Copyright (the right to keep others from copying your creations) is NOT a natural right. It's an artificial right created in the 18th century to encourage authors to keep on writing. In the US, the Constitutional clause authorizing the creation of copyright laws is quite specific about this purpose. And long copyright periods do NOT meet that criteria. People just don't think that far ahead. If 14 years of royalties from your work don't encourage you sufficiently to keep doing it, a longer period isn't going to do any better. 28 years is dubious. Life is ridiculous. Life + 75 is outrageous.
If you want to provide for your retirement, or your grandchildrens' retirements, you need to put money into stocks and bonds, not hope that people will still pay to read, hear, or view your work 25 or 100 years from now. Most creative work does not have a long life-time; true, we still perform Shakespeare, and read Marlowe if only to compare it to Shakespeare's version, but some dozens or hundreds of other playwrights in that era were forgotten within a decade of their last production. I rather doubt that anyone retired off the royalties from rag-time recordings - or that more than a half-dozen of the jazz greats enjoyed a comfortable retirement. And I certainly hope that the creators of "Dumb and Dumber" won't receive fat checks from that work in their old age.
Yes, I hate to hear about starving artists. But they are hardly ever starving because they aren't receiving royalties from duplication of their long-ago works. They are starving because the market is tilted too far in favor of the publishers, so writers and musicians get about 10% of the store price of a book or CD. They are starving because they signed lousy contracts - and in the past that may have been the only way to get their work out to the public. Stretching the length of copyright just means that the publishers get to rip them off for much, much longer.
Until now, however, if you went into any bookstore, there was hardly any difference between a copyrighted and a public domain book. Maybe a copyrighted book costed a little more, but for the most part, no one was hurt by having copyright extended. There was no such thing as getting a book "for free" or a movie "for free". There were printing costs.
However, whether it was copyrighted or not could make a big difference in whether it was printed in the first place. Public domain, the only issue is whether the likely sales would be enough to pay for a printing run. Copyrighted, you have to buy permission from whoever holds the copyright - if you can find them. Finding the author wasn't a big problem when copyright ran 14 years, it got harder at 26 years, but at 75 years after the author dies, merely locating the heirs is going to be a big, big problem.
Although from some accounts it sounds like if it looks profitable, RIAA member companies will go ahead and remaster those old recordings onto new CD's with or without the artist's consent... Who is the pirate?
That test had better be in a _rich_ foreign country - there are lots of places an American $1 is worth a day's pay, for the lucky few that even have a job. Try it in Afghanistan and they'll take all the bills and all your change too - and maybe run off to the scrap metal dealer with your keychain.
One fundamental difference is that it's perfectly reasonable for a Linux distro to lock down everything by default, so that you've got to make some changes before it's usable for much of anything. (You could play solitaire if the distro included a program...) If you bought Linux, you should know or learn a bit about administering.
Windows, OTOH, starts with the assumption that a complete idiot will be installing it. If networking is crippled by default, it will probably remain crippled until the user returns the computer because it "won't do X". And it makes the almost-reasonable assumption that with an idiot setting it up and using it, the box won't contain anything worth a good cracker's time. And these assumptions are almost OK; the problem is that (1) when the box is used for something serious, it's hard for even a professional administrator to keep up with all the changes needed to make a system secure, (2) they've made the home system default so wide open that serious crackers can take over hundreds of them at a time and use them in assaults on important targets, and (3) MS is so sloppy that everything is a lot more exposed than they intended...
for a large, complex system to have a mean time before failure (MTBF) of (say) 100,000 hours, it must be subject to at least that many hours of testing
This seems to assume that you are testing the quality into the system, rather than getting quality by design + inspection. We all know how important design is, whether or not we do it correctly... And it's been very well demonstrated that code inspections find more bugs than testing. Since open-source invites the whole world to inspect your code, did Anderson just miss it's biggest advantage? And still come out with security(open source) == security(by obscurity)?
I've only read the first two pages of that 13 page pdf so far, so this opinion is subject to revision.
There is one skill that good engineers and good managers share - that's communication. I wonder if part of Welshdave's problem is that he can't explain anything about his work to non-techies. At least, that seems a bit more likely than that no one in management is listening... If you can't explain the technical issues to non-techies, you'd better pray you never get into anything resembling management, because a manager's first job is keeping his superiors informed. And stay away from small companies, or you will have the CEO walking into your cubicle and asking you what the hell is going on - I've spent 15 years in small companies, and being able to answer that in a way even an MBA can understand is absolutely vital unless you're buried in a big enough organization that someone else will answer...
I'm a hell of a good engineer, I can explain technical issues to non-techies, I understand management issues more than many engineers, and I'm still a terrible manageer. I learned that back in the Air Force, where they kept trying to promote me out of fixing the radars to managing the technicians... I'm so bad at it, that if I was forced into a project management position on a critical project, I'd sell all my company stock before that became "insider trading".;-)
Some of Thunderhearts examples are bogus: Gannt charts are just a different sort of flowchart, the biggest challenge isn't handling the chart but understanding the stuff you are entering. An engineer ought to be better at creating the Gannt chart than a technically-challenged manager. But with only the average engineer's people-handling skills, you aren't going to get the resources that chart shows you need from other departments...
