Uhh...the odds of being hit by an asteroid at any particular time -- now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now -- are the same. The odds of being hit by an asteroid at *some* time are very high. The odds of being hit by an asteroid at any particular time are low, though I'd say far from nil. I think hiding our heads in the sand is not a very prudent approach to planning. You could use the same arguments about earthquakes -- "They don't happen very often, so don't bother to plan for what happens."
As far as blowing up the sun, I guess I'll let that concept pass without comment.
Pardon my bad manners in replying to my own post, but let me hasten to add that nothing in my above comment should be taken as support of the critic's extravagent conclusions, e.g. the Frank Poole anagram. I find that kind of coincidence-mapping totally boring -- like numerology or phrenology. As another poster observed, you can find a coincidence to support any ridiculous claim. What's the difference between a silly coicidence and a profound allegory? It's obviously in the eye of the beholder, with a smattering of common sense. So: images of Odysseus? Yeah, I can see that, it's part of our Zeitgeist. Frank Poole? I don't think so.
HAL isn't IBM moved down one letter each. It's Hueristic ALgorithm. -- jokrswild
But HAL *is* IBM moved down one letter each, regardless of the author's intent. Just because an author doesn't consciously intend something as an allusion doesn't make the connection invalid. Literature is full of accidental allusions and metaphors that add to the richness of the enclosing works.
Remember that the creative process is mysterious and complex, and we use many subconscious elements when writing, composing, painting, etc. Only a soulless, mechanical author would write by deliberately and systematically selecting images and themes to underlie a work. Good authors are often surprised to find parallels and echoes in their works, pointed out by their serious readers, which on reflection they realize must have been part of how those works evolved in their minds, and why those particular images struck the author as powerful and evocative.
Which is not to say that every coincidental detail has meaning. Obviously, you can easily read too much into something. But it is pointless (IMO) to say "the author didn't mean *this*, he meant *that*, because that's what he said in the introduction." There are plenty of good authors who admit they have no clue about how and why they construct their images they way they do; and plenty of others (T S Eliot comes to mind) who have deliberately misled the public about their sources and intent, chuckling long afterward about the lies they've told.
Is it significant that HAL is so similar to IBM? I dunno. But if you were a writer, who spent ten hours a day whacking away typing prose, who's to say what connections your fingers and brain might subconsciously make about a three-letter acronym? And besides, regardless of the author's intent, this image is part of the audience's consciousness, and affects how we react to the work. A work of art stands on its own, regardless of the author's intent (this is part of what makes it art). Of course, there's a valid discussion to have about whether 2001 can stand up to comparison with great works of art; perhaps it's simply not as internally rich. But that is beside the point.
Fair enough (particularly with respect to elaborate constructed interpretations like this one). But it can still be interesting to consider what other people have concluded, especially other people who have been able to devote substantial time, effort, and insight to the study of a particular piece. Reading a review is never a substitute for interpreting a work of art ourselves, but an thoughtful review can add dimension to our own vantage point, by highlighting details or similes that we might have missed, and raising questions we might have overlooked. And of course, in some cases there are contextual clues that a specialist can reveal -- for example, deliberate Biblical or Shakespearean allusions are often lost on today's audience, which is less familiar with these works than the audiences of yesteryear.
I've found works of criticism useful on various occasions. I agree it's no substitute for our primary experience, and I think many people use the criticism of others as a substitute for their own aesthetic; but I wouldn't dismiss all (most, perhaps, but not all!) criticism as wasted breath.
That being said, I find this particular type of criticism -- which tries to explain a work of art through elaborately contrived allegories, anagrams, metaphors, etc. as if a series of coincidences represent the author's intention -- generally to be uninteresting. As Freud reportedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." As another comment pointed out here, if you look hard enough for patterns, you can always find them, and you can make them support any conclusion you like. This is true in art and in life.
At any rate, I wish a lot of the focus of peer based projects would shift from simply being Peer to Peer!!! into specific implementations of peer based functionality, like resource discovery, content transfer, etc. -- PureFiction
Good points. Of course, these are the core problems of any network implementation. I'd say that, as an industry and as a science, we've done a poor job at developing robust discovery solutions that are both useful and resistant to degradation -- degredation due to malfunction, overloading, or black hat mischief.
This is another example of a situation where the availability of a flawed but usable solution creates de facto standards that are barriers to better solutions as they appear, and are disincentives to those who might invest effort to develop those better solutions.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me make the following comments, if anybody is still paying attention to this story. I've had a few email exchanges with the author of the salon story, David Wadler, who has made a number of posts here. I apparently pissed him off big time, and though doing so was not my intent, I thought it might be a nice gesture to clear the air.
I posted a comment a couple of days ago where I suggested that the author of the salon.com article might have fabricated the story as a work of fact-inspired fiction. I think I said this in a nice way: there's a great tradition of doing exactly this, both on the Internet and in literature. There's no shame in being a writer. And I furthermore don't think it was a stupid conjecture based on the text at hand.
Subsequent posts by him and by others have provided a wealth of plausible additional detail: names, locations, etc. The participants have vehemently maintained that the story was true in its essentials. I see no reason to doubt this. While it's always possible to construct a conspiracy theory for any outrageous chain of events, I see no reason why he and his colleagues would have maintained such a fiction to this point. (If this had been a work of fiction, he would have quietly smiled at the suggestion, or admitted his cleverness. So I have no reason to question what they say.)
Mr. Wadler seemed to resent the fact that I didn't do more research before making my suggestion that the story could be a fabrication. It's my contention that it is quite appropriate to draw conclusions from the text of an article as written, and that the burden of selection and presentation and plausibility falls to the author. Some things we read, and we *know* they're true. Other things we read, and we scratch our heads. I stand by my original assessment -- it *could* have been a fabrication. But I'm prepared to accept the author's assurances that it was not. (It didn't seem like such a big deal, since it all came out in the wash anyway. I thought the message was more important than its basis in fact. This is a useful cautionary tale for people embarking on a small business venture. It wouldn't be any less useful if Mr. W. had constructed it from his experience on half a dozen different startups, or from the stories of a dozen friends.)
