"What would you do if you were a company and saw your product ruined by a couple of kiddies who obviously never had anything to do with running a business before? Sit there and watch your dollars go down the drain?"
I have a hard time seeing how this is different from any other free market/competitive response. Let's say there are three profit-making (in the legal sense) companies competing to sell a certain product category, and that there are no free/open-source type products in that market. Company A release a new version which is potentially "better" or more attractive than Company B or C's, but appears to violate some law or cause some long-term damange to the customer. You had better believe that Companys B and C will immediately counterattck on several fronts with both their sales forces ("oh, you didn't know that product A causes sterility after 6 months?") and through the legal/political/media system. In fact, Companys B and C would be in violation of their obligations to their shareholders if they did _not_ counterattack and their directors could be subject to shareholder lawsuits seeking damages.
"Well, realistically, why wouldn't they be upset? It's equivalent to, say, Ford Motor company reacquiring Hertz, and finding out that all their executives drive Cadies..."
About a year ago I was reading an intervew with Novell's CTO (for internal services) in which she described Novell's internal architecture. The inteviewer asked some sharp questions about why there were a number of NT servers in production on the Novell network. She replied (a) there was a business application required by her clients which ran only on NT (b) Novell's external clients use heterogeneous networks with Novell, Microsoft, *nix, etc products, so she believed her internal network should reflect that reality.
Now, as a technology strategist, which company would you trust more to be your supplier in the long run: One which tries to eliminate all non-internal products regardless of functionality? Or one which works intelligently to work with the best of all products on the market?
"Good lord how dare Amazon.com follow a supply/demand model? You mean to tell me that if there is demand (but limited supply) on a particular item that they are raising the price? Personally, I am outraged. I think I should set the price for everything I buy (or steal, in the case of MP3s). I haven't heard of anything this crazy since freshman econ."
OK, without going back and hauling out my econ texts to get the terminology right: this isn't an issue of supply and demand. The most efficent price for society as a whole is set where the supply and demand curves intersect. However, that price does not maximize the profit that the seller can make. The difference between the supply-and-demand price and the maximum profit is the "consumer surplus". The Amazon strategy is an attempt to capture the consumer surplus all for themselves, destroying the concept of the economically efficient price. Which has long been the goal of every business, but which is almost impossible to achieve without the low-cost information and instant feedback that the Internet provides.
Airlines, BTW, claim that they are actually selling different products at different prices, not the same product (seats on a flight) at different products. That is, a ticket for a seat purchased four weeks in advance with restrictions is NOT the same product at a seat purchased one hour in advance. Which is dubious IMHO but at least logical.
IANAL, much less an anti-trust lawyer, but isn't this a pretty gross violation of the Robinson-Pattman Act? (In the US anyway). Not that Robinson-Pattman is ever enforced (or could ever be enforced for that matter), but this one seems a bit blatent.
I must say I am a little skeptical. About every 2 years, for the past 10 years or so, there has been an announcement from some lab concerning a breakthrough in display technology (the last one I heard about was from TI and was going to provide 300dpi on a 20' screen). None of these technologies has ever come to market; we are still pretty much stuck with big tubes or expensive (and somewhat slow) LCD's.
Now, I would love to see a breakthrough in technology and to have a 1200 dpi display device (other than paper that is;-) ). But forgive me if I don't believe it until I see it at Circuit City at a price of less than 1000 USD.
"I never heard of "Enterprise Resource Planning" before in my life, I suspect that a large number of people are the same way, nevertheless some quick dashing about the web trying to figure out what kind of software this is I fell asleep to the strains of marketing hype"
ERP installations and operations probably accounted for 50% or more of the total IT market in the Western world 1990-2000. Particularly 1998-2000 when large corporations finally realized that their 1960's vintage business code really couldn't be fixed for Y2K. Even today, total WAN traffic for most large enterprises is probably 90% generated by the ERP system, 10% by Internet. Therefore total datacomm traffic (again in the Western world) has been driven far more by ERP demands than Internet.
I know this sounds strange if one is working in a small academic environment or for a small company, but the system requirements of a large enterprise don't scale from small examples. As with much of IT.