PM's have to understand the way things look from upper management's perspective. Without that, you can neither communicate with them or appreciate their main concerns. Example: we were having problems with the motherboards for a touch-screen voting system. A straight engineering decision would be to shut down the line except for test quantities until everything is perfect. A management decision is to consider that, considering all the other steps after the boards are built (assembling into systems, delivering the systems, training election workers), the first Tuesday in November is already close. Also, we have 50 people working on that line - lay them off, and we won't have half of them when we're ready to start again. So we scrambled to fix the production process as fast as possible, and now we're going back and fixing the earlier production while continuing to crank out the new boards. It costs, but anything else would have crashed critical deadlines.
PM's have to handle being pulled a dozen different ways at the same time. The customer is calling and needs to be reassured, your boss is calling (ditto), some engineers need a sign-off right now, and others are running off in the wrong direction. I work best when I do one job and get it finished before starting the next one. With the shit my boss has to handle, I'd have a dozen things half done and forget where I was in every one of them...
OTOH, the theory that a manager only needs to know how to manage is wrong, wrong, wrong. I've been exposed to the pure form of it just once, when I was just starting out as a technician in the air force. SSGT X was a former B-52 tail-gunner who had been grounded for a little heart murmur. So they retrained him as a tech. We were in tech school together, and since I was the closest to him in age and the only other student with children we became friends. Then we arrived at our first duty assignment, and they were short of NCO's. So while I was still in on-the-job training (finding out that 90% of what they taught in tech school was wrong) and officially not supposed to do anything without a trainer watching, SSGT X became my supervisor. He spouted that "You just have to know how to manage" line and proceeded to get into trouble. To his credit, he kept his problems from impacting the workers - but he got so overstressed he totally lost it at home. His wife showed up on our doorstep blubbering something about him going crazy and kicking the cat to death - I'm not sure which of them was crazier by that time, but I called up the chaplain to get me out of the middle immediately!
If you don't know what you are managing, you are going to screw it up big-time. The PM doesn't have to be an engineer, but does have to understand how engineers work and the requirements and time needed. The two-man management team (PM & technical lead) might be the best choice in many cases.
It's been a few years since I last built a computer, but JDR was always a good place for computer parts (and general electronics as well). It sells mostly no-name made-in-Taiwan parts for a little higher price than you'd expect, but they've got a lab that actually builds up computers and verifies sample parts work before they market them - and their tech support is the best I've ever dealt with.
I've tried to read the NEC. I certainly understand the reasons behind it (training and experience as an electronics tech, electrical engineering degree and 15 years experience, various construction & repair experience since I was big enough to pick up a hammer, and I do better but slower wiring than most licensed electricians), but I sure can't understand it. Besides bad writing, the problem is that it tries to cover all possible cases (residential, industrial, farm, storage buildings), and all possible methods of construction.
Looking for the NEC on-line, I don't find it. (It's copyrighted so they can legally keep it off the net.) But what you do find is various attempts to tell you how to wire various things according to the code - and the one thing they all have in common is that they say you have to check with your building inspector to find out how he interprets it. The word for that is "subjective" - and a subjective law is even worse than a copyrighted law!
Unfortunately the best we'd be able to do to get the government out is to replace it with an even more dangerous system of profit motivated Corporate inspections. (Not that codes today aren't profit motivated, but they are not yet specific to things like your insurance premium.)
You know Underwriter's Laboratories (UL)? Their stamp is on about 90% of electrical equipment in the US. UL tests a typical unit and monitors the production process rather than inspecting everything, so the cost per unit is very small. UL stamps are mandated by the insurance companies, not by the government, and it works much better than gov't building inspections do.
And if you really want to use a different test lab for electrical equipment safety, some insurers will agree. European manufacturers use European testing labs, and their stamps are accepted here and vice-versa in most cases. Or there's a fair amount of small equipment on the market with no stamp at all (from lamps to computers, but all customer installed rather than installed to codes that mandate the stamp). Either the insurer trusts these manufacturers to do the job right, they pay enormous premiums, or they don't have liability insurance and take the risk if something does go wrong.
Re:This is arguably *the* most critical problem
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However, you could make the argument that the MS libraries are thus better and better, with each revision.
It depends on whether the changes really are improvements - or just churn for the sake of selling similar software to the same people again.
Another issue, of course, is how long you hang on to an old fundamental design feature. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but years later it turns out that a different choice would have been better (now). It makes further progress harder - however, changing it now would require reeducating all the users (or worse, break compatibility with almost everything), and there never is a point where the immediate gain from changing it outweighs the massive costs.
This isn't just a software issue - the Intel x86 architecture is probably the second-greatest all time greatest example of this. I think the greatest example is the weird signalling voltages used in the phone system - they date back to the 19th century and are quite inappropriate for semiconductor circuits, but changing them would break every existing phone and switch.
If there is anything out there that says... "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not", or else... by whatever literary device, and it can be used against you in any action - then it must be in the public domain for those affected. Period, no question. Any argument otherwise is a plea for tyrany. I agree completely. You've said it better than I could.
The other issues are how the developers of model building codes get paid for their work and expenses, and how building quality is assured, if copyrighted model codes cannot be directly enacted into law. It's not that tough a problem, especially if you are willing to think out of the "there ought to be a law" box:
1) Local governments desiring to use a building code could pay a fair price for the right to copy it. That would be a lot more than what they pay to put one copy in the inspector's office, but not prohibitive when you consider that the inspection fees on a small house around here are $3,000, or nearly as much as the sales tax. (The cost of meeting wrong-headed standards has sometimes been much, much higher.) It's just that the inspector won't be quite as big a profit center for the county if they have to buy a license to copy the code...