Here's the rub, and the main reason for this post: In our email conversation, Mr. Wadler suggested that *I* post the text of one of his emails here on slashdot. I said I thought it would be more appropriate for *him* to post it, as a response to my last posted comment. (I felt that it might seem strange for me to be posting his message; it might look like I was one of his coworkers, posting under an alias. So rather than my shilling his point of view, I suggested that he post it directly, if he felt these were important points.)
I had good intentions, but this suggestion apparently pissed him off no end, and led to his accusing me of being intellectually immature, needing to grow some testicles, trying to hide in anonymity, etc. Well.
I don't understand what all the fuss was about, since I thought we were having a mature discussion until this turn of events. I still think it's odd for party A to post party B's message, except in certain situations. Part of the conflict, no doubt, came from my other email comments about startups, the software business, PHB's, etc. I meant well, but I probably came across as a dinosaur, since I've been in the biz for a very long time. But I wasn't accusing David W. of making stupid choices or being incompetent. (I mostly had sympathy, unlike the flamers who have just told him to "get over it." I've had so many friends in exactly this situation through the years.) I *did* say that it's hard to make the right call when you're in the thick of battle, and that even with hindsight, it's often hard to know what the right choice would have been.
Perhaps my general observations came across as personal slights, I dunno. That wasn't the intent.
But as far as anonymity is concerned, I guess that's another matter. I don't feel that I engaged in a personal attack, and I did share my email address etc. with him (though as a policy I don't publish it on the net, since I get so much spam already, and I'm temporarily stuck with a low-speed connection).
But I am happy to identify myself, and to stand by my comments.
Trevor Hanson Hanson-Smith, Ltd. 218 N. Jefferson St. #102 Chicago, IL 60661 312-831-0722
I hope this makes Mr. W. a little happier with me. Sorry if the rest of you just want us to shut up. "These aren't the 'droids we're looking for. Move along."
Right, I'm talking about something from a couple of generations earlier, probably 1988 or so. It was nice looking and slim, despite lots of slots and internal hardware, but the way they made it small was to eliminate fans, airspace, etc. We had a client that bought a gazillion of these (along with tons of other DEC hardware, they were a flagship customer) and had plenty of heat-related failures. DEC learned a hard lesson and made sure the problem didn't recur.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
...
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
I think the the GPL abilities that you cite (charging for the mechanical distribution of free software and charging for warranty protection) do not in any way contradict the original claim: that incorporating GPL'd code in a commercial product is not feasible. GPL has been called a virus for good reason.
I am not asserting anything bad about GPL, and I am not trying to enter into an argument about its merits. I'm a big open source fan (though I have some problems with GPL). But I do understand why software companies developing licensed intellectual property need to be very cautious about using GPL'd software in the development environment. There are lots of very smart guys who are open-source on weekends who don't let GPL through the doors of their labs at work, because the nature of their business depends on IP license fees.
There's plenty of pro-GPL rhetoric asserting that proprietary software is intrinsically immoral, and that IP is evil. I agree that the GPL as written doesn't go that far; but GPL advocates often do, and the bottom line is that GPL places very substantial restrictions on a for-profit software developer/licensor.
Remember when DEC decided to make desktop systems without fans? They kept going up in smoke. It was pretty hilarious because all you had to do was look at the thing to realize that heat dissipation would be a problem. But to be fair, heat management is not as simple an issue as it may seem.
Didn't Dell have a bunch of monitors that started flaming out too? I'm pretty sure I have a couple of replacement flyback transformers that they sent out to resolve a wiring clearance problem. (I never installed them, I'm always willing to watch a monitor go up in smoke as a way to break the monotony of a Tuesday afternoon.)
It seems to me that a key technology ingredient needed for the success of a class of devices like 'the Finger' is a set of eyeglasses that:
Displays a high-res image in one or both of the lenses
Transmits audio through transducers in the earpieces
Can turn transparent or nearly transparent for offline use
Ideally: has one or two cameras as input devices, capturing the wearer's field of vision
Ideally: if we can't come up with transparent LCD's, we can display a corrected camera image on the LCD's to show what's in front of the wearer
Ideally: if we can show the field of vision via the camera, we can magnify or enhance what we're seeing, a la Steve Austin -- kewl
Ideally: can use eye movement and head movement as pointing cues
Ideally: has microphones to record ambient sound (from in front) and the wearer's speech (conducted via the cranium to the eyepieces)
Most of us would snap these up in a second. There are still some big technical steps required, but many of the requirements are simply miniaturization rather than new core technology, so it might not be such a long wait.
Potential problems:
First couple of generations will look like 'birth control glasses' or Borg implants
Great opportunity for hacking somebody, making them think they're somewhere else
Lost productivity at meetings as people visualize they're on the beach, having sex, etc.
Even more idiots walking around talking to themselves
Large battery packs that must be surgically implanted or carried around in a fanny pack (or worse)
But seriously, when VR goggles get to a certain point, they'll eliminate the need for laptop/PDA displays and various other interface devices. We still have the keyboard issue, but by that time speech recognition/interpretation/generation should be pretty strong.
I'm glad to see that some journalists are taking their responsibility to the public so seriously. What a sacrifice to make! And think of all the spammers who *really* have his number now.
Of course, it's so disappointing to hear that all those pyramid schemes aren't 100% reliable paths to fortune and happiness. But at least I'm sure he found out how to get *billions* and *billions* of verified email addresses of proven customers ready to buy *your* product.
This all makes much more sense now, as some details are filled in. A game company...it's much easier to understand now. I was imagining an eCommerce business, a B2B arbitrage site, a help desk software product -- something with a bit more density. From David's description of the founders, I was picturing $10M apiece of seed money, a cadre of experienced engineers, etc.
And plenty of start-ups with *that* profile had the same essential story.:O
Thanks for providing more background.