First, I believe an large UK software house announced an agreement in principle to purchase Baan about three weeks ago, so they won't be independent for much longer.
More importantly, "historically" (by which I mean in the 1970's and 1980's) ERP software (then usually called MRP II) was actually very close to the open source model. In that: (i) you received source code with your purchase (ii) you were free to modify the source code in any way you so desired, with the level of support from the vendor for your modified code varying depending on how complex your modification was and how much you were willing to pay (iii) vendors would capture thier clients' mods and often roll them back into the base product (iv) for some products, there was an active process of exchanging mod code among customers independent of the vendor.
(iv) is perhaps most interesting. Some vendors actively encouraged and supported the distribution of mods, some looked the other way, and a few tried to license or discourage communication among clients. A few vendors, such as ASK, actually encouraged their customers to communicate among themselves and form independent advocacy organizations.
Today the situation seems to be more restricted. A few vendors still distribute source code, but usually under fairly tight licensing restrictions. Most low- and mid-range vendors are only distributing executables now. High end is another story, but those contracts are all negotiated on an individual basis.
The problem here is that the "offshore" site (non-US, non-EU) must connnect to the rest of the world through some physical connection. That connection is most likely provided by a peering arrangement with one of the global telecomm providers. And there is a major asymmetry of power between the smaller country and the {US,EU}.
So when your posting annoys someone with serious clout, they have a quite chat with the State Department and the interconnecting telecomm player. They in turn have private chats with their peers, and your site disappears. The alternative is for, say, voice service into that country to "stop working" for a few days, until the point gets across.
IMHO the best choice is to set up your own site with a local or regional ISP in your home country, get some legal advice, and fight the battles you need to fight. That's the only way to prevail in the long run.
Does the entertainment industry (in the USofA) have any sort of statuatory exemption from antitrust regulation, similar to that held by major league baseball? As a non-lawyer, it seems to me that many things the recording industry does (DVD "regions" comes to mind, as does SCMS) are gross violations of antitrust regulations and potentially vulnerable to class-action lawsuits on behalf of _all_ consumers. Am I missing or misinterpreting something here?
sPh
What would happen if we changed the rules?
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Solving Chess?
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· Score: 2
A question that pops into my limited mind: what would happen to the computer-human chess balance if we changed the rules slightly? Say switching the bishop and knight on one or both sides, or the knight and rook, or the King and Queen (and yes, I realize these changes would have to be analyzed by GMs to insure they didn't create a trivial game).
Now, IIRC, most if not all computer chess programs start out playing from an opening book, then switch to a search method when they go "out of book". However, thsee opening books were developed over hundreds of years by human players using standard non-quantative human methods.
If the rules were to change, and the existing opening books become useless, would the advantage then go to the human's intuitive style of play when facing the unknown? Or would the computer be better able to calculate new openings starting from zero knowledge?
Personally, I go back and forth on whether or not digital cameras will replace film. However, one thing to keep in mind is the issue of archival (long term) quality. My wife has in her possession prints and glass negatives of her family from the post-Civil War period. Those negatives are 120 years old and can still be printed in today's darkrooms (with a little duct tape on the carrier).
OTOH, I have 160k floppy disks from 1983 that I can't read on any PC I can reasonably find today, which is probably OK because the file formats aren't usable by any software on the market either.
Something to think about if you want your pictures to last a _long_ time.
I would second that recommendation, at least from a business perspective. The company I work for has a lot of people on the road, both North American and globally, and IGN (now AGNS) is the only ISP we have found that provides a reasonably complete set of POPs that service the remote industrial areas around the world that we tend to operate in (boy that's an ugly sentence). Also, their dialer software does a good job of presenting and updating the list of telephone numbers by country.
They are fairly expensive for a single user, though. Also be careful where you open your account - if you open it in the UK, then travel to the US, you may get hit with "roaming" charges (I thought the "G" stood for Global, eh?).