2. Considering the abuses and weaknesses I've observed in the government-run inspection system, a libertarian solution would be much better overall:
1. No building code mandated by law, except possibly a few very simple restrictions to keep your building projects from becoming a danger to your neighbors. (E.g., propane tanks arranged so as not to explode.) Enforce it not by inspecting every project, but by allowing the neighbors to sue if they think your place is a hazard (at their risk of paying your legal expenses if they lose).
2. If you are dealing with a contractor to build a house or other construction for you, you agree in the contract on the code to be used and the private inspection agency to be hired. The contract isn't paid off until the inspector signs off - but he works for you, not the gov't. If you want the house wired with fiber, get an inspector that understands that (gov't inspectors will probably not notice if this part of the contract wasn't met at all). If you want the place built to last, find some higher standards, and get an inspector that will really enforce them. If you want a shack that can fall down in three years but no sooner, pick appropriate standards...
3. If you are buying a new house, not built to your specs, you check for the inspection agencies sign-off and which standards they used. On an older house, you can check the original inspection - but it's a good idea to hire an inspector to check it again, anyhow.
4. DIY, you can hire an inspector or inspect it yourself. If you actually know what you're doing, this saves money. If you're like the "Tim" character on Home Improvements, this probably reduces the chances of you or any of your family surviving to spread your genes, and is that such a bad thing? 8-)
The problems with the libertarian model are the ones of finding a good inspector (not the one the contractor likes because he'll approve anything if the contractor really needs him to) and figuring your way around the competing building codes. I find those problems preferable to paying an exorbitant fee to an inspector I cannot pick, and having only one building code, probably recommended to the county commission by the biggest developer of poor-quality housing...
Unfortunately, Veeck vs. SBCCI (in the parent post) applies to a case where the town, with authorization from the copyright holder, copied an entire Model Building Code into their law. For that situation only the law cannot be copyrighted. (At this point the decision applies only in Texas and other states under the 5th Circuit Court, however after reading this court's decision, it wasn't a close call at all.)
This doesn't address the case where the law refers to a copyrighted private publication, as in my county: 'If a statute refers to the Red Book..., the law requires citizens to consult or use a copyrighted work in the process of fulfilling their obligations. The copyrighted works do not "become law" merely because a statute refers to them.' I'd agree with the second sentence there - but I have a big problem with the first one. If you cannot comply with the law without dealing with a private monopoly, it shouldn't be a law.
By the way, if Congressman Joe Blowhard reads the latest Stephen King novel into the Congressional Record, does it thereby become non-copyrighted? (Of course, you would have to title it "Joe Blowhard reading Stephen King's..." when you republished it.)
So then it's back to the anti-trust lawsuits again, eh?
Actually, I do expect something like this. MS has been so obviously oblivious of what the case(s) have been all about that I expect they will continue piling on new violations until there no longer is a federal judge that isn't "prejudiced" against MS. Unless they get hit with a really heavy penalty that sticks, first...
Good point about the value of your time - how the heck is anyone except a retiree going to find the time the manage building a house while continuing to earn the money to pay for it? I do most of my own repairs, including all wiring and plumbing, and I do it better than a contractor - but I'm not even "earning" minimum wage...
Related to your comment about the community of contractors in an area, there's the issue of building inspectors. In the US, these are local government employees. They are supposed to both enforce building codes setting minimum standards, and see that whatever is in the plans is what actually gets built. Their "fees" for doing this are several thousand dollars on a small house around here - I'm sure the inspection office is quite a profit center for the county. But the main problem is that they often forget to check on anything unusual in the contract (some other poster mentioned a lot of cat 5 wiring that wasn't installed), and depending on the inspector their interpretation of building codes can cause more trouble than it saves.
The building codes are pretty subjective - also, in most jurisdictions the law just refers to _copyrighted_ and very expensive publications by building industry groups. (There's something fundamentally wrong about a copyrighted law...) Some of the inspectors are pretty good, but some are arseholes who like to throw their power around, with no understanding of the reasons for the building codes. And the chief inspector in this county just doesn't like do-it-yourselfers, and will hunt through the code for a way to make you tear it out... If you have a contractor, he'll probably be able to get his buddy in the office to pass the work. That's not always to the good, either...
So bring the beer around quitting time, not for lunch. Not that any construction worker should be significantly impaired by ONE beer - but they may think they aren't impaired by one sixpack...
Another thing (and IMO the most important): In the US, various privately-run internet blocking services have blocked POLITICAL sites, among others. Being privately run, it's pretty easy to verify this - filter off, there's the Democratic National Committee, filter on, no DNC... But if the government manages to effectively mandate filtering, it's going to be pretty hard to get around the filters and find out what the party in power doesn't want you to see. And if you allow the party in power to control the media, you no longer have a democracy or a republic...
The disheartening trend for CS to be an "easy major" is not common at all universities.
It depends on whether you are comparing CS to the handful of traditionally tough majors (engineering, pre-med, pre-law), or to all the relatively easy majors (from English to Education). My first year in the EE program at Oklahoma State, I was doing 60-80 hours of homework a week. The classes shrank by two-thirds in that year. That was by plan - you get some important basics in that first year, but the main thing is to ensure that you are never going to neglect checking all the details just because it's getting late, before they teach you the real stuff...
If there's a CS program anywhere that does things like that, I'd like to know about it. And hire their graduates. The CS classes I've taken (a couple of decades ago) were downright relaxing compared to anything in the engineering school.