Re:Outsourcing: one of the great hoaxes in history
on
When ASPs Go Under
·
· Score: 1
ROFL.
or... Jerks Must Have Opinions Java Means Helpful Options Jealous Men Hate Opportunists Joking Means Heaving Onions Jane Makes Horny Overtures
If you're super-curious, send me an email...and I'll indulge you with a resume. Also, check out Ari Feldman's posts on the WWWAC list. He was a co-worker of mine and was more offended than I when people questioned the veracity of the story. -- dwadler
Interesting. I'm glad you didn't see my comment in the same vein as some of the flames. Jeez, some of these guys need to lighten up. Besides, I did say "The story might be true" -- I wasn't convinced either way. I didn't and don't have any craving to show your work up as fiction; it just struck me as more likely an invention than a journal. Your response is convincing -- true, it could be a fabrication, but if you were the type of writer I suspected you were, and you were true to your star, you would never come out and say "this really happened" if it hadn't. You would smirk, wink, and say "you make some good points."
Since you're curious, and apparently not just another Internet novelist, I'll describe a few features of the story that rang false.
You described the start-up as a software company, founded by some high-fliers. They were impressed and excited by you, and gave you the title of Technical Program Manager. Given that background, I'd expect you to have shown some real heavyweight technical skills. This is not intended as a slight, just my experience with lots of startups with exactly that profile. I couldn't see them hiring someone who had your apparent skill set (as revealed in the story) for that job. So I assumed the story was actually a melange of a few different life stories, the way a journalist approaches this kind of situation. You know, person A went to startup X as a DBA and this happened, person B went to startup Y as a graphic designer and this happened, person C went to startup C as a Unix hacker and this happened, etc.
The founders took a short vacation within the first two years of business. Unbelievable!
A software company with hardly any programmers. Unbelievable!
The only programmers were the senior guys, and they went away at the same time, leaving an unknown resource (you) to tackle a serious programming project. Unbelievable!
Programming tasks got tacked onto your non-programming to do list, and you were a pretty senior guy. I haven't seen this happen very often.
You seemed surprised about working long hours and losing your personal life in a startup. Yet you seemed to get weekends off to sleep. And the office workday seemed to have a normal starting time. None of this made any sense.
Your description of your programming project just didn't ring true for a company founded by a bunch of experienced software guys. Perhaps these weren't actually software guys, but guys from some other part of the MS empire. That would make the whole thing alot more plausible.
Well, that's enough to convey the idea. There were other things as well.
I might add that, frankly, your P.S. about preferring call-by-reference to call-by-value, and the idea that you might have stolen it from "some obscure website," actually rings false as well. It's just the kind of thing a journalist with a little development experience might come up with. Contrast that with, let's see...something substantive about reference counting for storage management, LR(1) parsers, lexical scope, lambda expressions, callback pointers, or outer join processing.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, since there's no reason for you to have fabricated this whole position. There *is* a good reason for (and a grand tradition of) a serious writer constructing a work of fiction and passing it off as fact. So if you had done this, I'd say 'bravo' and move on. There is *no* reason for such an author, when the fiction is revealed, to refuse credit for a good job. So I take your explanation at face value.
I'll just add the following thoughts: 1. Despite the track record of these guys on paper, they clearly hadn't thought things through and were flying by ego. This is not a new thing. Many guys who are successful in a big business somehow get the idea that they're entrepreneurs and can succeed in a small business. 2. When faced with an unbelievably great opportunity that looks too good to be true, it often is. Use the "mirror test" to evaluate it: stand in front of a mirror and describe the deal, and see if you can do it with a straight face. 3. A small business is a leap of faith, a labor of love, a marriage. Everyone involved had better be prepared to bleed plenty, give up any hope of vacations or a social life, wear many hats, and expect changes in plans and expectations as the realities reveal themselves. I've had my own business since 1980, and have all the scars to prove it. I'd never go back, but it's not a life for everybody.
I hope my comments are constructive. Good luck. -- Trevor
Outsourcing: one of the great hoaxes in history
on
When ASPs Go Under
·
· Score: 5
I have seen so many companies buy into the outsourcing myth. A few execs and PHB's look great for a while, as they count up the savings. But then, lo! and behold, there are some surprises. I have a large, long-term client that outsourced its entire IT organization to IBM. Now, this is no knock on the many good IBM engineers who were providing my client its services and support, many of whom were my friends; unlike many outsource deals, this one did keep good resources and practices in place. But after a couple of years, the company was still hurting, because there was nobody inside the headquarters building whose job it was to make an informed technical decision. All their strategic choices were delegated to a third party in the computer services biz, not in the user company's biz.
Any time a company outsources its mission-critical systems, knowledge, or decisions, it's taking a big chance.
Several comments below regard this as a true story. It is possible, I suppose, but note that the author's bio lists him as a writer and performer. (The quality of his writing speaks for itself.) There are also a few lacunae in the narrative that don't feel like fact. I won't point 'em out; let the author try to spot them before his next effort!;)
I'm not complaining -- it's an amusing cautionary tale. And it's possible that it is truth, or based on truth; there have been many failed startups that followed a similar path. But don't lose too much sleep for this guy, who I expect has accomplished exactly what he wanted -- writing a plausible-sounding story that will be accepted as fact. There is a huge tradition of doing this on the 'net, as you know ("The real, real risks of margin" on www.fool.com and the famous rocket car story come to mind as examples).
Michael has written an excellent summary and highlighted many important points -- high marks. I am very concerned about the chilling effects of litigation, legislated norms of behavior, and ever-increasing constraints on my available forms of expression. Every year, the situation in this country seems to deteriorate. And the fact that well-meaning civil servants are shackling me "for my own good" only makes it worse and more insidious.
The question of software as a protected form of expression is a complex one, and in many cases the issues are idiosyncractic. Two people can stand in a museum and argue "That's not art"; "Yes it is." Similarly, people differ in their perceptions of software and its scope and purpose.
Let me report two bits of first-person anecdotal evidence.
I became a passionate software developer when I realized that writing software 'felt' like composing music. I had the same sense of artistic satisfaction, of creativity, of building something tangible from raw ideas. The aesthetic of programming became a dominant part of my thinking. Like many serious programmers, I labored over the artistic aspects of the development process: elegance of design, consistency, ingenuity of organizing and naming components, crafting clear and interesting comments -- bilding systems that were beautiful. Many hours and days were spent on tasks that can only be described as "art for art's sake": implementing details that had no practical requirement but yielded a more pleasing result, either in the behavior of the resulting system or, more significantly, in the expression of an elegant design in the source code itself. For me, it didn't matter whether an audience of hundreds or thousands could see my code. The expressive nature and issues were highly personal, and affected me in precisely the same way I feel when improvising or composing music. The expression is not for an audience, but for myself, and for the sake of an artistic result in itself.
