.
Same for the UK. It's not possible, yet, to make industry-wide generalizations --- we're too young an industry, and in some sense, too rooted in whatever area we call home, for that to work.
The argument for why this is bad, as seen by the claims that this is just like 1984, is an incarnation of the slippery-slope argument: once your privacy is violated in this manner, who will draw a line stopping further violations, where will the line be drawn, and how will it be drawable?
...
... because we're slipping down it. Each invasion of privacy is perfectly rationally justified, and even supported by many people; and yet, when you take them as a whole, it becomes something sinister and dark --- we are running the risk of turning into a modern-day Venice, where the authorities are watching us at every turn. And we're helping it along --- we allow our televisions to record our viewing habits, and then someday those records will get subpeanoad. (sp?) [Hey! look at him! he used to watch the playboy channel, the allegations that he's a child molester must be true!]
... it scares me ... but something has to be done, and soon.
Are slippery slope arguments valid? This is essentially the same argument that was used to justify the Vietnam War; it's like we're replaying that old nursery rhyme about how, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. And yet
We live in a world, now, where video cameras watch the public squares in many major cities (so the police can cut down on crime). Where parents log into the web to watch their children's day care center. Where televisions record their owner's viewing habits.
It doesn't appear that anyone _is_ drawing a line, and so the slippery slope argument is getting stronger
David Brin suggests in his book that the solution is to throw the floodgates open, and allow _anyone_ to violate your privacy, rather than just the authorities. I'm not sure I buy that
This might be a case where we could take a lesson from history.
... but the fact remains that, while these facts increase the amount the customer is willing to pay, they don't increase the cost --- so the resultant profit margin is much, much higher.
When CDs first became popular, it was evident that the production costs of CDs were _lower_ than the production costs of cassettes -- sure the production equipment was more expensive, but the production media was infinitely cheaper.
Yet today new CDs cost, usually, on the order of 1.5 times as much as new cassettes. Some of that is rationalized by the better sound quality, longer lifespan, what have you of CDs
Given that the recording industry was so successful getting us to pay ridiculous amounts for CDs, why wouldn't they try with online streams, too? They're just going on what they see as established fact, that music consumers are chumps willing to be screwed by a big corporation.
OK, so microsoft gained an enormous profit by doing illegal things, and as a result, the state has a right to take away their ability to do so. So far so good.
But isn't there a danger that by over-regulating microsoft, what would really be accomplished is a sort of affirmative action for microsoft competitors? In the end, how is requiring MS to not use software patents in the fashion that other companies are allowed to (for example) any different than Germany prohibiting neo-nazi parties, or some university establishing a quota for under-represented minorities?
Whatever happens to microsoft should be something which levels the playing field, not something that creates a situation where microsoft is the victim of legal discrimination just because we don't like them.
The problem with requiring MS to release documentation on its interfaces is that it
assumes that said documentation exists
in a meaningful form.
Now, I'm as anti-microsoft as the next guy.
But I tend to believe in stupidity as a side
effect of human effort rather than actual
malice, in most cases; and I think it's more
likely that MS releases undocumented and
incompatible interfaces because the teams
responsible for developing them didn't
thoroughly document them --- they're incompatible
because different teams within the company didn't
know what each other were doing.
This creates an image of MS as being a massive
bureaucracy --- like if the federal government
were responsible for developing software, only
it figured out it had to do it fast, so it
decided to do the paperwork later, and never
got around to it.
Of course they'll be able to fill up to capacity. But they're corporations. They're afraid of the world. Risk is bad in the corporate mind-set. And anything you haven't done before appears risky, even if it isn't really.
One of the problems Linux has in the corporate world, at least in my experience, is somewhat self-reinforcing: lack of experience with it on the part of understaffed IS teams.
The company I work for hosts newsgroups (that are actually fairly successful). The first iteration of this was done using a web-based interface using Lotus Domino; it was, quite literally, a piece of crap, and that was abandoned after several months. It was replaced by a netscrape server --- which had constant problems with load balancing, and would go down erratically.
Attempts to convince IS to replace it with something more stable --- linux, say, running INews --- were shrugged off with "but we can get support from Netscape."
In recent months, this mantra has changed to: "but we don't have anyone here who has the time to learn how to do that, and we can't hire anyone new."
This suggests that, as more people learn, there will be a snowball effect --- at the very least, this particular excuse will go away.
The potential problem --- and I say potential because i'm far from convinced that filters will automagically lead to this --- is that, if everyone is filtering their news down to only what they want to hear, then
... and the net has the potential to be a partial antidote to it. But it can also be used to exacerbate it ...
(a) there will be little to no cross-exposure to new ideas. [this problem already exists in overly-specialized scientific fields.]
(b) there will be no common information base; without a shared set of information, an established court (if you will), what basis is there for discussion of anything?
One of the problems in western society is that we became, with the coming of urbanization and the industrial revolution, significantly more atomized and disconnected from one another than _most_ people had been in the past. The modern consumer economy is accelerating that trend
Similarly, i've been working for about a month
on a large project where I need to graft a new
feature into an existing code base (that I know
nothing about). I've managed to add ~1000 lines
in that time; the rest of the month i've had
to spend analyzing how to manipulate the
existing code to make it do what I want.
Maybe we aren't behind.
.... which will mean for one hell of a party when we all start meeting each other. :)
That sounds silly, I know, but consider: if NOW in our timeline, measured from the beginning of the universe, is about the average time it takes for intelligent life to develop and reach space-faring capability, then there are a bunch of races, scattered across the universe, just now developing the ability
It's fairly common in Europe for movies to
have ads before them --- what we have here
pales in comparison to the endless cigarette
ads in a German theatre.
What I saw --- at www.scific.com, which may or may not be reliable --- is that lucas has said:
(1) one print per theatre. sharing prints among multiple theatres degrades quality.
(2) multiplexes must show in largest theatre.
(3) theatres can get multiple prints, but they have to agree to show each print for a full 8-week run.
Requirement #2 doesn't seem too difficult --- of _course_ they're going to put it in the biggest theatre.
#3 might be tougher: multiplexes have to commit, and that's something all corporates hate doing.
The biggest problem with AC is the lack of information about the technology --- there's no Civilopedia equivalent, so the terminology takes on this wierd sort of not-real flavor, and it makes the commitment to the game a lot smaller.
:)
CTP does not suffer from this flaw. It's UI is annoying, and a bunch of people have been whining in the activision forum about how their pet Civ strategies don't work any more, bu t it's a really cool game.
of this week's DOONESBURY comic strip, which
...
is talking about a high-school aged girl putting
on a live webcam show of her daily life.
Bizarre, but real