Java didn't and wasn't intended to commoditize _all_ the hardware, or to make _all_ software run on any hardware. Sun sells high cost high performance hardware. Why would people pay Sun's prices for fast boxen, then cripple them running an interpreted language?
Because they buy Sun boxen to run a particular, very resource-intensive, program which has been compiled specifically for the Sun. But they also need to run various other programs not requiring much in the way of resources. If they had to buy a Wintel box to do that, they might discover that it wasn't totally impossible to stretch the Wintel architecture to also cover the stuff they bought the Sun for. But if the commodity software becomes hardware independent, then Sun might be able to keep it's customers entirely on Sun boxen.
Sun did understand what they were doing. They didn't understand how M$ was going to embrace & extend...
. If the printer driver tanks the system, who do you hold liable?
The nitwits that designed the OS so a driver could tank it. Not to mention that incompatibility with drivers (which are not written by MS even when they are on the Windows installation disk) isn't the only problem. There are plenty of incompatibilities between Windows products!
A good OS should isolate different programs so one piece of runaway code is only going to tske down the functions it controls. Most versions of Unix do that pretty well. DOS didn't but it wasn't intended to be a good OS. It was a simple single-tasking single-user OS, and if something tanked you didn't lose too much by rebooting. Win 95/98/ME inherited some of DOS's weaknesses by design (to maintain compatibility), and due to the added complexity on a shaky foundation they were even more likely to tank - but they weren't intended for servers or heavy duty applications either. NT was supposed to be the server/heavy duty reliable OS - but it wasn't, and although it got better at each revision, even at rev 6.0 (XP) it still isn't really server grade.
The liability shouldn't be for writing crappy software, but for selling crappy software as if it were good software. False advertising...
As far as present law goes, you are right. Almost a century ago some book publisher tried to put a sort of EULA on the flyleaf, forbidding resales among other things - and that's when the First Sale doctrine was enunciated. They sold it, you bought it, they cannot tell you what to do with it.
But in the article, the record executives were discussing (going to Congress to get) a law to ban used sales. There probably is no constitutional ban on such a law - it's a ridiculous overreaching of the interstate commerce clause, but so are tens of thousands of other laws and regulations that the courts have upheld. The real question is, whether they'd have the nerve to do it, and whether they could buy enough idiots in Congress to get it through.
I almost hope they do. It might finally wake up the American public that (1) their "representatives" aren't representing anyone but the campaign contributors anymore, and (2) the media companies are bloodsucking monsters, whose power must be restricted - by kicking out the incumbents and getting new people in Congress who are aware that the Constitution doesn't give anyone intellectual property rights - it just gives Congress the power to grant as much IP rights as seems like a good idea, and right now chopping way, way back on copyright and patent rights seems like a good idea...
I'd be surprised if that doesn't pre-date Checkpoint Charlie in some form, with Hitler's picture or even the Kaiser's instead of Stalin. (However, I'm not sure Americans would have been that disrespectful before Franklin D. Roosevelt - aside from the South's attitude towards Lincoln and the Reconstruction Republicans. But a lot of rich and important Americans were just about that hostile towards FDR...)
But it apparently became quite OK for Russians to mock their government well before the end of communism, probably even before 1980. I don't know if that was because zeal turned to cynicism right up to the top, or if it was because they figured out something good American military leaders learned a very long time ago - let 'em gripe, it's a substitute for rather than a preparation for action.
With some people, You can tell them to their face "Do not open emails from people you do not know", print it out in 124 point font banners hung over their cubicles...
The problem with that advice is, e-mail viruses come from (the computers of) PEOPLE YOU KNOW. The virus found your e-mail in the address book of the last computer it took over. It will apparently come from the owner of that computer. Probably they aren't a complete stranger. So if someone is following your advice, he'll think that Shakira screen saver from his buddy Joe Luser is just fine.
What you have to do is find out whether your buddy Joe KNOWS he sent you a Shakira screen saver, before you touch that attachment. Or have the brains to figure out that Joe is more likely to send you a virus than anything worth downloading... Or have enough system knowledge to tell executables from non-executables, enough sense to thoroughly check the bona fides of any executables, and (if in Windows) enough paranoia to make damned sure the non-executables are really non-executable in spite of M$'s efforts to hide such details, and to open the semi-executables like Word or HTML in a mode that won't allow their scripts to run.
It's not all Windows and Outlook, in fact it is mostly stupid users, but M$ has made the stupid user problem worse by hiding file types by default, creating more than a dozen different executable file types, and allowing scripts to run in all sorts of places where simple text was all that anyone really needed. True, put the same lusers on Linux boxes and they'll have remote login to root enabled with their cat's name "Fluffy" as the password. But their e-mail tool won't be running script viruses before they've even opened the message because Linux e-mail tools don't do HTML, let alone allow scripts embedded in it to run wild.
From what I've heard, make a joke like that about the government in China and they shoot you and bill your family for the bullet. Bureaucrats and fanatics have no sense of humor...
OTOH, in Russia (even under the Soviets) nearly everyone makes jokes about the government. Unfortunately, they more they joke about it, the less they do to fix it.
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Copyright (the right to keep others from copying your creations) is NOT a natural right. It's an artificial right created in the 18th century to encourage authors to keep on writing. In the US, the Constitutional clause authorizing the creation of copyright laws is quite specific about this purpose. And long copyright periods do NOT meet that criteria. People just don't think that far ahead. If 14 years of royalties from your work don't encourage you sufficiently to keep doing it, a longer period isn't going to do any better. 28 years is dubious. Life is ridiculous. Life + 75 is outrageous.