"Fair use" is another doctrine that always strikes me as personal. Who is to dictate the boundaries of an appropriate personal use of a recorded performance, a piece of literature, a graphic image? In the eyes of an intellectual property attorney, for example, the purpose of viewing a DVD movie might simply be to hear the dialogue and see the pictures, so therefore some image degradation wouldn't matter. But as another poster has commented, noticing the fine details of shadow and light in a puddle on the ground might be just as important to one viewer as hearing the punchline is to another. Some viewers are passionate about noticing anachronisms and errors in films -- the little bits of telephone wire sticking up above the trees in a 16th Century period piece, or the out-of-era kitchen appliance in a WWII drama. These details require the best possible fidelity. Who can say that these are inappropriate interests, and beyond the scope of "fair use"?
In both of my points, I find that we are struggling with the age-old question of "what is art?" For me, the most satisfactory answer to this question, and to another tough philsophical question "what is science?", is this: "What the practitioners do." Art is what artists do, and science is what scientists do. When in doubt about where to draw the lines, look at respected members of each community, and consider their own priorities and methods as they invest their time and energies in their chosen disciplines.
In the case of software, I assert that software is (can be) a protected form of expression for this reason: Because great software writers view what they do as art, not as a purely functional and purposeful activity. If there are software artists, then there is software art. Similarly, if software can be pure science, a form of pure scientific research, then there is software science. If software can be art, or pure science, then it must be protected. We place creative limits on artists and scientists at our peril.
Why not?? We're not the Borg, alot of progress comes from individuals and small groups pursuing their own ideas. We already have foundations giving large money to a few schools.. why not one that's willing to give small funding to a large number of projects? -- Bitmanhome
Why not? Because giving away small chunks of money in public programs ALWAYS gets screwed up, and leads to horrible graft, corruption, waste, etc. There's a SMALL chance that you can give big chunks away fairly, because enough people will pay attention to the details. But there's NO chance that you could give $100M in $20K grants without funding a lot of brothers-in-law of polticians and cheeseball con artists. Remember when Nixon declared war on cancer? (Probably not, but I do.) All of a sudden, all my friends in legit cancer research had a HARDER time getting funding, because the influx of funds drew a lot of professional grantsmen who knew how to work the system with stupid 'sound bite' projects. There was a chilling effect on good research. It's the same process.
Try to keep the public sector out of things that are both complicated and important. If they have to be involved, make sure it's at a simple and high-enough level that nobody can make too much of a profit by working the system.
Great post, somebody please mod Donut's post up. And he makes a very good point about QA people -- in every part of the industry, there are good people in QA/QC/support who know their products well. There are plenty of clucks, of course, but testing and supporting a product can teach a receptive mind a great deal.
Related commment. Standard definition of a 'tech rep': somebody who puts his or her body where the salesman's mouth has been. A year of strong tech support, working with real customers, can be like 2-3 years of virtual work in cubeland.
Quite a few comments below seem to think this article was cited because of providing information about the speaker as a device. Sheesh! Obviously, it was instead seen as interesting because it was a simple example of driver implementation issues, without all the gory complexity of BitBlts or nasty interrupts or odd data structures. It's a simple example, using a hardware component every user already knows.
I at least was happy to see it listed here. I like simple examples.
Bwah-hah-hee-ha! Mod the parent up, this is the funniest thing I've read this week. Yes, I too have often felt that Windows was not a stable or versatile enough language, and am glad that IBM created its own easy-to-program form of Unix and called it Linux.
what if i were to type out the notes to a song (ie C D E F G) and post them to a board? -- sehryan
If you think about it, what you're describing is a form of sheet music. It's no different from writing out the lyrics that you hear on a record, and posting them. As I understand it, either of these (lyrics or notes, however rendered) would definitely be considered a violation, unless you mangled it badly enough that it no longer resembled the original (in which case, what's the point?).
You make a very plausible point, but I think this one has been tested already. Sometimes quoting only a couple of bars of a tune are needed to violate the copyright (recall the furor over samples being used in Rap music). The Estate of Cole Porter, for example, is apparently quite vigilent about attacking any small snippet of a Porter tune being used in advertisement, etc. And if you think about it, just hearing one bar of "I've Got You Under My Skin" in the middle of a Pepsi ad would clearly (to my ear) be a licensable bit of Cole Porter.
As someone else pointed out, some of these new phones play very sophisticated music, so the 'de minimus' argument would be further weakened in that regard as well.
I'd say a more defensible argument in this case might be that putting the snippet onto your cell phone constitutes fair use. You're not playing music on a commercial web site, or on a business telephone. I think the case would be weaker if you had to pay to download the ring tones, or if the site were deriving direcct revenues from making the ring tones available.
IANAL, but from my understanding of copyright and IP law, I believe this is a very messy area.
Commercial companies will continue to struggle to be close to successful with ad-based revenue sources. -- proxima
Right. For a while, when so much ad and click-through revenue was there for the taking, it appeared (to the shortsighted) that there was a simple ad-based business model for nearly any web-based company. But the bottom line is (and always was): A viable business must deliver something of value to a willing customer for a fair price. Therefore, the only valid ad-based business model delivers...well, valuable ads. Like TV Guide or Playboy, with a proven track record of delivering or influencing sales through advertising. And NOT like a game site that displays annoying banner ads to clever dudes who just ignore the lame ads.
I wish that every 'new economy' company decision-maker were forced to read your post.
taking away the "save as" button would be sufficiently annoying and frustrating for that 90% of people -- 6EQUJ5
FWIW, the button/option IS missing for lots of.pdfs. I'm not sure (i.e. haven't cared) exactly what the technical deal is, but I presume you can create a.pdf that specifies 'no save as'/'no print'/etc. I'd say 35% of the.pdf's I regularly work with don't have 'save as' enabled, but (for now) I can right-click and save them via the browser, or take the other obvious steps.
Eventually, I'm sure more and more of these holes will get closed, and I'll flip over to being in the stupid majority that can't or won't bother to figure out how to work around the annoying restrictions.