Don't miss Ted Drewes Frozen Custard when you are in St. Louis (on Chippewa St., which is part of the old Rte 66). Dixie Trucker Home in McLean, Illinois sits between I-55 and Old Route 66 and has a nice mini-museuem.
sPh
Re:USENET is dead! Long Live Usenet!
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Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 2
"I have not checked any Usenet groups for messages on a regular basis since 1997. I began to notice Usenet was seriously ill in 1994. The slow death march began in 1996. Just so you know I have some frame of reference, I've been using Usenet since 1990."
Of course, those of us who were reading netnews in 1983 thought the same thing in September of 1984. Netnews ( ==> Usenet ) survived those invading hordes. At least in the technical arena, people who want to ask/reply/discuss solid questions seem to drift to Usenet in the end.
_Tunnel Through the Deeps_ by Harry Harrison (originally published under another title in the UK and may currently be in print under that name, which I don't know). Lighthearted and amusing introduction to alternate history with Gus Washington trying to redeem his family's name by building a railroad tunnel from England to the American colonies around 1980.
_Under Pressure_ by Frank Herbert (also has another title which I can't remember - I am getting old). The pyschology of technology - or is it the technology of psychology? Somewhat heavy on the military theme. But really pushes the idea that how people interact as they use technology is more important than the technology itself.
I used to have an anthology of George O. Smith's "Venus Equilaterial" stories. Somewhat 1950's, but a good set of engineering mysteries mixed with space opera.
Isaac Asmimov edited a lot of anthologies of 1930's - 1970's SF short stories. Various anthologies of Hugo winners, etc. are also good. Short stories can be less intimidating than novels, and reading the 1930's stuff can be good for a laugh and an intro. to the genre at the same time.
As to the various comments on what is appropriate for a 13 y.o., I would make three observations:
1) At the ripe old age of 38, I can't imagine what it is like to be a pre-teen/teenager today. But based on what I see on VH-1, network television, and the teen section of the magazine rack, there isn't anything in any of the books listed in this discussion that will be corrupting, or even news to, a Western 13 y.o.
2) By the age of 14, certainly, I had read 75% of the books listed that had been published at the time. I suspect most of the people reading this had done the same. No significant damage done and possibly a lot of benefit.
3) Isaac Asimov once compared SF to a technical candle: expose a 12 y.o. to a good selection of SF, and if he (she) has an inborn desire/talent for technology, he will be drawn to it as a moth to a candle. Pretty accurate in my estimation.
I would suggest _Rite of Passage_ by Alexi Panshin. The surface story should still appeal to a young teenager, which gives time for the deeper themes to sink in. The result is not only a book that is good to read, but an understanding of how SF can dig into the structure of societies (current as well as future).
"As pathetic as it may sound - I still reread the Earthsea cycle from time to time. It still has something to say although the first book in the series is a bit too clumsy not as multifaceted as the later ones."
Funny you should say that. I read "Wizard of Earthsea" 5 or 10 times during my teenage 'read all the SF in the world' cycle. 20 years later I was scanning through it and the lightbulb went on - now I know what she was trying to say. A very enjoyable light fantasy when one is young; a lot deeper when one is older. That's what I would call a classic.
Some (if not many) of the problems I have seen (or heard others gripe about) concerning Slashdot recently have their origin in lack of resources. Do you have any plans to add more people: newsgathers, moderator managers, link checkers, etc? In other words, the equivalent of the publishing world's assistant editor(s)?
Any thought given to having a few full-time moderators? Just another take on the editor issue, really.
If no, is part of the concern libel/liability if you do add more editorial supervision to the content?
sPh
Re:Apocalypse Fixed, but the knowledge gap remains
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 2
"Please tell me you did NOT leave the "fixed" application written like this"
Yes, that would have been a potential future problem;-). The whole thing was replaced with a C++ based client/server app. That project had its own set of, um, interesting points, but at least it provided a modern foundation for the business system.
sPh
Primitive or restrained? You be the judge.
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Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 2
"A curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it's ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration."
Pretty much everyone I have talked to across the US has listed this as a strong net positive of the Y2K "thing". By not scheduling huge parties, by not having a massive "national vision", by not dumping huge amounts of money into the hands of greedy "entertainers", by simply not traveling over the long weekend, many people had time for friendly, personal celebrations with family, friends, and neighbors.