If you want to provide for your retirement, or your grandchildrens' retirements, you need to put money into stocks and bonds, not hope that people will still pay to read, hear, or view your work 25 or 100 years from now. Most creative work does not have a long life-time; true, we still perform Shakespeare, and read Marlowe if only to compare it to Shakespeare's version, but some dozens or hundreds of other playwrights in that era were forgotten within a decade of their last production. I rather doubt that anyone retired off the royalties from rag-time recordings - or that more than a half-dozen of the jazz greats enjoyed a comfortable retirement. And I certainly hope that the creators of "Dumb and Dumber" won't receive fat checks from that work in their old age.
Yes, I hate to hear about starving artists. But they are hardly ever starving because they aren't receiving royalties from duplication of their long-ago works. They are starving because the market is tilted too far in favor of the publishers, so writers and musicians get about 10% of the store price of a book or CD. They are starving because they signed lousy contracts - and in the past that may have been the only way to get their work out to the public. Stretching the length of copyright just means that the publishers get to rip them off for much, much longer.
Until now, however, if you went into any bookstore, there was hardly any difference between a copyrighted and a public domain book. Maybe a copyrighted book costed a little more, but for the most part, no one was hurt by having copyright extended. There was no such thing as getting a book "for free" or a movie "for free". There were printing costs.
However, whether it was copyrighted or not could make a big difference in whether it was printed in the first place. Public domain, the only issue is whether the likely sales would be enough to pay for a printing run. Copyrighted, you have to buy permission from whoever holds the copyright - if you can find them. Finding the author wasn't a big problem when copyright ran 14 years, it got harder at 26 years, but at 75 years after the author dies, merely locating the heirs is going to be a big, big problem.
Although from some accounts it sounds like if it looks profitable, RIAA member companies will go ahead and remaster those old recordings onto new CD's with or without the artist's consent... Who is the pirate?
That test had better be in a _rich_ foreign country - there are lots of places an American $1 is worth a day's pay, for the lucky few that even have a job. Try it in Afghanistan and they'll take all the bills and all your change too - and maybe run off to the scrap metal dealer with your keychain.
One fundamental difference is that it's perfectly reasonable for a Linux distro to lock down everything by default, so that you've got to make some changes before it's usable for much of anything. (You could play solitaire if the distro included a program...) If you bought Linux, you should know or learn a bit about administering.
Windows, OTOH, starts with the assumption that a complete idiot will be installing it. If networking is crippled by default, it will probably remain crippled until the user returns the computer because it "won't do X". And it makes the almost-reasonable assumption that with an idiot setting it up and using it, the box won't contain anything worth a good cracker's time. And these assumptions are almost OK; the problem is that (1) when the box is used for something serious, it's hard for even a professional administrator to keep up with all the changes needed to make a system secure, (2) they've made the home system default so wide open that serious crackers can take over hundreds of them at a time and use them in assaults on important targets, and (3) MS is so sloppy that everything is a lot more exposed than they intended...
for a large, complex system to have a mean time before failure (MTBF) of (say) 100,000 hours, it must be subject to at least that many hours of testing
This seems to assume that you are testing the quality into the system, rather than getting quality by design + inspection. We all know how important design is, whether or not we do it correctly... And it's been very well demonstrated that code inspections find more bugs than testing. Since open-source invites the whole world to inspect your code, did Anderson just miss it's biggest advantage? And still come out with security(open source) == security(by obscurity)?
I've only read the first two pages of that 13 page pdf so far, so this opinion is subject to revision.
There is one skill that good engineers and good managers share - that's communication. I wonder if part of Welshdave's problem is that he can't explain anything about his work to non-techies. At least, that seems a bit more likely than that no one in management is listening... If you can't explain the technical issues to non-techies, you'd better pray you never get into anything resembling management, because a manager's first job is keeping his superiors informed. And stay away from small companies, or you will have the CEO walking into your cubicle and asking you what the hell is going on - I've spent 15 years in small companies, and being able to answer that in a way even an MBA can understand is absolutely vital unless you're buried in a big enough organization that someone else will answer...
;-)
I'm a hell of a good engineer, I can explain technical issues to non-techies, I understand management issues more than many engineers, and I'm still a terrible manageer. I learned that back in the Air Force, where they kept trying to promote me out of fixing the radars to managing the technicians... I'm so bad at it, that if I was forced into a project management position on a critical project, I'd sell all my company stock before that became "insider trading".
Some of Thunderhearts examples are bogus: Gannt charts are just a different sort of flowchart, the biggest challenge isn't handling the chart but understanding the stuff you are entering. An engineer ought to be better at creating the Gannt chart than a technically-challenged manager. But with only the average engineer's people-handling skills, you aren't going to get the resources that chart shows you need from other departments...
PM's have to understand the way things look from upper management's perspective. Without that, you can neither communicate with them or appreciate their main concerns. Example: we were having problems with the motherboards for a touch-screen voting system. A straight engineering decision would be to shut down the line except for test quantities until everything is perfect. A management decision is to consider that, considering all the other steps after the boards are built (assembling into systems, delivering the systems, training election workers), the first Tuesday in November is already close. Also, we have 50 people working on that line - lay them off, and we won't have half of them when we're ready to start again. So we scrambled to fix the production process as fast as possible, and now we're going back and fixing the earlier production while continuing to crank out the new boards. It costs, but anything else would have crashed critical deadlines.