The earlier comment comparing these features to house locks was right on. We all know that a pro thief won't be deterred for a moment by a house lock, car lock, etc. Yet it's not the pros that create the bulk of the threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh...the odds of being hit by an asteroid at any particular time -- now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now -- are the same. The odds of being hit by an asteroid at *some* time are very high. The odds of being hit by an asteroid at any particular time are low, though I'd say far from nil. I think hiding our heads in the sand is not a very prudent approach to planning. You could use the same arguments about earthquakes -- "They don't happen very often, so don't bother to plan for what happens."
As far as blowing up the sun, I guess I'll let that concept pass without comment.
Pardon my bad manners in replying to my own post, but let me hasten to add that nothing in my above comment should be taken as support of the critic's extravagent conclusions, e.g. the Frank Poole anagram. I find that kind of coincidence-mapping totally boring -- like numerology or phrenology. As another poster observed, you can find a coincidence to support any ridiculous claim. What's the difference between a silly coicidence and a profound allegory? It's obviously in the eye of the beholder, with a smattering of common sense. So: images of Odysseus? Yeah, I can see that, it's part of our Zeitgeist. Frank Poole? I don't think so.
HAL isn't IBM moved down one letter each. It's Hueristic ALgorithm. -- jokrswild
But HAL *is* IBM moved down one letter each, regardless of the author's intent. Just because an author doesn't consciously intend something as an allusion doesn't make the connection invalid. Literature is full of accidental allusions and metaphors that add to the richness of the enclosing works.
Remember that the creative process is mysterious and complex, and we use many subconscious elements when writing, composing, painting, etc. Only a soulless, mechanical author would write by deliberately and systematically selecting images and themes to underlie a work. Good authors are often surprised to find parallels and echoes in their works, pointed out by their serious readers, which on reflection they realize must have been part of how those works evolved in their minds, and why those particular images struck the author as powerful and evocative.
Which is not to say that every coincidental detail has meaning. Obviously, you can easily read too much into something. But it is pointless (IMO) to say "the author didn't mean *this*, he meant *that*, because that's what he said in the introduction." There are plenty of good authors who admit they have no clue about how and why they construct their images they way they do; and plenty of others (T S Eliot comes to mind) who have deliberately misled the public about their sources and intent, chuckling long afterward about the lies they've told.
Is it significant that HAL is so similar to IBM? I dunno. But if you were a writer, who spent ten hours a day whacking away typing prose, who's to say what connections your fingers and brain might subconsciously make about a three-letter acronym? And besides, regardless of the author's intent, this image is part of the audience's consciousness, and affects how we react to the work. A work of art stands on its own, regardless of the author's intent (this is part of what makes it art). Of course, there's a valid discussion to have about whether 2001 can stand up to comparison with great works of art; perhaps it's simply not as internally rich. But that is beside the point.
JMHO -- Trevor
Fair enough (particularly with respect to elaborate constructed interpretations like this one). But it can still be interesting to consider what other people have concluded, especially other people who have been able to devote substantial time, effort, and insight to the study of a particular piece. Reading a review is never a substitute for interpreting a work of art ourselves, but an thoughtful review can add dimension to our own vantage point, by highlighting details or similes that we might have missed, and raising questions we might have overlooked. And of course, in some cases there are contextual clues that a specialist can reveal -- for example, deliberate Biblical or Shakespearean allusions are often lost on today's audience, which is less familiar with these works than the audiences of yesteryear.
I've found works of criticism useful on various occasions. I agree it's no substitute for our primary experience, and I think many people use the criticism of others as a substitute for their own aesthetic; but I wouldn't dismiss all (most, perhaps, but not all!) criticism as wasted breath.
That being said, I find this particular type of criticism -- which tries to explain a work of art through elaborately contrived allegories, anagrams, metaphors, etc. as if a series of coincidences represent the author's intention -- generally to be uninteresting. As Freud reportedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." As another comment pointed out here, if you look hard enough for patterns, you can always find them, and you can make them support any conclusion you like. This is true in art and in life.
JMHO -- Trevor
At any rate, I wish a lot of the focus of peer based projects would shift from simply being Peer to Peer!!! into specific implementations of peer based functionality, like resource discovery, content transfer, etc. -- PureFiction
Good points. Of course, these are the core problems of any network implementation. I'd say that, as an industry and as a science, we've done a poor job at developing robust discovery solutions that are both useful and resistant to degradation -- degredation due to malfunction, overloading, or black hat mischief.
This is another example of a situation where the availability of a flawed but usable solution creates de facto standards that are barriers to better solutions as they appear, and are disincentives to those who might invest effort to develop those better solutions.
JMHO - Trevor
In the interest of full disclosure, let me make the following comments, if anybody is still paying attention to this story. I've had a few email exchanges with the author of the salon story, David Wadler, who has made a number of posts here. I apparently pissed him off big time, and though doing so was not my intent, I thought it might be a nice gesture to clear the air.
I posted a comment a couple of days ago where I suggested that the author of the salon.com article might have fabricated the story as a work of fact-inspired fiction. I think I said this in a nice way: there's a great tradition of doing exactly this, both on the Internet and in literature. There's no shame in being a writer. And I furthermore don't think it was a stupid conjecture based on the text at hand.
Subsequent posts by him and by others have provided a wealth of plausible additional detail: names, locations, etc. The participants have vehemently maintained that the story was true in its essentials. I see no reason to doubt this. While it's always possible to construct a conspiracy theory for any outrageous chain of events, I see no reason why he and his colleagues would have maintained such a fiction to this point. (If this had been a work of fiction, he would have quietly smiled at the suggestion, or admitted his cleverness. So I have no reason to question what they say.)
Mr. Wadler seemed to resent the fact that I didn't do more research before making my suggestion that the story could be a fabrication. It's my contention that it is quite appropriate to draw conclusions from the text of an article as written, and that the burden of selection and presentation and plausibility falls to the author. Some things we read, and we *know* they're true. Other things we read, and we scratch our heads. I stand by my original assessment -- it *could* have been a fabrication. But I'm prepared to accept the author's assurances that it was not. (It didn't seem like such a big deal, since it all came out in the wash anyway. I thought the message was more important than its basis in fact. This is a useful cautionary tale for people embarking on a small business venture. It wouldn't be any less useful if Mr. W. had constructed it from his experience on half a dozen different startups, or from the stories of a dozen friends.)