We had three neighborhood parties within walking distance, then sat up with our little guys to count down the seconds and bang pots and pans at midnight. Which do you think they will better remember in 80 years - that, or some "national vision" televised from Washington?
sPh
Re:Apocalypse Fixed, but the knowledge gap remains
on
Apocalypse Not
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· Score: 2
"And it wasn't a *hard* problem either. Not technically. Finding a fix for Y2K-imperiled code tended to be easy; scheduding and managing the upgrade of live systems with no disruption of service was in many cases hard. Coming up with the resources was hard for some companies. But the fixes themselves tended to be pretty obvious"
Comeon now - my former employer's customer service software (accounts, billings, credit, cash collection) consisted of 12 million lines of IBM 1401 assembly language vintage 1965 (bet you didn't think that would run on an ES/9000, did you?). No source code, no documentation, 99% of the original designers and programmers retired or dead. It _worked_ fine, because it had been debugged for 30 years. But it **wouldn't** have worked as of Saturday 2000/01/01.
_Easy_ to go in and fix that? Would you like to take on the job? A good million manhours over 30 years, in the always-easier forward direction, to create it, and it could have been fixed _easily_? No way, no how.
Without a certain amount of scaremongering, that company (a critical, 'head for the bunkers' industry) would have been dying in mid-January ("I'm sorry sir, our computers are down for the next 4 years") and dead in mid-February ("no cash? Sorry, no more coal for you").
The geeks did a very very good job on this one. No ifs ands or buts.
"While we're at it, we need to vacate Chicago too, as it is also way too cold. There are too many other areas in the country that are more conducive to human life. Just pack up all of the nice museums, restaurants, etc and ship them to Florida or South Carolina."
The downside being that in those locations you have to carry a.22 pistol on your belt to kill the giant cockroaches. There is a reason peoples in temperate climates live longer than those in tropical climates (on average): 2 months of zero deg.F kills a lot of yucky stuff.
Plus, I would go batty if it were 75 (deg.F) and sunny outside all the time (well, maybe I already am). Give me four distinct seasons any time.
sPh (former Chicago, former St.Louis, soon to be working in Pittsburgh).
"Larger corporations tend to move more slowly and carefully, they are unable (due to commitments to their shareholders and employees) to set up risks where they might take a bad fall."
The customer's needs and demands play a part in this as well. An ongoing enterprise needs some assurance of longevity and stability from its vendors. If I am building a worldwide information system, at a cost of (say) 5% of corporate revenues, which is a huge investment, that system has to last x years. x can vary but certainly not less than 5 for a Fortune 500 company. Therefore, I cannot afford to base this system on untried technology from a small startup. No matter how good they are, I can't take the risk.
This will lead me to use large, established, conservative vendors, and pay them big bucks. Digital, (the old) IBM, Control Data, Sperry, etc. But of course, these large and profitable sales are exactly what holds the vendor back from innovating in the long run (note that none of the vendors I list above really exists today).
Crucially, this also affects the type of people a vendor has to hire and promote to fulfill these contracts. If you want a stable, secure, high quality system you have to employ knowledgable, experienced, conservative, belt+suspenders+extra-string-inside-the-pants guys, who are probably somewhere around 40-60 years old. It makes me shudder to hear that Microsoft doesn't hire anyone older than 22 (per Bill Gates interveiw in Newsweek 2 years ago) - these are the people I will trust with my mission critical systems?
But at the same time the conservative guys by their nature will resist innovation (having seen numerous failed innovations in the past, no wonder), and eventally prevent the vendor from advancing with the "next wave".
No real answers here - just some observations. But I think my observation does go a long way toward explaining why we have seen a substantial decrease in the quality and reliability of software and computer systems in general over the last 10 years: reliability and stability are in direct conflict with speed and innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
"What would you do if you were a company and saw your product ruined by a couple of kiddies who obviously never had anything to do with running a business before? Sit there and watch your dollars go down the drain?"