PM's have to handle being pulled a dozen different ways at the same time. The customer is calling and needs to be reassured, your boss is calling (ditto), some engineers need a sign-off right now, and others are running off in the wrong direction. I work best when I do one job and get it finished before starting the next one. With the shit my boss has to handle, I'd have a dozen things half done and forget where I was in every one of them...
OTOH, the theory that a manager only needs to know how to manage is wrong, wrong, wrong. I've been exposed to the pure form of it just once, when I was just starting out as a technician in the air force. SSGT X was a former B-52 tail-gunner who had been grounded for a little heart murmur. So they retrained him as a tech. We were in tech school together, and since I was the closest to him in age and the only other student with children we became friends. Then we arrived at our first duty assignment, and they were short of NCO's. So while I was still in on-the-job training (finding out that 90% of what they taught in tech school was wrong) and officially not supposed to do anything without a trainer watching, SSGT X became my supervisor. He spouted that "You just have to know how to manage" line and proceeded to get into trouble. To his credit, he kept his problems from impacting the workers - but he got so overstressed he totally lost it at home. His wife showed up on our doorstep blubbering something about him going crazy and kicking the cat to death - I'm not sure which of them was crazier by that time, but I called up the chaplain to get me out of the middle immediately!
If you don't know what you are managing, you are going to screw it up big-time. The PM doesn't have to be an engineer, but does have to understand how engineers work and the requirements and time needed. The two-man management team (PM & technical lead) might be the best choice in many cases.
It's been a few years since I last built a computer, but JDR was always a good place for computer parts (and general electronics as well). It sells mostly no-name made-in-Taiwan parts for a little higher price than you'd expect, but they've got a lab that actually builds up computers and verifies sample parts work before they market them - and their tech support is the best I've ever dealt with.
I've tried to read the NEC. I certainly understand the reasons behind it (training and experience as an electronics tech, electrical engineering degree and 15 years experience, various construction & repair experience since I was big enough to pick up a hammer, and I do better but slower wiring than most licensed electricians), but I sure can't understand it. Besides bad writing, the problem is that it tries to cover all possible cases (residential, industrial, farm, storage buildings), and all possible methods of construction.
Looking for the NEC on-line, I don't find it. (It's copyrighted so they can legally keep it off the net.) But what you do find is various attempts to tell you how to wire various things according to the code - and the one thing they all have in common is that they say you have to check with your building inspector to find out how he interprets it. The word for that is "subjective" - and a subjective law is even worse than a copyrighted law!
Unfortunately the best we'd be able to do to get the government out is to replace it with an even more dangerous system of profit motivated Corporate inspections. (Not that codes today aren't profit motivated, but they are not yet specific to things like your insurance premium.)
You know Underwriter's Laboratories (UL)? Their stamp is on about 90% of electrical equipment in the US. UL tests a typical unit and monitors the production process rather than inspecting everything, so the cost per unit is very small. UL stamps are mandated by the insurance companies, not by the government, and it works much better than gov't building inspections do.
And if you really want to use a different test lab for electrical equipment safety, some insurers will agree. European manufacturers use European testing labs, and their stamps are accepted here and vice-versa in most cases. Or there's a fair amount of small equipment on the market with no stamp at all (from lamps to computers, but all customer installed rather than installed to codes that mandate the stamp). Either the insurer trusts these manufacturers to do the job right, they pay enormous premiums, or they don't have liability insurance and take the risk if something does go wrong.
However, you could make the argument that the MS libraries are thus better and better, with each revision.
It depends on whether the changes really are improvements - or just churn for the sake of selling similar software to the same people again.
Another issue, of course, is how long you hang on to an old fundamental design feature. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but years later it turns out that a different choice would have been better (now). It makes further progress harder - however, changing it now would require reeducating all the users (or worse, break compatibility with almost everything), and there never is a point where the immediate gain from changing it outweighs the massive costs.
This isn't just a software issue - the Intel x86 architecture is probably the second-greatest all time greatest example of this. I think the greatest example is the weird signalling voltages used in the phone system - they date back to the 19th century and are quite inappropriate for semiconductor circuits, but changing them would break every existing phone and switch.
If there is anything out there that says... "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not", or else... by whatever literary device, and it can be used against you in any action - then it must be in the public domain for those affected. Period, no question. Any argument otherwise is a plea for tyrany. I agree completely. You've said it better than I could.
The other issues are how the developers of model building codes get paid for their work and expenses, and how building quality is assured, if copyrighted model codes cannot be directly enacted into law. It's not that tough a problem, especially if you are willing to think out of the "there ought to be a law" box:
1) Local governments desiring to use a building code could pay a fair price for the right to copy it. That would be a lot more than what they pay to put one copy in the inspector's office, but not prohibitive when you consider that the inspection fees on a small house around here are $3,000, or nearly as much as the sales tax. (The cost of meeting wrong-headed standards has sometimes been much, much higher.) It's just that the inspector won't be quite as big a profit center for the county if they have to buy a license to copy the code...
2. Considering the abuses and weaknesses I've observed in the government-run inspection system, a libertarian solution would be much better overall:
1. No building code mandated by law, except possibly a few very simple restrictions to keep your building projects from becoming a danger to your neighbors. (E.g., propane tanks arranged so as not to explode.) Enforce it not by inspecting every project, but by allowing the neighbors to sue if they think your place is a hazard (at their risk of paying your legal expenses if they lose).