Here's the rub, and the main reason for this post: In our email conversation, Mr. Wadler suggested that *I* post the text of one of his emails here on slashdot. I said I thought it would be more appropriate for *him* to post it, as a response to my last posted comment. (I felt that it might seem strange for me to be posting his message; it might look like I was one of his coworkers, posting under an alias. So rather than my shilling his point of view, I suggested that he post it directly, if he felt these were important points.)
I had good intentions, but this suggestion apparently pissed him off no end, and led to his accusing me of being intellectually immature, needing to grow some testicles, trying to hide in anonymity, etc. Well.
I don't understand what all the fuss was about, since I thought we were having a mature discussion until this turn of events. I still think it's odd for party A to post party B's message, except in certain situations. Part of the conflict, no doubt, came from my other email comments about startups, the software business, PHB's, etc. I meant well, but I probably came across as a dinosaur, since I've been in the biz for a very long time. But I wasn't accusing David W. of making stupid choices or being incompetent. (I mostly had sympathy, unlike the flamers who have just told him to "get over it." I've had so many friends in exactly this situation through the years.) I *did* say that it's hard to make the right call when you're in the thick of battle, and that even with hindsight, it's often hard to know what the right choice would have been.
Perhaps my general observations came across as personal slights, I dunno. That wasn't the intent.
But as far as anonymity is concerned, I guess that's another matter. I don't feel that I engaged in a personal attack, and I did share my email address etc. with him (though as a policy I don't publish it on the net, since I get so much spam already, and I'm temporarily stuck with a low-speed connection).
But I am happy to identify myself, and to stand by my comments.
Trevor Hanson
Hanson-Smith, Ltd.
218 N. Jefferson St. #102
Chicago, IL 60661
312-831-0722
I hope this makes Mr. W. a little happier with me. Sorry if the rest of you just want us to shut up. "These aren't the 'droids we're looking for. Move along."
But it's never caught on fire. -- dickens
Right, I'm talking about something from a couple of generations earlier, probably 1988 or so. It was nice looking and slim, despite lots of slots and internal hardware, but the way they made it small was to eliminate fans, airspace, etc. We had a client that bought a gazillion of these (along with tons of other DEC hardware, they were a flagship customer) and had plenty of heat-related failures. DEC learned a hard lesson and made sure the problem didn't recur.
From the GPL:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
...
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
I think the the GPL abilities that you cite (charging for the mechanical distribution of free software and charging for warranty protection) do not in any way contradict the original claim: that incorporating GPL'd code in a commercial product is not feasible. GPL has been called a virus for good reason.
I am not asserting anything bad about GPL, and I am not trying to enter into an argument about its merits. I'm a big open source fan (though I have some problems with GPL). But I do understand why software companies developing licensed intellectual property need to be very cautious about using GPL'd software in the development environment. There are lots of very smart guys who are open-source on weekends who don't let GPL through the doors of their labs at work, because the nature of their business depends on IP license fees.
There's plenty of pro-GPL rhetoric asserting that proprietary software is intrinsically immoral, and that IP is evil. I agree that the GPL as written doesn't go that far; but GPL advocates often do, and the bottom line is that GPL places very substantial restrictions on a for-profit software developer/licensor.
JMHO -- Trevor
Remember when DEC decided to make desktop systems without fans? They kept going up in smoke. It was pretty hilarious because all you had to do was look at the thing to realize that heat dissipation would be a problem. But to be fair, heat management is not as simple an issue as it may seem.
Didn't Dell have a bunch of monitors that started flaming out too? I'm pretty sure I have a couple of replacement flyback transformers that they sent out to resolve a wiring clearance problem. (I never installed them, I'm always willing to watch a monitor go up in smoke as a way to break the monotony of a Tuesday afternoon.)
Displays a high-res image in one or both of the lenses
Transmits audio through transducers in the earpieces
Can turn transparent or nearly transparent for offline use
Ideally: has one or two cameras as input devices, capturing the wearer's field of vision
Ideally: if we can't come up with transparent LCD's, we can display a corrected camera image on the LCD's to show what's in front of the wearer
Ideally: if we can show the field of vision via the camera, we can magnify or enhance what we're seeing, a la Steve Austin -- kewl
Ideally: can use eye movement and head movement as pointing cues
Ideally: has microphones to record ambient sound (from in front) and the wearer's speech (conducted via the cranium to the eyepieces)
Most of us would snap these up in a second. There are still some big technical steps required, but many of the requirements are simply miniaturization rather than new core technology, so it might not be such a long wait.
Potential problems:
First couple of generations will look like 'birth control glasses' or Borg implants
Great opportunity for hacking somebody, making them think they're somewhere else
Lost productivity at meetings as people visualize they're on the beach, having sex, etc.
Even more idiots walking around talking to themselves
Large battery packs that must be surgically implanted or carried around in a fanny pack (or worse)
But seriously, when VR goggles get to a certain point, they'll eliminate the need for laptop/PDA displays and various other interface devices. We still have the keyboard issue, but by that time speech recognition/interpretation/generation should be pretty strong.
Thanks for sharing my techno fantasy -- Trevor
I'm glad to see that some journalists are taking their responsibility to the public so seriously. What a sacrifice to make! And think of all the spammers who *really* have his number now.
:)
Of course, it's so disappointing to hear that all those pyramid schemes aren't 100% reliable paths to fortune and happiness. But at least I'm sure he found out how to get *billions* and *billions* of verified email addresses of proven customers ready to buy *your* product.
Snicker, snicker.
This all makes much more sense now, as some details are filled in. A game company...it's much easier to understand now. I was imagining an eCommerce business, a B2B arbitrage site, a help desk software product -- something with a bit more density. From David's description of the founders, I was picturing $10M apiece of seed money, a cadre of experienced engineers, etc.
:O
And plenty of start-ups with *that* profile had the same essential story.
Thanks for providing more background.
ROFL.
or...