I have a hard time seeing how this is different from any other free market/competitive response. Let's say there are three profit-making (in the legal sense) companies competing to sell a certain product category, and that there are no free/open-source type products in that market. Company A release a new version which is potentially "better" or more attractive than Company B or C's, but appears to violate some law or cause some long-term damange to the customer. You had better believe that Companys B and C will immediately counterattck on several fronts with both their sales forces ("oh, you didn't know that product A causes sterility after 6 months?") and through the legal/political/media system. In fact, Companys B and C would be in violation of their obligations to their shareholders if they did _not_ counterattack and their directors could be subject to shareholder lawsuits seeking damages.
Now, how is this different from the instant case?
sPh
"Well, realistically, why wouldn't they be upset? It's equivalent to, say, Ford Motor company reacquiring Hertz, and finding out that all their executives drive Cadies..."
About a year ago I was reading an intervew with Novell's CTO (for internal services) in which she described Novell's internal architecture. The inteviewer asked some sharp questions about why there were a number of NT servers in production on the Novell network. She replied (a) there was a business application required by her clients which ran only on NT (b) Novell's external clients use heterogeneous networks with Novell, Microsoft, *nix, etc products, so she believed her internal network should reflect that reality.
Now, as a technology strategist, which company would you trust more to be your supplier in the long run: One which tries to eliminate all non-internal products regardless of functionality? Or one which works intelligently to work with the best of all products on the market?
sPh
"Good lord how dare Amazon.com follow a supply/demand model? You mean to tell me that if there is demand (but limited supply) on a particular item that they are raising the price? Personally, I am outraged. I think I should set the price for everything I buy (or steal, in the case of MP3s). I haven't heard of anything this crazy since freshman econ."
OK, without going back and hauling out my econ texts to get the terminology right: this isn't an issue of supply and demand. The most efficent price for society as a whole is set where the supply and demand curves intersect. However, that price does not maximize the profit that the seller can make. The difference between the supply-and-demand price and the maximum profit is the "consumer surplus". The Amazon strategy is an attempt to capture the consumer surplus all for themselves, destroying the concept of the economically efficient price. Which has long been the goal of every business, but which is almost impossible to achieve without the low-cost information and instant feedback that the Internet provides.
Airlines, BTW, claim that they are actually selling different products at different prices, not the same product (seats on a flight) at different products. That is, a ticket for a seat purchased four weeks in advance with restrictions is NOT the same product at a seat purchased one hour in advance. Which is dubious IMHO but at least logical.
sPh
IANAL, much less an anti-trust lawyer, but isn't this a pretty gross violation of the Robinson-Pattman Act? (In the US anyway). Not that Robinson-Pattman is ever enforced (or could ever be enforced for that matter), but this one seems a bit blatent.
sPh
I must say I am a little skeptical. About every 2 years, for the past 10 years or so, there has been an announcement from some lab concerning a breakthrough in display technology (the last one I heard about was from TI and was going to provide 300dpi on a 20' screen). None of these technologies has ever come to market; we are still pretty much stuck with big tubes or expensive (and somewhat slow) LCD's.
;-) ). But forgive me if I don't believe it until I see it at Circuit City at a price of less than 1000 USD.
Now, I would love to see a breakthrough in technology and to have a 1200 dpi display device (other than paper that is
sPh
"I never heard of "Enterprise Resource Planning" before in my life, I suspect that a large number of people are the same way, nevertheless some quick dashing about the web trying to figure out what kind of software this is I fell asleep to the strains of marketing hype"
ERP installations and operations probably accounted for 50% or more of the total IT market in the Western world 1990-2000. Particularly 1998-2000 when large corporations finally realized that their 1960's vintage business code really couldn't be fixed for Y2K. Even today, total WAN traffic for most large enterprises is probably 90% generated by the ERP system, 10% by Internet. Therefore total datacomm traffic (again in the Western world) has been driven far more by ERP demands than Internet.
I know this sounds strange if one is working in a small academic environment or for a small company, but the system requirements of a large enterprise don't scale from small examples. As with much of IT.
sPh
First, I believe an large UK software house announced an agreement in principle to purchase Baan about three weeks ago, so they won't be independent for much longer.