2. If you are dealing with a contractor to build a house or other construction for you, you agree in the contract on the code to be used and the private inspection agency to be hired. The contract isn't paid off until the inspector signs off - but he works for you, not the gov't. If you want the house wired with fiber, get an inspector that understands that (gov't inspectors will probably not notice if this part of the contract wasn't met at all). If you want the place built to last, find some higher standards, and get an inspector that will really enforce them. If you want a shack that can fall down in three years but no sooner, pick appropriate standards...
3. If you are buying a new house, not built to your specs, you check for the inspection agencies sign-off and which standards they used. On an older house, you can check the original inspection - but it's a good idea to hire an inspector to check it again, anyhow.
4. DIY, you can hire an inspector or inspect it yourself. If you actually know what you're doing, this saves money. If you're like the "Tim" character on Home Improvements, this probably reduces the chances of you or any of your family surviving to spread your genes, and is that such a bad thing? 8-)
The problems with the libertarian model are the ones of finding a good inspector (not the one the contractor likes because he'll approve anything if the contractor really needs him to) and figuring your way around the competing building codes. I find those problems preferable to paying an exorbitant fee to an inspector I cannot pick, and having only one building code, probably recommended to the county commission by the biggest developer of poor-quality housing...
Unfortunately, Veeck vs. SBCCI (in the parent post) applies to a case where the town, with authorization from the copyright holder, copied an entire Model Building Code into their law. For that situation only the law cannot be copyrighted. (At this point the decision applies only in Texas and other states under the 5th Circuit Court, however after reading this court's decision, it wasn't a close call at all.)
..., the law requires citizens to consult or use a copyrighted work in the process of fulfilling their obligations. The copyrighted works do not "become law" merely because a statute refers to them.' I'd agree with the second sentence there - but I have a big problem with the first one. If you cannot comply with the law without dealing with a private monopoly, it shouldn't be a law.
This doesn't address the case where the law refers to a copyrighted private publication, as in my county: 'If a statute refers to the Red Book
By the way, if Congressman Joe Blowhard reads the latest Stephen King novel into the Congressional Record, does it thereby become non-copyrighted? (Of course, you would have to title it "Joe Blowhard reading Stephen King's..." when you republished it.)
So then it's back to the anti-trust lawsuits again, eh?
Actually, I do expect something like this. MS has been so obviously oblivious of what the case(s) have been all about that I expect they will continue piling on new violations until there no longer is a federal judge that isn't "prejudiced" against MS. Unless they get hit with a really heavy penalty that sticks, first...
Good point about the value of your time - how the heck is anyone except a retiree going to find the time the manage building a house while continuing to earn the money to pay for it? I do most of my own repairs, including all wiring and plumbing, and I do it better than a contractor - but I'm not even "earning" minimum wage...
Related to your comment about the community of contractors in an area, there's the issue of building inspectors. In the US, these are local government employees. They are supposed to both enforce building codes setting minimum standards, and see that whatever is in the plans is what actually gets built. Their "fees" for doing this are several thousand dollars on a small house around here - I'm sure the inspection office is quite a profit center for the county. But the main problem is that they often forget to check on anything unusual in the contract (some other poster mentioned a lot of cat 5 wiring that wasn't installed), and depending on the inspector their interpretation of building codes can cause more trouble than it saves.
The building codes are pretty subjective - also, in most jurisdictions the law just refers to _copyrighted_ and very expensive publications by building industry groups. (There's something fundamentally wrong about a copyrighted law...) Some of the inspectors are pretty good, but some are arseholes who like to throw their power around, with no understanding of the reasons for the building codes. And the chief inspector in this county just doesn't like do-it-yourselfers, and will hunt through the code for a way to make you tear it out... If you have a contractor, he'll probably be able to get his buddy in the office to pass the work. That's not always to the good, either...
So bring the beer around quitting time, not for lunch. Not that any construction worker should be significantly impaired by ONE beer - but they may think they aren't impaired by one sixpack...
Another thing (and IMO the most important): In the US, various privately-run internet blocking services have blocked POLITICAL sites, among others. Being privately run, it's pretty easy to verify this - filter off, there's the Democratic National Committee, filter on, no DNC... But if the government manages to effectively mandate filtering, it's going to be pretty hard to get around the filters and find out what the party in power doesn't want you to see. And if you allow the party in power to control the media, you no longer have a democracy or a republic...
The disheartening trend for CS to be an "easy major" is not common at all universities.
It depends on whether you are comparing CS to the handful of traditionally tough majors (engineering, pre-med, pre-law), or to all the relatively easy majors (from English to Education). My first year in the EE program at Oklahoma State, I was doing 60-80 hours of homework a week. The classes shrank by two-thirds in that year. That was by plan - you get some important basics in that first year, but the main thing is to ensure that you are never going to neglect checking all the details just because it's getting late, before they teach you the real stuff...
If there's a CS program anywhere that does things like that, I'd like to know about it. And hire their graduates. The CS classes I've taken (a couple of decades ago) were downright relaxing compared to anything in the engineering school.
As Microsoft's online Knowledge Base blandly explained, the special backup floppy disks created by Windows XP Home "do not work with Windows XP Home."
Very, very funny. And rather familiar - MS-DOS 3.x included a backup program which created floppy disks that could rarely be used for a restore.