Jerks Must Have Opinions
Java Means Helpful Options
Jealous Men Hate Opportunists
Joking Means Heaving Onions
Jane Makes Horny Overtures
...but in my case:
Just My Humble Opinion. -- Trevor
Interesting. I'm glad you didn't see my comment in the same vein as some of the flames. Jeez, some of these guys need to lighten up. Besides, I did say "The story might be true" -- I wasn't convinced either way. I didn't and don't have any craving to show your work up as fiction; it just struck me as more likely an invention than a journal. Your response is convincing -- true, it could be a fabrication, but if you were the type of writer I suspected you were, and you were true to your star, you would never come out and say "this really happened" if it hadn't. You would smirk, wink, and say "you make some good points."
Since you're curious, and apparently not just another Internet novelist, I'll describe a few features of the story that rang false.
You described the start-up as a software company, founded by some high-fliers. They were impressed and excited by you, and gave you the title of Technical Program Manager. Given that background, I'd expect you to have shown some real heavyweight technical skills. This is not intended as a slight, just my experience with lots of startups with exactly that profile. I couldn't see them hiring someone who had your apparent skill set (as revealed in the story) for that job. So I assumed the story was actually a melange of a few different life stories, the way a journalist approaches this kind of situation. You know, person A went to startup X as a DBA and this happened, person B went to startup Y as a graphic designer and this happened, person C went to startup C as a Unix hacker and this happened, etc.
The founders took a short vacation within the first two years of business. Unbelievable!
A software company with hardly any programmers. Unbelievable!
The only programmers were the senior guys, and they went away at the same time, leaving an unknown resource (you) to tackle a serious programming project. Unbelievable!
Programming tasks got tacked onto your non-programming to do list, and you were a pretty senior guy. I haven't seen this happen very often.
You seemed surprised about working long hours and losing your personal life in a startup. Yet you seemed to get weekends off to sleep. And the office workday seemed to have a normal starting time. None of this made any sense.
Your description of your programming project just didn't ring true for a company founded by a bunch of experienced software guys. Perhaps these weren't actually software guys, but guys from some other part of the MS empire. That would make the whole thing alot more plausible.
Well, that's enough to convey the idea. There were other things as well.
I might add that, frankly, your P.S. about preferring call-by-reference to call-by-value, and the idea that you might have stolen it from "some obscure website," actually rings false as well. It's just the kind of thing a journalist with a little development experience might come up with. Contrast that with, let's see...something substantive about reference counting for storage management, LR(1) parsers, lexical scope, lambda expressions, callback pointers, or outer join processing.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, since there's no reason for you to have fabricated this whole position. There *is* a good reason for (and a grand tradition of) a serious writer constructing a work of fiction and passing it off as fact. So if you had done this, I'd say 'bravo' and move on. There is *no* reason for such an author, when the fiction is revealed, to refuse credit for a good job. So I take your explanation at face value.
I'll just add the following thoughts: 1. Despite the track record of these guys on paper, they clearly hadn't thought things through and were flying by ego. This is not a new thing. Many guys who are successful in a big business somehow get the idea that they're entrepreneurs and can succeed in a small business. 2. When faced with an unbelievably great opportunity that looks too good to be true, it often is. Use the "mirror test" to evaluate it: stand in front of a mirror and describe the deal, and see if you can do it with a straight face. 3. A small business is a leap of faith, a labor of love, a marriage. Everyone involved had better be prepared to bleed plenty, give up any hope of vacations or a social life, wear many hats, and expect changes in plans and expectations as the realities reveal themselves. I've had my own business since 1980, and have all the scars to prove it. I'd never go back, but it's not a life for everybody.
I hope my comments are constructive. Good luck. -- Trevor
I have seen so many companies buy into the outsourcing myth. A few execs and PHB's look great for a while, as they count up the savings. But then, lo! and behold, there are some surprises. I have a large, long-term client that outsourced its entire IT organization to IBM. Now, this is no knock on the many good IBM engineers who were providing my client its services and support, many of whom were my friends; unlike many outsource deals, this one did keep good resources and practices in place. But after a couple of years, the company was still hurting, because there was nobody inside the headquarters building whose job it was to make an informed technical decision. All their strategic choices were delegated to a third party in the computer services biz, not in the user company's biz.
Any time a company outsources its mission-critical systems, knowledge, or decisions, it's taking a big chance.
JMHO -- Trevor
Several comments below regard this as a true story. It is possible, I suppose, but note that the author's bio lists him as a writer and performer. (The quality of his writing speaks for itself.) There are also a few lacunae in the narrative that don't feel like fact. I won't point 'em out; let the author try to spot them before his next effort! ;)
I'm not complaining -- it's an amusing cautionary tale. And it's possible that it is truth, or based on truth; there have been many failed startups that followed a similar path. But don't lose too much sleep for this guy, who I expect has accomplished exactly what he wanted -- writing a plausible-sounding story that will be accepted as fact. There is a huge tradition of doing this on the 'net, as you know ("The real, real risks of margin" on www.fool.com and the famous rocket car story come to mind as examples).
JMHO -- Trevor
The question of software as a protected form of expression is a complex one, and in many cases the issues are idiosyncractic. Two people can stand in a museum and argue "That's not art"; "Yes it is." Similarly, people differ in their perceptions of software and its scope and purpose.
Let me report two bits of first-person anecdotal evidence.
I became a passionate software developer when I realized that writing software 'felt' like composing music. I had the same sense of artistic satisfaction, of creativity, of building something tangible from raw ideas. The aesthetic of programming became a dominant part of my thinking. Like many serious programmers, I labored over the artistic aspects of the development process: elegance of design, consistency, ingenuity of organizing and naming components, crafting clear and interesting comments -- bilding systems that were beautiful. Many hours and days were spent on tasks that can only be described as "art for art's sake": implementing details that had no practical requirement but yielded a more pleasing result, either in the behavior of the resulting system or, more significantly, in the expression of an elegant design in the source code itself. For me, it didn't matter whether an audience of hundreds or thousands could see my code. The expressive nature and issues were highly personal, and affected me in precisely the same way I feel when improvising or composing music. The expression is not for an audience, but for myself, and for the sake of an artistic result in itself.