More importantly, "historically" (by which I mean in the 1970's and 1980's) ERP software (then usually called MRP II) was actually very close to the open source model. In that: (i) you received source code with your purchase (ii) you were free to modify the source code in any way you so desired, with the level of support from the vendor for your modified code varying depending on how complex your modification was and how much you were willing to pay (iii) vendors would capture thier clients' mods and often roll them back into the base product (iv) for some products, there was an active process of exchanging mod code among customers independent of the vendor.
(iv) is perhaps most interesting. Some vendors actively encouraged and supported the distribution of mods, some looked the other way, and a few tried to license or discourage communication among clients. A few vendors, such as ASK, actually encouraged their customers to communicate among themselves and form independent advocacy organizations.
Today the situation seems to be more restricted. A few vendors still distribute source code, but usually under fairly tight licensing restrictions. Most low- and mid-range vendors are only distributing executables now. High end is another story, but those contracts are all negotiated on an individual basis.
sPh
"Still, I sometimes find myself wanting for xtree... wish I could find a copy of that."
Totally off-topic, but try
www.ztree.com
Seems pretty close and is Win32 compliant.
sPh
Hmmm - were you stealing when you copied those definitions from the dictionary directly into your Slashdot post? Why or why not?
sPh
The problem here is that the "offshore" site (non-US, non-EU) must connnect to the rest of the world through some physical connection. That connection is most likely provided by a peering arrangement with one of the global telecomm providers. And there is a major asymmetry of power between the smaller country and the {US,EU}.
So when your posting annoys someone with serious clout, they have a quite chat with the State Department and the interconnecting telecomm player. They in turn have private chats with their peers, and your site disappears. The alternative is for, say, voice service into that country to "stop working" for a few days, until the point gets across.
IMHO the best choice is to set up your own site with a local or regional ISP in your home country, get some legal advice, and fight the battles you need to fight. That's the only way to prevail in the long run.
sPh
Does the entertainment industry (in the USofA) have any sort of statuatory exemption from antitrust regulation, similar to that held by major league baseball? As a non-lawyer, it seems to me that many things the recording industry does (DVD "regions" comes to mind, as does SCMS) are gross violations of antitrust regulations and potentially vulnerable to class-action lawsuits on behalf of _all_ consumers. Am I missing or misinterpreting something here?
sPh
A question that pops into my limited mind: what would happen to the computer-human chess balance if we changed the rules slightly? Say switching the bishop and knight on one or both sides, or the knight and rook, or the King and Queen (and yes, I realize these changes would have to be analyzed by GMs to insure they didn't create a trivial game).
Now, IIRC, most if not all computer chess programs start out playing from an opening book, then switch to a search method when they go "out of book". However, thsee opening books were developed over hundreds of years by human players using standard non-quantative human methods.
If the rules were to change, and the existing opening books become useless, would the advantage then go to the human's intuitive style of play when facing the unknown? Or would the computer be better able to calculate new openings starting from zero knowledge?
sPh
Personally, I go back and forth on whether or not digital cameras will replace film. However, one thing to keep in mind is the issue of archival (long term) quality. My wife has in her possession prints and glass negatives of her family from the post-Civil War period. Those negatives are 120 years old and can still be printed in today's darkrooms (with a little duct tape on the carrier).
OTOH, I have 160k floppy disks from 1983 that I can't read on any PC I can reasonably find today, which is probably OK because the file formats aren't usable by any software on the market either.
Something to think about if you want your pictures to last a _long_ time.
sPh
"teams were forced to realize on their own what was going wrong, and guess at what kind of output the judges wanted for such a graph."
And exactly how is that different from real world systems development? Sounds like a pretty realistic contest to me...
sPh
I would second that recommendation, at least from a business perspective. The company I work for has a lot of people on the road, both North American and globally, and IGN (now AGNS) is the only ISP we have found that provides a reasonably complete set of POPs that service the remote industrial areas around the world that we tend to operate in (boy that's an ugly sentence). Also, their dialer software does a good job of presenting and updating the list of telephone numbers by country.