That's just plain irresponsible. If you can't get the feature to work right, don't include it!
Java didn't and wasn't intended to commoditize _all_ the hardware, or to make _all_ software run on any hardware. Sun sells high cost high performance hardware. Why would people pay Sun's prices for fast boxen, then cripple them running an interpreted language?
Because they buy Sun boxen to run a particular, very resource-intensive, program which has been compiled specifically for the Sun. But they also need to run various other programs not requiring much in the way of resources. If they had to buy a Wintel box to do that, they might discover that it wasn't totally impossible to stretch the Wintel architecture to also cover the stuff they bought the Sun for. But if the commodity software becomes hardware independent, then Sun might be able to keep it's customers entirely on Sun boxen.
Sun did understand what they were doing. They didn't understand how M$ was going to embrace & extend...
. If the printer driver tanks the system, who do you hold liable?
The nitwits that designed the OS so a driver could tank it. Not to mention that incompatibility with drivers (which are not written by MS even when they are on the Windows installation disk) isn't the only problem. There are plenty of incompatibilities between Windows products!
A good OS should isolate different programs so one piece of runaway code is only going to tske down the functions it controls. Most versions of Unix do that pretty well. DOS didn't but it wasn't intended to be a good OS. It was a simple single-tasking single-user OS, and if something tanked you didn't lose too much by rebooting. Win 95/98/ME inherited some of DOS's weaknesses by design (to maintain compatibility), and due to the added complexity on a shaky foundation they were even more likely to tank - but they weren't intended for servers or heavy duty applications either. NT was supposed to be the server/heavy duty reliable OS - but it wasn't, and although it got better at each revision, even at rev 6.0 (XP) it still isn't really server grade.
The liability shouldn't be for writing crappy software, but for selling crappy software as if it were good software. False advertising...
"2001 was the warmest year since 1653 (or thereabouts) which begs the question, exactly who or what was emitting CO2 at present day levels back then?"
All those witch-burnings.
8-)
As far as present law goes, you are right. Almost a century ago some book publisher tried to put a sort of EULA on the flyleaf, forbidding resales among other things - and that's when the First Sale doctrine was enunciated. They sold it, you bought it, they cannot tell you what to do with it.
But in the article, the record executives were discussing (going to Congress to get) a law to ban used sales. There probably is no constitutional ban on such a law - it's a ridiculous overreaching of the interstate commerce clause, but so are tens of thousands of other laws and regulations that the courts have upheld. The real question is, whether they'd have the nerve to do it, and whether they could buy enough idiots in Congress to get it through.
I almost hope they do. It might finally wake up the American public that (1) their "representatives" aren't representing anyone but the campaign contributors anymore, and (2) the media companies are bloodsucking monsters, whose power must be restricted - by kicking out the incumbents and getting new people in Congress who are aware that the Constitution doesn't give anyone intellectual property rights - it just gives Congress the power to grant as much IP rights as seems like a good idea, and right now chopping way, way back on copyright and patent rights seems like a good idea...
I'd be surprised if that doesn't pre-date Checkpoint Charlie in some form, with Hitler's picture or even the Kaiser's instead of Stalin. (However, I'm not sure Americans would have been that disrespectful before Franklin D. Roosevelt - aside from the South's attitude towards Lincoln and the Reconstruction Republicans. But a lot of rich and important Americans were just about that hostile towards FDR...)
But it apparently became quite OK for Russians to mock their government well before the end of communism, probably even before 1980. I don't know if that was because zeal turned to cynicism right up to the top, or if it was because they figured out something good American military leaders learned a very long time ago - let 'em gripe, it's a substitute for rather than a preparation for action.
With some people, You can tell them to their face "Do not open emails from people you do not know", print it out in 124 point font banners hung over their cubicles...
The problem with that advice is, e-mail viruses come from (the computers of) PEOPLE YOU KNOW. The virus found your e-mail in the address book of the last computer it took over. It will apparently come from the owner of that computer. Probably they aren't a complete stranger. So if someone is following your advice, he'll think that Shakira screen saver from his buddy Joe Luser is just fine.
What you have to do is find out whether your buddy Joe KNOWS he sent you a Shakira screen saver, before you touch that attachment. Or have the brains to figure out that Joe is more likely to send you a virus than anything worth downloading... Or have enough system knowledge to tell executables from non-executables, enough sense to thoroughly check the bona fides of any executables, and (if in Windows) enough paranoia to make damned sure the non-executables are really non-executable in spite of M$'s efforts to hide such details, and to open the semi-executables like Word or HTML in a mode that won't allow their scripts to run.
It's not all Windows and Outlook, in fact it is mostly stupid users, but M$ has made the stupid user problem worse by hiding file types by default, creating more than a dozen different executable file types, and allowing scripts to run in all sorts of places where simple text was all that anyone really needed. True, put the same lusers on Linux boxes and they'll have remote login to root enabled with their cat's name "Fluffy" as the password. But their e-mail tool won't be running script viruses before they've even opened the message because Linux e-mail tools don't do HTML, let alone allow scripts embedded in it to run wild.
From what I've heard, make a joke like that about the government in China and they shoot you and bill your family for the bullet. Bureaucrats and fanatics have no sense of humor...
OTOH, in Russia (even under the Soviets) nearly everyone makes jokes about the government. Unfortunately, they more they joke about it, the less they do to fix it.
That's getting to be a problem here, too. 8-(