"Fair use" is another doctrine that always strikes me as personal. Who is to dictate the boundaries of an appropriate personal use of a recorded performance, a piece of literature, a graphic image? In the eyes of an intellectual property attorney, for example, the purpose of viewing a DVD movie might simply be to hear the dialogue and see the pictures, so therefore some image degradation wouldn't matter. But as another poster has commented, noticing the fine details of shadow and light in a puddle on the ground might be just as important to one viewer as hearing the punchline is to another. Some viewers are passionate about noticing anachronisms and errors in films -- the little bits of telephone wire sticking up above the trees in a 16th Century period piece, or the out-of-era kitchen appliance in a WWII drama. These details require the best possible fidelity. Who can say that these are inappropriate interests, and beyond the scope of "fair use"?
In both of my points, I find that we are struggling with the age-old question of "what is art?" For me, the most satisfactory answer to this question, and to another tough philsophical question "what is science?", is this: "What the practitioners do." Art is what artists do, and science is what scientists do. When in doubt about where to draw the lines, look at respected members of each community, and consider their own priorities and methods as they invest their time and energies in their chosen disciplines.
In the case of software, I assert that software is (can be) a protected form of expression for this reason: Because great software writers view what they do as art, not as a purely functional and purposeful activity. If there are software artists, then there is software art. Similarly, if software can be pure science, a form of pure scientific research, then there is software science. If software can be art, or pure science, then it must be protected. We place creative limits on artists and scientists at our peril.
JMHO -- Trevor
Why not?? We're not the Borg, alot of progress comes from individuals and small groups pursuing their own ideas. We already have foundations giving large money to a few schools .. why not one that's willing to give small funding to a large number of projects? -- Bitmanhome
Why not? Because giving away small chunks of money in public programs ALWAYS gets screwed up, and leads to horrible graft, corruption, waste, etc. There's a SMALL chance that you can give big chunks away fairly, because enough people will pay attention to the details. But there's NO chance that you could give $100M in $20K grants without funding a lot of brothers-in-law of polticians and cheeseball con artists. Remember when Nixon declared war on cancer? (Probably not, but I do.) All of a sudden, all my friends in legit cancer research had a HARDER time getting funding, because the influx of funds drew a lot of professional grantsmen who knew how to work the system with stupid 'sound bite' projects. There was a chilling effect on good research. It's the same process.
Try to keep the public sector out of things that are both complicated and important. If they have to be involved, make sure it's at a simple and high-enough level that nobody can make too much of a profit by working the system.
JMHO -- Trevor
Great post, somebody please mod Donut's post up. And he makes a very good point about QA people -- in every part of the industry, there are good people in QA/QC/support who know their products well. There are plenty of clucks, of course, but testing and supporting a product can teach a receptive mind a great deal.
Related commment. Standard definition of a 'tech rep': somebody who puts his or her body where the salesman's mouth has been. A year of strong tech support, working with real customers, can be like 2-3 years of virtual work in cubeland.
Quite a few comments below seem to think this article was cited because of providing information about the speaker as a device. Sheesh! Obviously, it was instead seen as interesting because it was a simple example of driver implementation issues, without all the gory complexity of BitBlts or nasty interrupts or odd data structures. It's a simple example, using a hardware component every user already knows.
I at least was happy to see it listed here. I like simple examples.
/rant
Bwah-hah-hee-ha! Mod the parent up, this is the funniest thing I've read this week. Yes, I too have often felt that Windows was not a stable or versatile enough language, and am glad that IBM created its own easy-to-program form of Unix and called it Linux.
ROFLSHISTC
what if i were to type out the notes to a song (ie C D E F G) and post them to a board? -- sehryan
If you think about it, what you're describing is a form of sheet music. It's no different from writing out the lyrics that you hear on a record, and posting them. As I understand it, either of these (lyrics or notes, however rendered) would definitely be considered a violation, unless you mangled it badly enough that it no longer resembled the original (in which case, what's the point?).
HTH
You make a very plausible point, but I think this one has been tested already. Sometimes quoting only a couple of bars of a tune are needed to violate the copyright (recall the furor over samples being used in Rap music). The Estate of Cole Porter, for example, is apparently quite vigilent about attacking any small snippet of a Porter tune being used in advertisement, etc. And if you think about it, just hearing one bar of "I've Got You Under My Skin" in the middle of a Pepsi ad would clearly (to my ear) be a licensable bit of Cole Porter.
As someone else pointed out, some of these new phones play very sophisticated music, so the 'de minimus' argument would be further weakened in that regard as well.
I'd say a more defensible argument in this case might be that putting the snippet onto your cell phone constitutes fair use. You're not playing music on a commercial web site, or on a business telephone. I think the case would be weaker if you had to pay to download the ring tones, or if the site were deriving direcct revenues from making the ring tones available.
IANAL, but from my understanding of copyright and IP law, I believe this is a very messy area.
Commercial companies will continue to struggle to be close to successful with ad-based revenue sources. -- proxima
Right. For a while, when so much ad and click-through revenue was there for the taking, it appeared (to the shortsighted) that there was a simple ad-based business model for nearly any web-based company. But the bottom line is (and always was): A viable business must deliver something of value to a willing customer for a fair price. Therefore, the only valid ad-based business model delivers...well, valuable ads. Like TV Guide or Playboy, with a proven track record of delivering or influencing sales through advertising. And NOT like a game site that displays annoying banner ads to clever dudes who just ignore the lame ads.
I wish that every 'new economy' company decision-maker were forced to read your post.
taking away the "save as" button would be sufficiently annoying and frustrating for that 90% of people -- 6EQUJ5
.pdfs. I'm not sure (i.e. haven't cared) exactly what the technical deal is, but I presume you can create a .pdf that specifies 'no save as'/'no print'/etc. I'd say 35% of the .pdf's I regularly work with don't have 'save as' enabled, but (for now) I can right-click and save them via the browser, or take the other obvious steps.
FWIW, the button/option IS missing for lots of
Eventually, I'm sure more and more of these holes will get closed, and I'll flip over to being in the stupid majority that can't or won't bother to figure out how to work around the annoying restrictions.
The earlier comment comparing these features to house locks was right on. We all know that a pro thief won't be deterred for a moment by a house lock, car lock, etc. Yet it's not the pros that create the bulk of the threat.