They are fairly expensive for a single user, though. Also be careful where you open your account - if you open it in the UK, then travel to the US, you may get hit with "roaming" charges (I thought the "G" stood for Global, eh?).
Don't miss Ted Drewes Frozen Custard when you are in St. Louis (on Chippewa St., which is part of the old Rte 66). Dixie Trucker Home in McLean, Illinois sits between I-55 and Old Route 66 and has a nice mini-museuem.
sPh
"I have not checked any Usenet groups for messages on a regular basis since 1997. I began to notice Usenet was seriously ill in 1994. The slow death march began in 1996. Just so you know I have some frame of reference, I've been using Usenet since 1990."
Of course, those of us who were reading netnews in 1983 thought the same thing in September of 1984. Netnews ( ==> Usenet ) survived those invading hordes. At least in the technical arena, people who want to ask/reply/discuss solid questions seem to drift to Usenet in the end.
sPh
_Tunnel Through the Deeps_ by Harry Harrison (originally published under another title in the UK and may currently be in print under that name, which I don't know). Lighthearted and amusing introduction to alternate history with Gus Washington trying to redeem his family's name by building a railroad tunnel from England to the American colonies around 1980.
_Under Pressure_ by Frank Herbert (also has another title which I can't remember - I am getting old). The pyschology of technology - or is it the technology of psychology? Somewhat heavy on the military theme. But really pushes the idea that how people interact as they use technology is more important than the technology itself.
I used to have an anthology of George O. Smith's "Venus Equilaterial" stories. Somewhat 1950's, but a good set of engineering mysteries mixed with space opera.
Isaac Asmimov edited a lot of anthologies of 1930's - 1970's SF short stories. Various anthologies of Hugo winners, etc. are also good. Short stories can be less intimidating than novels, and reading the 1930's stuff can be good for a laugh and an intro. to the genre at the same time.
As to the various comments on what is appropriate for a 13 y.o., I would make three observations:
1) At the ripe old age of 38, I can't imagine what it is like to be a pre-teen/teenager today. But based on what I see on VH-1, network television, and the teen section of the magazine rack, there isn't anything in any of the books listed in this discussion that will be corrupting, or even news to, a Western 13 y.o.
2) By the age of 14, certainly, I had read 75% of the books listed that had been published at the time. I suspect most of the people reading this had done the same. No significant damage done and possibly a lot of benefit.
3) Isaac Asimov once compared SF to a technical candle: expose a 12 y.o. to a good selection of SF, and if he (she) has an inborn desire/talent for technology, he will be drawn to it as a moth to a candle. Pretty accurate in my estimation.
sPh
I would suggest _Rite of Passage_ by Alexi Panshin. The surface story should still appeal to a young teenager, which gives time for the deeper themes to sink in. The result is not only a book that is good to read, but an understanding of how SF can dig into the structure of societies (current as well as future).
sPh
"As pathetic as it may sound - I still reread the Earthsea cycle from time to time. It still has something to say although the first book in the series is a bit too clumsy not as multifaceted as the later ones."
Funny you should say that. I read "Wizard of Earthsea" 5 or 10 times during my teenage 'read all the SF in the world' cycle. 20 years later I was scanning through it and the lightbulb went on - now I know what she was trying to say. A very enjoyable light fantasy when one is young; a lot deeper when one is older. That's what I would call a classic.
sPh
Some (if not many) of the problems I have seen (or heard others gripe about) concerning Slashdot recently have their origin in lack of resources. Do you have any plans to add more people: newsgathers, moderator managers, link checkers, etc? In other words, the equivalent of the publishing world's assistant editor(s)?
Any thought given to having a few full-time moderators? Just another take on the editor issue, really.
If no, is part of the concern libel/liability if you do add more editorial supervision to the content?
sPh
"Please tell me you did NOT leave the "fixed" application written like this"
;-). The whole thing was replaced with a C++ based client/server app. That project had its own set of, um, interesting points, but at least it provided a modern foundation for the business system.
Yes, that would have been a potential future problem
sPh
"A curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it's ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration."
Pretty much everyone I have talked to across the US has listed this as a strong net positive of the Y2K "thing". By not scheduling huge parties, by not having a massive "national vision", by not dumping huge amounts of money into the hands of greedy "entertainers", by simply not traveling over the long weekend, many people had time for friendly, personal celebrations with family, friends, and neighbors.
We had three neighborhood parties within walking distance, then sat up with our little guys to count down the seconds and bang pots and pans at midnight. Which do you think they will better remember in 80 years - that, or some "national vision" televised from Washington?
sPh
"And it wasn't a *hard* problem either. Not technically. Finding a fix for Y2K-imperiled code tended to be easy; scheduding and managing the upgrade of live systems with no disruption of service was in many cases hard. Coming up with the resources was hard for some companies. But the fixes themselves tended to be pretty obvious"
Comeon now - my former employer's customer service software (accounts, billings, credit, cash collection) consisted of 12 million lines of IBM 1401 assembly language vintage 1965 (bet you didn't think that would run on an ES/9000, did you?). No source code, no documentation, 99% of the original designers and programmers retired or dead. It _worked_ fine, because it had been debugged for 30 years. But it **wouldn't** have worked as of Saturday 2000/01/01.
_Easy_ to go in and fix that? Would you like to take on the job? A good million manhours over 30 years, in the always-easier forward direction, to create it, and it could have been fixed _easily_? No way, no how.
Without a certain amount of scaremongering, that company (a critical, 'head for the bunkers' industry) would have been dying in mid-January ("I'm sorry sir, our computers are down for the next 4 years") and dead in mid-February ("no cash? Sorry, no more coal for you").
The geeks did a very very good job on this one. No ifs ands or buts.
sPh
"While we're at it, we need to vacate Chicago too, as it is also way too cold. There are too many other areas in the country that are more conducive to human life. Just pack up all of the nice museums, restaurants, etc and ship them to Florida or South Carolina."
.22 pistol on your belt to kill the giant cockroaches. There is a reason peoples in temperate climates live longer than those in tropical climates (on average): 2 months of zero deg.F kills a lot of yucky stuff.
The downside being that in those locations you have to carry a
Plus, I would go batty if it were 75 (deg.F) and sunny outside all the time (well, maybe I already am). Give me four distinct seasons any time.
sPh
(former Chicago, former St.Louis, soon to be working in Pittsburgh).
"Larger corporations tend to move more slowly and carefully, they are unable (due to commitments to their shareholders and employees) to set up risks where they might take a bad fall."
The customer's needs and demands play a part in this as well. An ongoing enterprise needs some assurance of longevity and stability from its vendors. If I am building a worldwide information system, at a cost of (say) 5% of corporate revenues, which is a huge investment, that system has to last x years. x can vary but certainly not less than 5 for a Fortune 500 company. Therefore, I cannot afford to base this system on untried technology from a small startup. No matter how good they are, I can't take the risk.
This will lead me to use large, established, conservative vendors, and pay them big bucks. Digital, (the old) IBM, Control Data, Sperry, etc. But of course, these large and profitable sales are exactly what holds the vendor back from innovating in the long run (note that none of the vendors I list above really exists today).
Crucially, this also affects the type of people a vendor has to hire and promote to fulfill these contracts. If you want a stable, secure, high quality system you have to employ knowledgable, experienced, conservative, belt+suspenders+extra-string-inside-the-pants guys, who are probably somewhere around 40-60 years old. It makes me shudder to hear that Microsoft doesn't hire anyone older than 22 (per Bill Gates interveiw in Newsweek 2 years ago) - these are the people I will trust with my mission critical systems?
But at the same time the conservative guys by their nature will resist innovation (having seen numerous failed innovations in the past, no wonder), and eventally prevent the vendor from advancing with the "next wave".
No real answers here - just some observations. But I think my observation does go a long way toward explaining why we have seen a substantial decrease in the quality and reliability of software and computer systems in general over the last 10 years: reliability and stability are in direct conflict with speed and innovation.
sPh